Dean's Message

Dear Colleagues,

This first issue of our spring semester marks some new beginnings for the college as we continue to celebrate the ongoing accomplishments of our faculty, students and alumni.

I invite you to congratulate Erich Lear on his appointment as the director of our General Studies Program. Erich’s appointment marks the first time in the history of the program that General Studies has direct faculty oversight, an innovation that will make this program a more visible and vital home for its nearly 300 majors. Concurrent with this appointment, our College of Liberal Arts General Studies office has moved to 211 Smith Gymnasium, which now houses the office of our director, Erich Lear; academic advisor, Mark Moreno; and program assistant, Tom Whitacre.

Also new this spring is our College of Liberal Arts magazine, ask., a new publication which will appear twice a year and be distributed to faculty, alumni and friends of the college. With each issue of ask., we hope to develop a stronger Liberal Arts community as we work together to strengthen liberal education and encourage state and federal support for our programs. I look forward to your reactions to this important effort.

Top of mind for all of us, of course, is our state budget situation. I am encouraged by the outstanding work of President Rawlins, who has joined with University of Washington President Lee Huntsman to rally public support for increased funding for our research universities. Regardless of the final budget allocation, the future of our Liberal Arts programs will depend on our efforts to set clear priorities, aligned with the strategic plans of the University and the college. In preparation for our next budget cycle, I have asked our chairs and directors to submit by Feb. 17 their five-year unit plans and annual departmental assessment (see CLA strategic plan, Appendix A). I invite you to discuss with your colleagues specific ways that your programs can meet the goals and objectives of our university’s strategic plan (see www.wsu.edu/StrategicPlanning). Our college plans will reflect this input and give priority to those initiatives that best meet college and university planning goals.

Finally, I call your attention, in particular, this month, to the numerous student achievements that are recorded in this issue of the Chronicle. Congratulations to you for your outstanding guidance of these remarkable students.

Barbara Couture, Dean
College of Liberal Arts

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Worthy of Note

  Welcome to Marsha Appel, who joined the dean’s office as secretary senior Dec. 26.

  This year’s New Music Festival, scheduled for Feb. 4-6, will feature one of America’s most distinguished living composers and the current Ives Living Award winner, Chen Yi (pictured at right). The festival, now in its 14th year, was established by Charles Argersinger (Music). See the calendar on p. 3 for performance times and locations.

  The board of Annenberg/Corporation for Public Broadcasting has approved a $2.2 million world history proposal co-written by Candice Goucher (History, WSU Vancouver) and Linda Walton, chair of history at Portland State University. In conjunction with Oregon Public Broadcasting, Goucher and Walton will produce a 26-part series on world history. The half-hour episodes will be broadcast on television across the country. The videos, along with additional support materials, will be used for a graduate world history course for secondary teachers.

  Barbara Couture, dean of the College of Liberal Arts, and James Schoepflin, director of the School of Music and Theatre Arts, have been elected to three-year terms as trustees of the Washington Commission for the Humanities. The Washington Commission for the Humanities is dedicated to improving individual and community life through public programs that interpret culture and provide a forum for civic dialogue.
     Dean Couture has also been appointed to the nine-member board of directors of the Council of Colleges of Arts and Sciences (CCAS). CCAS is an international organization of over 500 arts and sciences colleges whose events are attended by deans and decanal staff and whose goal is for “deans to help deans be better deans.”

  Paul Hirt (History) will travel to Yunnan University in Kunming, China, for three weeks in March to launch an American studies curriculum development project funded by the U.S. Department of State. This project will involve the exchange of 20 faculty between WSU and Yunnan University over the next two and a half years. The first two visiting Chinese faculty arrived at WSU Jan. 15 and will be in residence throughout the spring semester. Roger Chan (History) serves as the project manager of the faculty exchange. Hirt will lecture at Yunnan University on 20th-century social, political and economic trends in America.

  The School of Music and Theatre Arts has appointed Jeremy Krug to the position of recording engineer/manager of the recording studio. Krug and his crew are presently installing the recording studio equipment, and an opening date in February is planned. Watch for further announcements about an open house in which the equipped studio may be viewed.

