
March 2005

Dean's Message

Thank you to all those who attended the February 16 Dean’s Address. The presentation is viewable on the college Web site. The content is largely about our achievements, our needs, and the linkages of these to all the planning, benchmarking, accountability, assessment, and accreditation initiatives of our university. In the presentation, I attempted to display a draft of our upcoming College Budget Dialog (scheduled for April) and, in so doing, to accomplish at least two things: first, make public some priorities derived from discussion among chairs, directors, and dean’s office; and second, ask for your input on these and other matters presented.

The PowerPoint slides list, on the right side of each, a set of budget requests in rough priority order. But the sources of funds vary from permanent budget to faculty start-up funds to equipment and minor capital to development money. Thus, we may receive funding for lower priority items because only that type of funding is available.

Among the permanent funding items is a Theatre leadership position; I am currently in discussion with the Theatre Program about this position and other program-building components. This priority states a need—first supported by college leadership at the August 2003 Chairs and Directors Retreat—that as a college we would want to ensure that Theatre is sustained and advanced at WSU. Suggested but not yet listed is a senior faculty position promoting diversity/equity.

Such an appointment would parallel the position approved in the College of Education and could be part of a larger cluster hire strategy in our college. The top priority on the list is increased funding for graduate assistants or, if increased funding is unavailable, a return to permanent funding for our graduate student appointments. Roughly 75% of these are at present on temporary funds.

In requesting input from our faculty and staff, I have noted on the PowerPoint slides a number of categories in which our units would submit information in their March 1 Budget Request materials. Unfortunately, the main message on budget is that we are very likely to implement the 5% expenditure reductions we discussed in November and December and that internal reallocations in our university for salary increases may make matters yet more difficult. We can, I think, convince the central university leadership of the quality of what we do and plan to do. Since President Rawlins and others have emphasized to the legislature and governor the connection of funding to quality at WSU, we are playing the same trump cards. The final allocations will be delayed into the summer and perhaps beyond.

But please accept my clearest possible “Thank you!” for making delivery of our message easy. The faculty, staff, and students of our college have accomplished truly fine things—and, especially so this year, broadly distributed across many of our units. As you read the presentation, the high quality and high visibility outcomes leap off the page—and there is no exaggeration. I am truly moved by your work. We are achieving as defined in our benchmarks, and such achievement will be tied to budget.

Please accept, as you are able, our invitations to several all-college events as the semester hurtles toward Commencement. Such times as the Authors’ Recognition Ceremony, Liberal Arts Awards Ceremony, Outstanding Seniors Brunch, and Commencement itself are opportunities when we have a chance to see each other, to visit, to shake a hand, to converse, and in contact often wordless but intensely collegial to reinforce our mutual understandings of value as we serve our students and our disciplines.

Erich Lear, Interim Dean
College of Liberal Arts

Worthy of Note

Chuck Madison (speech and hearing sciences, WSU Spokane) went to Bolpur, India, at the beginning of February to participate in an Operation Smile International cleft lip and palate surgical mission. Operation Smile is a Norfolk, Virginia, based organization of doctors and specialists who screen and treat children with varying degrees of cleft lip and palate worldwide. In nine days, the team screened 600 children and performed 139 operations. Madison’s role as speech-language pathologist was to assess the degree of impact the clefting had on a child’s speech, advise surgeons on the speech and language issues related to surgical options, and advise parents on the feeding of infants with clefts and on speech and language development.

Siskanna Naynaha, Wendy Olson (both Ph.D. candidates, English), and George Kennedy (English) have secured a Provost’s Teaching and Learning Grant of $23,000 for their project “Exploring Learning Communities as a Site for Improving Students’ First-Year Experience.” Their project will involve the collaborative efforts of faculty and students in several other departments—American studies, comparative ethnic studies, women’s studies, and the Multicultural Student Centers—and their work will begin now and extend over the next academic year.

Gene Rosa (sociology) has been appointed to the advisory board (consisting of U.K., French, and EU/EC government officials, media representatives, and academics) of the project “The Future of Nuclear Power in Europe” at Kings College London, University of London. The project will examine the barriers to introducing new nuclear power facilities in Europe.

