FSU Libraries' Celebration of Tenure 2017

Below are the newly tenured faculty and a brief explanation of the books or materials they hand-picked to be purchased and book plated in their honor.

 

Jennifer Atkins
School of Dance
College of Fine Arts

All of a Mardi Gras Day: Episodes in the History of New Orleans Carnival
by Reid Mitchell

New Orleans is a city steeped in rich cultural history. Carnival, of course, figures prominently into the customs of the Crescent City, but most texts devoted to Mardi Gras legacies are glossy histories that neglect the issues of power ubiquitous in pageantry and parading. Reid Mitchell’s All on a Mardi Gras Day: Episodes in the History of New Orleans Carnival not only juxtaposes revelry and racism, elitism and immigration, but also crafts a nuanced social history that delves into the centrality of Africans, Creoles, and gay rights to Mardi Gras narratives. Mitchell’s accessibility in style and inspirational approach enabled me to clearly define my own place within Carnival historiography and to remain committed to illuminating diverse experiences and bodily practices in my own work on New Orleans cultural history.

 

Willy Bolander, Ph.D.
Department of Marketing
College of Business

The Common Denominator of Success
by Albert E.N. Gray

This short text states that the common denominator of successful people is that they've made the habit of doing the things that failures don't like to do. Success then is an issue of effort (specifically, consistently applied effort), not an issue of heredity. I am thankful for this truth since upon beginning my doctoral studies it became clear to me that I was not the smartest person in the room (arrogantly, I believed this arguable in previous learning contexts). I didn't always have the best ideas, I wasn't the fastest reader, and I didn't possess the greatest quantitative toolkit. My success in this new context would not come from an innate disposition; it would not result from inherent talents or gifts. Instead, it would come from my effort, behavior, and habits. To me, this meant identifying areas where others in my field failed and focusing on excellence in those, seeking precision in the mundane, and aggressively attempting what others are unwilling to attempt. This advice seems very generalizable, and, as a result, this text is a great way for just about anyone to spend 15 minutes!

 

Will Hanley
Department of History
Arts and Sciences

al-Aʻlām : qāmūs tarājim li-ashhar al-rijāl wa-al-nisāʼ min al-ʻArab wa-al-mustaʻribīn wa-al-mustashriqīn
by Ziriklī, Khayr al Dīn

This rich and eclectic biographical dictionary embodies the modern integration of the Islamic scholarly tradition and western academic rationalities. Khair al-Din al-Zirikli was born in Beirut in 1893. He was a member of the last generation to be educated in Ottoman schools. After World War One, he was an itinerant intellectual sojourning in many of the new Arab states. An opponent of French rule in Syria, he fled in 1920 to Palestine, then Egypt, then the Hijaz, then Jordan. He settled in Cairo in 1923, and released the first edition of this encyclopedia in 1927. In form, al-A‘lam recalls the tarjama genre that emerged in the 11th century: it lists notable individuals, with an account of their genealogy, education, teachers, and their contributions to learning. But al-Zirikli was interested in a much broader swath of humankind than previous scholars of the genre. His dictionary places Thomas Jefferson alongside ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani and Max Weber alongside Muhammad Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab, juxtaposing their biographies, images, and even samples of their handwriting. Al-Zirikli went on to work in Palestine, Morocco, and Lebanon, often as a diplomatic representative of the Saudi king, and always as a collector of material for his ever-expanding dictionary. He died in 1976, shortly after publishing the 12-volume 3rd edition of al-A‘lam. It’s the first book I reach for when I’m trying to identify an obscure actor in modern Middle Eastern history.

 

Sara Hart
Department of Psychology
Arts and Sciences

Rosalind Franklin : the dark lady of DNA
by Brenda Maddox

I was given this book as a junior graduate student and it made a strong mark on me. My research involves understanding how genes influence a child’s achievement in school, and I’ve always had an interest in DNA. This book chronicles the story of Rosalind Franklin, whose research was fundamental to the Nobel Prize winning discovery of the molecular structure of DNA. However, in part because she was a woman in science in a time where such a person was rare, her work was ignored by history. Franklin’s story told in this book opened my naïve eyes to the struggles of being a woman in science, during her time and now. This book reminds me to fight for and support women in science, and to be an ally for other marginalized groups.