  Marina Tolmacheva (History) participated in a World Affairs Council presentation, “War with Iraq: Two Points of View,” Oct. 30 at Seattle University. The event took the form of a debate moderated by Don Porter, KING-5 News. Special guests were Kenneth Pollack, director of National Strategic Studies with the Council of Foreign Relations and author of The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq, and Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., recently returned from Baghdad. Tolmacheva and her co-panelist, David Rapach (Seattle University), asked the debaters questions on consequences and costs of invading Iraq.
     Tolmacheva was also selected as a field reader for the Department of Education Title VI grant competition for 2003-2006. The Title VI program awards National Resource Center funding and Foreign Language and Area Studies graduate fellowships to area studies centers at universities nationwide. The field reading session was held in Washington, D.C., Jan. 6-10.

  Ellen W. Gorsevski (English) attended the Peace and Justice Studies Association conference Oct. 4-6 at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Her presentation, “Overcoming Obstacles in Peace Rhetoric: Persuading for Justice by Challenging Dominant Discourses,” was recorded for airing on Pacifica Radio.
     Gorsevski was also a guest volunteer and teaching resource for the 10-week, Web-based course “The Practice of Peace” offered by DePaul University. The project invited students into a “community of practice” made up of volunteers who, like Gorsevski, a scholar of nonviolent/peace rhetoric, have practical experience in the fields they study. Visit the Web site at www.track3connections.org.
     Gorsevski has been invited to speak as a panelist at the University of Idaho’s upcoming Borah Symposium, “Propaganda and Conflict: True Lies About Islam and the West,” April 21-22, which will focus on Islam and the West, specifically how the media influences public opinion. Gorsevski will discuss the broader topic of propaganda and its role in conflict.

  Jon Hegglund’s (English) essay “Ulysses and the Rhetoric of Cartography” has been selected as one of five finalists for the Kappell Prize in Literary Criticism, awarded by the editorial board of Twentieth-Century Literature. The prize is given to the essay, chosen from among the year’s submissions to the journal, that “makes the most impressive contribution to the understanding and appreciation of the literature of the 20th century.” All of the finalists’ articles will appear in the summer 2002 issue.

  The Washington State Music Teachers Association selected Greg Yasinitsky (Music) as Washington’s candidate for consideration for the MTNA-Shepard Distinguished Composer of the Year, a national award.

  Leonard Orr (English, WSU Tri-Cities) gave a paper entitled ”Early, High, Late, and Post-: Modernism and the Issue of Periodization” at the annual meeting of the Modernist Studies Association, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Oct. 31-Nov. 3. He also was selected to give a reading of his poetry at the meeting.
     In addition, Orr has been selected to participate in the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies Seminar on Literature and the Holocaust this summer in Washington, D.C. The center is the scholarly division of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Orr was recently elected to the board of the Washington Poets Association, a statewide group that sponsors an annual convention, readings and contests for student and adult poets. The WPA encourages the writing and reading of poetry on all levels.

  Gene Rosa (Sociology) has been appointed to the National Research Council’s Committee to Review the U.S. Climate Change Science Program Strategic Plan. In April he will be the keynote speaker at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., for the dedication of the Marsh Library as the Jeanne X. Kasperson Research Library.

  Andrea Mason (English) was selected by the Idaho Commission on the Arts to be on the Artists in Education Roster for 2003-2004 in the field of creative writing. She has also been accepted as an artist in residence to Everglades National Park; she plans to go for the month of June.

  Raymond Sun (History) gave a presentation entitled “Encountering the Darkness: Using Case Studies of Perpetrators, Rescuers, and Survivors in Teaching About the Holocaust” at the 2002 biennial meeting of the Conference on Faith and History at Huntington College, Ind., on Oct. 11. The presentation was part of a roundtable he organized called “‘Into the Darkness?’ Teaching About Nazism and the Holocaust from a Christian Perspective.”
     One of the other participants on the panel was Theodore Nitz (PhD ’99, History). Nitz is currently an assistant professor of history and director of the International Studies Program at Gonzaga University.

  Paul Hirt (History) will present a paper at the annual meeting of the European Society for Environmental History in Prague, Czechia, in September titled “Centralization and Decentralization of Electric Power Systems in the U.S., 1900-2002.”

  Jana Argersinger (English), associate editor of the journal Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism, presented a paper titled “From the Editor’s Easy Chair: A Partial View of Trends in Poe Studies” at the Modern Language Association convention in New York City in December.

  Charles Argersinger (Music) recently won the 2003 Macro Analysis Creative Research Organization (MACRO) Composition Competition. This is an international competition for composers featuring a $1,000 prize from MACRO plus a $500 commission for a new choral work.