Carol Ivory (fine arts) will give a lecture, “Marquesan Tapa for Contemporary Times,” at the University of California, Santa Cruz, on March 3. This is part of a lecture series in conjunction with the exhibition Cloth and Culture in Oceania: Bark Cloth from Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, and the Marquesas Islands at the UCSC Women’s Center February 15 through March 13. Ivory consulted on the exhibit and lent twenty-six tapa pieces from her research collection.

John Streamas (comparative ethnic studies) presented the paper “Race and Technologies of Time and Space” at the Asian Americans and the Law Conference hosted by the University of Illinois College of Law February 3–5.

John Weiss (music) will perform the role of Sparafucile in Verdi’s Rigoletto with Granite State Opera in New Hampshire on April 29 and May 1. Granite State Opera is a mid-level regional company with an annual budget of $190-$260,000. It performs at the Capitol Center for the Arts (1,300 seats) in Concord, New Hampshire, the capital city. Because the company attracts well-known singers from New York City (Frederica von Stade sang a recital there two years ago as a fund raiser), audience members come from all over New England as well as NYC to see their productions. Other recently featured international singers include Patricia Racette and Barbara Kilduff. The cast of Rigoletto will include Metropolitan Opera contralto Ellen Rabiner and the leading regional and NYC Opera Verdi baritone, Michael Corvino. Weiss will also present two interest sessions at the 2005 Washington Music Educators Arts Time Conference, “Building a Successful High School Choral Program” and “Tone It Up! Techniques for Improving Choral Blend.” The conference will be held in Tukwila, Washington, March 11–12.

Marina Tolmacheva (history, associate dean of liberal arts) served as field reader for international undergraduate applications to the U.S. International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX); in January she also read U.S. Department of Education grant applications to the International Research Program. In February, she was an invited participant in the Medieval Studies Winter Colloquium at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She presented the paper titled “From Ptolemy to Idrisi to Ibn Sa`id: A Double Puzzle in the Islamic Cartography of Africa and the Indian Ocean.”

Barbara Monroe (English) will be a featured speaker at the 2005 Fordham University Graduate School of Education Summer Literacy Institute this July at the Lincoln Center, New York City. Her address is titled “Can We Talk? Communications Technology, Critical Literacy, and Culture.”

Jon Hasbrouck (speech and hearing sciences, WSU Spokane) was invited to present a paper at the Spokane Central Valley School District Special Education Colloquium on February 4. The presentation, “Effective Fluency Management Procedures for School-Age Children and Adults Who Stutter,” described the stuttering treatment program currently being used with school-age children in the UPCD Hearing and Speech Clinic on the Riverpoint campus in Spokane.

John Irby and Lisa Irby (both communication) will be presenting a workshop at the International Globalization, Diversity, and Education Conference sponsored by Washington State University’s College of Education, the Office of the Vice President for Equity and Diversity, and WSU Extension. They will cover the topic “Integrating Diversity in Writing and Media Courses.” The conference will be held on the WSU Pullman campus March 3–5 and features speakers from across the United States.

Raymond Sun (history) presented his paper “Focusing on the Family: Recasting the Catholic Working-Class Community in the Weimar Era” at the German Studies Association’s annual conference in Washington, D.C., in October.

Donna Campbell (English) presented a paper, “The Expatriate as Nation-Builder: Rose Wilder Lane’s Little House in 1920s Albania,” in the session “Victorian Matriarchs and Modernist Doppelgangers: American Middle-Class Women Writers” at the Modernist Studies Association annual conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, this past fall. At the American Studies Association in Atlanta last November, she was elected chair of the national committee of regional chapter representatives for 2005–2007.

Jeanne Johnson (speech and hearing sciences) and Leslie Power (speech and hearing sciences, WSU Spokane) testified as part of a higher education panel at a meeting of the Public Education Standards Board in Olympia during January. The board heard their testimony against changing the certification standards for speech-language pathologists (SLPs) in the public schools. Power is leading a task force appointed by the Washington Speech-Language-Hearing Association investigating the shortage of SLPs in the schools.

