
October 2006

Dean's Message

Friday, September 22, I attended the planning retreat held by our CLA colleagues at WSU Vancouver. In the next few weeks I will meet with CLA folks at WSU Tri-Cities and with leaders at WSU Spokane. At the Spokane Riverpoint campus the conversation will center on CLA opportunities through our co-location with that campus. These conversations, together with the discussions of our CLA Leadership Team, currently focus on drafting a new College Plan for 2007–2012. Thanks to your input, the original draft of the plan posted on our CLA Web site has been updated and is now accompanied by a second document—an outline of a presentation I made at Deans' Council early this fall.

During August, the Deans' Council developed criteria to identify existing and potential areas of pre-eminence at WSU. These discussions included a review of the urban campus plans and a presentation by each dean that identified three "areas of excellence" for her/his respective college as well as a top priority initiative in each of four aspects: the undergraduate experience, the graduate experience, research and creative activity, and engagement. My outline is posted for your review on the CLA Web site along with the new draft of the CLA Plan.

We are asking for your input on both documents via a survey,
also available at the college Web site. Our CLA chairs, directors, and dean's office group have offered input and will continue to do so together with the broader input submitted through the survey process. Our hope is to have a relatively complete version of the plan by the end of this semester. Some units in our college are also revising plans. While we will retain the March 1 deadline for annual reporting, revisions of departmental plans within the timetable for revising the CLA Plan are certainly welcome.

Our planning efforts are within the context of updates to the University's Strategic Plan and Academic Plan. Both these plans feature increased attention to the balance of undergraduate, graduate, and research effectiveness within a context that increasingly prizes societal impact and economic development. Associated with these updates is the Biennial Budget Request, again to be jointly submitted by WSU with UW. The most visible elements of the request do not feature programs and initiatives offered by our college. However, our efforts can be integrally tied to those programs that are highlighted in the university budget, and our successes will continue to draw attention to our capacity to contribute to the preparation of the next generation of leaders and to improvement of our world.

I encourage you to become familiar with President Rawlins' statements on our university's planning and budgeting and to offer suggestions on how our CLA Plan can best contribute. Thank you in advance for your assistance! Again, to those with whom I have had the pleasure of meeting and with whom I will meet, I offer my sincere thanks for the fine work, forward thinking, and open communication evident among us!

With best regards,

Erich Lear, Dean
College of Liberal Arts

Worthy of Note

Karen Denise Lupo (anthropology) has been named a Fulbright Senior Specialist. Lupo is a zooarchaeologist; she studies animal bones recovered from archaeological sites. For the last fifteen years she has focused on modern hunter-gatherers in Africa. Lupo’s most recent work has examined how different aspects of hunter-gatherer behavior, such as food sharing, choice of hunting technology, and the division of labor, might be reflected in archaeological remains.
“Karen Lupo is emerging as one of the leading international researchers in the field of ethnoarchaeology,” said Bill Andrefsky, chair of the Department of Anthropology. “Her longstanding investigations with African foragers has provided our profession with a much better understanding of the relationship between bone artifacts found on archaeological sites and the behavior responsible for creating those artifacts.”
As part of her Fulbright Senior Specialist work, Lupo will lead a workshop in Santiago, Chile, October 16–30. It is the first Chilean zooarchaeological conference and will be sponsored by her host, the University of Chile Precolumbian Museum.

Robert Eddy (English) and Carmen Kynard gave a paper called “Color-Conscious Pedagogies: Counter-Hegemonic Figured Communities for Students and Teachers” at the Race and Pedagogy National Conference at the University of Puget Sound in September.

The WSU Jazz Big Band, directed by Greg Yasinitsky (music), was selected to present an invited performance at the All Northwest Conference of the Music Educators National Conference, one of the nation’s leading organizations in music education. The band was selected in a competitive process on the basis of submitted recordings. The conference is scheduled for February 2007 in Portland, Oregon.

For the past year, Christine Oakley (sociology) has been working with the Pullman area’s three hospitals, the Council on Aging, and the Area Agency on Aging in Lewiston to write a grant to increase access by Whitman and Latah Counties’ seniors to health and human services. In May the consortium was awarded a three-year, $300,000 Health Resources and Services Administration Rural Health Outreach Grant to implement Project ACCESS. Oakley and Deirdre Rogers (University of Idaho) have been named the evaluators for the project.

