BRUCE BENNETT’s poetry manuscript, WEB-WATCHING, won the Bright Hill Press 2004 Annual Chapbook Competition. WEB-WATCHING will be published in Spring 2005. He had poems published in the magazines LIGHT and SMARTISH PACE. He also had a poetry pamphlet, ETERNAL RECURRENCE AND THE BIG BANG, published by Clandestine Press. On June 28 Professor Bennett participated in a reading of poems from Virginia Elson’s HARRIER (FootHills Publishing, 2004) for the Watkins Glen Writers Group, with Michael Czarnecki and the book’s editor Linda Allardt. He was in residence at the Writers Center at Chautauqua from July 25 through the 31st. While in residence, in addition to teaching a weeklong poetry writing workshop, Professor Bennett gave a public reading of his poetry on July 25 and delivered a lecture, "Let There Be (Not-So) Light Verse," to the Chautauqua Women’s Club on July 28.

LAURA CAMPBELL toured Switzerland and France as a member of the Central New York Summer Orchestra. They performed four concerts, two in Switzerland and two in France. Professor Campbell recorded a new CD of music written especially for harpist Myra Kovary and herself by Ithaca composer Laurie Conrad. Her community activities included starting and conducting a community band for musicians of all ages in the South Seneca County area. They performed their first concert on September 5 oi the town park in Ovid, New York. Earlier in May, Professor Campbell participated in the world premier of an oratorio for choruses and orchestra at the State University College of Oneonta, which was written to commemorate one of the first women doctors in the region. She was responsible for establishing the Bassett Clinic in Cooperstown.

CANDACE COLLMER spent a busy sabbatical year (2003-2004) working on a lab project during the summer of 2003 and an ongoing computer project that began last September, 2003. Last summer, with support from an NSF Research Opportunity Award, she spent 9 weeks working on a Nasonia (parasitoid wasp) courtship and mating project in Jack Werren’s lab at the University of Rochester. Beginning last September, she has been working on a project involving the creation of new terms to describe the functions of genes involved in pathogenesis, associated with the Pseudomonas syringae genome project in the Plant Pathology Department of Cornell University. This work was supported in part by a grant to Wells College from the Kauffman Foundation, which provided funding both for Collmer’s development in the field of bioinformatics and for increasing students’ awareness of entrepreneurial opportunities in the sciences (ongoing). 

During the year, Collmer was a collaborator on a proposal to NSF to support a 5-campus collaborative project on developing terms to describe the functions of genes involved in plant pathogenesis across diverse pathogens. Work on this project included two extended trips to train at TIGR (The Institute for Genomic Research) in Rockville, MD; the organization of a 1-day meeting of all scientists involved in the collaborative project; and an invitation to meet with the Gene Ontology Consortium at Stanford University this past August to present the proposed new terms. With only a bit more work, those terms will soon be accepted for use by the scientific community. Collmer presented a seminar to the Plant Pathology Department in February, 2004, on this work, and a talk at the Annual Meeting of the American Phytopathological Society in August entitled "The development of new Gene Ontology (GO) terms for annotation of genes of bacterial pathogens implicated in plant pathogenesis." Her work this past summer was extended by a Research Opportunity Award from the NSF to include the development of course modules on genomics, bioinformatics, and Gene Ontology for general training purposes. She is continuing this work part-time during fall, 2004.

Other professional activities during the year included attendance at the Pseudomonas 2003 International Meeting in Quebec City, Canada, September 6-10, 2003; attendance at the ninth US-Japan Science Seminar, "Genomic and Genetic Analysis of Plant Parasitism and Defense," in Shizuoka, Japan, November 2-7, 2003 (followed by a visit to professional colleagues in Taipei, Taiwan, November 7-10, 2003); training at a 3-day BioQUEST workshop on "Bioinformatics in Biology Education" last October at Cornell; training at a 3-day workshop on "Bioinformatics and Using Microarrays" on June 11-14, 2004, at Southwestern University, Georgetown, Texas; and attendance at the Simon-University of Rochester Entrepreneurship Teaching Conference for Entrepreneurship Educators at the University of Rochester, May 24-25, 2004. Finally, Collmer served as an outside evaluator for an NSF-supported project on the development of new hands-on, investigative labs for Introductory Biology at the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater. 

Two of CAROL CONTIGUGLIA’s works, one featuring day lilies above a timbered wall and the other featuring wild bindweed (morning glories), were accepted into the New York State Wildlife Art Exhibit at the New York State Fair.  They are done in colored pencil, color and tone overlaid multiple times to resemble a painting surface. This is a juried show comprised of paintings and sculpture representing the wild life of the world. 

