
Nov./Dec. 2006

Dean's Message

Thank you to those of you who have already taken the time to review the draft of our 2007–2012 CLA Plan. Your thoughtful feedback will help us formulate the final draft. If you have not already reviewed the plan, please take a moment to do so and provide your observations and suggestions via the Web survey. You will see in the message associated with the survey that two other documents accompany and complement the plan: our fundraising campaign emphases, and a document prepared for Deans' Council—a statement of our areas of excellence and our priorities. As you will note, our priorities relate to our budget. Comments made after the November 1 deadline will still be considered and will be important as this process continues. We anticipate showing you the final draft by January 31.

Our college, in recent years, has played a significant role in providing instruction to our increased numbers of undergraduate students at all campuses and in Distance Degree Programs. But now, as you may have learned in the media, the participation rate in college attendance among the most recently graduated high school class in our state is lower than in the past, though the class itself is still in the large, baby-boom-echo range. As a result, WSU has achieved its contracted enrollment but does not have students beyond that level as we have in recent years. The result is interesting for us. While pressure to increase our class sizes now occurs more at the upper division and seems less overall at the undergraduate level, the University does not have the revenue from the tuition paid by students enrolled above the state contract level. How might this relate to our role in instructional delivery and in our funding priorities?

At the same time, we see encouragement in the Yardley Report on doctoral programs at WSU and in the Report of the Graduate Education Commission to consider greater focus on graduate education, especially through increasing the number of faculty in each unit who are actively engaged in mentoring graduate students. This effort is paralleled by increased involvement in research and creative activity. In our college alone, we increased external funding from about $1 million in 2004–05 to $4.5 million in 2005–06. After taking a moment to say WOW! (yes, it's true—congratulations everyone!), let's consider if there are connections to the question that closes the paragraph above.

A fourth document related to the three referenced in our survey on the plan will soon reach you. This will be the final version of the Report of the Realignment Implementation Team for the College of Liberal Arts. As this report and last spring's draft of it propose, we have some opportunities to make our emphases and priorities more visible through selected organizational changes. These opportunities relate to parts of our drafted plan and to Question 6 in the plan survey, which asks for comments on funding leadership and support for formally constituted centers in relation to funding positions associated with centers of excellence. Of course we would like to have both, but the focus of the question points to our need to discuss the value of formal centers for research, creative activity, and engagement with our constituents.

My explicit intent here is to encourage your consideration of these matters as you read the draft CLA Plan and respond to the survey. We have some choices to make in proposing funding priorities for the next biennium for our college. At the moment, given the approach in the drafted plan, we will balance needs for faculty and graduate student funding with needs for administrative support in areas of excellence, regardless of enrollment at graduate and undergraduate levels. That is, we will implement at least some administrative changes to achieve our research and engagement goals while continuing to provide high quality instruction.

Thank you for your assistance in improving the drafted plan and in moving toward a strong positive consensus on our priorities. I look forward eagerly to reading your responses and discussing them in several settings.

Looking to the future,

Erich Lear, Dean
College of Liberal Arts

Worthy of Note

The American Society of Criminology has awarded Travis C. Pratt, director of the Criminal Justice Program at WSU, the Ruth Shonle Cavan Young Scholars Award for 2006. The award recognizes outstanding scholarly contributions to the discipline of criminology by an individual who has received the Ph.D. or a similar graduate degree no more than five years before the year of the award. Pratt’s winning research focuses on the individual and ecological sources of criminal behavior.
“The Cavan Award is a testament to Travis’ extensive and high-quality research,” said Steven Stehr, chair of the Department of Political Science. “To date, Travis Pratt has published over forty refereed journal articles in many of the finest outlets in the areas of criminology and criminal justice. His selection for this prestigious award is further validation of the high-quality work being done in our nationally ranked criminal justice program.”