Brett Atwood (communication) traveled to Minsk, Belarus, as a guest of the U.S. Department of State in late September. As a recipient of a U.S. Speaker and Specialist Grant, he conducted workshops and held lectures on various aspects of Internet journalism, including online news trends, marketing, design, and public relations. His visit included meetings with established Belarusian journalists and students of Belarusian State University. Independent journalists in the country have been operating under confining circumstances due to a crackdown on criticism of government officials. Many media outlets are state-controlled, and independent forms of media are finding it difficult to distribute their reporting. The Internet offers an opportunity for independent journalists to report freely, but the government is beginning to place restrictions on this form of reporting.
More information on the state of free journalism in Belarus.

In mid-October, Bill Lipe (professor emeritus, anthropology) will give the keynote address at the annual meeting of the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in Cortez, Colorado. He will discuss his recent research on the thirteenth-century migrations of Pueblo people from the Mesa Verde region of Colorado to the Rio Grande area of New Mexico. The center is a nonprofit institution devoted to archaeological research and public education, with members from across the U.S. In late October, Lipe will visit the University of Oklahoma as the T.W. Adams Distinguished Lecturer. He will discuss his research in a public lecture and lead a seminar for a class on cultural resource management. Lipe received his B.A. in anthropology from Oklahoma in 1957.

Augusta Rohrbach (English) has been invited to participate in the conference “Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity” at Duke University March 2–3. The conference will examine the role of photography in nineteenth-century African American cultural and political life, bringing together interdisciplinary scholars in literary studies, history, American studies, and art history whose work focuses on the dynamic intersections of race and visual culture. The conference will be the first step in a process that will culminate in an anthology of essays on this topic. Textual Cultures, the official publication of the Society for Textual Scholarship, has solicited the essay version of Rohrbach’s 2005 Modern Language Association presentation, “The Diary May Be from Dixie, but the Editor Is NOT,” for a special issue edited by Martha Nell Smith. Rohrbach’s work will join essays by Jay Grossman, Marta Werner, Robin Schulze, and John Bryant.

Debbie Lee (English) delivered the paper “Technology, Virgins, and Harlots: The Art of Engraving Hogarth’s Moll and Blake’s Thel” at the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism conference at Purdue University.

Gene Rosa (sociology) has been invited to give a keynote address at the Economic and Social Research Conference on Risk and Rationality at Queens College, University of Cambridge, in spring 2007.

Victor Villanueva (English) delivered a number of talks in Salt Lake City in September, including a keynote, a panel presentation, a radio interview, and a TV interview; a reading was canceled because of a bomb at the city library, the venue for the talk. This marked Villanueva’s eighty-fifth public presentation and his thirty-second keynote address.

Jazz Northwest, the WSU faculty jazz ensemble, performed at Cougar Jazz Night September 13 at Tula’s, one of the Emerald City’s top nightclubs. The event was part of the 2006 “WSU in Seattle” week. The performers at the sold-out event included Jennifer Scovell, vocals; Greg Yasinitsky, saxophone; Adam Donohue (M.A. candidate, music), saxophone; David Turnbull, trumpet; Anthony Taylor, piano; David Snider, bass; and David Jarvis, drums. The group also presented recruiting performances in Seattle area schools.

In May, the Eastern Washington Chamber Orchestra presented a concert at the Battelle Auditorium in Richland featuring violinist Meredith Arksey (music) as a soloist in a performance of the Bach D Minor Double Concerto; flutist Ann Marie Yasinitsky (music) as a soloist in the Bach B Minor Suite; and saxophonist Greg Yasinitsky (music) as a soloist in the premiere of his new Jazz Suite, commissioned by the orchestra.

A new jazz mass composed by Greg Yasinitsky (music) was premiered in June at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Salem, Oregon. The work was commissioned by St. Paul’s and is dedicated to Paul Klemme, former WSU music faculty member and director of music ministries at the church. Yasinitsky is the recipient of a 2006–2007 ASCAP Plus Award for Music Composition from the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers. These awards are granted by an independent panel and are based on the unique prestige value of a composer’s catalog as well as recent performance activity.

Bill Condon (English) was a featured speaker at Purdue University’s Second Language Acquisition Conference in June. A written version of his talk, “Toward an Inclusive Language Policy: The Case Against Correctness,” will appear in a collection of essays from the conference program.

Susan Swan (general education) has been invited to join the People to People Ambassador Programs’ History Education Professional Delegation to China in November, led by James Percoco, the history educator-in-residence at American University.

