November/December 2001   

Dear Colleagues,

The time has passed quickly since I wrote to you last, yet the time will pass slowly to heal the scars that remain on each one of us following the tragedy of Sept. 11 and the many disturbing events since. As I noted in my last letter to you, we need—each one of us—to continue to do our part to make our college and Washington State University a safe and collegial place for all of our faculty, students and staff.  I am pleased to note that many of you have contributed valiantly toward that effort over the past month. The college has sponsored several activities to help us cope with and understand better the crises that our nation is facing, involving wide participation from our faculty and colleagues across the University. Many faculty have shared with me their efforts to talk with students about these events in their classes, and, too, I am proud to say that our staff is working together to make our workplaces as secure and comfortable as possible. I want to thank each of you for these contributions. Our care for our students and each other has always been important, but it means so much more now.

We do not yet know fully how these tragic events and the subsequent downturn in our economy will affect our programs at Washington State University. We do know as of this writing that several of our capital projects will be put on hold, including work on the addition to our Edward R. Murrow School of Communication. We will need to be straightforward and vigilant in assessing our strengths and our core values in the months ahead should we be asked as a college to make some difficult choices.

The college strategic planning effort that you all participated in just over a year ago has left us well-prepared to focus on our priorities under these difficult circumstances. Your department chairs are submitting this month five-year plans that will be instrumental as well in focusing our college priorities. An additional challenge and opportunity will be for us to mesh our college goals and department plans with the University strategic planning effort soon to be completed. As you are aware, the University plan highlights four central goals to guide our work over the next several years:

I. To offer the best undergraduate experience in a research university.
II. To nurture a world-class environment for research, scholarship and the arts.
III. To create an environment of trust and respect in all we do.
IV. To develop a culture of shared commitment to quality in all of our activities.

This week your department chairs will be meeting with our college deans, the President, the Provost and other University leaders to discuss the particulars of the plan. Many of you have offered helpful suggestions for articulating and implementing the plan’s central goals in response to the draft posted on the University’s Web site. I urge you to begin thinking about ways that you individually can help your unit achieve these central aims. One area that has come into focus in a more poignant way, perhaps, than before is our University’s involvement in international programs and exchanges. I believe that it has never been more important to continue work that will help our students become more aware and knowledgeable of the peoples and nations that we interact with outside the United States.

In late October, I had the opportunity to visit Japan with Director of International Programs Robert Harder. Our trip was generously sponsored by a Washington State alumnus, who had arranged for us to make important contacts with several premier universities in Japan that offer and specialize in liberal arts programs. Our visit involved important conversations with administrators and faculty at Keio University, Sophia University and Waseda University—talks that we are confident will lead to fruitful exchanges involving our faculty and students. In the coming weeks, I will be talking with your chairs about these opportunities and sharing ways that you may become involved.

I urge you, too, to examine the achievements of our faculty, students and staff reported in this issue of the Chronicle. I enjoyed seeing many of you attend the Authors’ Recognition Ceremony on Oct. 26, honoring Ann Christenson, Thomas Preston, Erica Austin, Bruce Pinkleton, Camille Roman and Theatre Arts students who will be appearing in the upcoming performance of “Macbeth” (director, Terry Converse; dramaturg, Laurilyn Harris).

In short, although we are in the midst of difficult times, thanks to your unflagging efforts to continue our tradition of excellent teaching, scholarship and creative work, we are moving forward. My best wishes to you as you continue advising and teaching our students and pursuing your professional interests in the weeks ahead.

Barbara Couture
Dean, College of Liberal Arts

Loren Lutzenhiser (Sociology) and Dee Christensen (WSU Energy Program) have been awarded a $500,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to support the use of advanced telecommunications technologies in three resource-dependent rural Washington communities. The project will provide assistance to grassroots community development efforts and will study the long-term effects of globalized info-comm systems on social change at the community level. Julie Rice, a graduate student in Sociology, is also involved in the research.

Steven Stehr (Political Science) was mentioned in a New York Times article Oct. 25 in connection with his ongoing research of victim identification and assistance following the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. Subsequently, he was interviewed by representatives from Newsweek magazine, CNN and NBC News.