Paul Brians (English) was interviewed by National Public Radio correspondent Margot Adler on the October 9 broadcast of the NPR public policy series “Justice Talking.” He discussed his research on nuclear weapons and popular culture as part of a program entitled “Nuclear Disarmament: An Impossible Dream?” The broadcast is available in streaming audio at http://www.justicetalking.org/. Brians is the author of Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction and many articles on the subject. He is also the creator of the Web site Nuke Pop, which led “Justice Talking” to him.

Kenji Kitatani (communication), Lester Smith Distinguished Professor of Media Management, is executive producing the world’s largest multimedia digital cinema and live performance show in Yokohama, Japan, during the month of November. The show is based on “Terje,” a poem by Henrik Ibsen of Norway, and has a budget of $3 million dollars. More details may be found at http://www.terje.jp/.

Leonard Orr (English, WSU Tri-Cities) participated in the International Literary Semantics Conference held at the Jagiellonian University of Krakow, Poland, October 12–14. He gave a paper on “Hermeneutic Resistance: Four Test Cases for the Notion of Literary Uninterpretability.” He also chaired the session on “Theoretical and Cognitive Aspects of Interpretability.”

In October, Xiuyu Wang (history, WSU Vancouver) presented in Chinese the paper “Female tusi on the Run, Village baozheng on the Rise: Gendered Power Dynamics in Garze Regularization” as an invited panelist at the “Officials on the Chinese Borders” symposium at the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica in Taiwan. The symposium gathered scholars of China’s border history from the École française d’Extrême-Orient, the Academia Sinica, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and other countries. His paper is under consideration for publication in the peer-reviewed Sinologie française (Faguo Hanxue).

Andrew K. Jorgenson (sociology) was an invited panelist at the Symposium on Macrocomparative Analysis of Environmental Change and Sustainability, held October 18–21 at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine. Jorgenson was also recently elected a board member of the Research Committee on Economy and Society of the International Sociological Association, and he is the new managing editor of the Journal of World-Systems Research.

Dene Grigar (digital technology and culture, WSU Vancouver) and collaborator Steve Gibson (University of Victoria) will be partnering with the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry to develop an interactive installation involving motion tracking technology and narrative. Their project, the MINDful Play Environment, will run at the museum in fall 2007. Additionally, Grigar’s paper “Changing Perspectives of War and Violent Gaming: Translating a Performance-Installation to a Non-Zero Sum Serious Game” has been accepted to the 2007 Digital Arts and Culture Conference to be held in Perth, Australia, as one of the long, featured papers of the conference.

WSU Press has just published Tracking Ancient Footsteps: William D. Lipe’s Contributions to Southwestern Prehistory and Public Archaeology. Bill Lipe is an emeritus professor in the Department of Anthropology, and the volume is edited by two of his colleagues, R.G. Matson, professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of British Columbia, and Tim Kohler, regents professor of anthropology at WSU. “This volume is both an introduction to the prehistory of the northern U.S. Southwest, through a review of the accomplishments of one of its major architects, and also an introduction to the practice of archaeology today,” notes Kohler.

Greg Yasinitsky (music) has been selected as the guest conductor of the 2007 New Hampshire All State Honors Jazz Band.

Douglas Gast (fine arts, WSU Tri-Cities) had artwork included in the following group exhibitions: Cui Bono, at Ouch My Eye Studio, Seattle, in September; Prickly Heat, at Semantics Gallery in Cincinnati, Ohio, in August; Reel Shorts, at the Arts Center in Saratoga Springs, New York, July 1 to September 30; and Prescriptions, at Spark Video Canada in London, Ontario, in April. An exhibition Gast curated, Reasonable/Unreasonable: A New Normalizing Discourse, will be hosted by Ouch My Eye Studio in December. The show was previously exhibited at WSU Tri-Cities and features the work of nine artists, including Samantha DiRosa, Stephen Chalmers, and Joe Stengel (all fine arts). The gallery is located a few blocks south of Pioneer Square on 1st Ave.

Travis Ridout (political science) presented a paper, “Moving the Conversation West: How Much Attention Would the Candidates Pay to a Western States’ Primary?” at the Western Presidential Primary Symposium in Salt Lake City, Utah, on September 29.