Elizabeth Bishop’s World War II–Cold War View, a biography by Camille Roman (English, American studies, women’s studies), was selected by the Minnesota Humanities Commission (MHC) for its statewide K-12 curriculum on “The Art of the Cold War: Art, Poetry, Politics, and Pop Art.” The curriculum was developed as part of the MHC’s Teacher Institute Professional Development seminars. These seminars provide leadership, programs, and resources designed to advance the study of the humanities in all educational settings and institutions. Roman’s is the only biography included in the curriculum. Roman has also signed a contract with Rutgers University Press for the third volume of The New Anthology of American Poetry, which will cover the period 1950 to 2005. She will publish this final book in the award-winning project with Steven Gould Axelrod (University of California, Riverside) and Thomas Travisano (Hartwick College).

Ella Inglebret (speech and hearing sciences), along with speech and hearing graduate students A. Noelle Phillips and Desirae Bear Eagle, presented “Building a Circle of Success: Native American Students in Higher Education” for the 2006 American Indian Graduate Center Conference held in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Inglebret, Norma Joseph (retention counselor, Native American Student Center), and Justin Guillory (Ph.D. candidate, educational leadership) represented WSU at the national Summit on Indigenous Service Learning held at Northwest Indian College, located on Lummi Nation lands.

Bruce Pinkleton (communication) was quoted extensively in the Olympian on September 21, following the primary election, regarding the Supreme Court race in which the candidate who won had survived being the target of a $1.6 million negative ad campaign.

Patricia Freitag Ericsson’s (English) presentation “Breaking the Bounds of Print-based Argument: Digital Argument as a Vehicle for Identity Exploration” has been accepted for the 2007 Conference on College Composition and Communication, to be held in New York in March. Ericsson recently completed an invited board of regents review of English department programs at Dakota State University. Along with Preston Andrews (horticulture and landscape architecture), Ericsson will be presenting at the WSU Campus Sustainability Conference this month. Their presentation, “Sustainability as Rhetorics,” is an extension of the interdisciplinary graduate course they are teaching this fall, Rhetorics and Sustainability: Discourse, Science, and Culture. In addition, three graduate students from this course—Jared Anthony (Ph.D. candidate, English), Maia Clay (Ph.D. candidate, anthropology), and Kim Hamblin-Hart (Ph.D. candidate, environmental science)—will be conducting a WSU Campus Sustainability Assessment as part of the conference.

Buddy Levy (English) was an invited participant at the 2006 Montana Festival of the Book in Missoula September 28–30. He served on the panel “Someone Else’s Life: The Art of Biography,” along with David Quammen, Mary Clearman Blew, Jack Nesbit, and Greg Keeler. Levy was among the featured readers later that day at the Missoula Public Library, also part of the book festival.

Nancy Potter (speech and hearing sciences, WSU Spokane) and Jeanne Johnson (speech and hearing sciences) presented their work on the speech and language characteristics of children with galactosemia at the Symposium for Research in Child Language Disorders in Madison, Wisconsin. Potter was an invited speaker, addressing the diagnosis and treatment of childhood motor speech disorders, at the Parents of Galactosemic Children’s biennial conference in Philadelphia. Potter has also received an NIH Loan Repayment Grant to support research with pediatric populations.

Don Dillman (sociology) gave an invited presentation, “Why Telephone, Mail, and Web Surveys Often Produce Different Results,” to the NIH Inaugural Conference on Patient Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System in Gaithersburg, Maryland, on September 11.

Jeff Savage and Karen Hsiao Savage (both music) placed second at the Concours Grieg: International Competition for Pianists, held September 2–10 at the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo, Norway.

Barbara Monroe (English) will be presenting “Real Indians Don’t Rap: Hip-Hop, Tradition, and Other Discursive Influences on the Reservation” at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, to be held in New York in March 2007.

Jana Argersinger (coeditor of ESQ and Poe Studies, English) will take part in two sessions at this fall’s conference of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers in Philadelphia—as an invited panelist for an editorial roundtable on getting scholarship about women writers published, and as a presenter on a session titled “Women’s Letters: Public and Private.”

Tim Kohler (anthropology) is one of seven archaeologists from across the country to be invited to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s offices in New York on October 31 “to explore together some practical steps that might be taken, perhaps with Foundation assistance, to improve the representation of and access to archaeological information as well as the computational tools that are available to analyze and understand this information, and to discuss how improved representation, access, and computational abilities relate to scholarly priorities in the discipline.”

