Category: Faculty

Fiss’s Fanciful Frolicking at the History of Science Society Virtual Festival

Andrew Fiss
Andrew Fiss


Andrew Fiss presented a research paper titled “Singing Songs of HSS: Joking about the Standards of our Discipline” on Dec. 9 as part of the History of Science Society Virtual Festival.

Fiss’ paper analyzed a History of Science Society meeting and a related alumni reunion that occurred in Bloomington, Indiana, on Oct. 31, 1985. It argued that singing together in educational communities has led to heightened experiences of belonging.

He also chaired the virtual session “Sites of Science,” with contributed papers about tribal medicine of Santhal, India; Berzelius’ home laboratory in Sweden; agricultural stations of Hainan and Guangdong provinces, China; and environmental farming practices of Bihar, India.

Laura Fiss’ “The Idler’s Club” To Hit Shelves January 31

Portrait of Laura Kasson Fiss holding "The Idler's Club"
Laura Kasson Fiss explores Victorian humor through the cast of literary figures that contributed to the Idler literary magazine in The Idler’s Club.

The Idler’s Club: Humour and Mass Readership from Jerome K. Jerome to P.G. Wodehouse, written by faculty member Laura Kasson Fiss, is set to be released on January 31, 2023, from Edinburgh University Press. A release party will take place Friday, February 3, from 12-1 PM at the Van Pelt and Opie Library to celebrate the publication.

The Idler’s Club explores the humor of the key contributors to the Idler literary magazine, “. . . finding connections between people that we don’t really think of today as being connected.” Fiss explains, “They were all in this social network.” By creating humor around the idea of the Victorian social club while simultaneously using “The Idler’s Club” column to create one of their own, authors from Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes stories) to J.M. Barrie (Peter Pan) to Israel Zangwill (whose book, Melting Pot, inspired the oft-used metaphor) created these social and literary connections.

“A lot of them were outsiders, trying to foster social mobility at one point or another.” Fiss observes that the club was “. . . a kind of double-edged sword” that could be both appealing and damaging, and “often both at the same time.” But humor offered these writers and contributors a way to convey multiple meanings simultaneously.

Fiss’ passion for Victorian literature and humor began as an undergraduate, when she studied both English and Music and wrote a thesis for each, both centered around the comedic theatrical partnership Gilbert and Sullivan. Her graduate studies continued to focus on the topic of humor, which would lay the groundwork for The Idler’s Club.

“I’m really proud of it! I’m really excited to have other people read it, and I’m really hoping to have more people take up the topic of Victorian humor.”

Readers can save 30% off Idler’s Club by pre-ordering the book before its official release date on Tuesday using the code NEW30 on the Edinburgh University Press web site.

Canevez Wins 2023 Meheroo Jussawalla Research Award

New Humanities faculty member Richard Canevez has won the 2023 Meheroo Jussawalla Research Award, presented by the Pacific Telecommunications Council at their annual conference for the best participant research paper.

Canevez’s paper, “All-Encompassing War: An Exploration of Information Disorder Countermeasures Through Smooth and Striated Space,” discusses the various measures both taken and in consideration by Western states to combat disinformation and malinformation originating from adversarial states like Russia, China, and Iran in an evolving digital information landscape. Canevez uses the concept of smooth and striated spaces to explore how information—particularly with harmful intent—flows through digital space, how measures to combat disinformation and malinformation struggle with the unique challenges of digital information flow, and how this evolution is changing the nature of warfare to more closely integrate state, military, civil society, and private industry in a way that contrasts traditional, centralized notions of war.

“These changes in the way that war is fought stand to have a fundamental change in the structure of society we are still coming to grips with. In wartime, and in peacetime.” Canevez posits that where warfare was once a binary comprised of physical states of “at war” or “at peace,” we are transitioning into more of a spectrum of aggression, where states are always involved in some level of information aggression or defense. Add to this that the target of information warfare is, most often, civilian, and “when we fight wars, we fight them as a whole society, rather than as the domain of the state.”

Canevez will present his paper at the Pacific Telecommunications Council annual conference on January 17th as the culmination of a two-year postdoctoral fellowship with the University of Hawaii, Manoa. His fellowship was funded by the Computing Innovation Fellows program, which sought to offset the negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the academic job search for new PhD graduates in computing. (See a blog post that Richard made about the evolution of his research for CIFellows here.)

“I must express infinite gratitude to my postdoctoral mentor, Jenifer Sunrise Winter, and to the CIFellows program for preparing me for a faculty position in a way that I was not previously ready at the end of my graduate studies.” Of the award, Richard said, “It’s certainly validating! I’m honored to have my work associated with Meheroo Jussawalla, who contributed so much to the telecommunications field.”

Canevez hopes to take the energy and enthusiasm from this work as he begins his time at Tech in the spring 2023 semester.

Van Kooy’s paper for London conference examines ‘the plantationoscene’

Associate Professor Dana Van Kooy presented her essay, “Assemblages of the Plantationoscene” recently at The London Stage and the Nineteenth-Century World III conference, sponsored by the New College at Oxford University.

