Faculty Spotlight #2 October 10th

The Brown Center invites you to our first Faculty Spotlight on Thursday, October 10th at 1:00 PM in the Carlton Union Building’s Stetson Room. The spotlights series is a bimonthly showcase of research, creative inquiry, and other scholarly engagement of the campus community. Stop by and learn about the research of our talented Stetson community! Please use the following button to RSVP and receive a complimentary meal voucher:

Details about the time and place can be found on Stetson’s Event Calendar

We have changed the format this year and will be having two sessions for thirty minutes each.

The two professors participating in our second spotlight are:

Image retrieved from faculty profiles (Link is here)

Dr. Eric Kurlander – William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of History

Department of History

Strange Haven: Shanghai as East Asian “Solution” to the Nazi “Jewish Question”

The goal of my 2019 summer research was to examine the circumstances facing regional authorities, European states, and local and international Jewish organizations in facilitating an “East Asian” solution to the Nazi “Jewish Question.” This meant exploring diplomatic and local policy discussions involving Chinese, Japanese, British, French, German and Jewish officials located in the files at the Shanghai Municipal Archives and in printed periodicals located at the Shanghai City Library. For the purposes of my talk, I would like to highlight a few of the sources that I found this summer and explain how they might fit into my next book project, Before the ‘Final Solution’. A Global History of the Nazi ‘Jewish Question’, 1919-1945, as well as a chapter I am currently writing, “Strange Havens. Shanghai and Manchuria as Territorial ‘Solutions’ to the Nazi ‘Jewish Question’ in East Asia”, intended for an edited volume titled, Shelter from the Storm? German Jews and Asians in the Shadow of the Holocaust, 1930-1950

Dr. Eric Kurlander is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of History at Stetson University. He studied at Bowdoin College (BA) and Harvard University (MA, PhD), teaching three years at Harvard before arriving at Stetson in 2001. He offers a wide range of courses on Modern German, European, and World History. His recent monograph, Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich (Yale, 2017; paperback 2018), provides the first comprehensive study of the supernatural in Nazi Germany, illustrating how the Third Reich drew on a variety of occult practices, border sciences, and pagan religious ideas to gain power, shape propaganda and policy, and pursue their dreams of racial utopia and empire. Hitler’s Monsters has been translated into Italian, Polish, Croatian, Czech, and Estonian. Kurlander’s second monograph, Living With Hitler: Liberal Democrats in the Third Reich (Yale, 2009), illuminates the ways in which German liberals negotiated, resisted, and in some ways accommodated the Third Reich. His first book, The Price of Exclusion: Ethnicity, National Identity, and the Decline of German Liberalism, 1898-1933, appeared in 2006. Kurlander’s other books include two edited volumes,Revisiting the ‘Nazi Occult’: Histories, Realities, Legacies, co-edited with Monica Black (Camden House, 2015) andTranscultural Encounters between Germany and India: Kindred Spirits in the 19th and 20th Centuries, co-edited with Joanne Miyang Cho and Douglas McGetchin (Routledge, 2014). He has published articles in many journals and edited volumes, including Central European HistoryGerman History, and The Journal of Contemporary History, and held research and writing fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation; Alexander von Humboldt Foundation; the German Historical Institute; the German Academic Exchange Service; the Krupp Foundation; and Harvard University’s Program for the Study of Germany and Europe. At Stetson Kurlander has received the William Hugh McInery Award for Excellence in Teaching, and the Hand Award for Excellence in Research and Creative Activity, while contributing to the university in a number of substantive leadership roles. His current projects include two textbooks, Modern Germany: A Global History and The West in Question: Continuity and Change (both under contract with Oxford University Press) and a monograph, Before the Final Solution: A Global History of the Nazi “Jewish Question”.

Stephanie Mullins for The Studio Creative Group

Dr. Chadley Ballantyne – Assistant Professor of Music – Voice

School of Music

“What’s the Buzz? Auditory roughness and vibrotactile awareness.”

We can experience mechanical vibrations as sound and as a tactile sensation. The buzzy quality of high number harmonics can add an element of auditory roughness to singing that impacts timbre and perceived style. Harmonics in the range of human speech can felt as mechanical vibrations. What can we learn about our shared vocal experiences from the body of research on mechanoreceptors located in the skin and in the vocal instrument? How does auditory roughness impact our perception of a sound? This presentation will explore how we “feel” our voices, and how high-frequency energy can influence our perception of singing.

Bass-baritone Chadley Ballantyne has performed with Opera Fort Collins, Fresco Opera Theatre, Union Avenue Opera Theatre, Light Opera Works, Opera for the Young, Utah Festival Opera Company, Main Street Opera, American Chamber Opera and Theo Ubique. Ballantyne is a frequent guest speaker on the topic of applying vocal acoustic pedagogy for both classical and CCM techniques. He has presented at Chicago Chapter NATS, the 2017 and 2018 Pan-American Vocology Association Symposiums, the 2017 West Central and Central Region NATS Conferences, and at the 55th NATS National Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. He was a co-instructor at the 2018 Acoustic Vocal Pedagogy Workshop at the New England Conservatory of Music and is a contributing author to The Evolving Singing Voice: Changes Across the Lifespan. 

Dr. Ballantyne is Assistant Professor of Music, Voice at Stetson University. He holds a bachelor of music degree from Drake University, and a master of music degree and doctor of musical arts degree from the University of Illinois.