
March 2004

Dean's Message

Dear Colleagues,

On March 26, our college will host a meeting of our Liberal Arts Advisory Council. This group of leaders in business, industry, government, and academe meets twice a year and is organized to assist the college in reaching its development, public relations, and student recruiting goals. Our March meeting is planned to coincide with WSU Showcase, a series of events that highlight Washington State University’s achievements in curriculum and research.

The day begins with a session in the CUB featuring faculty and student research across WSU. In mid-morning, President Rawlins will address our council members, along with representatives from other advisory groups across the University, and we will meet with our own advisory council members in the afternoon. The day will close with “Celebrating Excellence: An Evening Honoring Our Faculty and Staff,” featuring this year’s winners of university-wide awards.

The college is especially pleased to honor at the banquet this year’s winner of the Eminent Faculty Award, Professor Frances McSweeney of our Department of Psychology. Professor McSweeney is recognized for her fundamental research in behavior and reinforcement, and one of her discoveries is said to have broad implications for the study of learning, motivation, and animal behavior that may cause theories of complex human behavior to be modified. In addition to conducting world-class research, Fran is an outstanding teacher and a true leader among her colleagues. Please join me in congratulating her.

Also in March our associate deans and I will join faculty members, chairs, and directors in phoning top students whom we hope to recruit to our freshman class next fall. I wish to thank in advance all of you who are contributing to this important effort. Our ability to grow top quality programs rests on a foundation of successful recruiting of high-ability students.

In closing, I wish to thank you for the thoughtful contributions that you are making to our college planning. As you are all aware, we have been challenged deeply this year to meet the constraints of budget cuts levied in 2003. Ultimately, we will need to focus on top-quality programs that meet student demand and discontinue offerings that do not meet this standard or our strategic priorities. Your best thinking and collaborative work within your departments and units are needed to help us succeed in maintaining quality in this environment. Again, thank you for your efforts.

As always best wishes for success in your teaching, research, and scholarly work.

Barbara Couture, Dean
College of Liberal Arts

Worthy of Note

David Pietz (history) has received a Mellon Fellowship to work at the Needham Research Institute at Cambridge University for spring semester 2005. He plans to research how post-1949 water management fits in to the context of traditional Chinese resource management.

Amari Barash (music) recently gave solo and chamber performances in Portland, Oregon (with Susan Chan on piano), Berkeley, and Ukiah, California. All three concerts included performances of Ryan Hare’s (music) “Canzonetta” for solo oboe. Barash was engaged as a concerto soloist for February concerts in Branford and Fairfield, Connecticut. She has also been awarded a creative residency at Centrum in Port Townsend, where she will be working on several composition projects in March.

The Korean Press Association has awarded the Center for Global Media Studies (CGMS) in the Murrow School of Communication up to $20,000 to recruit panelists for two panels scheduled for the center’s conference July 16–17 in Seattle. The panels will discuss South Korean and U.S. mass media coverage of the North Korean nuclear program. About a dozen journalists and scholars from South Korea and the United States will participate on the panels. Tae-hyun Kim (Ph.D. candidate, communication) played a key role in organizing the panels. David Demers (communication) is executive director of CGMS.

Tim Kohler (anthropology) will speak at two international invited symposia this spring. The first, co-organized by the International Program of the Santa Fe Institute and the T-Life Research Center, Fudan University, Shanghai, is entitled “Fudan–SFI Joint Workshop on Biocomplexity” and takes place May 17–21. (This workshop was previously scheduled for May 2003 but was canceled due to SARS.) The second is co-organized by the Santa Fe Institute and the Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and concerns “The Dynamics of Groups and Institutions: Their Emergence, Co-evolution, and Environment.” It will convene in Ljubljana and nearby Brdo pri Kranju, Slovenia, June 7–11.

Raymond Sun (history) will be a featured presenter at the first International Conference to Establish the Field of Hate Studies at Gonzaga University on March 19. In an interdisciplinary panel featuring specialists from the fields of sociology, social psychology, religious studies, political science, anthropology, and the law, he will be speaking about what the discipline of history can contribute to the field of hate studies. He will base the talk on his background in teaching courses and mentoring graduate students in the areas of Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, and comparative genocide.