Dana Van Kooy

Invoking the neologism “plantationoscene,” the paper from Van Kooy, who directs Tech’s English program, examines John Fawcett’s pantomime, “Obi; or Three-Finger’d Jack,” which opened at London’s Haymarket Theatre in 1800. Linking the era (cene) to the performance and visual reproduction of specific theatrical scenes, this neologism offers an alternative framework for interpreting Fawcett’s pantomime, which assembled scenes of plantation life and its corresponding devastation into a formulaic plot.

Focusing on stage descriptions and those scenes advertised on its playbills, “Assemblages of the Plantationoscene” draws attention to the production of a visual ecology that reconfigured the colonial landscape.

In her abstract, Van Kooy established the relevance of the topic: “Throughout The Atlantic World, the plantation system marked a period of human and ecological disaster, one that theaters in Britain and the United States readily transformed into captivating spectacles throughout 18th and 19th centuries. The scale of this devastation continues to impact society in myriad ways, including racialized violence and policies that associate people and labor practices with ‘natural’ and/or geographical spaces.”

On the Road and In Print

Andrew Fiss

Andrew Fiss (HU) presented at and participated in the British Academy workshop titled “Universals’ Locales: The International and Global History and Sociology of Modern Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences” Jan. 8-9, in Edinburgh, Scotland at the University of Edinburgh.

His contributions introduced historical considerations for the study of cultural representations of mathematics and mathematicians, including broader questions about how mathematicians come to agree on terms and styles.

Peitho published “The Mathmagics of Media Princesses: Informal STEM Learning, STEM Rhetorics, and Animated Children’s Movies” by Andrew Fiss (HU).

Book Discussion: Jacob Riis’s “How the Other Half Lives”

Stephanie Carpenter (HU) and Allison Neely (Michigan Tech Archives) will lead a discussion of “How the Other Half Lives” (1890) by Jacob Riis. The event will be held from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. Thursday (Sept. 12) at the Copper Country Community Arts Center in Hancock.

This program is in conjunction with the National Endowment for the Humanities On the Road exhibit “Jacob A. Riis: How the Other Half Lives,” on display at the Keweenaw National Historical Park’s Calumet Visitor Center (98 5th Street, Calumet) now through Oct. 20.

The discussion will focus on Riis’s verbal and photographic imagery. Questions to be considered include:

Black and white photo of three children sleeping on the street.How does the book depict “the other half”—and who is included (and excluded) from that category.

How does Riis encourage us to see the subjects of his book
What parallels can we draw between Riis’s presentation of new immigrants and urban poverty and depictions that we see today,

Participants are encouraged to view the exhibit prior to the discussion—and to read the book. Copies of “How the Other Half Lives” can be purchased from the Calumet Visitor Center. Scanned excerpts are available by emailing Carpenter.

The event is free and open to all. RSVP by calling 482-2333 by tomorrow (Sept. 11). The Copper Country Community Arts Center is located at 126 Quincy Street in Hancock.

Stephanie Carpenter Publishes Book Review

Stephanie CarpenterStephanie Carpenter has published an omnibus book review in the Fall 2018 issue of The Missouri Review. Her piece, “The End of the World as We Know It: Four Novels of Climate Change,” considers new novels by Louise Erdrich, Jenni Fagan, Paul Kingsnorth and James Bradley. Carpenter will again teach Literature and the Environment (HU 3508) in Fall 2020.

Andrew Fiss Publishes Article in Peitho

Andrew FissAndrew Fiss has published a research article titled “Structures of Antifeminism: Drugs and Women’s Education in the Texts of Dr. Clarke” in the rhetoric journal Peitho. The article used rare books from the Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard to track the historical roots of a pervasive antifeminist argument that has kept women from higher education since the Civil War Era. The article indicates how the structure of this argument came from early classes in pharmacy delivered by Boston doctor Edward H. Clarke in the 1850s-60s, popularizing discrimination through (implicitly, structurally) presenting women’s education as a dangerous drug that could be overused/abused.

Patty Sotirin to Give Talk on Copper Country Mothers

World War One in the Copper Country logoA talk on Copper Country Mothers during World War I by Patty Sotirin will take place tonight (Nov. 6) at the Carnegie Museum of the Keweenaw. Doors open at 6 p.m., and the talk begins at 6:15. Refreshments will be served. This event is part of World War I & the Copper Country.

Sotirin’s talk explains how mothers of sons in military service were critical figures in the Copper Country’s participation in the Great War. The war was a personal challenge for mothers, but made them public figures as well. Highlighting several local mothers whose boys went to war, Sotirin sketches what that experience was like for them based on letters, poems and newspaper stories. Beyond their personal pride and trials, the patriotic citizen mother ready to sacrifice her children for the nation emerged as a public focus for recruitment appeals, servicemen support and national grieving.

Special attention is given to the creation of the Gold Star Mothers and their sojourn at national expense to visit their boys’ graves overseas. Given women’s campaign for the vote and the importance of ethnic identity in the Copper Country, the experiences of mothers here highlight some of the tensions among motherhood, nationalism and citizenship that are still part of our collective story of motherhood and war.