Zheng-min Dong (foreign languages) will make a presentation at an international conference, “Russia - East - West: Challenges of Crosscultural Communication,” to be held at the Far Eastern National University in Vladivostok, Russia, April 22–26. In the presentation he will describe how American students learn the concept of the grammatical subject in Russian, thus helping build a bridge between Russian and American Russian linguists who have two different approaches to Russian language studies.

Sue Peabody (history, WSU Vancouver) has been appointed vice president of the French Colonial Historical Society with annual meetings in Dakar, Senegal (2006); La Rochelle, France (2007); and Quebec, Canada (2008).

The Honors College and the Department of Foreign Languages and Cultures have been awarded a WSU Undergraduate Teaching and Learning Assessment Initiative Grant for their project “Assessing Foreign Language Proficiency for a New Honors College Learning Outcome.” Libby Walker, Wes Leid (both honors), Ana María Rodríguez-Vivaldi, and Rachel Halverson (both foreign languages) collaborated on the writing of the grant. Walker and Halverson will serve as co-project leaders. Sabine Davis, Joan Grenier-Winther, and Sere Previto (all foreign languages) will serve as the representative contributors from the French and Spanish sections.

Spokane School District had an in-service day on January 31, inviting clinicians from UPCD, the cooperative program between WSU’s speech and hearing sciences and Eastern Washington University’s communication disorders. Robbie Jackson (UPCD-EWU) presented on “Phonological Processing.” Kerri Baldwin (alumna, speech and hearing sciences) and Leslie Power (speech and hearing sciences, WSU Spokane) presented on “Classroom Management of Pediatric Dysphagia.”

A poster by Brent J. Oneal (Ph.D. candidate, psychology) and Leonard Burns (psychology), with T.J. Kahn, “The Introduction of a Comprehensive Treatment Model for Adolescent Sexual Offenders,” was presented at the annual conference of the National Adolescent Perpetration Network in Denver in February.

Christopher Lupke (foreign languages) was invited to give a presentation entitled “Anti-Filial Conduct and Emergent Individual Identity in Transnational East Asian Film” at the University of California, Davis, in February.

Michael Delahoyde (English) guest-taught six classes at Pullman’s new junior high school in late January. Eighth-graders found themselves drawn into discussions about Shakespeare and about some topics in popular culture. This has become an annual event, and Delahoyde, though not hospitalized, feels that once a year with those young people is ample for his constitution.

Gail Chermak (speech and hearing sciences) has been appointed an assistant editor for the Journal of the American Academy of Audiology, a Tier I journal.

Joan Grenier-Winther (foreign languages) presented her paper “Demonstration of an Electronic Database-Driven Scholarly Edition of the Late Medieval French Lyric Poem La Belle dame qui eut mercy” at the Hawaii International Conference on Arts and Humanities, held in Honolulu in January.

Posters presented at the annual convention of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology in New Orleans in January included “Aggression as a Function of Concern with Future Consequences and Anticipated Interaction with an Aggressive Peer,” by Jeffrey Joireman (psychology), Cheryl Becker (Ph.D. candidate, psychology), Celestina Barbosa-Leiker (M.S. candidate, psychology), and Blythe Duell (Ph.D. candidate, psychology); “Mortality Salience and Cooperative Behavior,” by Duell, Joireman, and Craig Parks (psychology); and “Perceived Fairness of Structural Solution Decision-making under Conditions of Uncertainty,” by Donelle Posey (Ph.D. candidate, psychology), Parks, and Joireman.
The following posters were presented at the Association for Research in Personality conference, also in New Orleans in January: “Willingness to Adopt a Structural Solution as a Function of Consideration of Future Consequences,” by Posey, Joireman, and Parks; “Ego Depletion, Consideration of Future Consequences, and Discounting of Delayed Rewards,” by Joireman, Daniel Balliet (M.S. candidate, psychology), and colleagues; and “Knowledge Sharing in Organizations as a Function of Concern with Future Consequences and Reciprocation Wariness,” by Barbosa-Leiker, Joireman, and colleagues.

Paul Brians (English) spoke on a panel on English usage held after the Portland Center Stage matinee performance of My Fair Lady on February 27. Brians also spoke about the work of Wole Soyinka on a panel in the CUB on February 3 and introduced Soyinka’s poetry reading the following day.

