Faculty-Staff Achievements, April 7, 2015

Recognition

Minita Sanghvi, assistant professor of marketing, Department of Business, has won the University of North Carolina at Greensboro outstanding dissertation award. This is the first time anyone from her department—Consumer, Apparel and Retail Studies in the Bryan School of Business and Economics—has won the award. She is a member of a very small cohort that won both the Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award and the Outstanding Dissertation Award at UNCG. 

Publications

“Michel Foucault en Tunisie/ In Tunisia” is the subject of a recent issue of Revue CELAAN Review, Vol. XII, No. 1& 2, Spring 2015.  CELAAN (Centre d’Etudes des Littératures et des Arts d’Afrique du Nord), is a scholarly journal dedicated to the promotion of North African literature and art. . Editor is Hédi A. Jaouad, professor of French, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures.

French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) arrived in Tunisia in the fall of 1966 as a coopérant, or French civil servant and teacher working abroad, to take a position in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Tunis. Foucault taught courses on Descartes and Nietzsche, as well as a course on Italian art of the Quattrocento that was also dedicated to the aesthetics of western art.  He gave a series of lectures for the general public on the appearance and disappearance of man in modern western philosophy. All of these courses and lectures were enormously popular.

While described as a time of “exile” by some commentators, Tunis was in fact very much home from 1966-68; in fact, it was the first place he actually taught philosophy proper. More noteworthy, it was where he wrote the bulk of perhaps his signature work, The Archaeology of Knowledge. His sojourn coincided with the most tumultuous period in the still young country’s existence—Tunisia gained independence from France only a decade before, in 1956. 

This special CELAAN issue explores the impact of Foucault’s Tunisian experiences on his subsequent research, writing and political engagement. More specifically, this special anniversary issue--thirty years after his death--looks at Foucault’s own visceral and physical experience of authoritarian state violence and how it helped encourage his focus on power, disciplinarity and biopolitics in the ensuing decades.

In addition to Jaouad, other Skidmore contributors to this issue are Marc-André Wiesmann, Sonía Silva, and Sophia Bryan-Ajania and Kathryn Butler, both Class of 2015.

Jay Rogoff, visiting assistant professor of English, has had several poems published recently. "My Computer Reads Me a Poem" appeared in Stone Canoe, No. 9 (2015), and five poems--"Waking to The Enigma Variations," "The Little Black Boy," "Consumption," "Sugar Skull," and "Legacy"--have appeared in the British journal Stand, Vol. 13, No. 1 (2015).

In the News

Thomas P. (Pat) Oles, associate professor of social work, is the author of an essay titled “Institutions’ Misplaced Fear of Fossil-Fuel Divestment” that was published April 2 in chronicle.com, the online edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Please send submissions to Andrea Wise, Office of Communications.