Academic Spotlight November 2018: SJSU Celebrates 2018 Authors and Artists with Reception

Photo: Daniel Mitre, BFA and minor in Business, '19 At San Jose State University's Annual Author and Artist Awards guests peruse some of the books published by Spartan faculty members in 2018.

Photo: Daniel Mitre, BFA and minor in Business, ’19
At San Jose State University’s Annual Author and Artist Awards guests peruse some of the books published by Spartan faculty members in 2018.

By David Goll

When they are not preparing the next generation of Silicon Valley students for momentous futures, San Jose State University’s faculty are researching some of the world’s most topical issues.

The published and performed work of more than two dozen San Jose State University faculty members were celebrated during a Nov. 2 ceremony at the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Library. More than 100 people turned up for the event to recognize the efforts involved in editing and authoring scholarly books on topics ranging from politics to 3-D printing to cybersecurity, creating celebrated theater stage design and writing an adaptation of an internationally acclaimed play.

The seventh annual Author and Artist Awards presentation was held in the library’s spacious eighth-floor Grand Reading Room, where 29 pieces by 26 authors and artists were recognized.

“The work you do has such an impact on students,” said Joan Ficke, interim provost and senior vice president for Academic Affairs, during her welcome remarks. “It benefits all of us. The research is what is actually important. The students follow in your footsteps.”

Of the 26 faculty members recognized, two honorees were asked to make extended presentations of their work.

“Here we are in the spectacular Grand Reading Room, the crowning glory of our library,” said University Library Dean Tracy Elliott said. “The perfect place to honor the best of the best. (They) are the reason San Jose State is considered one of the top public universities for academic research.”

Associate Professor Virginia San Fratello, who teaches Interior Design, presented the book she co-authored entitled Printing Architecture: Innovative Recipes for 3D Printing. She noted it’s now possible to 3D print an entire structure. Taking advantage of the city of Oakland’s liberal review process for small residential units to help combat the housing crisis, San Fratello displayed such a home created by 3D-printed tiles.

She showed striking photographs of more whimsical printed objects, too, including coffee cups and coffee pots made of coffee “flour,” sugar spoons spun out of the granulated sweet stuff, and saltshakers constructed of salt.

“I approach these tasks like a chef in the kitchen,” she said.

Matthew Spangler, an associate professor of Communication Studies, also shared information about his creative work. He first read the book The Kite Runner in 2005. The 2003 novel by Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini detailed the tumultuous political and social events in his native country along with the exodus of refugees from Afghanistan to Pakistan and the United States — including the Bay Area.

The book changed Spangler’s life. He wrote a stage play based on the novel, which was first presented by SJSU students in 2007.

“Thirteen years later, 44 theater groups have done 15 different productions of the play worldwide,” Spangler said, including the theater capital of London last year. Other productions have been presented in Cleveland, Calgary, Tel Aviv, Liverpool and Nottingham. “Over 400,000 people have seen those plays,” he said. “That’s way more than read my scholarly articles and books.”

College deans introduced each of the other authors and artists, sharing a few notes about their scholarly and creative endeavors. See the list of all authors and artists on the library website.

Spangler’s ‘The Kite Runner’ Adaptation Opens in London with Positive Reviews

Matthew Spangler, a professor of communication studies in SJSU’s College of Social Sciences, created a theater adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s Kite Runner that is currently on stage in London’s West End. The show opened on Dec. 21 and runs until March 11. The performances are at Wyndham’s Theatre, an 800 seat venue off Leicester Square. The play has so far garnered more than two dozen reviews, including the few publications highlighted below:

“The best page-to-stage show since War Horse. . . . Matthew Spangler’s adaptation held the crowd spellbound. . . . Heartbreakingly good stage version of a popular story earns its place in the West End.”

★★★★★

The Stage Magazine

 

The Kite Runner soars.”

★★★★

The Independent

“Spangler skillfully balances the scenes in Asia with those of the Afghan refugees seeking to maintain their dignity and culture in the West. . . . It cannot but remind us of the thousands of vulnerable children in Syria today.”