John G. Jones (anthropology) has received a $10,000 grant from the Montpelier Archaeological Foundation. He will be using pollen to aid in the reconstruction of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century landscapes at Montpelier, Virginia, the home of James Madison, “Father of the Constitution,” as part of a multimillion dollar renovation project at the estate. This grant money will be used to support research efforts by a graduate student at the University of Idaho.
For several years now, Jones has been working at Thomas Jefferson ’s Monticello, identifying early crop plants and reconstructing farming systems on the mountain. Monticello is located about thirty miles from Montpelier, and these studies, plus other efforts in the region, will shed light on late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century agrarian practices and garden landscapes.

Steven Kale (history) presented a paper entitled “The European Encounters of Arthur de Gobineau” as part of a panel on “French Pan-European Encounters in the Nineteenth Century” at the annual conference of the American Historical Association in Washington, D.C., January 8–11.

Bill Condon (English) has accepted the coeditorship of Assessing Writing, an international journal that addresses topics ranging from language acquisition to classroom assessment techniques. His coeditor is Liz Hamp-Lyons of the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Lydia Gerber (history) received a Co-TEACH grant to fund the fourth annual Asia 301 “East Meets West” symposium in February 2004.

Joddy Murray (English, WSU Tri-Cities) presented a paper at the Midwest Modern Language Association conference in November called “Image Writing and Non-Discursive Symbolization: The Limitations of Alphacentric Historiographies” (coauthored with Damian Baca from Syracuse University).

John Weiss (music) presented a workshop at the Oregon Music Educators Association state conference in Eugene, Oregon, on January 30. “Tone It Up! Techniques for Improving Choral Blend” presented voice exercises as they relate to developing vocal technique, choral tone, and choral blend. Topics for discussion and demonstration included vowel shaping, vowel unification, and register blending as they affect intonation, balance, and blend. The demonstration choral ensemble was the South Eugene High School Concert Choir directed by Jim Steinberger.

Tamara Helm (fine arts) exhibited paintings and drawings entitled “Women of Note” as part of the WSU Symposium on Gender Research held in the CUB February 13.

Gene Rosa (sociology) was an invited speaker at the “Living with Risk” Workshop Project at the University of California, Berkeley, sponsored by the Center for Global Security Research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the International Institute for Strategic Studies at Stanford University. Rosa has also been appointed to the U.S. National Research Council/National Academy of Sciences Committee on Metrics of Global Change Research.

Faith Lutze and Karen Mason (both criminal justice) received funding to evaluate the Benton and Franklin Counties Adult Drug Court Program.

Michelle Forsyth (fine arts) will have a solo exhibition of her paintings, paper constructions, and videos at the Lorinda Knight Gallery in Spokane. The exhibition opening will be Friday, April 2, from 6–8 p.m.

In January, Ann Marie Yasinitsky (music) was featured as flute soloist in the Carmen Fantasie with the Coeur d’Alene Symphony, conducted by WSU alumnus David Demand (B.Mus., M.A.). Also featured on the program was saxophonist Greg Yasinitsky (music), who performed two orchestral arrangements of his own and the Charlie Parker version of “Just Friends.” Additionally, Larissa Yasinitsky (Ann and Greg’s daughter) was featured as the narrator for Greg’s piece “The Appleville Musicians.”
Also in January, Greg Yasinitsky acted as an adjudicator for the Viking Jazz Festival in Poulsbo, Washington (organized by WSU alumnus Bryce Adams). In March, Greg will serve as the conductor of the Wyoming All-State Jazz Band and will be featured as a guest artist and adjudicator at the High Plains Jazz Festival in Chadron, Nebraska. In February, Greg’s arrangement of Dizzy Gillespie’s “Dizzy Atmosphere” (published by Warner Brothers) was featured at the annual conference of the Washington Music Educators Association in the session “Charts that Work and Why.”