Carol Siegel (English, WSU Vancouver) was the keynote speaker for the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association Women’s Caucus Oct. 13 in Vancouver, B.C.  Her talk was entitled “Nonsense Terminable and Interminable: American Marital Advice.”

Gene Rosa (Sociology) is a Guest Scientist at the Akademie Für Technikfolgenabschätzung in Baden-Württemberg in Stuttgart, Germany, and Visiting Professor at the University of Stuttgart. He will be serving in these positions through mid-January.

Jeanne Johnson (Speech and Hearing Sciences) presented a full-day workshop in Ellensburg Oct. 18 for the Autism Outreach Project. The workshop focused on augmentative and alternative communication as it applies to children with autistic spectrum disorders. Attended by parents and public school teachers and specialists, the workshop discussed assessment, design and implementation of AAC systems.

Carolyn Long’s (Political Science, WSU Vancouver) book Religious Freedom and Indian Rights was one of four finalists for the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel award.

Tahira Probst (Psychology, WSU Vancouver) has been asked to sit on the editorial board of the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology for the upcoming term 2002-2004. This is the leading journal in her specific field looking at the effects of job stress on employee health and wellbeing. She has also been selected to be the 2002-2003 Diversity Faculty Fellow for the Vancouver campus.
     This summer, Probst was an invited speaker at a conference hosted by the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. She spoke concerning her research in the area of job insecurity and worker safety outcomes. In addition, she was one of four invited speakers from around the country at a similar conference on occupational health hosted by Oregon Health and Science University and Portland State University Oct. 26.

Buddy Levy (English) has had a number of recent publications in a wide range of journals and mainstream magazines. In September Levy traveled to the Swiss Alps as one of 10 invited U.S. journalists to cover the Discovery Channel World Championships of Adventure Racing, a weeklong multi-sports competition. His article from the trip, “The Politics of Adventure,” appeared Sept. 29 in TV Guide’s Ultimate Cable.  Levy also has recently been given his own column in the national outdoor adventure magazine Hooked on the Outdoors, a quarterly. His column on adventure sports is called “Taking a Bearing,” and the first installment premiered in the October issue. The next piece, called “Gear Whores,” will appear in the December/January issue.
     Levy, a frequent contributor to Alaska, Horizon and Midwest Express magazines, has a feature article on winter activities in the Inland Northwest forthcoming in the December issue of Horizon Air magazine.  The piece, entitled “Spokane as Winter Mecca,” will appear in the Special Washington section of the magazine.

Michael Delahoyde (English) presented his work on “Medievalism in Contemporary Popular Culture” at the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association conference in Vancouver, B.C.

A paper by Mary Blair-Loy and Gretchen DeHart (both Sociology) titled “Inflexible Flexibility? Workplace Demands and Work-Life Balance Among Stockbrokers” has been accepted for presentation at the academic conference “Persons, Processes, and Places: Research on Families, Workplaces and Communities,” to be held in San Francisco in February.

Marina Tolmacheva (Asia Program, Associate Dean of Liberal Arts) was interviewed live on KUOW Oct. 9. The Northwest Public Radio’s full-hour “Weekday” broadcast focused on the significance of the Sept. 11 events to the countries neighboring Afghanistan.
     On Oct. 10, Tolmacheva and Robert Staab (History) participated with Rafi Samizay (Architecture) and Ahmed Younis (Pullman Muslim community) in the third campuswide American Tragedy Forum held in the CUB Auditorium. The session, titled “The Middle East: The Complexity Behind the Crisis,” was moderated by Martha Cottam (Political Science) and attracted an audience of over 300.

On Nov. 8, Laurie Drapela (Criminal Justice, WSU Vancouver) will present an original research paper, “The Effect of Negative Emotion on Drug Use: An Empirical Test of General Strain Theory,” at the American Society of Criminology’s annual meeting in Atlanta, Ga.

Gail Chermak (Speech and Hearing Sciences) will deliver an invited one-day workshop on assessment and management of auditory processing disorders Nov. 5 at the Dean Medical Center in Madison, Wis.