Nickolus Meisel’s (fine arts) show New Now Know How starts March 1 and will run through April 2 at Blackfish Gallery in Portland, Oregon. The opening reception will be Thursday, March 3, from 6:00–9:00 p.m. The gallery is open 11:00–5:00 Tuesday through Saturday or by appointment.

Michelle Kayne (M.S. candidate, psychology) and Maureen Schmitter-Edgecombe (psychology) had their poster titled “Costs of Predictable Switch between Simple Cognitive Tasks following Severe Closed-head Injury” presented at the International Neuropsychological Society conference in St. Louis last month. Schmitter-Edgecombe had a second poster with Shital Pavawalla (M.S. candidate, psychology), “Long-Term Retention of Skilled Visual Search following Severe Closed-head Injury,” presented at the same conference.

Professional Productivity

Leonard Orr (English, director of liberal arts, WSU Tri-Cities) has poems appearing in the current issues of Poetry International, Poetry East, Midstream, Rosebud, and Washington English Journal. His poem “Wind Farms” was a finalist for the William Stafford Prize, and his book manuscript, Clouders, was selected by Ishmael Reed as one of four finalists for the 2005 T. S. Eliot Prize in Poetry.

John Streamas (comparative ethnic studies) published reviews of the books Being Chinese, Becoming Chinese American and Memory and Popular Film in successive issues of the journal American Studies.

Laurie Drapela (political science, criminal justice, WSU Vancouver) authored an article, titled “The Effect of Negative Emotion on Licit and Illicit Drug Use among High School Dropouts: An Empirical Test of General Strain Theory,” accepted for publication in a 2005 issue of the Journal of Youth and Adolescence.

Monica Kirkpatrick Johnson’s (sociology) article “Family Roles and Work Values: Processes of Selection and Change” is being published in the Journal of Marriage and Family.

Azfar Hussain’s (comparative ethnic studies) essay “Toward a Political Economy of Colonialism and Racism: Re-reading Frantz Fanon in the Twenty-first Century” will appear in the anthology Race and the Foundations of Knowledges: Cultural Amnesia in the Academy, edited by Jana Braziel and Joseph Young. The anthology is due out from the University of Illinois Press in fall 2005. One of the editors of this anthology instantly solicited the paper on Fanon after Hussain presented it at a major international conference on “Race in the Humanities” held at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse, in 2002. Also, Hussain’s translations of creative works from five languages—Bengali, Hindi, Urdu, Sanskrit, and Arabic—have been reproduced in numerous online literary and cultural sites originating, for instance, in countries like Canada, Singapore, India, Nepal, and the U.S., while his own poems in English titled “10,000 Atypical Haikus Dedicated to Caliban” and “This Is (Not) a Poem” have been featured by ZNet. Further, an interview with Hussain, focusing on his book-in-progress, Poems against Bayonets, Bullets, Bombs, and his poetry reading were recently telecast on Cable 8, while two publishers from South Asia have already expressed interest in bringing out his book of poems. In addition to this book, Hussain is currently working on two academic book projects.

Joan Grenier-Winther’s (foreign languages) book chapter entitled “Server-Side Databases, the World Wide Web, and the Editing of Medieval Poetry: The Case of La Belle dame qui eut mercyî” has appeared in The Book Unbound: New Directions in Editing and Reading Medieval Books and Texts, edited by Stephen T. Partridge and Sian Echard (University of Toronto Press, 2004). This was a revision of a paper presented at University of British Columbia in September 1999.

Raymond Sun’s (history) article “Finding Light in the Darkness? The Historical Treatment of Genocide as a Template for the Field of Hate Studies” appeared in the Journal of Hate Studies 3(1).

Mimi Salamat (speech and hearing sciences, WSU Spokane) has coauthored a recently published Tier I article, “Interactions among Variables in the P300 Response to a Continuous Performance Task with ADHD Adults,” in the Journal of the American Academy of Audiology 15.