  Jeannette Mageo (Anthropology) will attend the 29th annual meetings of the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania Feb. 11-15 in Vancouver, B.C., where she is organizing a symposium pursuant to an edited volume entitled “Gender Histories: Reading Pacific Colonial Experience Between the Lines.” She will present a paper at the session entitled “Sporting with Gender: Indigenous Art as Historical Commentary in Samoa.”

  Lisa McMullen (administrative manager, Foreign Languages) has received a $2,000 scholarship from the National Public Employees Labor Relations Association in Washington, D.C. She is on professional leave this year in Salem, Ore., attending Willamette University and earning her MBA.

  Mary Watrous-Schlesinger (History) presented a paper, “What’s for Dinner? Native Women’s Responses to Conquest in Mexico and India,” at the Hawaii International Conference on Arts and Humanities.

  Brenda Jackson (General Education, History; PhD ’02, History) has accepted a tenure-track position in the history department at Belmont University in Nashville. She will remain at WSU until August.

  Camille Roman (English) has been selected as the chair of the poetry and poetics division of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Languages Association.

  Stanton Linden (English) presented the keynote address at the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival Colloquium, held Nov. 15-17 on the campus of Drew University, Madison, N.J. His talk, “Monsters and Cherubim: Cultures of Alchemy in the English Renaissance,” was part of the 40th anniversary of the NJSF’s founding, making it the longest running Shakespeare company on the East Coast.

  Sue Armitage (History) has received the Samuel H. Smith Leadership Award for 2002. The award is presented annually to a member of the Association of Faculty Women who has been a leader in advancing the role of women on campus and at the community, state and national levels.

  Sarah Rial (Sociology) has partnered with the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare Children and Family Services, Gritman Medical Center’s Young Children and Family Programs to develop a “Grandparent/Kin Raising Children” support group.

  Tamara Helm (Fine Arts) gave a solo exhibition of her oil paintings “The Famous and Infamous,” featuring famous writers, artists and actors of the 19th and 20th centuries, in the CUE New Writing Center on the Pullman campus through Dec. 31.

  Paul Brians (English) has been asked to speak on a panel entitled “African Theater Now: The Soyinka Paradigm” for the Feb. 16-19 Wole Soyinka Festival, sponsored by the University of Central Florida. He will speak on “Teaching Soyinka’s Plays in the Contemporary Classroom.” The organizer, a Nigerian businessman and Soyinka fan named Benjamin Ohwovoriole, asked Brians to participate a year ago because of his study guides to Soyinka plays on the Web (www.wsu.edu/~brians/anglophone). The conference will pay for Brians’ transportation and housing.

  By invitation Amy Wharton (Sociology) will present her work on work-family policies at the third annual Penn Economic Conference in Philadelphia in March. The conference is jointly sponsored by the Wharton School of Business and the Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.

  Faith Lutze (Criminal Justice) and Megan Symons (PhD candidate, Political Science) have been invited to serve on the Northwest Region’s Domestic Violence Task Force for the United States Navy. They will be assisting in the design and implementation of research to test the effectiveness of the interagency collaboration of law enforcement, social services and the Navy to deal effectively with domestic violence.

  Jeff Nye and Jon Hasbrouck (both Speech and Hearing Sciences, WSU Spokane) presented a workshop entitled “Auditory Processing Deficits: WSU Spokane Collaborative Evaluation and Treatment Approach” at the recent Washington Speech-Language-Hearing Association’s annual convention in Seattle.

  Susan Chan (Music) performed a piano recital and presented a lecture at Nihon University in Tokyo, Japan, on Jan. 10. Entitled “Performing Chopin’s Twenty-four Preludes for Piano: A Multimedia Approach Inspired by Alfred Cortot,” the lecture was also delivered as a paper presentation at the Hawaii International Conference on Arts and Humanities, held in Honolulu Jan. 12-15.

  Masha Gartstein (Psychology) has received a $4,000 travel award from the National Science Foundation Women’s International Science Collaboration Program 2001-2003 in support of “Laboratory and Parent-report Assessment of Infant Temperament: An Evaluation of Physiological Correlates and Related Parental Variables.” She will be visiting her collaborator in Novosibirsk, Russia, collecting data and planning an NSF proposal for this cross-cultural investigation.