Riley E. Dunlap (Sociology) gave an invited address at the Kyoto Environmental Sociology Conference, held in Kyoto, Japan, Oct. 19-23, entitled “Environmental Sociology: A Personal Perspective on Its First Quarter Century.”

A number of Speech and Hearing Sciences faculty will present papers at the upcoming (Nov. 15-18) annual convention of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association in New Orleans. Jeanne Johnson, Ella Inglebret, Carla Jones and Jayanti Ray will lead discussion groups on the reasons for abandonment of augmentative and alternative communication systems. Jones, Ray, Johnson and graduate students Britt Elstrom and Courtney Christensen will present strategies for treating phonological/articulatory errors in non-native English speakers.  Inglebret, Johnson, Jones and Ray will describe a new guide to assessment of students’ clinical performance. Leslie Power, Linda Vogel and Johnson will present on strategies to enhance clinical instructors’ skills. Gail Chermak will present with alumna Ellen Tucker on differential diagnosis of auditory processing disorder and subtypes of attention deficit disorder.

Birgitta Ingemanson (Foreign Languages) remains active with the Library of Congress and Russian National Library Web project “Meeting of Frontiers,” a digital treasure trove of maps, letters, photos, diaries and explorers’ accounts of life in Siberia and the Russian Far East, and Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. She is currently preparing a photo album from 1899 for the site. Eleanor L. Pray, an American woman living in Vladivostok from 1894 to 1930, took most of the photos and organized the album. It will be one of few items on the Web site created by a woman and with a focus on women’s lives.
Ingemanson has also been named the coordinator of the new Film Studies minor at Washington State University. Many colleagues from diverse departments are now meeting regularly to discuss and organize all aspects of this minor, including the make-up of its courses and the equipment necessary for good film viewing.

Sue Peabody (History, WSU Vancouver) will present a paper on “The Emergence of Race in French Slave Colonies” at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, Jan. 3-6 in San Francisco.

Robert Helm (Fine Arts) was featured in the Palouse section of the October 2001 National Geographic Traveler.

Tri-Cities faculty David Sonnenfeld (Sociology), Brigit Farley (History) and Akram Hossain (Civil Engineering) organized a campus-community forum entitled “Terror in Context” at WSU Tri-Cities on Sept. 19. The session was well attended, with over 120 people in two days’ notice, and received substantial news media coverage. They were interviewed by KVEW-TV, KEPR-TV and KONA radio. The publisher, editorial page staff and reporters from the Tri-City Herald also attended.  Future fora are planned.

Jazz Northwest, the WSU faculty sextet, has been invited to perform at the 2002 Washington Music Educators Association (WMEA) conference next February in Yakima. Jazz Northwest includes Music faculty Greg Yasinitsky, Horace-Alexander Young, Charles Argersinger, David Turnbull, David Jarvis and Gus Kambeitz. The award-winning WSU Jazz Big Band, under the direction of Yasinitsky, has been invited to perform at the conference as well.
     Yasinitsky will present the session “A Composer’s Perspective on Jazz Composition and Publishing.” His new big band composition “Jackknife,” commissioned by the WMEA, will be performed by the Washington All-State Jazz Band at the conference.
     Jazz Northwest has also recently completed a recruiting tour. The group presented seven concerts in two days at five institutions, including performances at the Northwest Academy in Portland, Ore., and the Vancouver (Wash.) School for Arts and Academics.

Paul Brians (English) was interviewed in October by Delia Rios, a reporter who writes background stories involving American history for the Newhouse News Service. She was working on a piece comparing the U.S. during the Cold War and current American reactions to the terrorist crisis.

On Oct. 19, Don Dillman (Sociology) received an Alumni Distinguished Achievement Citation from Iowa State University for his work in the development of modern survey methodology and its application to design of the 2000 U.S. Decennial Census.

