BRADFORD, Pa. — University of Pittsburgh at Bradford faculty members have had a productive year so far, publishing and presenting papers, acting, and creating an interactive art installation.

Dr. Kevin Ewert, professor of theater, published an article this summer in Shakespeare Bulletin. The article, “Playable Whiteness, or, My Week as Iago,” reflects on a distinctive rehearsal process that asks actors to examine themselves before portraying a racially charged character. Ewert played Iago during a residency week in Connecticut with the Untitled Othello Project, run by Keith Hamilton Cobb, who brought his show “American Moor” to Pitt-Bradford in 2014 and later led a mini-residency on the “untitling” theatrical practice with students before rehearsals for “Timon of Athens” in fall 2024.

                Jenelle Jensen, liaison librarian for student and community engagement, co-authored a paper that appeared in the College & Research Libraries Journal. In “The State of Funding for Curriculum Materials Centers and Collections,” Jensen and co-author Caitlin Stewart looked at 80 U.S. universities to examine whether colleges with more education students have better-funded curriculum materials centers. Researchers found that larger programs tend to have better funded centers, but that the pattern is unreliable.

                Jensen also co-authored an article with Dr. Shailendra Gajanan, professor of economics, and Renee Kiner that appeared in The Journal of Academic Librarianship. The authors found that librarians who teach often defer to subject-area faculty during instruction. How much the librarians deferred depended on their career background, including their years working as a librarian and their own classroom teaching experience.

Instruction services librarian Catherine Baldwin had an active summer. She led a workshop, “Rebel women: Quilting for social change with cotton and color,” at the Pittsburgh Book Festival. She offered a 30-minute presentation, “A fresh start: Strategies for approaching daunting projects with renewed vitality,” at the Association of College and Research Libraries Western Pennsylvania/West Virginia Chapter held at the University of Pittsburgh’s Hillman Library.

Also, Baldwin and colleague Kimberly Bailey, reference/instruction librarian, presented “The Evaluative Bridge: Moving from Information Literacy to AI Fluency via Human-In-the-Loop Frameworks” at the Generative AI in Libraries 2026 Conference.

                Daisy Wiley, assistant professor of art, was a summer visiting artist at Stone Quarry Art Park in Cazenovia, N.Y., where she created an installation on the grounds of invented avians vocalizations that explore the evolution of birds in relationship to landscape.

                Finally, Dr. Beth Rezaie, assistant professor of engineering, presented a paper, “Solar Thermal Storage Enhancement in a Heat Pipe Collector Coupled with a Paraffin-Based Porous Medium Container” at the summer meeting of the Fluids Engineering Division of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in Bellevue, Wash.

                Additionally, she published papers in two journals, the American Society of Mechanical Engineering’s Open Journal of Engineering and Thermal Science and Applications, about artificial intelligence techniques for optimizing cooling and energy management in smart data centers.