  Carol Ivory (Fine Arts) is participating in two conferences this February: first in Vancouver, B.C., at the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania, where she will discuss “New Directions, New Markets for Marquesan Artists” in a panel on “Pacific Artists in the Global World”; then at the College Art Association in New York, where she will co-chair a panel, “Exhibiting Pacific Art,” and also preside at the Pacific Arts Association American chapter’s annual business meeting, held concurrently with CAA.

  Michael Egan, Laurie Carlson, Diane Krahe (all PhD candidates, History), Kevin Marsh (PhD ’02, History) and Paul Hirt (History) are all on the program of the annual conference of the American Society for Environmental History in Providence, R.I., in March. Egan will present “Prospects and Pitfalls: Barry Commoner and the Origins of the Environmental Justice Movement.” Hirt will give a paper on “Momentary Outbursts of Design Intelligence: The Evolution of Electrical Systems in the U.S. Since 1880.” The ASEH is the premier professional association for environmental historians in the U.S. and globally.

  Alexander Hammond (English), editor of Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism, presented papers at two refereed conferences in 2002: “Literary Commerce and the Discourse of Gastronomy in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Bon-Bon,’” at the Second International Edgar Allan Poe Conference in Baltimore; and “Carey, Lea, and Blanchard’s ‘Acceptance’ of Poe’s Folio Club Collection: An Overlooked Letter to John Pendleton Kennedy,” at the 13th annual conference of the American Literature Association in Long Beach, Calif.

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Professional Productivity

  The autumn 2002 issue of Montana: The Magazine of Western History includes Rick Hines’ (General Education) article entitled “‘First to Respond to Their Country’s Call’: The First Montana Infantry and the Spanish-American War and Philippine Insurrection, 1898-1899.” The article came out of a public history seminar that focused on the history of the Montana National Guard.

  Sue Armitage (History) has published Women’s Oral History: The Frontiers Reader with University of Nebraska Press.

  Thomas Brigham (Psychology) co-authored an article in press with Behavior and Social Issues, “Psychology and AIDS education: Reducing high risk sexual behavior.” He will have another article, co-authored by Dana Lindemann (PhD candidate, Psychology), published in AIDS and Behavior, “A Guttman scale to assess condom use skills among college students.”

  David Demers (Communication) has completed the first draft of An Interpretive Introduction to Mass Communication, a textbook he began writing three years ago. The book will be published by Allyn & Bacon in fall 2004. He also signed a contract with Literary Group International, a New York literary agency, to market China Girl: One Man’s Adoption Story. The literary journalism book chronicles the story of his adoption of a Chinese baby girl in fall 2001. A condensed version was published in the Dec. 5 issue of the Local Planet Weekly in Spokane.
     As executive director of the Center for Global Media Studies, Demers also has been working with the East-West Center and the Globalization Research Center at the University of Hawaii to sponsor in spring or summer 2004 an international conference in Hawaii on globalization and communication.

  Masha Gartstein (Psychology) co-authored “Studying Infant Temperament via a Revision of the Infant Behavior Questionnaire,” in press with the Journal of Infant Behavior and Development.

  Heather Streets’ (History) manuscript Born Warriors? Martial Races, the Military, and Masculinity in Late Victorian Britain is being sent out to readers by Manchester UP for their “Studies in Imperialism” series.

  The final report of the National Research Council/Institute of Medicine Committee on Case Studies of School Violence, of which Jim Short (professor emeritus, Sociology) was a member, has been published by the National Academies Press, titled “Deadly Lessons: Understanding Lethal School Violence.” Also, Short’s chapter “Ethnische Segregation und Gewalt” has been published in the Internationales Handbuch der Gewaltforschung by Westdekutscher Verlag.

  A study by Rick Busselle (Communication) and L.J. Shrum (University of Texas, San Antonio), titled “Media Exposure and Exemplar Accessibility,” will be published in the next issue of the journal Media Psychology.

  Rebecca Craft (Psychology) has authored two review articles that will be published in 2003. “Sex differences in opioid analgesia: ‘from mouse to man’” will appear in the Clinical Journal of Pain, and “Sex differences in drug- and non-drug-induced analgesia” will appear in Life Sciences. She also co-authored a paper entitled “Gonadal steroid hormone modulation of nociception, morphine antinociception and reproductive indices in male and female rats” with her doctoral student Erin Stoffel and collaborator Dr. Catherine Ulibarri (VCAPP), which will soon appear in the international journal Pain.

