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Stillwagon Presents at Economics Conference in Copenhagen

Assistant Professor of Economics Joshua Stillwagon presented at a conference held at the University of Copenhagen November 27-28, the theme of which was “Cointegration: Theory and Applications.” Stillwagon’s topic was “exchange rate dynamics and forecast errors about persistently changing fundamentals,” aspects of which he has discussed with his Trinity students in recent weeks.

Joshua Stillwagon, with Copenhagen’s famous Nyhavn Canal in the background

“In class we’ve discussed exchange rates and the idea that it is the ‘news’ or forecast errors about fundamentals that cause financial markets to move,” said Stillwagon, explaining (for someone who has not studied economics) that fundamentals are the variables that affect the exchange rate, such as interest rates, inflation, RGDP (Real Gross Domestic Product), etc.

Stillwagon said it was an honor to be invited to speak at the conference, which was held in recognition of the retirement of Katarina Juselius, who was ranked the eighth most cited economist in the world from 1990 to 2000. Several other renowned econometricians presented as well, including Soren Johansen, who has one of the five most cited papers in all of economics.

Stillwagon, who joined the Trinity faculty in 2013, received his B.S., M.A., and Ph.D. from the University of New Hampshire. His areas of specialty include macroeconomics, international economics, econometrics, and financial markets.

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Ethan Rutherford’s Inaugural Reading Delights Packed House in Mather Hall

For his inaugural Trinity reading on Thursday, November 20, Ethan Rutherford, assistant professor of English, was greeted by a capacity crowd in Mather Hall’s Rittenberg Lounge. The dozens of students, faculty, staff, and visitors were not disappointed. Rutherford read “Camp Winnesaka,” a short story from his award-winning 2013 book, The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories.

“Camp Winnesaka” is told from the perspective of a camp counselor, the Head Eagle, whose summer camp is struggling with low enrollment. After the disappearance of Moosey, a stuffed and mounted moose head that serves as Camp Winnesaka’s unofficial mascot, the Head Eagle tries to boost morale by leading his campers to war with neighboring Camp Chickapony. Essentially, everything that can go wrong does, as Rutherford’s introductory comments suggested.

“I know that I tell you guys to keep the death count low in your stories,” he told the students in the room before he started reading. “But do as I say, not as I do.”

“Camp Winnesaka” is one of eight short stories in The Peripatetic Coffin, Rutherford’s debut book. The anthology was named a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Pick, a “Best Book of the Summer” by Publishers Weekly, and long-listed for the Frank O’Connor Award. It was also a finalist for the both the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize and the Los Angeles Times’ Art Seidenbaum Award, received an honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award, and won a Minnesota Book Award.

Rutherford’s work has appeared in Ploughshares, One Story, American Short Fiction, and The Best American Short Stories. He is currently working on a novel set in the wilderness of Alaska.

Rutherford’s inaugural reading is available as a Trinity College podcast. The Peripatetic Coffin is available from independent booksellers, the Trinity College bookstore, and Powell’s.

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John Platoff Gives Common Hour Lecture on Work of Giuseppe Sarti

Today, most people would think of an opera as a fixed piece of work, with musical numbers that don’t change from one performance to the next. In the 18th century, however, that was not the case: when an opera arrived at a new company or in a new city, it was adapted for the performers. One opera with a particularly interesting history was Giuseppe Sarti’s Fra i due litiganti: the subject of a recent Common Hour lecture at Trinity by John Platoff, professor of music.

Fra i due litiganti, as composed by Sarti, premiered in Milan, Italy, in 1782. A year later, it arrived at the Vienna Opera, where Francesco Benucci and Nancy Storace played the roles of Titta and Dorina, as they had in Milan. In an era when the performers were held in higher esteem than the composers or the piece itself, almost half of the arias were replaced for the stars in Vienna. Interestingly, the replacement arias were not composed by Sarti, but by anyone who happened to be available to help. It wasn’t a glamorous responsibility, Platoff said, but instead was considered to be a kind of grunt work.

John Platoff, Professor of Music

John Platoff, Professor of Music

“Operas were routinely altered when they moved to new cities with new performers,” Platoff said during his Common Hour talk.

However, Benucci and Storace were not new to Fra i due litiganti, having originated the roles in Milan. Arias were usually replaced at the request of a new performer, Platoff said, not someone who had previously played the same role. But because the performers were new to Vienna and working to craft their operatic personas, they wanted pieces that better reflected the comedic nature of their characters and the roles they would play throughout their careers.

