March 11, 2022

We are pleased to recognize the recent grants, publications, presentations, awards and honors of the members of the College of Arts and Sciences.

Awards and Honors

Akanksha Bhatnagar, PhD student in Biology, received the Trainee Professional Development Award from the Society of Neuroscience for demonstrating scientific merit and excellence in research.

Dave DeMatteo, JD, PhD, professor of psychological and brain sciences, received the 2021 Psyche Award for the Most Valuable Paper on Psychological Assessment. The award is presented annually by the Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy, and his article “Use of the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised in legal contexts: Validity, reliability, admissibility, and evidentiary issues,” published in the Journal of Personality Assessment, was selected from several hundred articles as the winner in that category.

John Medaglia, PhD, assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences, was awarded a research and professional development co-op for the spring and summer terms from the Dean’s Excellence Fund.

Karen Nulton, PhD, director of writing assessment and teaching professor of English, has been selected to participate in the Drexel Teaching Academy, run by the Teaching and Learning Center, as a member of the 2022 cohort.

Sanjana Ramanathan, a senior English major, will join the PhD program in comparative literature at the University of Michigan in the fall. Ramanathan won and will be supported by a generous and fully funded Rackham Merit Fellowship. She will present her capstone English senior project on “Kassandra, Troy’s Cursed Prophet,” directed by Sheila Sandapen, at the end of this academic year.

Publications

Hilde Van Den Bulck, PhD, department head and professor of communication, and Matt Griffin, PhD, alum of the Communication, Culture & Media PhD program, published “Of Superheroes and SJWs: Media and Fans Framing the Impact of ‘Diversity’ in 2010s Comic Books" in the Journal of Popular Culture, Volume 55, Issue 1.

Amelia Hoover Green, PhD, associate professor of politics and associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion, served as an adviser to honors thesis student Lily Lauben, whose peer-reviewed article “Building Resilience: Multidisciplinary Research, Iterative Processes, and Serious Game Design” was published in Vol. 3 of Journal of Games, Self, & Society on the basis of her thesis project.

Georgi S. Medvedev, PhD, professor of mathematics, recently co-authored “The Large Deviation Principle for Interacting Dynamical Systems on Random Graphs,” which was published in Communications in Mathematical Physics. Medvedev also co-authored “Chimeras Unfolded,” which appeared in the Journal of Statistical Physics.

Harriet Millan, director of the certificate program in writing and publishing, had her poem “Kaleidoscopic, after Lou Xiaobo (126 Days Under Quarantine)” published in the latest issue of The Notre Dame Review.

Doctoral candidates in the Department of Communication, Sreyashi Mukherjee and Dacia Pajé co-authored “You Can’t Force Someone to Want You: Investigating Consent, Tokenism, and Play in Reality Dating Shows,” a chapter that will appear in the book The Forgotten Victims of Sexual Violence in Film, Television and New Media published by Palgrave Macmillan and reviewed by renowned feminist media scholar Tanya Horeck.

Gwen Ottinger, PhD, associate professor of politics, published "Misunderstanding Citizen Science: Hermeneutic Ignorance in U.S. Environmental Regulation” in Science as Culture.

Jack Santucci, PhD, assistant teaching professor of politics, has a new book, More Parties or No Parties: The Politics of Electoral Reform in America, scheduled to be published by Oxford University Press this July. Santucci also has a forthcoming publication in Public Opinion Quarterly, due any day: “The Structure of American Political Discontent” (with Joshua J. Dyck of UMASS-Lowell).

Volume 3 of the MFA Program's literary magazine, Paper Dragon, is now live on the magazine’s site.

Heather Webb, faculty member in the Creative Writing MFA program, published her latest novel, The Next Ship Home.

Presentations

The Drexel University Libraries will feature an exhibition of handmade books created by students in winter term 2021-2022 in the course Spanish 410 (Performing Spanish: Language Proficiency through the Arts), taught by Global Studies and Modern Languages Spanish language instructor Celeste Mann. The exhibition, titled Drexel Cartonera: Memórias al carton (Cardboard Memories), opens on March 14 in Haggerty Library and extends through the spring term. The books in this exhibition are original creations in Spanish, inspired by the street publishing movement in Latin America.

Rebecca Clothey, PhD, associate professor and department head of global studies and modern languages, gave a talk at the Penn Museum in February. The lecture, “On a Tightrope: Balancing ethnic and national identity for Uyghurs in China,” was given in response to a film screening of On A Tightrope.

Deirdre McMahon, PhD, teaching professor of English, was the featured keynote speaker at the March 6 Drexel Alumni Talk and Tour, held in conjunction with the Franklin Institute's world premiere of "Harry Potter: The Exhibition." McMahon delivered a presentation titled "J.K. Rowling and the Ethics of Worldbuilding" to 150 Drexel alumni and families.

Sreyashi Mukherjee, a doctoral candidate in the Communication, Culture and Media program, will present a dissertation chapter titled "From 'soft and clean' to 'stop the beauty': an analysis of agency in Indian advertising" at the Association for Asian Studies 2022 Annual Conference, to be held from March 24 to 27.

Jack Santucci, PhD, assistant teaching professor of politics, recently gave a talk to Claremont Graduate Institute about his book More Parties or No Parties: The Politics of Electoral Reform in America.

On March 3, the Biodiversity, Earth and Environmental Science department hosted its fourth bi-annual Research Day for undergraduate and graduate students to share their research of the past two years. Enthusiasm was high, as this was the first time since March 2020 that students and faculty gathered in person. Over 30 research posters were displayed, and three oral presentations were heard. The event concluded with a special keynote speaker, Jerome Shabazz, the executive director of the Overbrook Environmental Education Center.

In the Media

To view media mentions, visit In the Media.