  Travis Pratt (Political Science, Criminal Justice) co-authored an article titled “The Relationship of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder to Crime and Delinquency: A Meta-Analysis” that was published in the International Journal of Police Science and Management.

  Paul Strand’s (Psychology, WSU Tri-Cities) article “Treating antisocial behavior: A context for substance abuse prevention” appears in Clinical Psychology Review. He also co-authored a chapter in the recently published Handbook of Dynamics in Parent-Child Relations, edited by Leon Kuczynski, titled “Dynamic models of parenting and parenting interventions: Current fit and future prospects for integrating developmental and behavioral/clinical perspectives.”

  Romana Hillebrand (English) has had an article, originally published in the Quarterly of the National Writing Project, republished in Breakthroughs: Classroom Discoveries About Teaching Writing, a text that showcases popular articles that are described as “thoughtful and thought-provoking accounts of classroom stories.” Her article, “It’s a Frame-up: Helping Students Devise Beginnings and Endings,” describes strategies she uses to demonstrate her conviction that linking the introduction and the conclusion helps unify a paper and satisfy the reader.

  A selection from Roger Schlesinger’s (History) book In the Wake of Columbus (1996) has been included in a new world history reader, The West in the Wider World.

  Gail Chermak (Speech and Hearing Sciences) published two invited articles, “Deciphering (central) auditory processing disorders in children” in Otolaryngologic Clinics of North America, and “Auditory training: Principles and approaches for remediating and managing auditory processing disorders” in Seminars in Hearing. The second was contained in the issue she edited, “Management of auditory processing disorders.”

  Moon Lee (Communication) has an article, “The Effects of Three Different Computer Texts on Readers’ Recall (Based on Working Memory, Risk-taking Tendencies, and Hypertext Familiarity and Knowledge),” in press with Computers in Human Behavior. She co-authored another article, in press with Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, titled “The Effects of Anti-Tobacco Advertisements Based on Risk-Taking Tendencies: Realistic Fear Ads Versus Vulgar Humor Ads.”

  Jeffrey Joireman (Psychology) co-authored “The aggression paradox: Understanding links between aggression, sensation seeking, and the consideration of future consequences,” in press with the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

  Michelle Forsyth’s (Fine Arts) video work is currently featured in an exhibition entitled “Stop and Go: Photography and Video. Motion and Stillness” at City Without Walls Gallery in Newark, N.J. The exhibition runs Jan. 18-Feb. 27.

  Kevin Haas (Fine Arts) participated in the Slop Art Supermarket Exhibit (www.slopart.com) at the Center of Contemporary Art in St. Louis, which will continue to travel to various locations throughout 2003. Haas will also present a solo exhibit and lecture at Kansas State University. Titled “Cities, Images, Distances,” the exhibit will run Feb. 24 to March 7.

  Camille Roman’s (English) The New Anthology of American Poetry was launched in a large reception at the New York Hilton hosted by Rutgers University Press at the Modern Language Association conference. Over 200 attended the reception to celebrate volume one of this three-volume project co-edited by Roman, Steven Gould Axelrod and Thomas Travisano. Early reviews are praising it as the “new benchmark” in American poetry.

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Student Activities and Awards

  Tamara Helm (Fine Arts) reports her Fine Arts 102 class project yielded the three top winners in President Rawlins’ annual holiday card contest. Lisa Swensen won the top award, her design chosen as the official 2002 WSU holiday card along with a cash award of $200. Julie Ubigau was first runner-up, winning a certificate of achievement and $100 cash. Tara Diluciano was second runner-up with a cash award of $50 and a certificate of recognition.

  After Katie Johnson (PhD candidate, History) completed her cultural resource assessment of Denali National Park in her spring 2002 public history seminar, the National Parks Conservation Association contracted with her to complete a cultural resource assessment of the Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park. Her work was incorporated by the NPCA in the November 2002 ”State of the Parks: A Resource Assessment” of Glacier Park.
     In addition, the National Park Service has just published a book by Johnson titled Buried Dreams: The Rise and Fall of a Clam Cannery on the Katmai Coast.