Otwin Marenin (Political Science) was invited to participate in a workshop on “Democratic Control of Policing and Security Sector Reform,” organized by the Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF) and held in Geneva Nov. 1-2. He chaired the introductory session, participated in a discussion of recent developments in post-colonial policing and the capacity of international police assistance programs to help reform and democratize existing policing systems, and acted as the oral rapporteur for the workshop’s final session.

Clare Wilkinson-Weber (Anthropology, WSU Vancouver) will present a paper, “Gendered Garments: Women, Clothes, and Costumes in India,” in a panel entitled “The Changing Nature of Gender and Work in India” at the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians in June 2002.

Michelle Kibby (Psychology) had three poster presentations on dyslexia at the National Academy of Neuropsychology Pediatric Grand Rounds, Nov. 1-3 in San Francisco.

Matthew Guterl (Comparative American Cultures), Susan Kilgore (General Education), T.V. Reed (American Studies), Jeff Sellen (General Education), Shawn Michelle Smith (English) and John Streamas (Comparative American Cultures) will all be presenting papers at the national American Studies Association conference Nov. 8-11 in Washington, D.C.

Carol Ivory (Fine Arts) received a Professional Development Assistance Program grant from the Washington State Arts Commission this summer for travel to the Pacific Arts Association Symposium in New Caledonia. In October, she attended the Native American Art Studies Association biannual meeting in Portland, Ore.

The Jazz Studies program at WSU, coordinated by Greg Yasinitsky (Music), has been included in “Where to Study Jazz 2002” in the October issue of DownBeat magazine, arguably the most important magazine in jazz. WSU is listed among 111 U.S. colleges, universities and conservatories. Only 20 institutions were included from the Western U.S., and WSU is the only Washington state university named. WSU was also listed in the “Jazz Education Guide 2001/2002” presented by Jazz Times magazine, another important jazz publication.

This fall’s Art a la Carte lecture series featured several Fine Arts faculty and an alumna. On Oct. 4, Ann Christenson (ceramics) and Sandra Deutchman (painting) gave complementary reviews of their past and current sources of imagery. On Oct. 11, Amy Mooney (art history) illustrated various works from two African American painters in their treatment of the Harlem Renaissance and the Bible; Mooney’s lecture will also be given Nov. 9 at the Tacoma Art Museum. Nov. 4 featured Moscow, Idaho ceramist Marilyn Lysohir (MFA) looking at tattooed ladies and dinosaurs, among other items.

Camille Roman (English) has been selected for the advisory board of the Robert Frost Society. She also has been chosen president-elect for the academic year 2006-2007.
Roman’s work on the poet Elizabeth Bishop has been receiving a great deal of critical attention. Her book Elizabeth Bishop’s World War II – Cold War View has been reviewed in such library, trade and scholarly publications as the Library Journal, Michigan Today, tradebooknews, and the Elizabeth Bishop Review. The recently published American Literary Scholarship 1999 has commended one of her essays on Bishop, and several reviewers have praised her conference papers on Bishop for their excellence.
     In addition, The Women and Language Debate, co-edited by Roman with Suzanne Juhasz and Cristanne Miller, has been selected as one of the 14 required core texts in collections on women/gender and language studies by the American Association of College & Research Libraries. Other texts on the list include work by such scholars as Deborah Tannen, Dale Spender, and Cheryl Glenn.

Pamela Smith Hill (English, WSU Vancouver) was a speaker at the Children’s Literature Festival of the Ozarks, held at Drury University in October.

Barbara Couture (Dean of Liberal Arts) will preside at a session on graduate student issues at research universities at the national conference of the Council of Arts and Sciences Deans, Nov. 8-11; Couture is chair of the CASD committee on research universities. Also, at that conference, she will join a panel of three women deans who will speak on the topic of leadership issues for women deans at the conference’s breakfast for women deans.

David Sonnenfeld’s (Sociology, WSU Tri-Cities) manuscript “Social Movements and Ecological Modernization: The Transformation of Pulp and Paper Manufacturing” has been accepted for publication in Development and Change, published by the Institute of Social Studies at The Hague, Netherlands.
     Sonnenfeld and Arthur Mol, professor and head of the Environmental Policy Group at Wageningen University, are co-editors of a symposium, “Globalization, Governance and Environmental Transformation,” to be published next year as a special issue of the American Behavioral Scientist.