Titta’s act 1 aria, “Quando saprai,” was replaced with a new song, called “Dunque ascoltate” After a few performances, however, Benucci returned to the original piece. Dorina’s aria, “Non fidarti,” was replaced in Vienna with a new piece by Storace’s brother, composer Stephen Storace. The replacement aria, “Compatite,” was a more comedic piece that better suited the character.

But this is where the opera’s history becomes even more interesting. The process didn’t continue from city to city. Instead, however, the Viennese version became the standard, performed in cities throughout Europe with few, if any, changes.

Platoff credits this phenomenon to the central role that Vienna played in 18th-century Europe. Though few today are familiar with Fra i due litiganti, it was enormously commercially successful. In fact, Mozart quoted one of the hit songs from Fra i due litiganti in his own Don Giovanni, a testament to the opera’s popularity and significance. The Viennese opera was home to Europe’s best singers and became Europe’s most reliable source of musical scores. So, it was likely that other companies would turn to Vienna’s version for their productions. Lacking the resources of Europe’s foremost opera company, they would simply perform the opera as they received it.

This summer, Platoff was invited to discuss the development of Fra i due litiganti and the importance of the Viennese version at a conference called “Giuseppe Sarti: Individual style, aesthetical position reception and dissemination of his works” at Berlin’s Universität der Künste. Additionally, Platoff will be presenting his research at this November’s meeting of the American Musicological Society and submitting a paper to the Journal of the American Musicological Society.

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Johannes Evelein Explores ‘Learning Exile, German Style’ in Common Hour Talk with Colleagues

Exile means many things to many people. Still, there are common threads that run through the writings of many German thinkers who have tackled the subject. Johannes Evelein, professor of language and culture studies, discussed these common themes with his colleagues in the Department of Language and Culture Studies during a Common Hour talk titled, “Learning Exile, German Style: Benjamin, Brecht, Bloch et al.”

LiteraryExilesFromNaziGermanyEvelein examined the recurring themes in German writing about exile, a subject he discusses at length in his upcoming book, Literary Exiles from Nazi Germany: Exemplarity and the Search for Meaning, set for release this summer. One observation Evelein made was the tendency for those in exile to compare themselves to renowned fellow exiles. One example is Bertolt Brecht’s comparison of himself to Homer and Dante.

Another exile who appears frequently in German literature is Ahasverus (also known as Ahasuerus), a figure said to have been cursed by Jesus Christ after taunting Christ on the way to his crucifixion. Ahasverus is also known as “the wandering Jew” or “the eternal Jew” and was co-opted by anti-Semites in propaganda in the years leading up to the Third Reich.

Evelein’s lecture was the final Common Hour of the academic year in a series of talks among faculty members in the Department of Language and Culture Studies that was organized by Thomas Harrington, associate professor of language and culture studies. The series brought together those from various disciplines to present their work and offered opportunities for faculty members to discuss the intersections of their research interests. Evelein’s talk was no exception.

Following his presentation, Evelein’s colleagues weighed in, comparing and contrasting the German portrayals of exile to those in other cultures, including Israel, Latin America, and other parts of the world. Harrington contrasted the German idea of exile, a very individual experience as observed by Evelein, to the more communal experience of Catalonian exiles, one of his areas of research.

Evelein’s book will be available in August from publisher Camden House. In it, he presents a history of the learning process of exile as experienced by German and Austrian writers who left their countries in opposition to National Socialism.

category: Lectures and Panels, Publications

Kristin Triff Delivers Guest Lecture for Two Wesleyan First-Year Seminars

Kristin A. TriffWhen the papacy followed Pope Clement V from Rome to Avignon, France, in the early 14th century, it had a profound impact on Rome’s politics, architecture, and overall culture. These changes, in particular the way that Roman baronial families filled the void left by the papacy, were among the topics discussed in a guest lecture last semester at Wesleyan University by Trinity’s Kristin A. Triff, associate professor of fine arts.

Triff was invited by two faculty members from Wesleyan to deliver a lecture to their first-year seminar students. Students in the two courses, “Baroque Rome” and “The Roman Family,” were brought together for a lecture about the powerful Orsini family, whose rise and fall during the late Middle Ages and Renaissance in Rome was mirrored in the evolution of its palace complex at Monte Giordano.

The lecture, based on Triff’s upcoming book, The Orsini Palace at Monte Giordano: Patronage and Public Image in Renaissance Rome, served as a bridge between the two seminar courses. “The Roman Family” focused on the institution of the family in Rome and its structure. Meanwhile, “Baroque Rome” was an inclusive look at life, art, and culture in Rome during the Baroque period. Students from both courses, she said, were able to participate in a conversation about the Orsini family and its palace, each contributing to a lively picture of a city in transition.

