The Academic Minute for 2023.09.11-2023.09.15

The Academic Minute from 9.11 – 9.15

Monday
Lewis Davis – Union College
COVID on Campus
Lewis Davis is the Thomas Armstrong Professor of Economics and Chair of the Economics Department at Union College.  He has over 30 peer-reviewed journal articles, with recent work addressing the religious, climatic, and linguistic roots of individualism and its implications for economic growth, regulation, social status, family structure, gender inequality, women’s rights, and anti-immigrant hostility.  He received his PhD in economics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1999.

Tuesday
Judith DeSena – St. John’s University
A Study of COVID-19 Lockdowns in Two Iconic Brooklyn Neighborhoods
Judith N. DeSena, Ph.D., is a Professor of Sociology at St. John’s University in Queens, NY. and a resident of Brooklyn, NY. Her work focuses on the study of neighborhoods and the analysis or race, class, and gender within them. Jerome Krase, Ph.D.,  is Emeritus and Murray Koppelman Professor at Brooklyn College, The City University of New York, and a Brooklyn, NY resident.

Wednesday
Stephen Collins – Kennesaw State University
Presidents, Twitter, and U.S. Soft Power
Dr. Stephen D. Collins is Professor of Government and International Affairs at Kennesaw State University (Ph.D., Political Science, Johns Hopkins University, 2004). His past publications have examined diplomacy, economic statecraft, foreign policy, political communications, security and conflict resolution, democracy, and nuclear proliferation. He recently analyzed digital diplomacy in his co-authored work (with Jeff R. DeWitt, and Rebecca K. LeFebvre) “Hashtag Diplomacy: Twitter as a Tool for Engaging in Public Diplomacy and Promoting U.S. Foreign Policy,” Place Branding & Public Diplomacy, 15(2), 78–96.

Thursday
Mark Satta – Wayne State University
First Amendment Violations in Anti-Drag Laws
Mark Satta is assistant professor of Philosophy at Wayne State University. He received his PhD in Philosophy from Purdue University and his JD from Harvard Law School. His research specializations include epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of law, with an emphasis on First Amendment freedoms such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion. His work often examines legal cases that concern both First Amendment freedoms and the advancement of LGBTQ civil rights.

Friday
Jodie Childers – Tulane University
The U.S. and NATO in Icelandic Literary Imagination
Jodie Childers is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Tulane University. Her research examines twentieth-century transnational Icelandic/American literary and political encounters.  She has published her work in Comparative American Studies, Resources for American Literary Studies, Transatlantica, and The Hopkins Review, among others. In 2018, she received the Leifur Eiríksson Foundation Fellowship to pursue independent research and language study in Reykjavík, Iceland. She holds a Ph.D. in English with a concentration in American studies from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.