 

Skip Horack
The English Department
Arts and Sciences

Home ground: language for an American landscape
edited by Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney

Thank you for the honor of allowing me to select a book for the FSU Libraries’ collection. Of course, this was no easy task for a writer—as there are hundreds upon hundreds of books that have played a significant role in my life and career—but I suppose one longstanding, and unique, resident of my own personal “library” well illustrates that important role that landscape, and the natural world, plays in my fiction and nonfiction writing. Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape is a dictionary of sorts, providing definitions for almost a thousand “landscape terms and terms for the forms that water takes”—with an appreciation that understanding the words used to describe a place is essential to appreciating and understanding the place itself. In pursuit of this ambitious (and even patriotic) goal, the editors of Home Ground enlisted a wide array of respected poets and writers whose beautiful, and often haunting, definitions range from a single sentence to several hundred words in length. Supplemented with evocative illustrations—as well as numerous citations in which authors such as Twain, Faulkner, O’Connor, and Nabokov use the various terms in context—what emerges is a literary and cultural achievement that can be used as an innovative kind of desk-reference . . . or, as in my case, as a continual source of inspiration and encouragement.

 

Kevin Huffenberger
Department of Physics
Art and Sciences

Modern Cosmology
by Scott Dodelson

Modern Cosmology by Scott Dodelson appeared while I was in graduate school, a time when precision measurements of the large-scale Universe were just beginning to become available.  Over the past two decades, technological advancements have sparked a data revolution in this field.   Astrophysicists and cosmologists are building a unified picture of the properties and history of the cosmos.  We use measurements of the leftover light from the Big Bang (the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation), the clustering of the positions of galaxies, and the fading light of distant, exploding stars, among other phenomena.  These probes provide information on the large-scale Universe and the micro-physical processes that influenced it during its infancy.  Dodelson’s book presents a coherent introduction to the theoretical work and data analysis techniques that have made the interpretation of these data possible.  It is still one of the best resources for graduate students and other researchers in the field.

 

David Kalhous
Music
College of Music

sofferte onde serene ... per pianoforte e nastro magnetico
by Luigi Nono

In my house on the Giudecca in Venice the sound of various bells rung in different ways and with different meanings reach our ears continuously, day and night, through the fog or in the sunshine.

They are indications of life on the lagoon, on the sea.  Calls to work and to meditation, warnings. And life continues there in the painful and calm necessity of the "balance of the deep interior," as Kafka says.

...sofferte onde serene... [...serene waves endured...](1976) for piano and magnetic tape, is the second (after Como una ola de fuerza y luz) and last of Nono's works in which piano plays a central role.  Dedicated to his close friend Maurizio Pollini, whose extraordinary pianism Nono admired, this deeply personal work was premiered by Pollini in 1977 at the Milan Conservatory.  Several tragic deaths in the families of Nono and Pollini are reflected in the emotional landscape of the piece.  “This experience in common,” Nono said, “brought us even closer together in the endless grieving smiles of ...sofferte onde serene...

The source material for the tape part of  ...sofferte..., recorded by Pollini, consists of an improvisation on single chord with a vast range of often contrasting articulations in different registers (from legato, often enhanced by sostenuto and una corda pedals, to sharp martellato attacks).  Audible pedal attacks and wooden knocks also became part of the tape, recorded and composed in the RAI Studio di Fonologia in Milan.  The notated, live piano part, is essentially an exploration of the seemingly infinite sonorous possibilities of the piano.  Here, the initial static quality of the primary musical material is set into motion through its melodic, rhythmic, dynamic, coloristic, and spatial variations and distributions, creating a mobile sound world,  seemingly without an beginning and an end, charged with dynamism and inner tensions.

No musical notation of the tape part exists, which allows for a significant degree of freedom when coordinating the notated part and the tape.  In the piano score, only eight riferamenti (references or connections) mark the points in which the piano part and the tape must coincide.  Despite this flexibility, the feeling of timbral, melodic, and rhythmic consistency between the live piano and the tape is often unavoidable.  The seemingly self-sufficient and fixed material of the tape becomes animated through a dialectic process, providing enhancement (rather than contrast or counterpoint) as it weaves in and out of the sound coming from the instrument on the stage.