“Having more first-year seminars ‘talk’ to each other here at Trinity would be fantastic,” Triff added. “To have viable links that are content driven would further strengthen our first-year program and promote more creative synergy among our incoming students.”

Triff’s research examines the Orsini family’s impact on Rome’s social history and palace culture. In particular, her lecture focused on the topic of patronage in Rome and how the Orsini family used it to maintain its status. She also explored the ways that the papacy’s 1420 return to Rome affected the city’s baronial culture and led to the Orsini family’s decline.

At Trinity, Triff teaches art and architectural history in addition to being acting director of the art history program and the faculty coordinator of the Rome study-abroad program. She endeavors to bring a focus on visual literacy to her teaching, as she did in her guest lecture at Wesleyan.

“It is important that we engage with the arts, whether visual arts, music, dance,” she said. “They’re each important and eloquent markers of individual cultures. That’s how we reveal ourselves.”

category: Lectures and Panels

Sam Kassow speaks at opening of Polish history museum

Since the 2007 publication of Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive, Samuel Kassow, Charles H. Northam Professor of History at Trinity, has won numerous awards, been elected a Fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research, lectured often and widely, and been recognized as one of the world’s leading scholars on the Holocaust and more specifically, the fate of Jews in Poland.

Just last month, Kassow was invited to Warsaw to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and was asked to speak at the unofficial opening of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews. The five-day event, April 18-22, was somber yet uplifting and featured a number of dignitaries and notable organizations, including the president of Poland, Bronislaw Komorowski; the Israeli Philharmonic and conductor Zubin Mehta; philanthropic organizations; human rights activists; scholars; and Simcha Rotem, one of the last survivors of the ghetto uprising.

About 3.3 million Jews lived in Poland at the outbreak of World War II, although in 2011 only about 7,500 Poles identified themselves as Jews. Nonetheless, the Warsaw Ghetto and Poland’s pre-war Jewish population is still inextricably linked with Polish history.

The Warsaw Ghetto uprising began on April 19, 1943 when the German military entered the Ghetto with the intention of “liquidation” – the deportation of all residents, mostly Jews, to forced labor camps. The residents chose to resist rather than be deported to the camps, where death awaited them. The Jews continued to fight for 28 days, though greatly outnumbered and lacking weapons. By May 16, thousands of Ghetto fighters were captured or killed and the Germans proceeded to destroy the Ghetto.

The major highlight of the 70th anniversary commemoration was the dedication of the museum, although it is not scheduled to officially open until early next year. Kassow not only has served as a consultant to the museum since 2006 but he delivered the first formal lecture in its auditorium to approximately 400 people.

When the permanent exhibition of the museum (which cost about $100 million in money donated by the Polish government, Jewish groups and private donors) opens in the spring of 2014, it will tell the story of the Jewish people’s 1,000-year history in Poland. The core exhibition will demonstrate how Jewish history and Polish history have been intertwined, if not always happily.

Kassow also participated in a panel discussion on human rights, during which he spoke about the history of the Holocaust as well as Ringelblum. Kassow is considered the leading authority on Ringelblum, who, in 1940, established a secret organization named Oyneg Shabes in Nazi-occupied Warsaw to document Jewish life in wartime Poland and to compile an archive that would preserve the events for posterity.

Ringelblum was captured and killed in 1944 but before he died, he hid thousands of documents in milk cans and tin boxes. They were discovered in 1946 and 1950. Who Will Write Our History? tells the gripping story of Ringelblum and his determination to use historical scholarship to resist Nazi oppression. Kassow’s book has been published in eight languages.

View photos from Kassow’s trip. 

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Christoph Geiss investigates the fate of arctic carbon

Pooja Shakja '12 (left) and Christoph Geiss boring holes in the northern Manitoba peatland.

The title of the Common Hour lecture was “Predicting the Fate of Arctic Carbon.” But after twice traveling to northern Manitoba, Canada, to study the Arctic tundra and the possible effects that climatic change could have, Christoph Geiss, associate professor of physics and environmental science, found that there are no easy answers.

Thanks to a grant from the National Science Foundation, Geiss was able to visit the Manitoba tundra in 2008 and 2009, along with fellow scientists from Bowdoin College in Maine, St. Olaf College in Minnesota and the Science Museum of Minnesota. “Our main conclusion,” said Geiss, “is that peatland evolution is much more complicated” than scientists first envisioned.

