Faculty Accomplishments

Our faculty are recognized experts, published authors, accomplished researchers, and more. Read a collection of recent accomplishments listed by month below.
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Professor Michael Groth delivered a public presentation titled “Slavery & Emancipation in New York State” at the Equal Rights Heritage Center in Auburn, New York, on March 15. The inaugural event kicked off the 2024 “Lunch & Lecture Series” sponsored by the Seward House.

Marian Brown, director of the Center for Sustainability and the Environment, was invited to serve as a judge of student presentations for the Union Springs Academy’s STEAM Fair on Sunday, March 10. This year’s fair theme was Aviation. Student teams created posters and models to explore some aspect of the field of aviation. This is the third year Brown has been an invited guest for this annual academic showcase event and the second year she was invited to serve as a judge. The first year Brown was invited to participate in USA’s STEAM Fair, she was the keynote speaker on that year’s theme of Sustainability.

Assistant Professor of Theatre Claire Mannle received an award for Excellence in Direction from the Theatre Association of New York State (TANYS) for her work on Mary’s Wedding in which more than 100 people attended in-person. The production won a total of 7 awards including and Excellence in Lighting Design and Execution (won by Visiting Assistant Professor Andrew Hunt), Excellence in Musical Composition & Sound Design (won by Rosalina Maassen ’17), Excellence in Scenic Design and Execution (won by Max MacMillan), and Excellence in Acting (won by both Katie Ostrander ’24 & Alexander Blaine ’24).

Leslie Rogne Schumacher, Visiting Assistant Professor of History and Director of the ICCAE at Wells, received news of his election as a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society on February 20th. A mid-career award recognizing both outstanding academic accomplishment and potential, fellowship in the RHS is given for life and is second only to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in British historical honors. In Dr. Schumacher’s case, his election was first based on his recent monograph on the relationship between the British and Ottoman Empires in the late 19th century, a book that a leading scholar in the field has deemed “a required reader for graduate students working on the Middle East, Ottoman Empire, and Victorian foreign policy.” Second, the RHS elected him in recognition of his long record of work investigating the “Eastern Question,” the term used by modern Europeans to name their belief that the Middle East is a source of chaos–a topic on which another major scholar recently described Dr. Schumacher as a “renowned scholar.” Previously elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in recognition for his efforts in bringing together academic, government, and business communities to work on refugee affairs, Dr. Schumacher will be entitled going forward to use the postnominal “FRHistS” to indicate his membership in the RHS and eligibility for further RHS awards.

Read more: https://royalhistsoc.org/

Assistant Professor of Studio Arts, Anna Ialeggio has a solo exhibition at Cornell University’s Glass Box in Fernow Hall (College of Agriculture and Life Sciences). Entitled “Core Samples,” the exhibition showcases creative and material research from Ialeggio’s Wells College Summer Research Grant (2023). Clay-heavy soil samples from several sites of prairie rehabilitation are plumbed through high-fire processes to reveal their various ineffable qualities as ceramic glazes, and to meditate on the cyclical nature of reclamation in an age of massive climactic and cultural drift. The next phase of this project will be shown in Fall 2024.

As part of an ongoing collaboration with the Maine-based artist Lauren Fensterstock, Tara Kohn was invited to participate in the panel “Embodied Form: Material Engagement as a Path to Environmental and Social Justice” at the Scope International Art Fair in Miami Beach, Florida. The conversation, inspired by Fensterstock’s sculptures and the paintings of LaNia Roberts,
explored the ways that meditative practices and mindful responses to visual materials draw our attention to the interconnections between our bodies and the entangled political and ecological landscape.

Kohn also presented her paper “Stone Memories: Reflections on Photographic Originality and Absences in the Jewish Archive” at the Association for Jewish Studies annual conference in San Francisco, California. Grounded in her discovery of a missing photograph in a cache of extant prints by the Warsaw-based writer, translator, and artist Alter Kacyzne, this study is a reflection on what it means to handle images that, in the wake of destruction, no longer have an original or an origin.

Mary Tasillo contributed a bibliography to the exhibition catalog for “Eternal Paper,” which is on view at the University of Maryland Adelphia campus October 22, 2023 through May 19, 2024 and then moves the The Paper Academy in Denmark in late 2024.

Associate Professor of English Dan Rosenberg has three poems in the newly-released Volume 22, Number 1 of Blackbird. The editors share these insights into his work: “Dynamic and vivid, Dan Rosenberg’s poems ponder the nature of consciousness, fatherhood, the passage of time, and our relevance within its cycle. Suspended within the liminal in-between of pre-dawn, ‘Earthshine,’ ‘A Narrow Berth,’ and ‘Morning Half-Light’ envelop the reader in a dreamlike space of intangible moments which give way to understanding” (https://blackbird.vcu.edu/foreword/).