Camille Roman (English, American studies, women’s studies) has been invited to present a paper at the Society for the Study of American Women Writers (SSAWW) conference November 8–11 in Philadelphia. Her paper, “Elizabeth Bishop and Louise Crane’s High Society World,” discusses the role of the patron Crane in Bishop’s life and work as well as Crane’s unexamined positioning in U.S. cultural patronage and women’s networks. Roman is the representative of the Elizabeth Bishop Society to SSAWW. She has organized the society’s session for the conference and will host its dinner.
Roman was interviewed by Susan Henry for Henry’s forthcoming book on the media marriages of public relations founders Edward L. and Doris Fleischman Bernays and The New Yorker’s editorial founding couple Jane Grant and Harold Ross. Bernays biographers view Roman as a crucial member of the couple’s inner circle in their retirement years. Interviews with Roman provide exclusive views for Larry Tye’s book The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Spin, as well as Henry’s essays “‘There Is Nothing in This Profession... That a Woman Cannot Do’: Doris E. Fleischman and the Beginnings of Public Relations” in American Journalism and “Dissonant Notes of a Retiring Feminist: Doris E. Fleischman’s Later Years” in Journal of Public Relations Research.

Donna Campbell (English) gave an invited presentation in May on the “Digital Americanists” panel at the American Literature Association conference, and in June she gave the keynote address at the Jack London Symposium in Alaska.

C. Richard King (comparative ethnic studies) presented “Protecting Civilization from the Hostiles: Ward Churchill, Cultural Wars (on Terror), and the Silencing of Dissent” at the annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy in Philadelphia.

Andrew I. Duff (anthropology) presented “Two Great House Communities on Chaco’s Southern Frontier,” and Melissa Elkins (M.A. candidate, anthropology), Duff, and Aaron Wright (M.A. candidate, anthropology) presented “Ethnicity and Ceramic Technology on the Mogollon/Anasazi Frontier,” at the fourteenth Mogollon Conference, held October 12–14 in Tucson, Arizona.

Michelle Forsyth (fine arts) has been selected as a finalist in the Miami University Young Painters Competition for the William and Dorothy Yeck Award. Her work will be included in an exhibition with the nine other finalists at Miami University December 13, 2006, through February 9, 2007. Forsyth has also been invited to create an installation for the Bridge Art Fair at the Catalina Hotel and Beach Club in Miami, Florida, in December. On October 12, Forsyth gave a lecture on her work at Camosun College in Victoria, B.C.

Marsha Quinlan and Robert Quinlan (both anthropology) were invited to guest-edit two special issues of the journal Cross-Cultural Research. The issues will focus on applications of evolutionary theory to cross-cultural patterns of human behavior. Quinlan and Quinlan are co-organizing a related session at the joint meetings of the Society for Anthropological Sciences and the Society for Cross-Cultural Research to be held in February in San Antonio, Texas.

In October, Gerald Berthiaume (music) judged the final round of the Pianovision Sonata/Concerto Competition at the World Piano Pedagogy Conference in Atlanta, Georgia. In September, Berthiaume performed with several WSU music faculty—Ann Yasinitsky, Meredith Arksey, Ruth Boden, and Julie Wieck—in two concerts on the WSU Tri-Cities campus as part of the new Liberal Arts Season there.

Rachel Halverson (foreign languages and cultures) has been elected to a three-year term, 2007–2009, as presiding officer of the Chapter Presidents’ Assembly for the American Association of Teachers of German. On October 1 she presented “An Uncertain Future and a Cloudy Past: Narrative Strategies and Alltagskritik in Martina Hefter’s Zurück auf Los” at the German Studies Association Conference in Pittsburgh, and on September 28 she served as commentator for “Contemporary Trends in German Literature 1: Literature in the Public Sphere” at the same conference.
At the joint conference of the Washington Association of Foreign Language Teachers and the Confederation in Oregon for Language Teaching, held in Portland, Oregon, in October, Halverson presented the paper “Sophie Scholl: Die letzten Tage – Aktives Lesen und Lernen” and was a panelist for “First-Timers, Would-Be Presenters, and Credit Seekers.” She also presided over two sessions, “Intercultural Learning through Gesture and Interaction” and “Visions of Valuing Diverse Learners: Many Languages, Many Cultures,” which entailed introducing the presenter, distributing and collecting session evaluation forms, and writing a summary of the session for The Forum.