Using spectacular photographs from the Manitoba landscape, Geiss explained to his Common Hour audience Thursday that his team is still analyzing its collected data. But one result of global warming that is apt to happen is that the forest will grow in a northerly direction and the tundra will change, perhaps reducing or even eliminating the peatlands.

Manitoba has approximately 17 percent of Canada’s peatlands, covering 19.2 hectares or almost one-third of the province. They’re concentrated in the Hudson Bay lowlands, areas to the north and east of Lake Winnipeg, the Saskatchewan River Delta, and the southeast corner of the province.

One of the reasons Geiss chose northern Manitoba is because the tundra is similar to the Arctic and the ground is permanently frozen, making it a suitable locale to conduct his research.

The peatlands, which are wetlands with a thick waterlogged organic soil layer (peat) made up of dead and decaying plant material, contain a significant amount of carbon mainly from the plants that have accumulated over thousands of years. Peatlands include moors, bogs, mires, peat swamp forests and permafrost tundra.

Geiss and his colleagues used aerial photography and borehole- and ground-penetrating radar data to estimate the extent and size of peat deposits in northern Manitoba, and a combination of paleo-climatic records to determine when the deposits formed and how they might change in the future.

It’s estimated that 18 to 19 gigatons of carbon is stored in Manitoba’s peatlands, an amount equivalent to almost a century of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions. Canada’s wetlands, including peatlands, have been identified as the import important carbon sink in the world.

One of the reasons that the future of peatlands is critical is that they have a long history of supporting human activities, such as for the gathering of medicinal plants, hunting, trapping for food and clothing, as well as gathering plants for ceremonial and spiritual purposes. Peatlands also contribute clean water and a habitat for many animals, birds and insects.

In studying the area, Geiss said the group tried to determine how the climate has changed since the retreat of the glaciers 8,000 years ago and how the landscape responded to the change. That is especially important, Geiss said, given that most scientists believe that it is going to get “much, much warmer over the next 50 years.” The team also studied the sediment in the lakes, which were carved out by the glaciers, to “figure out how the climate had changed.”

Some of the effects of global warming in the future could be the melting of ice, the drying of the peatlands, the export of dissolved carbon into the ocean and the release of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. All of those effects would obviously greatly affect the region’s ecosystem and contribute even more to climate change.

On the other hand, as the climate gets warmer, the peatlands could grow and counteract the harmful effects. A third option would be if the climate stabilizes, the landscape could stabilize, Geiss explained. That’s why more study and analysis is needed, he explained.

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Mark Setterfield delivers Maloney economics lecture

Mark Setterfield, Maloney Family Distinguished Professor of Economics at Trinity, delivered his inaugural lecture, “Growth and Crisis: A Multi-Agent System Approach,” on December 3 at McCook Auditorium. The presentation centered around an ongoing research project on which Setterfield collaborated with Bill Gibson, John Converse Professor of Economics at the University of Vermont.

Setterfield began his lecture with an overview of previous literature on growth and crisis–subjects that he described as well-established themes in economic theory with obvious contemporary relevance. Traditionally, models for studying economic systems are articulated in diagrams and equations. Since the early 1990s, however, the multi-agent systems (MAS), or agent-based modeling approach, has provided an alternative framework for studying economies.

The use of computer programs for modeling opens up limitless opportunities for study in this field. However, the more complicated the model, Setterfield noted, the more difficult it can be to interpret the output.

As a demonstration, Setterfield’s presented a MAS model of real and financial sector interaction. The model illustrated that heterogeneous firms depend on the financial sector for the intermediation and money creation necessary to facilitate investment spending. In turn, investment spending drives growth and profitability in the real sector, which affects the sentiment of heterogeneous “traders” in the financial sector and hence their willingness to finance investment and buy financial assets.

Setterfield ran the computer model, projecting constantly flashing lights of economic activity on a large screen, to show the model tracking the creation of demand, productive capacity, and financial wealth in the economy.

The MAS model and related research developed by Setterfield and Gibson–with the assistance of Trinity students–will allow researchers to study the effects of different financial network structures and monetary regimes on the performance and resilience of the economy, including the capacity for growth and the propensity to encounter crisis.

The important research question involved is how real and financial forces combine to affect performance and resilience. The ultimate conclusion, said Setterfield, is that troubled economies “can emerge, but not necessarily from the size and connectedness of financial firms. Firm conduct, not financial market structure, undermines economic performance and this should be the focus for policy makers.”

A key takeaway, Setterfield noted, was that stand-alone models of the real or financial sectors can be misleading. It is important to integrate both sectors to successfully study growth and crises.

