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African American History Professor Establishes Ties with Ethiopian University
Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between Ramapo College and Addis Ababa University. The MOU will establish various faculty, administrative, and student exchanges, including a four-week summer study abroad in Ethiopia focusing on globalization and development issues. The study abroad course, “Globalization and Development in Ethiopia,” will begin in the summer of 2011. Photo Courtesy: David Lewis-Colman
Associate Professor of African American History David Lewis-Colman traveled to Ethiopia in May with the support of the Roukema Center for International Education. Lewis-Colman presented a lecture to students and faculty at Addis Ababa University about his current research on African Americans and the anti-apartheid movement. Lewis-Colman, along with Professor of Psychology Tilahun Sineshaw, is working on negotiating a
Associate Professor of African American History David Lewis-Colman at the site of the Church of St. George in Lalibela, Ethiopia
Psychology Professor Published in Journal of Personality Disorders
A study by Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology Peter Heinze was recently published in the Journal of Personality Disorders. His article was titled, “Let’s Get Down to Business: A Validation Study of the Psychopathic Personality Inventory Among a Sample of MBA Students.”
One of Heinze’s research interests includes the study of psychopathy, a syndrome marked by a variety of traits such as lack of remorse, shallow affect, pathological lying and superficial charm. While the majority of such research has concentrated on incarcerated populations, Heinze’s focus is in the area of “noncriminal” psychopathy, investigating the presence 14 Ramapo magazine
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of those with psychopathic personalities in “mainstream” fields such as business.
The article appears to be the first in the field involving the investigaAssociate Professor of tion of psychopathy Clinical Psychology Peter Heinze among MBA students and examines the association between psychopathic traits and moral decision making. The results of the study revealed an inverse relation between one psychopathic trait, Machiavellian Egocentricity, and moral reasoning.
Dental Microwear & Paleontology: Scratching The Surface
Assistant Professor of Biology Sandra Suarez
Building further upon doctoral dissertation research at New York University in 1999, Assistant Professor of Biology Sandra Suarez is delving into the field of paleontology, specifically focusing on dental microwear, which is the study of microscopic scratches and pits that form on a tooth’s surface as the result of its use. This research can be used to deduce dietary composition for extinct species from the fossil records. Suarez has collected microwear data from a diverse sample of 44 individual, wild Saguinus labiatus or red-bellied tamarins, representing all age categories.
Currently, she is working with Ramapo student Lance Vicente who plans to study dentistry. Vicente and Suarez continue to visualize casts of the teeth at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, using a scanning electron microscope. Suarez is also collaborating with Siobhan Cooke (Ph.D. candidate) from Brooklyn College, a specialist in New World Primate dental morphology. Results from this study will be compared with information cast from fossils from the La Salla field site in Bolivia housed at the National Museum of Natural History in La Paz, Bolivia through a collaborative study on the La Salla Primates with Alfred Rosenberger, professor of Anthropology and Archaeology at Brooklyn College. Suarez hopes the study will shed light on the dietary habits of the fossil primates discovered in this region of Latin America. Although in the preliminary stages of research, Suarez plans to publish her research in a scholarly journal in two years.
A Ramapo Sabbatical Odyssey: 11 Countries, Six Months and Countless Impressions for Two Faculty Members This spring, 21 years after witnessing the tumultuous events of the 1989 Tiananmen Square student democracy movement in China, Professor of Communication Arts Patricia Keeton and Professor of Literature Peter Scheckner returned to that country for research related to academic sabbatical and Ramapo Foundation grant projects. China was one of the major stops of their six-month, eleven-country sabbatical odyssey that began in January 2010 when the couple traveled to Argentina, Bolivia and Peru. Keeton conducted interviews and research for her sabbatical project on the resurgence of documentary filmmaking in Argentina following that country’s economic collapse in December 2001. In May and June, the pair spent five weeks in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing, their first visit to Asia since 1989, when they taught as Visiting Foreign Experts at the Beijing Institute of Tourism (BIT) and lived in Beijing with their six-year-old daughter Lucia.
Keeton and Scheckner were the first Ramapo professors to participate in a new faculty exchange established at that time between Ramapo and BIT. Scheckner is updating a memoir he wrote about their year in China for his sabbatical project and used the visit to observe and analyze the transformations China has undergone during the past two decades, while Keeton focused on gathering materials for a creative nonfiction project supported with a Foundation Grant. Between Latin America and China, the couple also traveled to India and Southeast Asia, and spent three months in Thailand,
Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. They ended their semester with a week in Berlin, Germany, and Prague, in the Czech Republic, before returning to New York.
“Traveling so widely enabled us to witness and document, through writing and photography, the variety of ways in which people in all these countries are responding to the effects of the worldwide economic crisis that will inform our individual projects. Now we have to digest these experiences and begin to write,” said Keeton.
Photo Courtesy: Pat Keeton and Peter Scheckner
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Photo Courtesy: Pat Keeton and Peter Scheckner
Faculty news
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Nine years after Argentina’s economy collapsed, leaving half the population living below the poverty line, neighborhood popular assemblies and political organizations continue to protest government economic policies.
Professors Pat Keeton and Peter Scheckner in Halong Bay, Vietnam, against a backdrop of limestone karsts
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