Birgitta Ingemanson (foreign languages and cultures) traveled to Vladivostok in September to participate in an international conference organized by the Russian Academy of Sciences (Far Eastern Division) and the British Universities Siberian Studies Seminar. Her paper, “Eleanor Pray’s Vladivostok: A Portrait, 1894–1930,” is an overview of her book manuscript based on the Eleanor L. Pray Collection of letters and photo albums and introduces the Vladivostok public to parts of their city’s history that have previously been unknown (the paper will be published by Far Eastern National University). In addition, Ingemanson was asked to read the paper at an evening gathering of the “Club of Book Lovers,” a very active, interested, and fun group of culture-seeking individuals in Vladivostok. The conference presentation led to several more research opportunities and meetings with scholars, including a TV interview broadcast on the evening news and an editing project focusing on the unique photos by an American soldier who was in Vladivostok with the American Expeditionary Forces in 1918–1920, during the Russian Civil War.

The WSU Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of Nicholas Wallin (music), has been invited to perform at the All-Northwest Music Educators National Conference (MENC) biennial conference to be held in Portland, Oregon, in February 2007. MENC is one of the leading national associations for music education. Groups were selected based on applications and recordings submitted to the national office last spring.

Flutist Ann Marie Yasinitsky (music) will be heard as soloist with the Washington Idaho Symphony, conducted by Nicholas Wallin (music), in the premiere of Concertino for Flute and Orchestra composed by Ann’s husband, Greg Yasinitsky, Meyer Distinguished Professor of Music, on November 4 in Pullman and November 5 in Lewiston, Idaho.

Augusta Rohrbach (English) has been invited to present her work on Hannah Crafts at the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic 2007 annual meeting on a panel entitled “The Antislavery Movement and Print Culture in the Early Republic.” Joining Rohrbach on the panel will be Holly Kent (Lehigh University) and Timothy McCarthy (Harvard University). Ann Fabian (Rutgers University) will be chair and respondent.

Marianne Kinkel (fine arts) delivered the paper “Projecting Race” at the Society for the History of Technology conference in October.

Bryan Vila (criminal justice, WSU Spokane) gave an invited talk in Calgary, Alberta, to executives from Canada’s ten largest police unions. His October 14 talk, “Healthier, Safer Cops and Communities: Why Police Fatigue Is a Labour Issue,” introduced some forty labor leaders to research evidence about the impact of fatigue on officer safety, health, and performance. It also provided guidance about how to help officers manage fatigue and how to steer management in the right direction on this issue.

Gail Chermak (speech and hearing sciences) presented a one-day featured workshop on (central) auditory processing disorder at the British Columbia Association of Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology in Victoria, B.C., October 13.

Jim Short (professor emeritus, sociology) will participate in two panels at the annual meetings of the American Society of Criminology in November, “Pathways to Career Professionalization” and “The Roots of Strain and Subcultural Theories.” Lori Hughes’ (Ph.D. ’03, sociology) paper “Community Notification and Community Stratification: The Unintended Consequences” will be presented at the same meetings.

Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo (philosophy, associate dean of liberal arts) and Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo (comparative ethnic studies) presented their paper, “Disciplining the Public: Enemy Combatants, Same-Sex Marriage, and a New Kind of Containment,” at the annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy in Philadelphia, and they had this paper read at the American Studies Association conference in Oakland, California. Lugo-Lugo presented a paper, titled “An Island in Raw Skin: Vieques, the Biggest Military on Earth, and Lessons on a Transnational Challenge to Colonial Invisibility,” at the Puerto Rican Studies Association meeting in Ithaca, New York.