Steven Stehr (political science) will participate on a panel on the topic of homeland security at the annual meeting of the American Society of Public Administration in Portland, Oregon, on March 29. The panel will discuss what state and local governments have been doing to prepare for and respond to potential terrorist attacks. Stehr will also be a featured speaker at the Partners in Emergency Preparedness conference in Bellevue, Washington, April 14. He will deliver a presentation titled “Putting the Home Back in Homeland Security: Assessing the Activities of State and Local Governments.”

Robert Patterson (psychology) and colleagues have had a paper accepted for presentation at the annual meeting of the Society for Information Display in Seattle in May. The paper is titled “Terrain texture and 3-D object cues in the control of heading in simulated flight.”

Lori Wiest (music) was invited as guest clinician and adjudicator for the University of Nevada, Reno, Choral Festival held in February. The three-day festival included performances from thirty-nine high school and middle school choirs in Nevada. Wiest also attended the Washington Music Educators conference in Yakima last month.

Lisa McMullen, finance manager in the Department of Foreign Languages and Cultures and employee relations manager in the College of Liberal Arts, successfully passed the Human Resources Certification Institute (HRCI) certification exam in Spokane on December 6 and was recently awarded her “Professional in Human Resources” credential by the HRCI and the Society for Human Resource Management. McMullen spent academic year 2002–2003 on professional leave attending the Atkinson Graduate School of Management at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, where she completed an accelerated program with emphasis in public sector employee/labor relations, employment/labor law, and alternative dispute resolution. While at Willamette, she served in an internship with the State of Oregon Labor Relations Division and received the National Public Employer Labor Relations Association Graduate Scholarship. She received her M.B.A. for business, government, and not-for-profit management with honors in May 2003.

Tahira Probst (psychology) gave an invited address, entitled “A new threat to employee safety? Emerging implications of job insecurity,” at the British Psychological Society Occupational Psychology Symposium on the Psychology of Workplace Safety in Stratford Upon Avon, England, in January.

Nicholas Lovrich (political science) spent part of January in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, offering a series of six workshops on applied social science research on public policy to faculty and graduate students at the Tashkent Institute of Irrigation and Agricultural Mechanization Engineers (TIIAME). This activity is part of a WSU partnership with TIIAME under the auspices of a grant from the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State for the training of institute faculty and the development of a capacity for doing policy studies research. The principal investigators on the project are Walt Butcher (International Programs) and Ed Weber (political science); other faculty who have been involved in the training and field research in recent months have included Mark Stephan (political science) and Matt Carroll (natural resource sciences). Dr. Abdulkhakim Salokhiddinov is the principal TIIAME representative.

On January 22, Debbie Lee (English) gave an invited lecture at Texas A&M University entitled “Imperialism and Impostors: The Notorious Case of Princess Caraboo.” On February 26, she gave an invited lecture at Walla Walla College entitled “Exotic Identities in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Stamford Raffles and Mary Baker.”

In February, Jeffrey Joireman (psychology) coauthored a poster, “A social dilemma analysis of organizational citizenship behaviors,” presented at the fifth annual convention of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in Austin, Texas. Joiremen and Blythe Duell‘s (M.S. candidate, psychology) poster “Mortality salience leads proselfs to endorse prosocial values” was also presented.
In January Joireman’s poster “Attributionally complex individuals report higher levels of perspective taking and empathic concern” was presented at the Association for Research in Personality conference, also in Austin. He coauthored with Donelle Posey (Ph.D. candidate, psychology) and Craig Parks (psychology) the poster “The effects of social value orientation and the consideration of future consequences on resource consumption when the state of the resource is unknown.”

Carol Ivory (fine arts) presented a paper, “New Markets for Marquesan Artists,” at the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania meeting in Salem, Massachusetts, in late February. She also attended the College Arts Association meeting in Seattle February 18–21.

Once again, the Theatre Program will take part in WSU’s Cougar Quest youth camp this summer. Ben Gonzales will hold workshops in playwriting and makeup, STAGE will conduct an improvisational workshop, and Phyllis Gooden-Young will teach a dance workshop. Stan Brown will also be teaching acting classes during summer session; Acting I, II, and III will be offered concurrently for the first time since 1989.