  Christina Wygant (MA candidate, English) presented “A Comparison of John Gabriel Stedman’s 1790 and 1796 Narratives and a Study of His Time in Surinam While Suppressing the Slave Revolt: Exploring Theories of Hegemony and the Foreign Female Black Body” at the International Conference on Romanticism, Oct. 10-13 at Florida State University.
     She also presented a paper, “An Investigation of the Intersection of Europe’s Economic, Social, and Political Ideologies as Portrayed in Stedman’s Surinam,” at the Northwest Society for Eighteenth Century Studies conference, held at the University of Washington Nov. 15-17. Ruth Ulvin (MA candidate, English) presented “Maria Sibylla Merian’s and John Keats’s Obsession with the Unknown: The Interconnectedness of the Exotic, Experience, Exploration and Art” at the same conference.
     Ulvin also presented “From Billie Holiday to the Indigo Girls: Traversing Tradition Through Sound and Song” at the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association conference in Scottsdale, Ariz., Oct. 10-12.

  The WSU chapter of the Association for Women in Communications, advised by Roberta Kelly (Communication), has been named 2002’s Outstanding Student Chapter and Outstanding Fundraiser. Both awards were announced in October at the AWC national convention in Denver. WSU’s chapter was also honored in 1999 as the Outstanding Student Chapter. JoAnna Hix, a senior in public relations, was AWC president last year; Bernadette Flynn, a senior in communication studies, is AWC president this year.

  Michael Brown’s (PhD candidate, History) review of Robert Shimabukuro’s Born in Seattle (U. of Washington Press, 2001) appeared in the fall 2002 Pacific Northwest Quarterly.

  Michael Egan (PhD candidate, History) has been awarded the Boeing Graduate Fellowship in Environmental Studies from the College of Liberal Arts. His article “The Social Significance of the Environmental Crisis: Barry Commoner’s The Closing Circle” was published in the December 2002 issue of Organization and Environment. At the end of March, Egan will present “Second Genesis or Second Coming?: Genetic Engineering and the Myth of Omnipotence” at a graduate symposium at Virginia Technical Institute called “Technologies/Moralities: The Ethical Grammar of Technological Systems.”

  Steve Shay (PhD candidate, History) has been awarded a Thomas S. Foley Institute Fellowship. The $1,000 will help him pay for the transcription of 2,000 pages of trial transcripts from shorthand notes. The information is vital to his research on the relationship between the farm crisis of the past 20 years and the rise of Freemen movement in Montana. Taeyhun Kim (Communication), Michael McDonell (Psychology), Keiko Kato (Anthropology) and Stephanie Mizrahi (Political Science) also received fellowships.

  Jenna Ross-Nazzal (PhD candidate, History) has been appointed the oral history editor of Quest: The History of Spaceflight Quarterly. Her latest work is in Vol. 9 No. 5, “An Interview with Eilene Galloway.”

  An article by Phillip Vannini (PhD candidate, Sociology), titled “Cardboard Resistance: Deconstructed Rock and the Politics of Authenticity,” is being published in CTheory: An International Journal of Theory, Technology, and Culture.

  Carol Ann Scally (PhD candidate, History) received a grant from the Program for Cultural Cooperation Between Spain’s Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports and United States Universities. The grant was in support of dissertation research she carried out in several archives and collections in Madrid, Spain.

  Fernanda Martinez (MA candidate, Psychology) had her thesis research accepted for presentation at the forthcoming meeting of the American Psychological Association in August 2003. The title of the presentation is “Child Behavior Checklist Structural Equivalence Across Hispanic and Caucasian Children.”

  Lana Leishman’s (MFA candidate) photograph “Dwellings” has been chosen Best of Show at an exhibit running at the Idea Gallery in Austin, Texas, until Feb. 4.

  Crystal White (PhD candidate, History) is project director and president of the familial advisory committee for the Nez Perce St. Louis Warriors Project, whose purpose is to honor four Nez Perce who traveled to St. Louis in 1831. An eight-foot-tall granite monument will be unveiled March 29 in St. Louis at the site of the final resting place for two of the delegates, BlackEagle and SpeakingEagle. The other two, Rabbit-Skin-Leggings and No-Horns-On-His-Head, died on the return trip. White discovered the story in 2000 while conducting other research and discovered that the burial site was unknown. Later, along with Otis Halfmoon, the project was presented to the Nez Perce Tribe Executive Committee for their approval. See the project site at www.nezpercewarriors.org.

  Lin Xu (MFA candidate) reports her “Two Cups #2” has been selected into a juried ceramic cup exhibition entitled “An Affinity for the Cup” at Exploding Head Gallery in Sacramento, Calif. The show runs Feb. 6 through March 1.