The Spokane Symphony Chorale, prepared by Lori Wiest (music), performed Brahms’ “Ein Deutsches Requiem” with the Spokane Symphony Orchestra on October 20 at the Spokane Opera House.

Robert Patterson (psychology) gave an invited presentation to the International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality on October 22 at the University of California, Santa Barbara, sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. The presentation was titled “Perceptual Issues in the Use of Head-worn Displays.”

On October 5, Vilma Navarro-Daniels (foreign languages and cultures) gave a presentation, titled “Defamiliarization of the ‘Spanish tribe’ in Paloma Pedrero’s The Yellow Island,” at the sixteenth conference of the International Association of Feminine Hispanic Literature, hosted by Weber State University, Ogden, Utah. This paper was part of the panel “Three Women Dramatists in Times of Crisis: Building the Nation from a Stage,” organized and chaired by Navarro-Daniels.
From October 5 to 7, Maria Serenella Previto (foreign languages and cultures) attended the same conference. Previto surprised everyone by making drawings of some of the panelists, including portraits of the Spanish poet Ana Rossetti and the Chilean poet Mary Rosa Moraga.

Faculty in Print

Leonard Orr (English, WSU Tri-Cities) has poems appearing in the current issues of Fugue, Crab Creek Review, and the British literary quarterly Orbis.

Andrew K. Jorgenson (sociology) has two new articles in press: “Unequal Ecological Exchange and Environmental Degradation: A Theoretical Proposition and Cross-National Study of Deforestation, 1990–2000” will appear in the December issue of Rural Sociology, and “The Political-Economic Causes of Change in the Ecological Footprints of Nations, 1991–2001: A Quantitative Investigation,” coauthored with Tom Burns, is in press at the journal Social Science Research. Jorgenson also has articles examining the environmental impacts of foreign investment in agriculture forthcoming in the International Journal of Comparative Sociology and Society and Natural Resources.

Robert Patterson (psychology) is coauthor of the review paper “Perceptual Issues with the Use of Head-mounted Visual Displays,” which will be published in the journal Human Factors 48.

Donna Campbell’s (English) article “Howells’ Untrustworthy Realist: Mary Wilkins Freeman” appeared in the winter 2006 issue of American Literary Realism.

An article by Dana Lee Baker (political science, WSU Vancouver) entitled “Defining Autism in Canada: Unfolding the Public Aspects of Neurological Disability” has been accepted for publication in the Social Science Journal.

C. Richard King and David J. Leonard (both comparative ethnic studies) published the edited collection Visual Economies of/in Motion: Sport and Film (Peer Lang).

Joseph Keim Campbell’s (philosophy) paper “Free Will and the Necessity of the Past” has been accepted for publication by the journal Analysis. He also presented a paper, “Farewell to Direct Source Incompatibilism,” at the Western Canadian Philosophical Association conference in Vancouver, B.C., that will be published in the journal Acta Analytica.

Cornell Clayton and Mitch Pickerill (both political science) have published “The Political Determinants of the Supreme Court’s Criminal Justice Jurisprudence: How the New Right Regime Has Shaped the Rehnquist Court” in the fall issue of the Georgetown Law Journal 94(5).

Michael Delahoyde (English) has published “De Vere’s Lucrece and Romano’s Sala di Troia” in The Oxfordian, concerning a Mantuan visual source for the Shakespeare poem. His article “Music, Monkeys, and Publishing in de Vere’s Venice” has appeared in Shakespeare Matters with images of a cover-art war between two sixteenth-century madrigal publishers, and his review article on recent publications in Oxfordian studies appears in the current issue of the Rocky Mountain Review.

Greg Yasinitsky’s (music) “Livin’ Large” for jazz band has been published by Kendor Music.