[The result is] two acoustic planes, often mingling, frequently nullifying the alien mechanical nature of the tape … Not ‘episodes’ which are successively exhausted, but “memories” and “presences” that are superimposed on those memories and presences that are themselves mingled with the “serene waves.”

(The italicized text was excerpted from Luigi Nono’s liner note for Pollini’s recording of …sofferte onde serene …, Deutsche Grammophon, 2531 004, LP, 1979.)

 

Jay Kesten
Law
College of Law

Corporate Law
by Robert Charles Clark

This book was a revelation. As a law student and in practice, I often found myself agreeing with Bayless Manning’s scathing critique of the intellectual foundations of corporate law: “[C]orporation law, as a field of intellectual inquiry, is dead in the United States … We have nothing left but our great empty corporation statutes – towering skyscrapers of rusted girders, internally welded together and containing nothing but wind.”  I was, however, rather naïve. Dean Clark’s treatise, and later his mentorship, opened my eyes to the dizzying array of normative policy questions raised by the law governing corporations and the range of methodologies that could be deployed to analyze those questions. Wrestling with the implications of Clark’s arguments and analyses was a profoundly transformational intellectual exercise. It was, for me, a clarion call to the academy.

 

Rajan Kumar
Mechanical Engineering
College of Engineering

Fundamentals of Aerodynamics
by John Anderson

The idea of flying in the same realm as birds has possessed human minds since the dawn of human intelligence, but the real breakthrough was the Wright brothers’ first successful flight in 1903. The philosophy of much advancement in aeronautics since 1903 has been to fly faster, higher and in an efficient manner. My journey with aerospace started in 1988 as an undergraduate student with a simple question, “how can an airplane fly faster than the speed of sound?” In 2014, I designed and commissioned a polysonic wind tunnel, capable of operation at Mach 5 - five times the speed of sound - to advance key fundamental sciences, develop transformational technologies and educate the next generation of engineers and scientists at the Florida State University. The next time you see an airplane flying overhead, pause and reflect for a moment.

 

Jake Linford
Law
College of Law

Rethinking Copyright: History, Theory, Language
by Ronan Deazley

Ronan Deazley’s careful analysis of fundamental English copyright cases informs decisions by the Supreme Court of the United States and other courts, as well as the work of many scholars of intellectual property. Deazley’s scholarship was also critically important to my earliest academic endeavors. As a student, writing the first draft of my first article, I struggled to understand key English copyright cases, from which the United States copyright system derives many of its basic rationales. Deazley’s book, On the Origin of the Right to Copy: Charting the Movement of Copyright Law in Eighteenth Century Britain (1695-1775), was an invaluable aid. In that book, Deazley uncovers the role played by British publishers in the 17th and 18th centuries in establishing an author-centered justification for modern copyright regimes. My own scholarship on the relationship between publishers and authors of that era would have been impossible without Deazley’s research.

 

Chad Marzen
Department of Risk Management/Insurance, Real Estate and Legal Studies
College of Business

The New American Bible, Revised Edition

“Fear not, I am with you;

be not dismayed; I am your God.

I will strengthen you, and help you,

and uphold you with my right hand of justice."

—Isaiah 41:10

 

Simon J. P. May
Department of Philosophy
Arts and Sciences

Michael Nair-Collins
Medicine
College of Medicine

Rest in Power: the enduring life of Trayvon Martin
by Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin

I chose Rest in Power to honor the life of Trayvon Martin, a Black youth who was followed, assaulted, and murdered; was posthumously put on trial for his own murder by the media; and yet whose killer walks free. Trayvon’s life mattered. His death sparked the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, and forced many to confront the racial injustice and institutionalized white supremacy that characterizes the United States. Sadly, Trayvon’s death is not unique:  Rob Thomas; Claude Neal; Emmett Till; Aiyana Mo’Nay Stanley-Jones; Trayvon Martin; Rekia Boyd; Mike Brown; Tamir Rice; Mya Hall; Alton Sterling; Philando Castile; Timothy Coughman; ….  These acts of racialized violence are not unexpected and they are not inexplicable. They are the predictable outcome of a society founded on exploitation, genocide, and slavery; a society which never really abolished slavery but shifted it to forced labor in our racist mass incarceration system; a society in which racist disparities persist from healthcare to jobs to income to housing to education; and a society which honors rather than despises those who enslaved human beings, including at FSU with the statue honoring the enslaver Francis Eppes. One might wonder what this has to do with my achievement of tenure. Very simply: Tenure is instituted to protect academic freedom, so that scholars may pursue the truth, and speak the truth, as they see it. This is an extraordinary privilege and represents a deep trust bestowed upon us by the people of the State of Florida. As we move to the next stages of our academic careers, my hope is that we will not turn inward and hide from the world of suffering and injustice that surrounds us; but to turn outward, to deserve the trust bestowed upon us, and to use the power and privilege of tenure to stand in solidarity as both allies and accomplices with all those who suffer and fight injustice.

 

Paul Niell
Department of Art History
College of Fine Arts

The Academy of San Carlos and Mexican Art History: Politics, History, and Art in Nineteenth-Century Mexico
by Ray Hernandez-Duran

When I began my PhD studies at the University of New Mexico, I was confronted with an exciting new field, that of Spanish Colonial art and architectural history. It was a daunting adjustment for one who had been trained, as with most art historians, in the rigors of analyzing European art and architecture. I suddenly saw objects splayed broadly on the margins, disobeying the rules, causing me to rethink what I thought I knew of the Western tradition, and challenging me to confront and interpret the difference found within and around the globalized object. In the sense of the global, we were asked to stretch our conceptualization of “modernity” outward to encompass those vast areas effected by European colonialism and backward in time from the Industrial Revolution to 1492 with the arrival of Christopher Columbus. This experience was exhilarating, if daunting, and if it were not for a challenging, charismatic, and compassionate mentor in Ray Hernández-Durán, I might not have made this transformation as fully and effectively as I did. This book is Ray’s finished product of the dissertation manuscript he first gave me to read in 2004, a work that opened my eyes to new spatial and temporal horizons. In achieving tenure, I aim to make him proud and to continue the journey that started with this text.

 

Chiwoo Park
Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering
College of Engineering

Linear Programming and Network Flows
by Mokhtar Bazaraa, John Jarvis & Hanif Sherali

I have been interested in the use of modeling and optimization to optimize engineering systems. The book chosen was the first textbook that I read to study on the area of optimization. The book contains many interesting perspectives of approaching optimization problems, including geometric point of views, relaxation and dualities, which inspired many of my thought processes later in research and teaching. From time to time, I am still taking the book out from my bookshelf for a reference.

 

Jose Renato Pinto
Biomedical Sciences
College of Medicine

Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology, 1972: The Mechanism of Muscle Contraction
organized by James Watson

Troponin is a protein that has a crucial function in striated muscle contraction—it is the “on” and “off” switch of the muscle. I started to work with troponin during my undergraduate studies when I was still a freshman. During this initial time, guided by a great mentor, I developed a keen interest in the molecular mechanism by which this protein regulates striated muscle contraction. Thus, I decided to continue my graduate and post-doctoral studies within the same field of research. When I was writing my PhD thesis I came across this book—Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology, 1972: The Mechanism of Muscle Contraction, Vol. XXXVII, 1973—and ever since that time I have been fascinated by it. This book summarizes the discussions from a scientific meeting that took place in 1972. Very important, during this meeting the different subunits of troponin were finally named as troponin T, I and C! Before this meeting, different research groups were using different terms for the parts of troponin. Finally, as suggested on the last day by Hugh Huxley (p. 692), the troponin subunits were named here according to their known functions: T is the tropomyosin-binding subunit, I is the inhibitory and C is the calcium sensor. In this same scientific meeting, additional functions were reported for these proteins. What amazes me about this book is the thorough experimental description and how the different groups—rivals, but also friends—were able to agree and reach the same conclusions on the role of each troponin subunit. This book will always be my favorite book because it shows how simple and even, in some cases, naïve experiments can lead to important questions that will define a field of study forever.