Shila Baksi (anthropology, general education) will present a paper, “Modernization in an Indian Village: Impact on Leisure and Lifestyle,” at the Northwest Anthropological Conference in Eugene, Oregon, in March.

Paul Brians (English) has been invited by the new World Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame, opening in June in Seattle inside the Experience Music Project, to present this summer a lecture on the literary sources of imagery in contemporary science fiction films and a workshop for teachers on using science fiction in the English classroom. On February 20, Brians spoke on the WSU Pullman campus on the fiction of Rohinton Mistry. A showing of the film Such a Long Journey, based on Mistry ’s novel by the same name, followed. His talk was preceded by an address by long-time WSU India scholar Fritz Blackwell (history).

Professional Productivity

The English version of Jim Short’s (professor emeritus, sociology) chapter “Ethnic Segregation and Violence” in the International Handbook of Violence Research, edited by Wilhelm Heitmeyer and John Hagan, has been published by Kluwer. Short has also accepted an invitation to be guest editor for the May 2005 issue of the Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice. The issue will be devoted to the topic “Why Study Gangs?” Submissions will be accepted until September 1 of this year.

In March, the University of New Mexico Press will publish Tim Kohler’s (anthropology) edited book The Archaeology of Bandelier National Monument: Village Formation on the Pajarito Plateau, New Mexico. It includes three chapters coauthored by Matthew Root (Ph.D. ’92, anthropology).

Steven Kale’s (history) new book, French Salons: High Society and Political Sociability from the Old Regime to the Revolution of 1848, will be published by Johns Hopkins University Press in March. The book is featured on the press’s Web site.

C. Richard King (comparative ethnic studies) has published “Re/Claiming Indianness: Critical Perspectives on Native American Mascots” in a special issue of the Journal of Sport and Social Issues and “De/Scribing Squaw: Indigenous Women and Imperial Idioms in the United States” in the American Indian Culture and Research Journal.

Travis Pratt (criminal justice) coauthored two articles with John Worrall (Ph.D. ’98, political science) that appeared in print this month. The first was “Estimation Issues Associated with Time-Series–Cross-Section Analysis in Criminology,” published in Western Criminology Review 5(1), and the second was “On the Consequences of Ignoring Unobserved Heterogeneity when Estimating Macro-Level Models of Crime,” published in Social Science Research 33(1).

Zheng-min Dong (foreign languages) had a paper entitled “A Fixed Structure Denoting Quantitative Meaning in Russian” published in Linguistic Analysis 31(3–4). In this paper he has proved the existence of a special fixed quantitative sentence structure in Russian based on the analysis of the Russian data.

Debbie Lee’s (English) article “Forgers and Impostors” will appear in the Oxford Guide to Romanticism, published by Oxford University Press, due out this summer. Lee has also been asked by the editors of English Romantic Review (Routledge) to contribute her essay “Representing Java” to their forthcoming issue, which will appear later this spring.

Gene Rosa (sociology), along with coauthors Richard York (Ph.D. ’02, sociology) and Thomas Dietz, has an article titled “Tracking the Anthropogenic Drivers of Ecological Impacts” accepted for publication at AMBIO: A Journal of the Human Environment of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Marina Tolmacheva (associate dean of liberal arts, history) published “Statehood and Religion: Historiographical Perspectives on Islam in Kyrgyzstan” in Gosudarstvennost’ i religiia v dukhovnom nasledii Kyrgyzstana (“Statehood and Religion in the Spiritual Heritage of Kyrgyzstan,” Bishkek–Leipzig: Ilim, 2003). Tolmacheva’s review of The Tenacity of Ethnicity: A Siberian Saga in Global Perspective by Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer (Princeton UP, 1999) appeared in Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism 30.

Greg Yasinitsky’s (music) composition “As the Sun Descended,” a concerto for trumpet, string orchestra, and timpani, has been published by Hoyt Editions.

Camille Roman (English) has published a photo essay, “Resisting Cold War Surveillance: Elizabeth Bishop in Washington D.C.,” in ENGLISHES, a journal published at the University of Rome, Italy. St. Martin’s/Palgrave Macmillan will publish her book Elizabeth Bishop’s World War II–Cold War View in paperback next fall.