Rachel Halverson’s (Foreign Languages) article “Wolfgang Hilbig’s Ich: Narrating Loss of Voice, Identity and Self” appeared in the September issue of the journal Seminar.

The State University of New York Press has just accepted Ellen Gorsevski’s (English) book manuscript for publication, pending final revisions. The title of the book is The Geopolitics of Peaceful Persuasion: Toward a Theory of Nonviolent Rhetoric. Through case studies in nonviolent, peaceful communication on the international and domestic scene, the treatise establishes a foundation for theorizing how conflicts can be managed and reduced by employing peace-minded rhetorical means. The intended readership includes scholars, teachers and students of disciplines ranging from rhetoric to international relations, political science, and peace and conflict studies.

Riley E. Dunlap’s (Sociology) Handbook of Environmental Sociology is scheduled to be published by Greenwood Press in December.

Pamela Smith Hill’s (English, WSU Vancouver) latest book, The Last Grail Keeper, was published in September by Holiday House. She is currently writing a state history Web site for fourth-graders with the South Dakota Department of Education and Cultural Affairs.

Randy Kleinhesselink (Psychology, WSU Vancouver) has a book review of Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart, by Gerd Gergenrenzer, Peter M. Todd and the ABC Research Group, in the current issue of Cognitive Technology.

Bill Condon (Writing Program) has an essay in a just published collection co-edited by Sue McLeod (English) and Eric Miraglia (PhD ’98, English). The essay is titled “Accommodating Complexity: WAC Program Evaluation in the Age of Accountability” and may be found in WAC for the New Millennium:  Strategies for Continuing Writing-Across-the-Curriculum Programs.

The second editions of Lisa McIntyre’s (Sociology) textbook and reader The Practical Skeptic: Core Concepts in Sociology and The Practical Skeptic: Readings in Sociology have been published by McGraw Hill Publishers.

Sue Armitage’s (History) historiographic essay on women in Pacific Northwest history, “Tied to Other Lives,” is the opening article in the recently published revised edition of Karen Blair’s Women in Pacific Northwest History.

Marcel Wingate (professor emeritus, Speech and Hearing Sciences) has just published Foundations of Stuttering with Academic Press.

Tahira Probst (Psychology, WSU Vancouver) has had two journal articles accepted for publication. “Exploring employee outcomes of organizational restructuring: A Solomon four-group study” will appear in Group and Organization Management, and “Sexual minority identity formation in an adult population,” with Donna Johns (BS ’00, Psychology) as the lead author, will appear in the Journal of Homosexuality.
     An additional article co-authored with colleagues at the University of Illinois, “Matching management practices to national culture in India, Mexico, Poland, and the U.S.,” was highlighted in the Academy of Management Executive, a publication that “translates” some of the most relevant and pertinent research in the field for corporate executives and human resources personnel.
     Two other journal articles came out earlier this year, one of which resulted in quite a bit of media attention. “The effects of job insecurity on employee safety outcomes: Cross-sectional and longitudinal explorations” was co-authored with Ty Brubaker (BS ’00, Psychology), who now attends Portland State University’s PhD program in Industrial/Organizational Psychology, and appeared in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology. This article on the effects of job insecurity on employee safety behaviors was featured twice in USA Today (once on the front page) and was written up in the APA Monitor, as well as in several other news outlets—CBS, ABC and Reuters. The second article, “Culture and deception in business negotiations: A multi-level analysis,” Probst co-authored with a group of international scholars; it was published in April in the International Journal of Cross Cultural Management.