Read more: https://blackbird.vcu.edu/contributor/dan-rosenberg/

Dr. Matthew Miller has accepted a regular monthly commentator role on wallethub.com. He serves as the “Hospitality & Tourism Expert,” with educating about personal finance, especially its application to United States travel. His most recent “Ask the Experts” article is featured in the link below.

Read more: https://wallethub.com/d/american-express-platinum-219c#expert=matthew_miller

Leslie Rogne Schumacher was invited to submit an article to a special issue of Transatlantic Policy Quarterly. The issue focuses on the past, present, and future of the BRICS+ geopolitical bloc, and Dr. Schumacher’s article will cover the growing conflict between BRICS+ and the European Union in the Mediterranean region.

Read more: https://transatlanticpolicy.com/

Gehan Dhameeth authored a scholarly article titled “Assessing Online Customer Satisfaction through Customer Reviews: Employing Topic Modeling via Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) Algorithm” in the Journal of Marketing and Supply Chain Management, a reputable double-blind, peer-reviewed journal. The publication’s ISSN is 2754-6683, and it is available with the DOI: doi.org/10.47363/JMSCM/2024(3)120.

Read more: https://www.onlinescientificresearch.com/journal-of-marketing-supply-chain-management-home-jmscm.php

Dan Rosenberg’s reflection on teaching a course on ekphrasis (poetry written in conversation with other artworks) in England this summer was published in Advanced Studies in England’s annual newsletter. This short essay touches on the Diamond Sutra, papyrus fragments, cannibalistic pigeons, accidentally breaking into an Oxford college, crying at Stonehenge, and the death of irony.

Read more: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5f60932d12946b295bbb9ac8/t/6582e3e595a3b146609ec761/1703076854304/Alumni+News+2023.pdf

For the second month in a row, Matthew Miller was chosen as Wallethub.com’s national travel “Expert.” The national communications team solicited commentaries from hospitality professors across the United States about using credit cards in international destinations and chose his commentary to display on the website.

Read more: https://wallethub.com/best-international-credit-cards#expert=Matthew_Miller

Marian Brown, director of the Center for Sustainability and the Environment, was named to another 2-year term on the Advisory Council for the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE). The Advisory Council is the primary mechanism for members to get involved in AASHE governance. Consisting of leaders from higher education, business, nonprofits, and government, the Advisory Council provides advice and guidance on higher-level strategy as well as specific programs and services. Marian has served on the AASHE Advisory Council for several terms.

Read more: https://www.wells.edu/faculty-staff/marian-brown/

Assistant Professor of Hospitality Management, Matthew Miller was invited and served as a Faculty Panelist for Iowa State University’s Graduate Hospitality Management Program. Accomplished alumni and past faculty had to provide an informational session speak to current Hospitality Management graduate students. The focus of the panel and conference was to provide valuable insights about the current job market, as a way to prepare graduate students for a future career in hospitality academia.

Associate Professor of English Dan Rosenberg led a generative workshop at the Aurora Free Library. The activity focused on creating collaborative poetry, and both Aurora residents and Wells students were in attendance. The event was coordinated by Jack Yeats ’25 as part of his internship at the Aurora Free Library, which aims to forge more connections between the College and the surrounding community.

On November 4th, 2023, Lindsay Burwell and Tom Jensen took 15 researchers to the Rochester Academy of Sciences Fall Paper Session at RIT. Of the undergraduate researchers who attended, three gave an oral presentation, and six gave a poster presentation of their work. Topics presented by Wells researchers include modeling human diseases in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, building topline in equine athletes, identifying therapeutic properties in medicinal plants, and questions associated with animal reproduction.

Dr. Gehan Dhameeth, Associate Professor of Business, shared his expertise in the Application of Artificial Intelligence in Sales and Marketing with MBA and Ph.D. students at the University of the Cumberlands in Texas on November 3-4, 2023.

Read more: https://www.wells.edu/faculty-staff/gehan-s-dhameeth/

Leslie Rogne Schumacher, Visiting Assistant Professor of History, took part in a roundtable on the topic “The Historiography of the Black Sea, the Balkans, and the Mediterranean during the Long 19th Century” at the annual convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. He also accepted an invitation to perform a peer review for Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees.

Leslie Rogne Schumacher, Visiting Assistant Professor of History, contributed a chapter to the book, “Forced Migration: Exiles and Refugees in the UK and the British Empire, 1810s-1940s,” which is forthcoming from Brill. His chapter, based on documents he uncovered at the Maltese National Archives and titled “Seeking securo asilo: Malta’s Italian Refugee Crisis, 1815-1848,” recounts the untold tale of how Britain’s colonial administrators in Malta policed, documented, and managed the flow of Italian political refugees through the island during the era of Italian unification.