John W. Wright (psychology) and Joseph Harding (VCAPP) have published “Angiotensins in Brain Function” in the third edition of the Handbook of Neurochemistry and Molecular Neurobiology, published by Verlag Press, and “The Role of Brain Angiotensin System in Learning, Memory, and Neural Plasticity” in Progress in Learning Research, published by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. Wright, Eric Murphy (Ph.D. ’03, psychology), Kelby Holtfreter (B.S. ’05, psychology), Christopher Davis (Ph.D. ’05, psychology), Mikel Olson (Ph.D. ’06, psychology), Kalyani Muhunthan (B.S. ’00, microbiology), and Harding published “Habituation of the Head-shake Response Induces Changes in Brain Matrix Metalloproteinase-3 (MMP-3)” in the journal Behavioural Brain Research 74(1).

Volume 1 of Gail Chermak (speech and hearing sciences) and co-editor Frank Musiek’s Handbook of (Central) Auditory Processing Disorder: Auditory Neuroscience and Diagnosis has just been published by Plural Publishing.

“Youth Gangs and Unions: Civil and Criminal Remedies,” by Lori Hughes (Ph.D. ’03, sociology) and Jim Short (professor emeritus, sociology), appears in the latest issue of Trends in Organized Crime 9(4).

John Ruiz’ (psychology) article “Does Whom You Marry Matter for Your Health? Influence of Patient’s and Spouse’s Personality on Their Partner’s Wellbeing following Coronary Artery Bypass Surgery” has been published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 91. The paper has generated media interest: in October Ruiz did radio interviews with KOMO and Inland Northwest News, and he had television interviews scheduled with two stations, including KING 5.

Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo (philosophy, associate dean of liberal arts) and Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo’s (comparative ethnic studies) article “Threatening Bodies Resisting Containment: Enemy Combatants, War Protestors, and Same-Sex Couples” has been accepted for publication in Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture.

The Museum of Art has published a book to accompany their current exhibit, Art & Context: The ’50s and ’60s. The exhibit and book present major American works of art from one of the most dramatically shifting periods in art history along with information on the social and political context within which these changes occurred. The book includes essays by museum director Chris Bruce and curator Keith Wells, as well as contributions by Nella Van Dyke (sociology) and Provost Robert Bates. The book is available for purchase at the museum.

Jeff Joireman (psychology) and Blythe Duell (Ph.D. candidate, psychology) have an article, “Self-transcendent Values Moderate the Impact of Mortality Salience on Support for Charities,” in press with Personality and Individual Differences.

Student Activities and Awards

Trumpeter John Gronberg (M.A. candidate, music) is featured on the Jazziz on Disc CD included in the 2006 Education Issue of Jazziz magazine, a leading international publication. The disc showcases musicians from the top jazz studies programs in the nation and includes a recording of Gronberg’s composition “Cup-o-Joe” as performed by the Gronberg Quartet. Gronberg was the first-place winner in the solo trumpet division at the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival last February.

Jason Fancher (Ph.D. candidate, anthropology) recently presented “Big Mammal, Little Mammal: An Ethnoarchaeological Analysis of Prey Reduction Strategies among Central African Foragers” at the International Council for Archaeozoology meetings in Mexico City. He will be presenting “Foraging Theory and Processing Intensity: A Study of Small Prey Utilization among Central African Foragers” at the American Anthropological Association meetings in San Jose, California, in November.

Craig Macmillan (Ph.D. candidate, sociology) has three articles accepted to the forthcoming Encyclopedia of American Environmental History, published by Facts on File and scheduled to be released in the summer of 2007.

Katharine Gray (M.A. candidate, speech and hearing sciences) has been awarded the 2007 Blankinship Fellowship in Childhood Language Disorders from the Scottish Rite Foundation of Washington.

Loren Redwood (Ph.D. candidate, American studies) presented a paper, “The Rebuilding of a Tourist Industry: Immigrant Labor Exploitation in Post-Katrina Reconstruction,” at the American Studies Association 2006 annual meeting held in Oakland, California, October 12–15.