Lydia Gerber (history) has an article forthcoming in the Hong Kong publication Ching Feng, “Missionaries as Pawns: German Missions and Chinese Elite in Post-Boxer North China.” Gerber has also been invited to contribute a chapter on Berlin missionaries to the second volume of Ulrich Van der Heyden’s edited Kolonialmetropole Berlin, to be published in 2005.

Al von Frank’s (English) essay “The Secret World of Radical Publishers: The Case of Thayer and Eldridge of Boston” was published in Boston’s Histories: Essays in Honor of Thomas H. O’Connor, edited by James M. O’Toole and David Quigley (Boston: Northeastern Press, 2004).

Clare Wilkinson-Weber (anthropology, WSU Vancouver) has an article accepted for publication in Visual Anthropology Review titled “Behind the Seams: Designers and Tailors in Popular Hindi Cinema.” The article is based on her research among technicians and craftspeople working in “Bollywood.”

Tahira Probst (psychology, WSU Vancouver) has published “Safety and insecurity: Exploring the moderating effect of organizational safety climate” in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology 9(1).

A paper by Anne Lincoln (Ph.D. candidate, sociology) and Michael P. Allen (sociology), entitled “Double Jeopardy in Hollywood: Age and Gender in the Careers of Film Actors, 1926–1999,” has been accepted for publication in Sociological Forum. The paper also received recognition in the Washington Post in 2002.

Joddy Murray ’s (English) essay “Michel de Certeau’s Language Theory” was published in the Journal of College Writing 6(1).

Student Activities and Awards

The German faculty in foreign languages, Rachel Halverson and Bernadette Hyner, in collaboration with the University of Idaho and the Goethe-Institut, sponsored the Zentrale Mittelstufenprüfung, an internationally recognized German language exam, in Pullman on January 24. Eight WSU students took and successfully passed the exam. Two of the students, Hayley Jensen (senior, German, international business) and Ayah McGuiness (German, political science), passed the exam with the highest rating of sehr gut.

Nathan Goodale (Ph.D. candidate, anthropology) will present three papers at the fifth Pre-Pottery Neolithic Lithic Workshop in Frejus, France: “Lithic Technological Organization: An Analysis of Chipped Stone Spatial Patterns from ‘Iraq ed-Dubb, Jordan,” “A Chip of the Old Block: PPNA Core Reduction Systems and Failure Rates,” and “Chipped Stone and Technological Organization: Linking Tool Function to Spatial Variability during the Early Neolithic Occupation at Dhra’, Jordan.” The papers are coauthored with Ian Kuijt (University of Notre Dame) and Bill Finlayson (Council for British Research in the Levant). Funding for research and travel was provided by the Department of Anthropology’s Scoales Scholarship in archaeology.

Three journalism students have obtained prestigious national summer internships. Ahmed Namatalla and Michaeljohn Valencia have been named Chips Quinn Scholars/Interns, and Amy Trang has been awarded a Dow Jones Fund Internship.
     Namatalla will work as a reporting intern at the Wilmington News Journal, a 125,000-circulation Gannett newspaper in Wilmington, Delaware. Valencia will work as a reporting intern at the Contra Costa Times, a 100,000-circulation Knight-Ridder newspaper in Walnut Creek, California. Trang will work as a business reporting intern at the Reno Gazette-Journal, a 70,000-circulation Gannett newspaper in Reno.
     The Chips Quinn Scholars program is sponsored by the Freedom Forum and provides training, paid internships, and $1,000 scholarships to college students of color who are pursuing careers in print journalism.
     The Dow Jones Newspaper Fund offers annual summer internships in business reporting, newspaper copyediting, and sports copyediting. Each program provides free pre-internship training seminars on college campuses and weekly salaries starting at $350 for a minimum of ten weeks. Interns who return to college full-time the following fall will receive $1,000 scholarships from the fund. The business reporting program is specifically intended for minority sophomores and juniors.
     The students were nominated by John Irby, coordinator of the journalism degree program.