Setterfield, who joined the Trinity faculty in 1992, is chair of the College’s Department of Economics. In addition, he is an associate member of the Cambridge Centre for Economic and Public Policy at Cambridge University (UK), a senior research associate at the International Economic Policy Institute, Laurentian University (Canada), and a member of the Centre d’Économie de l’Université Paris Nord (CEPN) at l’Université Paris XIII (France).

His main research interests are macrodynamics (with a particular focus on the development and application of concepts of path dependence) and Post-Keynesian economics. He is co-editor of the newly released After the Great Recession: The Struggle for Economic Recovery and Growth (Cambridge University Press, 2013), author of Rapid Growth and Relative Decline: Modelling Macroeconomic Dynamics with Hysteresis (Macmillan, 1997), editor or co-editor of six other volumes of essays, and has published in numerous journals including the Cambridge Journal of Economics, Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, European Economic Review, and The Manchester School.

Read the full story here. 

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Sonia Cardenas delivers Common Hour lecture on national human rights institutions

In a Common Hour event on Thursday, November 29, Sonia Cardenas, Charles A. Dana Research Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Human Rights Program, spoke about the global rise of national human rights institutions, the subject of her upcoming book, Chains of Justice: The Global Rise of National Human Rights Institutions.

Cardenas, who has traveled widely in researching this book and two previously published books, noted that today there are 115 National Human Rights Institutions (NHRIs), which are administrative bodies responsible for promoting and protecting human rights domestically. Only 15 countries, including the United States, have not expressed any interest in creating an NHRI.

The highest concentration is in Europe, but they can also be found in the Americas, Africa and the Asia-Pacific region. Cardenas said there was “explosive growth” in the creation of NHRIs in the 1990s, concurrent with the end of the Cold War, the drive toward democracy and an increased interest in the need to foster human rights.

Some of the NHRIs have “exceeded expectations,” such as the one in Uganda, while others have disappointed, for example those in Fiji and Honduras. Cardenas said, in many cases, it’s hard to assess whether the NHRIs have made a difference. “Ultimately, protecting and promoting human rights must be aimed at improving peoples’ lives.”

Cardenas’s lecture was presented just days before the start of Human Rights Week at Trinity College, December 3 – 7, 2012, which this year will focus on disability rights.

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Stefanie Chambers examines voter turnout during panel at Old State House

With the presidential election less than a month away, a panel of three experts tackled the thorny issues of low voter turnout, obstacles to voter participation, efforts to target and disenfranchise ethnic and racial groups, and other election-related topics.

The panel discussion, “The Fight to Vote, The Right to Vote,” took place on Wednesday, October 10 at the Old State House in downtown Hartford and featured Stefanie Chambers, associate professor of political science at Trinity; Secretary of the State Denise Merrill; and Cheri Quickmire, executive director of Common Cause, Connecticut. The moderator was Elizabeth McGuire of the Connecticut Network (CT-N), which recorded the discussion and will broadcast it over the coming week.

For a listing of airtimes, please visit: www.ct-n.com.

McGuire opened the discussion by noting that the number of people who turn out to vote could very well be a deciding factor in both the presidential election pitting Democrat Barack Obama against Republican Mitt Romney and Connecticut’s U.S. Senate race between Democrat Chris Murphy and Republican Linda McMahon. However, McGuire continued, “we know that a huge number of people in this country just sit it out.”

The nation’s dismal voter participation rate – especially when compared to other democracies – dominated the hour-long conversation. Panelists discussed barriers to voter participation in the United States compared to other democracies, some of which do not require citizens to first register and some have elections on weekends or turn election day into a national holiday. The barrage of negative ads on American TV is also a big turn-off, as are the barriers that keep racial and ethnic minority groups from the polls.

Furthermore, the lack of participation occurs despite decades of inequality that women and minorities endured with regard to voting rights. Chambers, who teaches a course at Trinity on women and politics, gave an overview of the struggle by women for the right to vote, a fight that wasn’t won until the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1920, more than a century after women had begun clamoring for enfranchisement. The framers of the Constitution did not specify which groups were entitled to vote, resulting in various constituencies having to fight “to get a place at the table.”

These historical struggles seem forgotten by many, as in the past few decades less than half of the eligible adults in this country have voted in presidential elections, and even fewer in off-year elections. Merrill, whose job it is to oversee state elections, emphasized the historical context provided by Chambers by describing the voter participation rate as “a crisis in this country. [Voting] is a right that people have fought and died for.”

Read the full story here. 

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