AUBG Faculty Newsletter issue 2

March-April 2013

Volume 1, Issue 2

Dear faculty, students, staff and visitors to the AUBG website,

Another academic year is over and most of us have already dispersed back to our homes, our vacation destinations, our hideaways to seek some much‐needed rest. For many of us this is also the opportunity to complete half‐finished projects or to begin new ones. What better way, then, to celebrate the end of an academic year and to seek inspiration for the year ahead than to reflect on what we have already accomplished.

Have a great summer all!

Filitsa Sofianou‐Mullen, Editor fmullen@aubg.bg Faculty News

Nancy Bartley’s book, The Boy Who Shot the Sheriff, the Redemption of Herbert Niccolls, Jr., has been nominated for the National Book Award in nonfiction. In April she presented a paper, “The Boy Who Shot the Sheriff, the Media and Juvenile Justice Sentencing Trends in the U.S.’’ at the International Journal of Arts and Sciences in Florence.

She was also Fulbright lecturer in Constanta, Romania at Ovidius University (March 4, 2013) with the paper “The Boy Who Shot the Sheriff – the Rise of the Gun Culture in the U.S.’’ Nancy

was Fulbright Scholar in Journalism for the academic year 2012‐13.

Svetla Boytcheva, Associate Professor of Computer Science, co‐authored with I. Nikolova, G. Angelova, and D. Tcharaktchiev, the paper “Medical Archetypes and Information Extraction Template in Automatic Processing of Clinical Narratives.” In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Conceptual Structure, ICCS‐2013, Springer, Lecture Notes in Computer Science Vol. 7735, Mumbai, India, Jan 10‐12, 2013.

Dimitar Christozov, Professor of Computer Science, was recognized as a “fellow” of two international academic institutions: Informing Science Institute (http://informingscience.org ) 1

and Institute of Applied Knowledge Management (http://www.iiakm.org).

He also published a book titled Informing and Information Brokerage, supported by the Bulgarian Science Fund. The book was published by the Publishing House of the Bulgarian Academy of Science “Marin Drinov”. The book is in Bulgarian and is available at the Panitza Library.

Sean Homer, Associate Professor of Writing and Literature, gave a talk in Sofia on political violence in Greece entitled “On ‘The Critique of Violence’ and revolutionary Suicide” (February 20th). His introduction to Jacques Lacan (Routledge 2005) was published in Turkish by Pheonix, Siyasal and Ekinoks Publishing in April.

Sean’s paper “ ‘The Roma Do Not Exist’: The Roma as an Object of Cinematic Representation and the Question of Authenticity” (2006) was translated into Portuguese and published in the Gypsy Caravan Film Festival catalogue in Rio De Janeiro Brazil in May. His much delayed paper “The Rupture of the Real: Resistance and Recuperation in Recent Serbian Cinema” will be published in Lacan, Discourse, Event: New Analyses in Textual Indeterminacy. (eds.) David Pavon Cuellar and Ian Parker in September by Routledge and later in the year in Spanish. A chapter entitled “The Politics of Comradeship: Philosophical Construction and Commitment in Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek” has been accepted for publication in Badiou and the Political Condition. (ed.) Marios Constantinou Edinburgh University Press and scheduled for publication in the Autumn of 2013. Finally, his entry “Jacques Lacan” has been accepted for inclusion in the The Žižek Dictionary (ed.) Rex Butler to be published by Acumen Publishing (2014).

Lynnette Leonard, Adjunct Instructor of English, presented the paper “Managing Degrees of Anonymity in Online Support Groups/Sites to

Facilitate Constructive Communication for Positive Mental Health Outcomes” on the Panel: Out of the Darkness: Communicating the Possible for Improving Outcomes for Individuals and Families Struggling with Mental Illness.

Presented at Central States Communication Association Conference, Kansas City, MO, April 2013.

Diego Lucci (Associate Professor of History and Philosophy) has been awarded a Visiting Fellowship at the Institute of Historical Research (IHR) in London, to be held in March and April 2014. The IHR is part of the School for Advanced Study at the University of London. Prof. Lucci is currently working on an edited collection of essays on atheism and deism in Britain from 1650 to 1800, to be published by Ashgate in 2014. At the IHR in London, Prof. Lucci will work on his new research project—a monograph on heterodox views of early Christianity in Enlightenment England, to be submitted to Cambridge University Press.

John Mullen, Assistant Professor of Writing and Literature, delivered the paper “Peace, Poetics, and Partisanship: Whig versus Tory Literary Responses to the War of the Spanish Succession and the Peace of Utrecht”, at the University of Utrecht / Dutch‐Belgian Society for Eighteenth‐ Century Studies conference “Performances of Peace: Utrecht 1713‐2013” in Utrecht, Netherlands, April 24‐26, 2013.

Ljuben Mutafchiev, Professor of Statistics and Mathematical Statistics, published the article “The size of the largest part of random weighted partitions of large integers.” In Combinatorics, Probability and Computing 22, No. 3, 433-453 .

(The journal is published by Cambridge University Press; current impact factor of the journal: 0.778). Also, the following paper was accepted for inclusion in the conference proceedings: (co‐authored with Olivier Bodini, Philippe Ducon, Alice Jacquot). “Asymptotic analysis and random sampling of digitally 4

convex polyominoes.” 17th IARP International Conference on Discrete Geometry for Computer Imaginary, March 20‐22, 2013, Sevilla, Spain. To appear in Lecture Notes in Computer Science 7749 (2013), pp. 95‐106 (published by Springer Verlag, Berlin 2013). Professor Mutafchiev is participating in the Program Committee of Alea in Europe School, organized by CIRM (France) to be held in October, 2013, in Marseille (Luminy, France).

Diana Stantcheva, Associate Professor of German, was invited to give a guest lecture at the Institute for German Language and Linguistics, (Humboldt University in Berlin) on Wednesday, April 17, 2013. The title of her lecture was “Phraseologie sehen: Zur Visualisierung von Phraseologismen im DaF‐ Unterricht“ ["Seeing Phraseology: About the Visualization of Phrasemes in German‐as‐a‐ foreign‐language Classes“].

Cosmina Tanasoiu, Associate Professor of European Studies, had her article "Homo Post‐ Communistus: Portrait of a Character in Transition" accepted for publication in the Summer edition of the academic journal Perspectives on European Politics and Society.

In June she will present a co‐authored paper on the Romanian political discourse during the 2012 political crisis at the Annual Conference of the Council for European Studies, held in Amsterdam.

Moreover, in April, she was one of the speakers at AUBG‐TEDx where she offered a"defense of reading" and considered the impact of the digital era upon our perception of books and reading.

Finally, as the keynote speaker at the AUBG Teacher‐Student Research Conference she talked about epistemological debates in social science.

Numan Ülkü co‐authored and published an article in Emerging Markets Review, a high‐ ranked international journal (impact factor 1.07). The full citation is as follows: Ülkü, N. and D. İkizlerli (2012) “The Interaction between Foreigners’ Trading and Emerging Stock Returns: Evidence from Turkey”. Emerging Markets Review 13(3), 381‐409.

Emilia Zankina, Assistant Professor of Political Science, presented the paper “Does Parity Exist in the 'Macho' World?: Party Regulation and Gender Representation in the Balkans,” with Ekaterina Rashkova.

Presented at the 3rd European Conference on Politics and Gender, March 21‐23, 2013, Barcelona, Spain.

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