Jason Miller (Ph.D. candidate, English) recently presented his paper “Dis(re)membering History at American Riverscapes: An Environmental Justice Reading of Langston Hughes’s ‘The Bitter River’ and Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Santarem’” at the “Elizabeth Bishop and Her Worlds” international conference held in Cancun, Mexico, December 11–13. He also presented “Bishop’s Ecocriticism and the Vassar Circle” at the Society for the Study of Women Writers second international conference in Fort Worth, Texas, September 24–27. Miller will be chairing a session sponsored by the Robert Frost Society entitled “The Cold War Frost” at the American Literature Association’s annual conference in San Francisco, May 27–30.

At least eight students and one faculty member from the Murrow School of Communication have been invited to work with Sony at the National Association of Broadcasters’ annual conference and technology showcase in Las Vegas. The students will be used as interns to work in some of the Sony display booths, operating the audio and video equipment used in the presentation areas. Sony pays all the airfare, hotel, meals, transportation, and some clothing (so the students look like Sony pros). The students (yet to be selected as of publication) will leave April 16, just after the Murrow Symposium, and return by April 23.
Last year, WSU students did all of the technical work for Sony’s Optical Disk products, gaining much hands-on experience. This presentation was the main area where the audience gathered to see firsthand the operation of this kind of product. According to Marvin Marcelo (communication), “The Sony people were very impressed with our students’ technical knowledge and experience. They even remarked about how fast the students learned the routine and that the trainers were able to leave the students alone after only two run-throughs.”

Ryan Sain (Ph.D. candidate, psychology) and Thomas Brigham (psychology) published “The effect of a threaded discussion component on student satisfaction and performance” in the Journal of Educational Computing Research.

The WSU Graduate School awarded a Block Grant to five fine arts graduate students for travel to the national convention of the College Arts Association, held in Seattle February 18–21. Those funded as a group were Scott Hagel, Tia-Maria Hoeller, Jason Lascu, Brent Patterson, and Alma Rocha.

Congratulations to the six Writing Portfolio Award winners for fall 2003: Kathryn Dooley (senior, history), Jessica Hulst (junior, comparative ethnic studies), Terah Anderson (junior, Spanish), Mary Bareither (junior, interior design), Kelsey Watrin (junior, elementary education), and Kelli Carter (senior, neuroscience).

Alumni News

Heather D. Mills (M.A. ’02, political science) started her new job as research analyst with the democratic polling firm Decision Research in February. The firm is located in Washington, D.C.

Bryan Long and Robert G. Dennis, both recent M.A. graduates in music emphasizing choral conducting with Lori Wiest (music), presented a clinic at the Washington Music Educators conference in Yakima in February. Long is the choral director at Zillah High School, and Dennis is the choral director at Emerald Ridge High School in Puyallup. Zillah High School Choir, conducted by Long, was featured as a performance ensemble at the conference in another session that he and Aaron Wagner (B.Mus. ‘02, music education) presented at the conference. Wagner is a band and choral director in Warden. Also presenting at the conference was Jennifer LeRose (B.Mus. ’99, music education), who teaches music at Mabton High School.

Flannery Aquino (senior, broadcast production) worked on the behind-the-scenes documentary of Mel Gibson ’s film The Passion as the assistant editor, with broadcasting graduate Jason Payne (B.A. ’01) as the editor. They both are working at North by Northwest under Rich Cowan (B.A. ’79, communication) and Ian Kennedy (B.A. ’97, communication). The documentary aired on PAX TV in February and will be on the DVD release of the film.

Mock Trial Club Makes Promising Start

WSU’s newly organized mock trial team traveled to Portland, Oregon, February 6–8 for the American Mock Trial Association (AMTA) regional tournament. Though neither of the two teams representing WSU did well enough to advance to the national competitions, they did win several awards and in all ways represented WSU well. WSU competed against twenty-two teams from nine other universities. According to Mitchell Pickerill (political science), coach of both WSU teams, “Most of these programs have been around for a long time and take the competition very seriously.”

Out of about ninety witnesses on the twenty-four teams, nine students were recognized as outstanding witnesses from the entire competition, two of whom were from WSU, Natalie Zack and Caroline Bundy. One of WSU’s teams received the Spirit of AMTA Award, voted on by other teams’ captains for the team that “best exemplifies [AMTA’s] ideals of justice, fair play, and civility” and other good sportsmanship traits. WSU also won the Outstanding New School Award. Although they did not receive any awards, several WSU attorneys and another witness were ranked fairly highly by the judges.