SARA FRENCH attended the Advanced Studies in England board meeting in Bath, England, June 7-9, 2004 as the Wells representative to its Academic Board. She also presented a talk to Alumnae College on June 11 entitled, "The Arts are Fine at Wells: Curriculum, Collections & Conservation." 

DEBORAH GAGNON had a poster accepted for presentation at NECTOP, October 2004: "No student left behind: Frequent quizzing, student performance, and course satisfaction." The paper was presented at the Tenth Northeast Conference for Teachers of Psychology, Providence, Rhode Island. She co-authored a Technical Report for Cornell University entitled, "An integrated framework for Cornell University Library digital collections: High-level requirements and internal implementation issues." Professor Gagnon’s peer-reviewed journal publication, "Origins of nonword phonological errors in aphasic picture naming, appeared in Cognitive Neuropsychology, 21(2-4), 159-186. (Mar-Jun Issue). She gave an invited talk, "Managing technologies in the hybrid library," at the Endeavor EndUsers Annual Meeting in Chicago, Illinois. Professor Gagnon’s recent public/community service activities include being elected to serve as Vice President of Public Relations, Ithaca Area Toastmasters Club; Term: July 1, 2004-June 30, 2005. In August she taught a Cornell Cooperative Extension Compost Education Program Class, entitled "Is It Done Yet? Harvesting and Uses of Household Compost" at Community Gardens.

PILAR GREENWOOD presented a paper entitled, "Memoria, Violencia y Teatralidad in "La Fiesta del Chivo," at the III International Conference of the Hispanic Humanities Association, held in Madrid, Spain from July 9-11, 2004. It analyzes the contrasts between Mario Vargas Llosa's novel and the play by the Colombians, Jorge Alí and Verónica Triana by the same title. At this conference Professor Greenwood also chaired the session entitled, "Madrid en el teatro del Siglo de Oro." The conference was co-sponsored by the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures of the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

JOSEPH HOFFMANN’s book Julian: Against the Galileans, is published this month and completes a series begun in 1987 on the pagan critiques of Christianity in late antiquity.

CYNTHIA KOEPP traveled to Paris, France, to deliver a paper at the 50th anniversary meeting of the Society for French Historical Studies that took place from June 16-20. Her talk was entitled "Publishing and Pirating Best-sellers in the 18th century: The Abbé Pluche and His Imitators," and was part of a panel called "Unpacking their Libraries: Marketing Books in France from the Ancient Régime to the Present.

LINDA LOHN’s paper, "Lesbian Detective Agency: Toward an Epistemology of Empathy in the Works of Katherine V. Forrest" has been accepted for presentation at the Mid-Atlantic Popular Culture Association's annual conference in November.

LESLIE MILLER-BERNAL presented her paper, "Struggling to Survive: Women's Colleges Since the 1960s," at the 99th annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in San Francisco on August 15. It was part of a session entitled, Sociology of Education: Gender and Schooling.

WILLIAM ROBERTS exhibited his artwork at the following galleries: Delavan Gallery in Syracuse during June; Joseph Scala Gallery, The Noble Horse 2004, in New Woodstock, New York, during July; and Sola' Gallery, Birds and Horses, in Ithaca during September. His publications included the Saratoga Sketchbook in the Syracuse Post Standard, eight entries from July 27 through September 12; and the Saratoga Special, Saratoga Springs, five drawings, in the September 5 and 6 issues.

Mark Foster Music, Inc. has accepted for publication CRAWFORD THOBURN’s original composition for unaccompanied mixed voices entitled, "The Starry Stranger," a setting of a text by the 17th century English poet Richard Crashaw. He has been informed that his biography is to be included in the 59^th edition of Marquis' "Who's Who In The United States" to be published in 2005.

THOMAS VAWTER once again joined the faculty of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University this past summer as a Visiting Professor and taught his course, "Ecology and the Environment."   In addition, he was re-appointed in that department, part time, as a visiting fellow.

The Joint Steering Committee for Public Policy granted CHRISTINA WAHL $750 to attend Capitol Hill Day in Washington in June. She met with staffers of Senators Charles Schumer, Hillary Clinton, and Barbara Mikulski, and also the Senior Policy Director of the House Committee on Science, chaired by Representative Sherwood Boehlert. Professor Wahl’s task was to inform the members of the serious imbalance in the President's Council on Bioethics, which currently has no scientists. She also spoke with them about the importance of stem cell research and discussed the consequences of reducing public spending on health care research in favor of increasing reliance on private sector funding. 
 

Earlier Announcements of Faculty Accomplishments