Rita Kepner’s (Ph.D. candidate, communication) paper “The Information Railroad Is Off the Tracks: Not Only in the U.S.” has been accepted for the World Communication Association conference “Global Perspectives on Communication and Culture” in Springfield, Massachusetts, and a paper coauthored with Tammey Boston (Marketing Communications), Emily Garrigues (CDPE), Nidhi Kirpal, and Lindsay Warner (both M.A. candidates, communication), “Litigation, Discrimination, Women, and Wal-Mart: Crisis Communication Strategies of a Retail Giant,” has been accepted for the National Communication Association conference.

Abigail Sudbery (M.A. candidate, speech and hearing sciences) was awarded a travel grant from the WSU Graduate School.

The national broadcasting organization College Broadcasting Inc. has selected a news report from WSU’s “Face to Face” series as a finalist for its Best News Reporting category. The story by reporter Rachel Padget (senior, communication), entitled “Who Belongs in America?” dealt with difficult immigration issues facing college students in a post–9/11 world. WSU’s Cable 8 Web site has also been nominated in the Best Student Media Website category.

Congratulations to James Eberlein III (senior, foreign languages and cultures), Grant Holly (senior, history), Zachary Purvis (B.S. ’06, math), and Vanessa Serratore (junior, zoology), whose WSU junior writing portfolios were selected as the best of the more than 2,900 submitted in spring 2006.

Celestina Barbosa-Leiker (Ph.D. candidate, psychology) was awarded a travel scholarship from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a travel grant from WSU’s Women’s Resource Center to attend two advanced statistics workshops: “Traditional Latent Variable Modeling and Growth Modeling with Latent Variables Using MPlus” at the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing, and “Latent Variable Mixture Modeling using MPlus” at the University of Montreal, Canada.

Nominees for the 2007 Kennedy Center/American College Theatre Festival Irene Ryan Acting Competition include theatre majors Chaya Glass, Susie Vi, and Patrick Ryan for Dragonwings, and Patrick Rayment (sophomore, English) and Heidi Karim (senior, theatre arts) for STAGE One.

Alumni News

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal (Ph.D. ’04, history) presented “From Farm to Fork: How Space Food Changed Food Safety Standards” at the Societal Impact of Spaceflight Conference September 19 at the Hirshhorn Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Ross-Nazzal is a historian for the NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project in Houston, Texas.

Michael Serizawa Brown’s (Ph.D. ’03, history) book review of Pioneer Square: Seattle’s Oldest Neighborhood (University of Washington Press, 2005) will appear in the next edition of Pacific Northwest Quarterly. Brown has been teaching civil rights law and federalism at Eastern Washington University’s Bellevue location, along with other law and history courses at various other postsecondary institutions in the Seattle area. He and his pairs partner, Shelly Lane, finished third place in the USFSA Adult Sectionals Figure Skating Championships in Oakland, California, and fourth place in the USFSA Adult National Figure Skating Championships in Dallas earlier this year.

Tina Krauss (M.A. ’06, American studies) will present part of her thesis, “The L Word: Love It or Leave It,” at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) “Creating Change” conference, November 9–12 in Kansas City, Missouri, with Julie Childs (NGLTF), Marta Alvarado (Pride at Work), Sally Kohn (director of the Movement Vision Project), Alexes Anderson (NGLTF), and Alix Olson (activist and poet).

Foley Institute Hosts Public Forum, Lectures

Thursday, November 2

Public Forum: “Another Victory for President Bush and the GOP or a Resurgence by the Democrats?” with Bruce Pinkleton (communication), Travis Ridout (political science), and Brandon Rottinghaus (political science, University of Idaho), Wilson Hall 13, 4:00–6:00 p.m.

This biennial elections forum will discuss the November 7 mid-term elections from a national, regional, and state perspective and provide insight into battleground states, key issues influencing voters, and the probability that one or both chambers of the U.S. Congress will switch from Republican to Democratic Party control.

Monday, November 6

Public Lecture: “The Mafia and the American Labor Movement,” Jim Jacobs, CUE 518, 3:10–4:45 p.m. Book signing 2:30–3:00 p.m. in CUE 518.