The Department of Political Science/Criminal Justice Program and the Foley Institute both made modest contributions to the WSU club last year to support registration with the national organization. Zan Lanouette (senior, political science) founded the club and has been instrumental in mobilizing the group. Most of the students are political science or criminal justice students.

The club will be organizing a mock trial case on campus soon, which will be open to the public.

Team 1 Members:

Zan Lanouette (team captain)
Caroline Bundy (won Best Witness Award)
Harlan Harvey
Jeff Johnson
Tony Ostrander
Alan Quon
JJ Thompson

Team 2 Members (won the Spirit of AMTA Award):

Meghan Olson (team captain)
Tara Barry
Chris Conklin
Rebecca Fritch
Linda Johnson
Kristiné Reeves
Adam Shor
Kate Whiting
Natalie Zack (won Best Witness Award)

Videoconferencing Equipment Connects Liberal Arts with the World

Videoconferencing equipment purchased by the College of Liberal Arts is allowing students and faculty in distant locations to connect face-to-face. A conference in February connected about two dozen students of Joseph Keim Campbell (philosophy) with Professor Peter Klein at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

“There’s a great faculty benefit since we are able to have CLA professors meet and collaborate with scholars at other universities on joint research sessions, help with planning, and even teach courses,” Keim Campbell said.

“The digital conferencing technology connects up to three remote locations at a time and can record lectures for later viewing,” said Wade Lafferty, computing coordinator for the College of Liberal Arts.

The videoconferencing units are located in Thompson Hall, Avery Hall, Wilson Hall, College Hall, and Johnson Tower. For more information about setting up a videoconference, contact Wade Lafferty at 335-5764 or lafferty@wsu.edu.

“Celebrating Excellence: An Evening Honoring Our Faculty and Staff” — March 26, 2004

Frances K. McSweeney (psychology) will receive the Eminent Faculty Award at a new university event, “Celebrating Excellence: An Evening Honoring Our Faculty and Staff,” taking place the evening of Friday, March 26, at the Beasley Performing Arts Coliseum. The event showcases newly tenured and promoted faculty and honors the 2004 recipients of the University’s top faculty and staff awards. The evening will begin with a social at 6 p.m. followed by dinner at 7 p.m. Newly tenured and promoted faculty, award recipients, and one guest each will be hosted by the University. Banquet tickets for the rest of the campus community and the public may be reserved on-line.

WSU Music Students to Perform at Benaroya Hall

The Washington State University Concert Choir and Madrigal Singers are scheduled to perform in the Grand Lobby at Benaroya Hall in Seattle.

The group’s performances will span four days, March 18–21, and coincide with the world premiere of Chen Yi’s Symphony No. 3, My Musical Journey to America, on March 18. Chen Yi is this spring’s MUSIC ALIVE composer-in-residence at the Seattle Symphony and was the 2003 visiting composer at WSU’s Festival of Contemporary Art Music. As part of that festival, students performed several selections of Chen Yi’s traditional Chinese folk songs. “The songs are performed in Chinese, which adds another layer of difficulty to these beautifully simple yet intricate songs,” said Lori Wiest (music), director of choral activities. “We’ve been very diligent to learn not only the selections, but also the dialect and phrasing of the language and the meaning of the songs,” said Wiest.

Christopher Wang (junior, music and accounting and information systems), who sings in both Concert Choir and Madrigal Singers, has been the language coach for the ensembles. “It is fun to serve as the bridge between the language and the music as we prepare for the performances,” Wang said. “I have had the unique experience of bringing my understanding of Chinese to each of these ensembles, helping them to pronounce the language, and to be in direct communication with the composer, Chen Yi.”