★★★★★

Sunday Express

“The book has to be something I really like,” Spangler said, of working on an adaptation. “When you write a play, you spend a lot of time with it. It takes about a year to write it, then I look for a theatre that wants to produce it and then there’s the rehearsal time. It can be a two-to-three-year process so it has to be a story I really feel connected to and I want to share.”

Faculty Notes for November 2016: Publications, Quotes and More

The Kite Runner Poster

The Kite Runner Poster

Department of Journalism Lecturer Lisa Fernandez was recognized and applauded by NBC Bay Area news for the “small act of kindness” that helped student Brandon Beebe get back into the classroom after a series of financial setbacks left him homeless. Fernandez reached out to her Facebook community who “within minutes jumped in and asked what they could do to help,” Fernandez reported—help that ranged from direct financial assistance to connections to other sources of financial aid and housing assistance. For more of the story, including information about Beebe’s GoFundMe page.

Mother Nature Network interviewed Department of Physics and Astronomy Lecturer Friedemann Freund about the “earthquake lights” that appeared over New Zealand during the peak of the recent 7.8 magnitude earthquake. Freund, who co-authored a paper on the topic, theorizes that earthquake lights result when certain types of rock, under stress, produce electrical charges. Read more online.

Published this month through Cornell University’s East Asia Series: Department of History Assistant Professor Xiaojia Hou’s Negotiating Socialism in Rural China: Mao, Peasants and Local Cadres in Shanxi 1949-1953, the first monograph in English about the beginnings of China’s agricultural collectivization. Hou specializes in research about China’s socialist transformation in the 1950s and joined SJSU’s history faculty in the fall of 2015.

Dean Walter Jacobs, College of Social Sciences, was elected to the executive board of the Council of Colleges of Arts and Sciences, a national association based at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va. The council provides professional development programming to its member deans and works to sustain the arts and sciences as a leading influence in American higher education.

With help from her public relations class, Department of Journalism Lecturer Halima Kazem is spearheading a fundraiser for Syrian refugees living in a refugee camp in Lesvos, Greece, selling the brightly colored bags those refugees fashioned from life vests worn while fleeing their country by boat. The bags sell between $14 and $40 and Kazem hopes to sell all 130 bags by Christmas, raising approximately $3,000 for the refugees. For more information, contact Kazem at halima.kazem@sjsu.edu.

Department of Biomedical, Chemical and Materials Engineering Professor Claire Komives’s antivenom research made the news again in a Pensacola News Journal report extolling the role of the possum in developing snakebite antivenom. (Possums are immune to the poison inflicted by snakebites.) Komives has previously presented her research findings at the American Chemical Society’s national conference.

Both Popular Science and inverse.com noted iSchool Lecturer Susan Maret’s Freedom of Information Act request regarding the role of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in “the development and application of Hybrid Insect Microelectromechanical Systems.” The 88-page document Maret received in response details the feasibility of using flying insects for purposes of espionage. Read more online and at Maret’s blog.

Department of Communication Studies Associate Professor Matthew Spangler’s adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s bestselling novel The Kite Runner will open at Wyndham’s Theatre in London’s West End on December 21 and run through March 11, 2017. Spangler’s adaptation was staged at San José Repertory Theatre in 2009 for its U.S. premiere and at the Nottingham Playhouse in 2013 for its European premiere.

Professor Emeritus Karl Eric Toepfer, Department of Television, Radio, Film and Theatre, is a contributing writer to the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, an online research resource. Toepfer’s articles focus on two important figures in modern dance in Germany, Dore Hoyer and Harald Kreutzberg.

The San Jose Mercury News interviewed Dean Lisa Vollendorf, College of Humanities and the Arts, about the inspiration behind the Hammer Theatre Center and the city/university collaboration that resulted in an approximately $1 million refurbishment of the San José Repertory Theatre, turning that facility into a first-class performing arts venue for SJSU students and the larger South Bay community.

NPR affiliate KTEP in El Paso, Texas, interviewed Department of Physics and Astronomy Professor Ken Wharton for a Science Studio: Quantum Theory segment that aired on November 20. Listen online.

Professor Fritz Yambrach, Department of Nutrition, Food Science and Packaging, is concept designer and team organizer of the Fritz Water Vest, a flexible device designed to help populations in disaster or impoverished areas more easily transport water. The vest is currently being beta tested in Ethiopia, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Burundi.