Christopher Lupke’s (foreign languages) edited volume The Magnitude of Ming: Command, Allotment, and Fate in Chinese Culture has been published by the University of Hawaii Press. In addition to editing the book, Lupke contributed one chapter, entitled “Divi/Nation: Modern Literary Representations of the Chinese Imagined Community.”

Karen Lupo (anthropology) has an article in press with the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology titled “Small Prey Hunting Technology and Zooarchaeological Measures of Taxonomic Diversity and Abundances: Ethnoarchaeological Evidence from Central African Forest Foragers.”

Joddy Murray (English, WSU Tri-Cities) has recently published two poems, “Sacrament” and “The Repentance of Everyday Things,” in Phantasmagoria 4(22). He published two more poems, “Red Wind” and “Seeded Morning,” in Wisconsin Review 39(1).

O. Gene Clanton (professor emeritus, history) recently published a new work entitled A Common Humanity: Kansas Populism and the Battle for Justice and Equality 1854–1903 (Manhattan, KS: Sunflower University Press).

An article Eloy González (foreign languages) wrote, in collaboration with Adriana Tápanes-Inojosa (Chicago State University), “Reconsideraciones al poema 15 de Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada de Pablo Neruda: ‘Me gustas cuando callas porque estás como ausente’” (Reconsidering Poem 15 in Twenty Love Poems and a Desperate Song by Pablo Neruda: ‘I like you when you are quietly absent’), has been accepted by the Spanish literary journal Explicación de textos literarios (California State University, Sacramento). This study offers a new interpretation of a very well-known poem by the Chilean poet, who won the 1971 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Travis Pratt (criminal justice) published “Assessing Macro-Level Predictors and Theories of Crime: A Meta-Analysis” with Frank Cullen (University of Cincinnati) in Crime and Justice: A Review of Research (University of Chicago Press).

Three articles by Don A. Dillman (sociology) and colleagues have appeared recently in journals: “Impacting Growers’ Use and Adoption of Conservation Cropping Systems through Research and Field Design” (with Olivia Forte, Frank Young, and Matt Carroll) in Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems, “Factors that Influence Reading and Comprehension of Branching Instructions in Self-Administered Questionnaires” (with Cleo Redline, Lisa Carley-Baxter, and Robert Creecy) in Allgemeines Statistiches Archiv (journal of the German Statistical Society), and “Survey Mode as a Source of Instability across Surveys” (with Leah Melani Christian, Ph.D. candidate in sociology) in Field Methods.

Maureen Schmitter-Edgecombe (psychology) ran a study with James Bales (B.S. ’04, psychology; B.S. ’04, neuroscience) as part of the Undergraduate Research Initiative that is now in press with Brain and Language. The title is “Understanding Test after Severe Closed-head Injury: Assessing Inferences and Memory Operations with a Think-aloud Procedure.”

Rebecca Goodrich’s (English) essay “Firefight” has been accepted for publication in the forthcoming anthology A Mile in Her Shoes: Women Who Work in the Wild. The essay describes her experience learning to fire the M60 machine gun in U.S. Army basic training.

Student Activities and Awards

Tina Krauss’ (M.A. candidate, American studies) review of Suzanna Danuta Walter’s All the Rage: The Story of Gay Visibility in America has been accepted for publication in Women’s Studies 34(2).

Raja Al-Khalili (Ph.D. candidate, English) presented a paper entitled “The Disguise of Imperialism in the Configuration of the Non-European ‘Barbary’: Character in the Barbary Captivity Narratives of James Riley and Eliza Bradley” on January 13 at the third annual Hawaii International Conference on Arts and Humanities.

Noelle Lee (M.A. candidate, speech and hearing sciences) is the new vice president of the Graduate and Professional Student Association at WSU. Her goals are to improve communication with international students about services available at WSU and to form closer ties between GPSA and the WSU administration.

A paper titled “Pacific Northwest Waterborne Commerce: A Detailed Analysis of Up-River and Down-River Movements on the Columbia/Snake River System” will be presented at the Transportation Research Forum held at George Washington University in March. The paper is a result of work Shushanik Makaryan (Ph.D. candidate, sociology) did during summer 2004 with Ken Casavant and Eric Jessup (both economic sciences) on the analysis of waterborne commerce transportation of the Columbia/Snake River system.