“When we have had questions about various sounds to recreate the music,” said Wiest, “Christopher Wang has e-mailed Chen Yi directly to ask her what she had in mind when she composed the pieces. She e-mailed back to him within a few hours and even called him so that she could verbally explain. That type of connection between the performers and the composer is very special and unique.” According to Wang, Chen Yi told him she is anxious to work with the WSU ensembles again. “Having the opportunity to work with her in Seattle and share her vocal music with our Seattle audience will be very exciting,” Wang said.

Madrigal Singers will be performing eight of Chen Yi’s “Chinese Folksongs,” including “Fengyang Song,” “Mayila,” “Jasmine Flower,” and “Riding on a Mule.” The Concert Choir will perform “Know You How Many Petals Falling?” dedicated to the New York firefighters who died September 11, 2001, and “Xuan,” based on the text taken from the book Dao De Jing written by Lao Zi in the Zhou Dynasty of the sixth century B.C.

Performance dates and times are:

Thursday, March 18, 7:00 p.m.
Friday, March 19, 12:30 p.m.
Saturday, March 20, 7:30 p.m.
Sunday, March 21, 1:30 p.m.

Plateau Center Update

Mary Collins (anthropology), Barbara Aston (provost’s office), Robbie Paul (Intercollegiate College of Nursing), Michael Holloman (M.F.A. ’93; director, Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture), and Patsy Whitefoot (Yakama), all members of the Plateau Center for American Indian Studies fall 2004 conference planning committee, attended the winter meetings of the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians in Portland, Oregon, February 9–12.

WSU hosted a very well attended listening session at the conference where Indian leaders, many of them WSU alumni, provided important input to the conference planning process.

The conference, scheduled for September 29 and 30, 2004, will be held on the Pullman campus. This conference is coming together as a result of collaboration between the tribes and scholars at WSU. This type of collaboration is unique and promises to be the foundation for building the Plateau Center concept. The conference will include opportunities to hear speakers and panel discussions, see a number of art and historical exhibits, and visit display table presentations about projects being undertaken by and for the tribes throughout the Northwest.

For more information, visit the conference Web site.

American College Theatre Festival Comes to the Palouse

The WSU Theatre Arts Program played an active role in the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival (KCACTF) Region VII conference February 17–21, hosted by the University of Idaho’s Department of Theatre and Film. WSU’s program even stepped in to host four performances in Wadleigh Theatre following an electrical system failure at the UI; attendees were shuttled from Moscow to Pullman for the shows.

WSU sent seven entries to the Irene Ryan Acting Scholarship Competition. Joseph Davidson (junior, theatre), Josh Evans (B.A. ’03, theatre), and Eva McGowan (senior, music major with theatre minor) were selected for the semifinal round. Two of the three, Evans and McGowan, were chosen for the final round. McGowan went on to win the Marvin Simms Diversity Award for acting.

Two student written one-act plays, American Camouflage by Sean O’Malley (senior, English; B.A. ’02, communication) and Reality Check by Holly Mueller (junior, theatre), were performed during the One-Act Marathon, and student improv group Nuthouse fared quite well in the “improv wars.”

Laurilyn Harris, director of the WSU theatre program, was on the panel of the National Critics Institute Workshop. Stan Brown (theatre) was chosen as a first round judge for the Irene Ryan Acting Competition and presented the workshop “The Body in Dramatic Space.” Dorothy Hopkins, costume designer, was chosen to assist with the conference costume display.

ICU Partnership Update

Following President Rawlins and other WSU representatives’ visit to International Christian University in October 2003, six faculty members from the College of Liberal Arts visited ICU from January 9–13, 2004. In addition to Edward Weber (director, Foley Institute) and Noriko Kawamura (director, Asia Program), who are in charge of the partnership projects, Eugene Rosa (sociology), Noël Sturgeon (women’s studies), Andrew Appleton (political science), and Ashley Grosse (Social and Economic Sciences Research Center) attended various meetings and work sessions to discuss the planning of the joint peace studies projects with ICU faculty members. ICU and WSU have agreed to hold two conferences, the first on “Defining Peace, Security, and Kyosei” in Pullman from September 17–22, 2004, and the next on “Peace, Security, and the Environment” at ICU in the fall of 2005. The two universities also agreed to jointly conduct a “Japan–U.S. Peace and Security Values Survey.”

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