 

Paromita Sanyal
Department of Sociology
College of Social Sciences and Public Policy

Development as Freedom
by Amartya Sen

Amartya Sen is a development economist, a feminist economist, and a self-described part-time sociologist, who revolutionized the conventional understanding of ‘development’. In Development as Freedom he argues that human development, and aspects like human capabilities, women’s agency, and gender empowerment are equally and perhaps more important than indices of economic growth. His work in welfare economics won him the Nobel Prize in economics in 1998. His work has been inspiring me since my graduate student days and has been formative in my thinking and research in the fields of sociology of development and gender. In my research on microcredit programs and women’s empowerment, I take great care to analyze improvements in women’s individual and collective social capabilities as separate from gains in their own income and their households’ economic fortunes. I show that a vast array of capabilities are linked to women’s social empowerment, which is facilitated by the associational mechanism put in place to enable the operation of giving collateral free loans to groups of poor women. My book on this titled, Credit to Capabilities: A Sociological Study of Microcredit Groups in India, was recognized with the Outstanding Book Award given by the American Sociological Association, Sociology of development section. Sen’s ideas continue to be influential in my ongoing research on the social impacts of livelihoods programs and on participatory governance and deliberative democracy.

During my graduate student years at Harvard, I had the good fortune of taking a philosophy class taught by Sen, and I was wonderstruck by his encompassing knowledge of different disciplinary fields. He is a polymath, and scholars like him who have distinguished themselves in their own field while having rich knowledge of other fields and disciplines are rare. In addition to providing theoretical inspiration, his work is a reminder that humanistic social sciences can contribute a great deal to enhancing human welfare broadly by making the case, as Sen does, for what should matter and why.

 

John Schwenkler
Department of Philosophy
Arts and Sciences

Authority and Estrangement
by Richard Moran

I read this book for the first time as a young assistant professor, and it changed the way I think about philosophy. In it, Richard Moran shows how discussion of the scope and sources of first-person authority cannot be untangled from further questions about the significance of a person's understanding of herself, and the role of this self-understanding in the constitution of a life. This argument has consequences for ethics, moral psychology, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind, and makes clear the peril of pursuing these philosophical "sub-disciplines" in separation from each other. At stake is nothing less than the question of what it is to be a human person.

 

Robert Spencer
Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science
Arts and Sciences

Biogeochemistry of Marine Dissolved Organic Matter
edited by Dennis Hansell and Craig Carlson

The first edition of this book (Biogeochemistry of Marine Dissolved Organic Matter) came out when I was a graduate student and its clear and accessible chapters by leaders in the field provided a fantastic introduction to new topics in the field as well as the importance of the subject area to global biogeochemical cycles. At the time the first edition came out the field of dissolved organic matter biogeochemistry started to grow rapidly as new techniques came online that opened up the black box of organic matter into individual components that could be linked to different sources, processes and pathways. Throughout the following twelve years since the first edition was published I have referred to the book countless times as well as recommended it to numerous colleagues, post-doctoral researchers and students. It was an honor to be asked to contribute a chapter to the second edition of this book and to see addition of new study areas to the original version. I sincerely hope this new edition is as helpful to new scientists to the field as the original version was to my early career.

 