Sue Peabody (History, WSU Vancouver) will have a chapter called “Slave, Subject, Citizen: Gender and the Transition to Freedom in the French Caribbean, 1625-1848” in a book forthcoming from Duke University Press, Gender and Emancipation in the Atlantic World. She is co-editor of The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France, also forthcoming from Duke UP; the volume includes an introduction by Peabody and her translation of an essay by French scholar Claude Blanckaert. Her essay “’A Dangerous Zeal’: Catholic Missions to Slaves in the French Antilles, 1635-1789" will appear in the winter 2002 issue of French Historical Studies.
     In addition, Peabody’s translation of a letter by Jean Mongin, a 17th-century French Jesuit missionary to the French Antilles, will be published on the AARDOC Web site, under the auspices of African American Religion: A Historical Interpretation with Representative Documents, edited by Albert Raboteau and David Wills and forthcoming from Chicago University Press. The site may be viewed at www.amherst.edu/~aardoc.

Paul Kwon (Psychology) and Duncan Campbell, a PhD candidate in Clinical Psychology, published an article called “Domain-specific hope and personal style: Toward an integrative understanding of dysphoria” in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology.

Published in October is the work Indelible Images: Women in Local Television, an anthology of histories. One chapter is written by Val Limburg (Communication) on Dorothy Stimson Bullitt. Mrs. Bullitt was perhaps the first and foremost woman in the history of broadcasting, the first female owner-manager and the first woman to buy a television station. That station, KING-TV, Seattle, became the flagship station for a regional network of stations and cable network in the Northwest. Limburg traces the history of this remarkable woman, who began the management of her family’s station as a widow and mother of three and ended overseeing its broadcast activities at the age of 97.
     The book is published by Iowa State University Press and is edited by Mary Beadle and Michael Murray.

Peter Chilson’s (English) short story “Disturbance Loving Species” was a finalist for both the Tobias Wolff Fiction Prize and the Arts & Letters Fiction Award. The story will be published this spring in the Clackamas Literary Review. His essay “Tourist of Fire, Prisoner of Dust,” about the 2000 summer fire season, will appear this spring in the North Dakota Quarterly, and this fall the literary journal Ascent will publish his essay “Guilt and Malaria: A Memoir.”

Jack Dollhausen’s (Fine Arts) solo 30-year retrospective show opens Dec. 13 at the Boise Art Museum and will run through Feb. 17.

Amy Mooney’s (Fine Arts) article “The New Negro; Other Types: Portraits by Archibald J. Motley, Jr.” has been included in the Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, edited by Cory Wintz.  The publication will be available next semester from Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers.

The volume Approaches to Teaching the Works of D. H. Lawrence, just published by the Modern Language Association, contains an essay by Carol Siegel (English, WSU Vancouver) on teaching Lawrence in the feminist classroom.

Birgitta Ingemanson (Foreign Languages) has an article coming out this fall in Rossiia i ATR (Russia and the Pacific Rim), published by the Russian Academy of Sciences, Far Eastern Division. The article, titled “Paradise Lost: The Novogeorgievsk Estate, 1892-1922,” shows some aspects of what life was like at a country estate near Vladivostok at the beginning of the 20th century.

Darlene Croteau’s (BA ’01, History) manuscript “Nuclear Reactor Project” has been accepted for publication by COLUMBIA, the magazine of the Washington State Historical Society.

Keith Williams (PhD ’91, History) has been elected to the Washington Commission for the Humanities Board of Trustees. Williams, who did his graduate work on the agricultural history of the Palouse, is director of the Wenatchee Valley Museum.

Three History alumni have had books published by Oregon State University Press in October.
     Greg Hall (PhD ’99) authored Harvest Wobblies: The Industrial Workers of the World and Agricultural Laborers in the American West, 1905-1930, a lively social and cultural history of the radical IWW and their struggle to organize a racially diverse farm labor union of migrant and seasonal workers. Hall is currently adjunct assistant professor of history at Idaho State University.
     Robert Hadlow (PhD ’93) wrote Elegant Arches, Soaring Spans: C.B. McCullough, Oregon’s Master Bridge Builder, the first major study of a brilliant engineer and builder renowned for his elegant, cost-efficient, custom-designed spans. McCullough’s legacy lies in the nearly 600 bridges he and his staff designed and built in Oregon during the years between the two world wars.
     Keith Petersen’s (MA ’77) book River of Life, Channel of Death: Fish and Dams on the Lower Snake chronicles the history of the four Lower Snake River dams and their impact on Northwest salmon. In a new preface written for this edition, Petersen comments on information that has become available and events that have occurred since his book, the Idaho Library Association’s 1996 Book of the Year, was first published in 1995.