Brent J. Oneal (Ph.D. candidate, psychology) was awarded a GPSA Travel Grant to cover the cost of traveling to the National Adolescent Perpetration Network conference in Denver.

Elizabeth Horton (Ph.D. candidate, anthropology) has been selected to receive the 2005 Society for American Archaeology Student Paper Award for her paper “Style, Function, and Ceramic Manufacture: A Case Study from Central New York,” coauthored with Christina Rieth.

Congratulations to the following students, whose university writing portfolios were judged most outstanding for fall 2004: Hadley Gulin (junior, psychology), Jacob Hughes (senior, anthropology), John Yeager (senior, materials science and engineering), Amy Thompson (junior, English), Rachel Neff (junior, Spanish), and Steven Holmes (junior, English).

Jenn Mueller (M.A. candidate, anthropology) will present a paper, “Power and Prey: Faunal Resources and Social Power in a Chacoan Community,” at the Society for American Archaeology’s annual meeting in the session “Chacoan Period Community Development in the Zuni Area.”

The Kennedy Center/American College Theatre Festival has sent four Meritorious Achievement Awards for the Theatre Program’s production of STAGE One, the show of student-written one-act plays from mid-November. Catherine Ellis (freshman), James Katica (junior, communication), and Michael Carpenter (senior, English) received them for their playwriting, and Hillary Wardwell (senior, communication and theatre) received one for direction.

Alumni News

Debra Sutphen (Ph.D. ’97, history) works at Sierra College in Rocklin, California, a community college of 24,000 students serving much of northern California from Sacramento to Lake Tahoe and Truckee. She was promoted January 28 to interim associate dean for liberal arts after teaching U.S. history and women’s history since 1999. Sutphen spent last semester in Vienna, Austria, leading a group of Sierra students in the study abroad program. Prior to her promotion, she also served Sierra College as honors program director and as faculty representative for the faculty union. The interim associate dean position is a one-year position.

Leslie Holt (M.F.A. ’03) had an exhibition, Effective Disorder, on display at the College of the Siskiyous Art Gallery in February. The series of paintings explored Holt’s childhood memories of growing up with a mentally ill family member. Several used images of spilt pills, such as Prozac, juxtaposed with popular fictional characters, such as Hello Kitty, Yoda, and Sesame Street characters. The references are personal but also refer to larger social issues, specifically the shame or taboo of mental illness and the popularization of psychiatric medication for both adults and children. Holt’s work has been shown in galleries and museums across the United States and in Canada, Korea, Europe, and India.

Michael Egan (Ph.D. ’04, history) has accepted a tenure-track position in the history of science and technology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. The position has a 2-2 teaching load with the freedom to develop new courses in science, technology, and the environment.

Jason Knirck has accepted a tenure-track position at Central Washington University in modern western European and British history. He received his Ph.D. from WSU in history in modern Europe, with a specialization in modern Ireland, in 2000.

CLA Faculty Honored with University Awards

Liberal arts faculty received two of three 2004–2005 Sahlin Faculty Excellence Awards, a trio of honors given out annually in recognition of faculty excellence.

Lisa J. McIntyre (sociology) received the Sahlin Faculty Excellence Award for Instruction for her outstanding accomplishments and national recognition in instruction and her contributions to excellence in the instructional programs of WSU. McIntyre was selected for the award on the basis of her continuing efforts to enrich the lives of her students and find new and innovative ways to expose students to ideas that are challenging and intellectually enriching. She has designed her courses to facilitate dialogue through carefully crafted writing assignments, the use of a finely tuned lecture guide and workbook, and face-to-face interactions she calls “Lattes with Lisa,” which are weekly informal discussions with students related to dialogues initiated in the classroom.

Victor Villanueva (English, interim associate dean of liberal arts) received the Sahlin Faculty Excellence Award for Research, Scholarship, and the Arts, awarded for major research or a creative contribution or series of contributions completed at WSU. The contribution can be empirical, theoretical or artistic, but must be widely recognized as highly meritorious and must have had a significant impact. One of the nation’s most distinguished and respected scholars in the discipline of rhetoric and composition, Villanueva authored Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color, which incorporates interpretive anthology and the sociolinguistics of ideology and has proven a classic in its field. His creative work has been extensively anthologized and has significantly influenced an entire generation of rhetoricians and compositionists.

