Author: Brynn Boyer

Professor of English Mara Scanlon delivered an invited paper for a panel of the H.D. International Society at the South Atlantic Modern Language Association Convention in Durham, N.C., on Nov. 9.  The paper, “‘Dot tick we are here’: H.D. on Art, Vision, and Codebreaking,” focused on modernist writer H.D.’s use of telegraphy and Morse code in several works as a metaphor for the unsayable (those elements of art and vision that transcend or resist translation or language) and to establish a model for the appropriate audience, or “receiving stations,” for modern literature.

The Center for Strategic and International Affairs, a think-tank in Washington D.C., published Assistant Professor of Political Science Surupa Gupta’s article “FDI in Retail: How Can It Benefit India’s Farm Sector?” The article appeared in the Nov. 2012 issue of the Center’s publication. Gupta’s research was funded through a Jepson Fellowship.

Students from the University of Mary Washington were finalists in a preliminary round of the College Fed Challenge competition, held on Friday, Nov. 9 at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. In the competition, students delivered 20-minute presentations on monetary policy and were scored on content, teamwork, responses to questions, presentation and style.

Students Patrick Byrne, Robert Herse, Lawton Cooper, Chelsea LeHew, Luke Mendelsohn and Roxy Sklavos presented for UMW. Daniel Abbondanzo, Jose Chavez Guzman, Paul Flather, Colin Jennings and William Zebian were part of UMW’s research support team. Professor of Economics Margaret Ray coached the UMW team.

UMW competed against teams from across the Commonwealth, including the University of Richmond, Virginia Tech and Christopher Newport University. The team from the University of Virginia, winners of the preliminary round, competed against the winners from the Richmond Fed’s Baltimore and Charlotte branches. American University won the overall competition on Nov. 13.

The Richmond Fed sponsors College Fed Challenge, a regional academic competition, to encourage better understanding of the nation’s central bank, the forces influencing economic conditions in the United States and abroad, and the ways the economy affects everyone. More information is available online at www.richmondfed.org/education/.

Chris Foss, professor of English, organized a roundtable discussion on autism studies at the South Atlantic Modern Language Association Annual Convention in Raleigh/Durham, N.C., on Nov. 10. For this special extended session panel, Foss joined four prominent national voices in offering short presentations to introduce threads of discussion that initiated a two-hour conversation on topics such as the nexus of autism and aesthetics, the nexus of autism and neurocosmopolitanism, and the nexus of autism and rhetoric.

Janusz Konieczny, professor of mathematics, has co-authored a research article, Sn-normal semigroups of partial transformations, published in the journal Algebra Colloquium. The article has been written jointly with two UMW graduates, Sean Droms and Roberto Palomba, and contains the results of undergraduate research that Sean and Roberto did when they were mathematics students at the University of Mary Washington.