  The WSU Sextet and soloist Sophia Tegart (senior, Music) were regional winners in their categories at the Music Teachers National Association Northwest Division Competition, held Jan. 17-19 at Boise State University, and will be going on to the national competition in Salt Lake City March 15-16.

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Alumni News

  Alan Gross (PhD ’79, Psychology), a professor of psychology who received his PhD under the direction of Thomas Brigham (Psychology), is one of the first recipients of a Liberal Arts Distinguished Faculty Fellowship at the University of Mississippi. Gross is a prolific researcher with more than 150 journal articles and book chapters. “His teaching is exemplary, both at the undergraduate and graduate level, and he has recently taken on the important position of director of clinical training in the Department of Psychology,” said Dr. Glenn Hopkins, dean of the college.

  Charlie Mutschler (PhD ’99, History) has a book out with WSU Press, Wired for Success: The Butte, Anaconda & Pacific Railway, 1892-1985.

  Suzanne Julin’s (PhD ’01, History) article entitled “Art Meets Politics: Peter Norbeck, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the Sylvan Lake Hotel Commission” appears in the summer 2002 issue of South Dakota History. An outgrowth of her dissertation research, it addresses the effects of politics and public policy on Black Hills tourism development before World War II.

  Native American alumna Lara Reyes (BA ’98, Speech and Hearing Sciences) was elected co-chair of the Native American Caucus of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association.

  Megan Martens (MFA ‘98) was appointed to the Spokane Falls Community College art faculty in fall 2002. Her paintings were featured at an exhibition entitled “Two In – Two Out” at the Spokane Falls Gallery through Jan. 30.

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Erich Lear Appointed Director of General Studies

Erich Lear, currently a professor and graduate studies director for the School of Music and Theatre Arts and former director of the school, has been named director of the Liberal Arts General Studies Program.

Dean Barbara Couture says, “Erich Lear brings to this position many years of administrative experience and a genuine interest in and concern for students and their liberal arts education.”

General Studies is the college’s third largest major, just behind Communication and Criminal Justice.

“This is the optimal position for me,” says Lear, “because I’ve always wanted to work in more than one field. I’m excited about working with students who have a variety of interests and goals and choose this major hoping those interests will be fostered. This has always been my main commitment in higher education.”

Lear has demonstrated a wide range of interests and abilities since coming to WSU in 1989. During his tenure as director of the School of Music and Theatre Arts he developed music degree options with business, theatre, electrical engineering and computer science. He was instrumental in planning for the school’s new digital recording studio and in securing the $625,000 grant from the Allen Foundation for Music to pay for equipment and maintenance of the studio. Lear was program committee chair for the new Kimbrough Music Building and heavily involved in pre-design, design and construction of the state-of-the-art facility.

Lear has a goal for the General Studies Program. “A clearer and more visible identity that prizes the multi/inter/cross-disciplinary nature of the program which is currently not well described by the title, ‘general’ [studies],” he says. According to Dean Couture, “He will help create a liberal arts identity for our general studies program and its students, and he will provide the faculty leadership we need to build and maintain a top-quality undergraduate program.”

GENERAL STUDIES HAS MOVED: The Liberal Arts General Studies Advising Center is now at its new location in Smith Gym 211. The mail code is 1412 and the main phone number is 335-8731.

Erich Lear is assisted in his efforts by Mark Moreno, academic advisor, and Thomas Whitacre, program assistant.

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New Degree Focuses on ‘Digital Diversity’

There is a new master’s degree track in American Studies at WSU, the first to combine multicultural studies with multimedia studies. “Our goal,” said T.V. Reed, director of American Studies, “is to help make the Internet more user-friendly for low income people, rural people and people of color.”

Reed says because computer technology is unavailable to certain segments of the population, it stands to reason these groups are underrepresented on the World Wide Web. “Truly relevant information for economically challenged communities and underrepresented people is tough to find.”

Reed estimates about six students will be enrolled in the new master’s track when it debuts next fall and plans to expand the program as scholarship funds are secured. See libarts.wsu.edu/amerst for more on the graduate program.

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Call for Proposals

• Arts and Humanities Travel Grants
• Edward R. Meyer Grant Development Award
• Edward R. Meyer Project
• Initiation/Completion Grant

NEW DEADLINE: Feb. 21

See libarts.wsu.edu and click on Faculty & Staff for CLA award guidelines and forms.

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