McIntyre and Villanueva will be honored publicly April 1 during the annual WSU Academic Showcase, a daylong celebration of faculty and staff achievements.

WSU to Host Leading Expert on Human Population Genetics

L.L. Cavalli-Sforza, M.D., father of “genetic geography and history” and considered by most to be the world’s leading expert on human population genetics, will deliver the Holland Lecture at Washington State University this March. His lecture, titled “Genes, Culture, and Human Evolution: A Synthesis,” will present the culmination of Cavalli-Sforza’s research and thinking on the relative force and interactions of genes and culture in the human evolutionary process. The lecture will be given Wednesday, March 23, at 4:00 p.m. in the Smith Center (CUE) 203. A reception for Professor Cavalli-Sforza will be held in the Museum of Anthropology, College Hall, immediately following his presentation.

Cavalli-Sforza, creator of Stanford University’s Human Population Genetics Laboratory, is an active professor emeritus in the Department of Genetics at Stanford’s School of Medicine. He is credited with advancing the study of the origin of modern humans and their evolutionary history by using genetic markers along with linguistic and archaeological data. In effect, he used genes and culture to reconstruct the history of humankind. Working in many disciplines, Cavalli-Sforza has been called “one of 20th-century biology’s greatest synthesizers” (David B. Goldstein, 2000, Science).

“Cavalli’s vision has brought about a new way of looking at human evolution and, like every novelty, it has been controversial,” according to a recently completed scientific biography of Cavalli-Sforza by Linda Stone (anthropology) and Paul Lurquin (genetics). The book, A Genetic and Cultural Odyssey: The Life and Work of L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, is being published by Columbia University Press and is due for release in April. In it, Stone and Lurquin write “...Cavalli’s legacy will be his vision that a great deal about human evolution—in its biological, cultural, and linguistic aspects—can be understood through looking at how and where human groups have moved over the earth, preserving more stably those characteristics which are passed from generation to generation through specific conservative mechanisms of transmission.”

Cavalli-Sforza was granted his M.D. from the University of Pavia in 1944. His bio lists numerous honors and awards, including U.S. National Academy of Sciences, 1978; president, American Society of Human Genetics, 1989; Academia dei Lincei, National Member, 1991; Foreign Member of the Royal Society, London, U.K., 1992; Honorary Sc.D., Columbia University, Universita delle Calabrie, Bologna, Cagliari, Roma, and Cambridge University; Fyssen International Prize, 1994; Italian Academy of Medicine Award, 1998; and Balzan Prize, 1999.

The Philip C. Holland lecture is an annual event at WSU funded through an endowment established by Ernest O. Holland, the fifth university president (1916–1944), in honor of his father, a physician in Indiana.

Fulbright Scholar Visits WSU

Fulbright scholar Boumairam Ismailova visited Washington State University January 27 and 28, observing classes and sharing her research and knowledge with faculty and students in several departments.

A professor of linguistics at Osh State University in the Kyrgyz Republic, Ismailova is also director and educational advisor at the Osh Resource Center of the Soros Foundation–Kyrgyzstan and a Fulbright scholar at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is on a five-month exchange to the United States to conduct research for her book describing verbal and nonverbal communication differences between American and Kyrgyz cultures. The text is intended to increase linguistic competency and improve intercultural communication skills of students, aiding American and European students studying in Kyrgyzstan and Kyrgyz students studying in the U.S. to understand and more quickly adapt to their host cultures. The book will also encourage students to clarify their own values and ethics while working to prevent and counter misunderstandings, stereotyping, and prejudices.

While on the WSU campus, Ismailova visited classes, met with Erich Lear (interim dean of liberal arts), attended a meeting of the Teacher Education Committee in the College of Education, and attended a graduate music recital. She also participated in a roundtable discussion on border security between the U.S. and Mexico sponsored by the Foley Institute.

