Personal Mention

Kiron Skinner, foreign policy adviser for Republican presidential candidate Senator Rand Paul, is quoted in a New York Times Magazine article about what a new conservative foreign policy would look like. Of Paul’s foreign policy, Skinner says, “He’s trying to provide a corrective to both the Bush and Obama administrations, in which we use American military power responsibly and when there’s a clear understanding of what’s needed.’’ Skinner is director of the Dietrich College's Institute for Politics and Strategy. Read “Between Iraq and a Hawk Base.”

Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor Radu Marculescu and collaborators are using Twitter as a metaphor to better understand how different bacterial strains communicate with one another via certain chemical signals to form densely matted biofilms that protect them against antibiotics. The team grew and studied various bacterial specimens in order to learn how many bacteria had to bump up against one another and under what circumstances before they started to cooperate to build a biofilm. Find out more. 

English Professor David Shumway’s 2014 book, “Rock Star: The Making of Musical Icons from Elvis to Springsteen,” is making headlines again, this time by receiving its first academic review. In the book, Shumway investigates the rock star as a particular kind of cultural construction, different from a mere celebrity. A review in the Journal of American History calls “Rock Star” a “minor masterpiece” and says that Shumway's "critical assessments succeed in rewarding readers with original insights in virtually every paragraph.”  Find out more. 

When Jay Kadane arrived at CMU in the early 1970s, Pittsburgh was experiencing the “glory days” of Steelers football. In a new piece for the Huffington Post, Kadane blogs about how he went from being a fan of the sport that “galvanized the city” to no longer being able to watch it because of safety issues. Read "Confession of an Ex-Football Fan."

In a poetry book review of "Bartran's Garden" in The Los Angeles Review of Books, contemporary poet Lisa Sparr calls Carnegie Mellon University Press "one of the country’s most respected university presses” and praises the press’ founder and director, English Professor Gerald Costanzo, for maintaining “an abiding devotion to the publication of poetry” and for being the press’ “presiding spirit.” In describing CMU Press' latest poetry book by Eleanor Stanford, Sparr says "the primal matter of Stanford’s poems is the body, particularly the female body, and its vicissitudes, capacities, betrayals, and desires.” Find out more.