Congratulations to Asao “Ty” Inoue (PhD candidate, English), who has been awarded the Harold and Jeanne Rounds Olsen Writing Across the Curriculum Fellowship for his project “A Study of Minority Students in Washington State University’s M-Courses and Pedagogical Recommendations for the Future.”

Two undergraduate Sociology students, Erin Mockler and Selena Castro, have been accepted into the McNair program.
     Mockler, a junior from Sacramento, is a mother and a member of the National Society of Collegiate Scholars who has been on the President’s Honor Roll every semester since fall 2000. She is still narrowing down her research interest area but wants to look into various aspects of social work.
     Castro is a senior from Vancouver, Wash. She has a family, is a member and past vice president of the Sociology Club, and serves as the secretary for AWANA. She is also involved in many other organizations on and off campus. Her research interests include how attitudes, behaviors and conformity affect both interpersonal relationships and group interaction among ethnic minorities.

Mike Russell (PhD candidate, History) received the Graduate School’s 2001 summer research assistantship for the Department of History and used these funds to travel to the Leo Baeck Institute, a research center in New York City dedicated to the study of the history and culture of German Jewry. Russell was also hired by Eastern Washington University last March as an adjunct professor to teach History 106: Western Heritage, 18th Century to Present. This position at Eastern was extended for the current school year, and he will continue to teach there through spring 2002.

Laurie Carlson (PhD candidate, History) presented a paper, “Cattle Battle: Women, Milk Cows and the Hudson’s Bay Company in the Pacific Northwest,” at the Western History Association meeting in San Diego.  She also presented “The Right of the Individual to Rise: Frederick Jackson Turner and the Vision of State Universities as an American Frontier” at the History of Education Society annual meeting at Yale University Oct. 21.

Phillip Vannini’s (PhD candidate, Sociology) article “‘Size Matters’: Narcissism on American Bumper Stickers” was published in the August issue of Popular Culture Review.

Works by Fine Arts graduate students Julia Cardone (ceramics), Michelle Clesse (ceramics), Leslie Holt (painting), Nik Meisel (sculpture), Rafael Mendoza (sculpture), Nathan Orosco (sculpture) and Ann Porter (mixed media) were included in Spokane’s Visual Arts Tour on Oct. 5. This is a night when all the art galleries and museums stay open; food, wine and conversation flow about equally; and there is live music, dancing in the streets and a sense of adventure in the air.

Diane Krahe (PhD candidate, History) is author of “A Sovereign Prescription for Preservation: The Mission Mountains Tribal Wilderness,” one chapter within the new book Trusteeship in Change: Toward Tribal Autonomy in Resource Management, edited by Richmond Clow and Imre Sutton. The book is published by the University Press of Colorado.

Congratulations to Taryn Fagerness (undergraduate, American Studies), who recently won first place in the Palouse Punch, the Palouse’s first poetry bout championship. Congratulations also to her co-finalist, Azfar Hussain (PhD candidate, English). The championship offered a cash prize of $500 to the winner, with $250 going to the runner-up.

Julia Cardone, currently in her second year of the MFA program in ceramics, will conduct a “hands-on throwing” Teapot and Platter Workshop Nov. 17 at the Northstar Ceramics Center on Sprague Avenue in Spokane.

Lisa Williams (PhD candidate, American Studies) recently completed 30 entries for an encyclopedia of feminist literature to be published by ABC-Clio.

Judy Meuth (Women’s Studies) and Sandy Cooper (Math) are collaborating on a project that will help more girls and ethnic minorities in Eastern Washington stay in school and enter science, engineering, technology and math-related careers.

The pair received an $886,505 grant from the National Science Foundation for Promising Reform in Science and Math (PRISM), a project that brings together academics, school districts and tribal leaders to improve awareness of gender and culture issues that affect learning. The project involves seven school districts with multiple cultures which will be addressed. In particular, Meuth and Cooper are working closely with the Colville Confederated Tribes, 11 Native American tribes that have a shared governance and reservation in northeastern Washington.