After leaving Pullman, Ismailova was hosted by Candice Goucher (director of liberal arts, WSU Vancouver), who arranged for her to see the Vancouver campus and visit Portland State University. She will complete her five-month exchange at Indiana and return to Kyrgyzstan on March 1.

Writer-Activist Ngugi wa Thiong’o to Give Public Lecture at WSU

African novelist, short-story writer, playwright, essayist, theorist, filmmaker, journalist, activist, and teacher Ngugi wa Thiong’o will deliver a public lecture at WSU in the Fine Arts Auditorium at 5:00 p.m. on March 29 as part of the Comparative Ethnic Studies Speaker Series.

Ngugi was born in British-ruled Kenya in 1938. He was educated in Kenya, Uganda, and England. The emancipatory character and content of Ngugi’s work place him in the revolutionary tradition of such black freedom fighters as W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Amílcar Cabral, Kwame Nkrumah, Walter Rodney, and C. L. R. James, figures that Ngugi deeply admires. His oppositional theater took him to prison without charge in 1977, while his work in general subsequently caused him twenty-two years of forced exile. But neither prison nor exile could silence the voice of Ngugi. He wrote in his native Gikuyu the entire novel Caitaani Mutharaba-ini—later translated into English as Devil on the Cross—on prison-issued toilet paper, while his exile has prompted him to remain productive as an artist and an activist. He is currently Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. His works, translated into thirty major languages, have influenced and inspired an entire generation of artists and activists around the world.

Like his African contemporaries Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka (the latter recently visited WSU), Ngugi burst onto the literary scene in Africa’s independence and post-independence climate of the late 1950s and early 1960s. After writing in English with spectacular success, Ngugi turned to his native Gikuyu, accentuating the centrality of African languages and cultures to the struggle for liberation. His “farewell to English” is famously theorized in his collection of essays Decolonizing the Mind (1986). This work articulates a powerful critique of linguistic and cultural colonialism, while it is widely regarded in Africa, Asia, and Latin America as another manifesto of decolonization—as “armed words for mental decolonization”—after the Caribbean writer-activist Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth.

Ngugi’s early works in English include his three novels Weep Not, Child (1964), The River Between (1965), and A Grain of Wheat (1967). His later three novels are Petals of Blood (1977), Devil on the Cross (translated into English in 1982), and Matigari (translated into English in 1989). These novels register the rhythms and rituals of Gikuyu life and community; the conflicts between tradition and modernity; the moments of Kenya’s anti-colonial peasant insurgency famously known as the Mau Mau movement; the post-independence corruptions of the national ruling classes; and the dialectically enacted relationships between the personal, the historical, and the political in the service of the struggle for freedom. Some of these concerns also surface in his collection of short stories Secret Lives (1970). Ngugi’s contributions further reside in developing the communal theater of the oppressed in collaboration with Kenyan peasants and working-class people who directly took part in his Gikuyu plays such as I Will Marry When I Want (translated into English in 1982). Ngugi has written a number of books for children as well. The notes he wrote down in prison later became the basis of his memoir Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary (1982). Some of his major collections of essays—apart from Decolonizing the Mind—include Homecoming (1969), Writers in Politics (1982, 1997), Moving the Center (1993), and Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams (1998). In these influential works Ngugi wa Thiong’o rubs his words such that they catch fire, appearing as the foremost anti-colonial and anti-racist writer-activist of our time who not only underlines the social and political responsibilities of writers and intellectuals but also emphasizes the urgent need to imagine and materialize a world free from exploitation and oppression.

[Biography: Azfar Hussain]

Foley Institute Summer Fellow Program

The Thomas S. Foley Institute is pleased to announce the fourth annual Summer Fellow Award for College of Liberal Arts graduate students. There will be one award of $2,500 for summer 2005. The successful candidate must be currently enrolled in a liberal arts Ph.D. program at WSU and must submit a written proposal.

The intent of the award is: (1) to provide recognition and financial support for WSU Ph.D. students who are pursuing original, substantive research projects that focus on public policy issues or problems, and (2) to advance a student’s progress toward completion of the Ph.D. degree.

Proposals are due April 1, 2005. For proposal requirements, see http://libarts.wsu.edu/foleyinst/. Questions may be directed to Margie Kimball at 509-335-3477.