Professor James B. Jacobs is director of the Center for Research in Crime and Justice at the NYU School of Law. His most recent book looked at the Mafia’s penetration and exploitation of the American labor movement throughout the twentieth century. He will discuss how it happened that, by the 1960s, the country’s most powerful crime syndicate had the power to choose the head of the nation’s largest private sector labor union, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, and to exert influence in many other unions as well. He will also talk about the Department of Justice’s twenty-five-year effort to purge organized crime from the labor movement.

Tuesday, November 7

Public Lecture: “From the Margins to the Mainstream? Disaster Research at the Crossroads,” Kathleen Tierney, CUE 518, 4:00–5:30 p.m.

Tierney is professor of sociology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. The sociological study of disasters can be critiqued on a number of fronts. The field remains bogged down in outdated conceptual frameworks and has proven remarkably resistant to new theoretical developments. Over more than five decades, disaster research has revealed much about the societal dimensions of disasters, but also has systematically ignored important topics such as the social construction of disaster, the social production of disaster, conflict during disasters, and the manner in which axes of inequality intersect with hazards disasters to produce differential patterns of vulnerability and victimization. Ways of bringing disaster sociology into the mainstream include the development of linkages with closely allied areas of specialization, including the sociology of risk, organizational sociology, and in particular environmental sociology.

For more information, contact the Foley Institute at 509-335-3477.

Jo Hockenhull Lecturer Named

The Department of Women’s Studies has named Faith Ringgold the Jo Hockenhull Distinguished Visiting Lecturer for 2006–2007. Ringgold will talk about forty years of art, activism, and life February 21, 2007, at 7:00 p.m. in the CUE (room TBD).

“Like Jo, Ringgold is a renowned artist who uses her talents to call attention to issues related to social imbalance and diversity,” said Noël Sturgeon, chair of women’s studies. “It seems doubly appropriate that Ringgold will be on campus during February, Black History Month.”

A painter, writer, speaker, mixed media sculptor, and performance artist, Ringgold is professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, where she taught art from 1987 until 2002. She lives and works in Englewood, New Jersey. Known to many for her award-winning children’s book Tar Beach, Ringgold has written and illustrated a total of fourteen children’s books. Her work has been exhibited around the world and is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the National Museum of American Art. An exhibit of Ringgold’s work is planned for the Jundt Gallery at Gonzaga University from December 15 through April 22.

Ringgold is the recipient of more than seventy-five awards, including eighteen honorary doctor of fine arts degrees. She has received fellowships and grants that include National Endowment for the Arts Awards for sculpture (1978) and painting (1989), the La Napoule Foundation Award for painting in France (1990), the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for painting (1987), and the New York Foundation for the Arts Award for painting (1988).

The 2006/2007 Jo Hockenhull Lecture is sponsored by the Department of Women's Studies, the Department of Fine Arts, the Museum of Art/WSU, VPLAC (Visual, Performing, and Literary Arts Committee), and the College of Liberal Arts.

Public History Field School Planned for 2007

WSU is planning a public history field school in Virginia City, Montana, the historic mining town and former capital of Montana Territory.

The field school, with its first class of approximately twenty graduate students tentatively scheduled for May 7–25, 2007, will be a partnership between WSU and the Montana Heritage Commission. Students will receive training in various areas, including ethnography, archaeology, museum and archives, historic structures, cultural landscapes, and history.

Leading the work for WSU are Orlan Svingen and Rob McCoy (both history). Both specialize in public history, which emphasizes the public context of historical scholarship.

Although its population peaked at 10,000 in 1865, Virginia City is now home to 150 year-round residents. Throughout the summer, they and the Montana Heritage Commission sponsor living history re-enactments, a fully functioning railway linking Virginia City with nearby Nevada City, interpretive activities, and public programs.

The heritage commission wants to expand the Virginia City experience, and a WSU-sponsored public history field school will provide a collaborative setting that will attract graduate students and future scholarship. Commission specialists working at Virginia City will provide hands-on public history training in areas such as museum curation, historic building stabilization, historic archaeology, education curation, creation of historic interpretive exhibits, and cultural landscape assessment.