The project will begin this fall with planning and preparation, Cooper says. In the fall of 2002, Omak, Pullman and Spokane School Districts will be the first to receive the full range of programs, which include workshops tailored to help educators understand gender and cultural issues, stipends for teachers and counselors to attend a summer institute focused on curriculum reform and a university course for would-be teachers at WSU and LCSC. In the following year, more school districts will begin to participate.

The project targets Colville Tribal students with field trips, hands-on projects, community service and career planning, and puts long-term reform in the hands of both tribal leaders and school teachers and administrators. The groups will work together with a tribal advisory council to develop and maintain the programs.

“The idea is everyone will learn together—the teachers, the academics and the students. Our goal is the same—kids really succeeding in math and science,” Meuth says.

An educational DVD-ROM developed over the last four years by faculty and students at Washington State University Vancouver and West Virginia University was released this month by University of Pennsylvania Press.

Designed for school, home or library use, Red Planet: Scientific and Cultural Encounters with Mars includes text, photos, film clips, video interviews and cultural memoirs that depict society’s relationship and fascination with the fourth planet from the sun. WSU Vancouver’s Harrison Higgs (Fine Arts), Michelle Kendrick (English) and Jeannette Okinczyc (BA ‘99, Humanities), with a cadre of English and Electronic Media and Culture students, helped with research and production of the electronic textbook, working with faculty and students from WVU and the University of British Columbia.

Higgs directs WSU Vancouver’s Multimedia Application Research Studio and teaches courses in Fine Arts. An artist and designer, he was hired in 1997 to develop interdisciplinary and collaborative multimedia projects. The Mars project developed from a brainstorming effort with Kendrick and WVU’s Robert Markley.

Kendrick is an assistant professor of English and director of WSU Vancouver’s Electronic Media and Culture program.

Okinczyc, currently with Vancouver Information Technology, served as the project’s art director.

Screenshots and a project preview are available online at www.mariner10.com. The DVD-ROM is available from University of Pennsylvania Press and bookstores.

The College of Liberal Arts held its second Authors’ Recognition Ceremony Oct. 26 in the Museum of Anthropology. This event is held semi-annually to celebrate the scholarly and creative achievements of Liberal Arts faculty.

Books featured this fall were The President and His Inner Circle, by Thomas Preston (Political Science), with comments by Martha Cottam (Political Science); Strategic Public Relations Management, by Bruce Pinkleton and Erica Austin (both Communication), with comments by Moon Lee (Communication); and Elizabeth Bishop’s World War II — Cold War View, by Camille Roman (English), with comments by Elwood Hartman (Foreign Languages).

Two ceramic pieces by Ann Christenson (Fine Arts) were on display throughout the ceremony, and Paul Lee (Fine Arts) spoke about the artist and her work. The event closed with a performance of several scenes from “Macbeth” by WSU Theatre students Sean Barker, Emily Squyer and Josh Evans, directed by Terry Converse (Theatre Arts). The play will be staged on campus beginning Nov. 29.

The next speaker in the Department of Comparative American Cultures’ lecture series “Who Speaks for America?” will be Michele Serros, a performance author whose books include How to Be a Chicana Role Model and Chicana Falsa and Other Stories of Death, Identity and Oxnard.  A brilliant, informative and entertaining performer, her talk, titled “Stories of Identity and Pork Rinds,” will be held Wednesday, Nov. 28, at 7 p.m. in Kimbrough Auditorium.

The novelist (Last Standing Woman), author (All Our Relations) and social activist (founding director of the White Earth Land Recovery Project) Winona LaDuke was the year 2000 Green Party vice-presidential candidate.  Named by TIME magazine as one of America’s most promising leaders under age 40, she will be the third speaker in the series, Thursday, Dec. 6, at 7 p.m. in the CUB Auditorium.

The series kicked off Oct. 17 with a reading by Victor Hernández Cruz. Future speakers in the series will include Doris Givens and Vine Deloria.