Kara Doyle, associate professor of English, has published a book-length examination of Chaucer manuscripts, The Reception of Chaucer's Shorter Poems, 1400-1450: Female Audiences, English Manuscripts, French Contexts (Boydell and Brewer Press, 2021). The book examines the way Chaucer's audiences initially encountered his female-voiced and female-focused short poems: namely, in manuscript collections together with late medieval French works and poems by some of Chaucer's imitators. Analyzed as a group, these anthologies reveal the roots of the controversy about Chaucer's sympathy for women's perspectives. They suggest the multilingual context that shaped both Chaucer's poems and his audiences' reactions to them, and they hint at the female social networks in which his poems circulated in the first 50 years after his death.

Lilla Safford Smith '11, senior staff thermal systems engineer at Tesla, presented a talk on her career pathway to students enrolled in the Research and Entrepreneurship Practicum being piloted by Ann Anderson, the Agnes S. MacDonald Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Bradford Bruno, professor of mechanical engineering, and Mary Carroll '86, the Dwane W. Crichton Professor of Chemistry, as part of a National Science Foundation Partnership for Innovation grant. Jose Madero Munoz '12, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Bucknell University, was also a featured speaker for the practicum. In the course, student researchers are developing entrepreneurial ideas and learning what is involved in bringing technology developed through fundamental research to the marketplace.

Sharon Gmelch, professor of anthropology, received a Fulbright alumni grant to return to Ireland to continue her work with Irish Travellers. She was also recently interviewed as part of a nationally broadcast celebration of Irish Traveller ethnicity, sponsored by the National University of Ireland, Galway. The interview, illustrated with photographs by George Gmelch, professor of anthropology is available here.

Andrew Feffer, professor of history, delivered a paper on the history of the College Teachers Union in New York City during the 1930s during a panel at the annual conference of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education. The panel was titled “From Social Movement Unionism to Bargaining for the Common Good.”