Nathanael Stein
Department of Philosophy
Arts and Sciences

Aristotle’s Physics, A revised text
by Aristotle

This is the book I’ve probably spent the most time with over the past decade and more. The title actually means “Lectures on Natural Science.” It’s not an exaggeration to say that before this book, the very idea that there could be such a thing as a science of nature didn’t have many takers. Indeed, it seemed incoherent. For the Greeks, mathematics was the paradigm of knowledge. After all, as they saw things, if you want real understanding, you need to have something stable to understand. Fashion, for example, can’t be a science, because what people find fashionable is always changing.  And the natural world is precisely, like fashion, a domain in which things are always changing—growing, moving about, popping in and out of existence. So any claim you might have to understand something about the natural world on Tuesday might have evaporated by Wednesday. In this book, Aristotle sets out to show how natural science is possible after all. He does it by rigorously developing a series of concepts—matter, form, cause, change, time, and so on—that allow us to see that underlying all the change, there are deep sources of stability in the natural world as well—what would eventually yield the concept of laws of nature. Some of these concepts were already familiar but subject to confusion and puzzles, like time. Others, such as the concept of matter, he introduces into Western thought for the first time. So without contesting the idea that scientific knowledge requires a stable object, he shows, by a series of arguments, how we can in fact treat the natural world as having the right kind of stability after all. And so to the extent that we think natural science is the project of finding the hidden, stable facts that underlie changing appearances, we are pursuing a project that was started with this book. Perhaps the most surprising thing, however, is how interesting and controversial the arguments still are. The idea of whether a science of nature is possible now seems to us like a dead question. But when we read the Physics, we see that the conceptual issues that connect to natural science are just as live and as puzzling today as they always were. And that is one of the best things reading a book like this can do—it can help us step outside of our unblinking assumptions and received ideas, so that we can find new sources of both puzzlement and, hopefully, insight.

 

Benjamin Sung
Music
College of Music

Six Caprices for Violin Solo
by Salvatore Sciarrino

Performing new music and working with composers has been an important part of my music making since I was a student, and this area of music comes with its own risks and rewards.  Older music that we still play today has passed the test of time - the highest of standards, when you consider how many pieces are written by any generation, how few we remember, and how fewer still we actively play.  The music of our current generation is still undergoing that selection, and we can only wait to see which pieces last.  Meanwhile, we play everything, and of course play more music that will fail the test than will pass.

But the unique reward of working in contemporary music is to be one of the first to experience those special works that will achieve that standard, like being the first person to walk through a new building or to taste a new dish.  In his Sei Capricci, the Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino achieves astonishing feats of imagination in the use of the instrument, the technical demands required of the performer, the respectful homages paid to violinists and composers of past centuries, and the completely new sound world he creates on an instrument that has been the same for hundreds of years.  This collection has been part of my performing and research during my time at FSU, and the privilege of playing music like this is what propels our musical tradition to the generations to come.

 

Angelina Sutin
Department of Behavioral Sciences and Social Medicine
College of Medicine

Explorations in Personality
by Henry Murray

For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to know why people do the things that they do and why, even in the same situation, two people will often do two very different things. This curiosity naturally led me to psychology and to the study of personality. In Explorations in Personality, Henry Murray outlined a comprehensive theory of personality written during the time of the grand theories of personality. First published nearly 80 years ago, the breadth and creativity of Murray’s ideas continue to shape the field of personality today. This book introduced me to the extensive reach of personality and the numerous ways to study it, and it remains part of the foundation on which my current program of research is built.

 

Kunihiko Taira
Mechanical Engineering
College of Engineering

Computational Fluid Dynamics
by Takeo Kajishima and Kunihiko Taira

This book on computational fluid dynamics was selected as it was compiled by my colleague, Prof. Takeo Kajishima, and I, during my career as an assistant professor at the Florida State University.  The book is based on my coauthor’s original book in Japanese and has been updated and translated into English.  Throughout its preparation, this book has benefitted from numerous discussions with students at FSU and collaborators.  As this book will continued to be used for the courses I teach, I believe it can serve as a nice reference for engineering students who are interested learning computational fluid dynamics.

 

Kelly Whalon
School of Teacher Education
College of Education

Single Case Research Methodology
edited by David L. Gast and Jennifer R. Ledford

As a former teacher of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), I was always interested in learning instructional approaches and strategies to effectively teach my students. As a faculty member in special education, I have continued this effort by developing and testing interventions designed to support the participation and learning of children with ASD in school settings. When conducting research with low incidence, heterogeneous populations such as children with ASD, single case research designs are extremely helpful. Such designs allow researchers to document changes in specific behaviors over time instead of relying on normative group means. This book is a wonderful resource for anyone interested in single case research design. I have learned so much from reading this book and applying the designs, and I hope this resource will help others interested investigating interventions for similar populations.