Oberlin Alumni Magazine

(Alumni News, continued)

Music scholar Charles McGuire '91, a visiting assistant professor of music at Ball State University, is exploring the link between the sight-singing method known as Tonic Sol-fa, and 19th-century evangelical Christian reform movements that focus on the methods of evangelization and principles of self-improvement. A double- degree Oberlin graduate with majors in musicology and history and a minor in trombone performance, McGuire presented a lecture, "Tonic Sol-fa, 'Moral Reform' and Elgar's Oratorios" in April.

McGuire earned a PhD at Harvard, where he served as visiting lecturer in the department of music and core curriculum; as a head teaching fellow; and as director of Dudley House Chorus. He is a past member of the Billings Symphony Chorale and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, with professional honors that include a Graduate Society Dissertation Completion Fellowship, Pirotta Research Fellowship, Oscar Schafer Fellowship, and John Knowles Pain Traveling Scholarship.

"Making the Transition to Graduate Studies for Black Americans," was the topic of a speech delivered by Michelle Wright '90, an assistant professor of literary and cultural theory and the McCandless professor of English at Carnegie-Mellon. She spoke at Oberlin's annual Mellon Minority/McNair Conference in April.

Wright received her doctorate in comparative literature from the University of Michigan, and focuses on literature and theory of peoples of African descent living in the West, whom she calls the "African Atlantic." She is currently studying the effect of mass media on minority subjects, and she is the author of Missing Persons: The Search for the Postcolonial Subject in the African Atlantic, currently in revision.

Wright provided the inaugural address for the Race and Ethnicity Study Group at the University of Pittsburgh, and her work has been recognized by the Center for Africamerican Urban Studies and with an Economy Research Grant from Carnegie-Mellon, a Falk Humanities Award from Carnegie-Mellon, and a SSRC Postdoctoral Research Award.

Oberlin's geology department sponsored a colloquium on groundwater contamination in April that featured the work of hydrologists Brian McAninch '85 and Peter Richards '65.

McAninch works in Costa Mesa, California, for Geomatrix Consultants, rated as a top environmental engineering consulting firm working in the fields of engineering, applied environmental and earth sciences, air quality and toxicology, and risk assessment. He addressed the issue of politics and hydrogeology of MTBE (methyl tertiary butyl etherl).

Richards, a water quality hydrologist and statistician at The Water Quality Laboratory at Heidelberg College, spoke about ground water contamination in rural Ohio. His expertise involves tributary monitoring, monitoring network design, surface and groundwater quality efforts of nonpoint pollution, statistics applied to water quality, and exposure assessment.

He is a past member of the State of Ohio Nonpoint Water Quality Assessment Task Force and an assistant professor of geology at Oberlin. He served on the U.S. EPA Expert Committee on Clean Sediment Standards for Surface Waters,. and participated in the Workshop on Pollutant land Estimation for Western States EPA Conference.

Musician and businessman Eugene Carr '82 is founder and president of CultureFinder.com--an Internet business that provides information and tickets specifically for cultural events in major cities throughout the country. He became involved in arts management as executive director of the American Symphony Orchestra at Lincoln Center and for the Concordia Orchestra. Eugene is a board member of High Five-Tickets to the Arts, a nonprofit company he developed while directing of both orchestras. The company provides $5 tickets for cultural events to New York City high school students. A double-degree graduate in cello and history with an MBA from Columbia Business School, Carr talked about his eclectic career with Oberlin students in April. (See "Wired for Culture," May 1999 OAM)