Jon Hasbrouck and Jeff Nye (both speech and hearing sciences, WSU Spokane) will present a session on the WSU Spokane Auditory Processing Disorders Clinic at the joint annual convention of the Oregon and Washington Speech and Hearing Associations on October 14.

Dene Grigar (English, WSU Vancouver) gave a paper, “Kinesthesia and Electronic Literature,” at the 2006 Collision Symposium: Inter-arts Research and Practices at the University of Victoria September 20.

Barry Hewlett (anthropology, WSU Vancouver) was interviewed for a science article in the Washington Post on the evolution of fatherhood, and for Canada’s Globe Mail on human responses to Bird Flu outbreaks in Indonesia. He gave an invited lecture, “Cultural Contexts of Ebola: Applications to Outbreak Management,” at the International Filovirus Conference in Winnipeg, Canada.

Faculty in Print

Joan Burbick’s (English) latest book, Gun Show Nation: Gun Culture and American Democracy, has just been published by The New Press. Talking directly to gun lobby strategists, Burbick reveals the pro-gun movement’s deliberate effort to co-opt the language of rights from the civil rights movement to appeal to a disaffected white electorate, crafting a powerful conservative response to liberal efforts to achieve social, economic, and racial justice in the 1960s.

Paul Whitney (psychology, associate dean of liberal arts), John M. Hinson (psychology), and Tina L. Jameson (Ph.D. ’04, psychology) have published “From Executive Control to Self-control: Predicting Problem Drinking among College Students” in Applied Cognitive Psychology 20(6). Their study showed that young adults who have repeated personal problems because of their drinking habits display a characteristic pattern on measures of executive function (attentional control abilities associated with the frontal lobes): they made rapid decisions, but had difficulty with interference from prepotent responses.

Debbie Lee’s (English) coauthored article “The Vaccine Rose: Patronage, Pastoralism, and Public Health” has just been published in Robert Bloomfield: Lyric, Class, and the Romantic Canon, edited by Bridget Keegan and John Goodridge and published by Bucknell University Press.

Gene Rosa (sociology), with coauthors Thomas Dietz and Richard York (Ph.D. ’02, sociology), has an article titled “Driving the Human Ecological Footprint” forthcoming in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, the journal of the Ecological Society of America.

Joey Reagan (communication) returned from leave in August after finishing a book, Applied Research Methods for Mass Communicators (Marquette Books, 2006), and a book chapter with Moon J. Lee (communication), titled “Online Technology, Edutainment, and Infotainment,” in Communication Technology and Social Change: Theory, Effects, and Applications (Lawrence Erlbaum, 2006), edited by Carolyn Lin and David Atkin.

Joddy Murray (English, WSU Tri-Cities) recently published the following poems: “Fertility” in Zone 3 21(1); “Sorrows in Miniature” in Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry 4; “Density” and “Natural Measure” in Sulfur River Literary Review 22(1); and “What Gives Thoroughly” in Hampton-Sydney Poetry Review, winter 2005.

Monica Kirkpatrick Johnson’s (sociology) paper “The Confluence Model of Subjective Age Identity Extended: Social Experience and Differentiation in Self-Perceived Adulthood,” authored with sociology graduate students Justin Allen Berg and Toni Sirotzki, has been accepted for publication by Social Psychology Quarterly.

Borders and Security Governance: Managing Borders in a Globalised World, edited by Marina Caparini and Otwin Marenin (political science, criminal justice), has been published by LIT Verlag, Vienna. The book is part of a series of edited volumes on Security Sector Governance supported by the Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces.

J.P. Garofalo (psychology, WSU Vancouver) is lead author of the article “Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenocortical Axis Dysregulation in Acute Temporomandibular Disorder and Low Back Pain: A Marker for Chronicity?” in press with the Journal of Applied Biobehavioral Research. The study found preliminary evidence of a neuroendocrine mechanism underlying a constellation of psychosocial factors believed to increase the risk for pain to transition from the acute stage to a chronic stage.

Brett Parmenter (psychology) is lead author of “Working Memory Deficits in Multiple Sclerosis: Comparison between the N-back Task and Paced Auditory Serial Addition Test,” published in the Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society 12(5). The study compared two measures of working memory/processing speed in patients with multiple sclerosis. Parmenter is also a coauthor of “The Relationship between Perceived and Objective Cognitive Functioning in Multiple Sclerosis,” published in the Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology 21(5). Patients with multiple sclerosis often report deficient performance on measures of neuropsychological functioning even when their performance is within normal limits. This study investigated MS patients’ perceptions of their cognitive performance compared to objective data.

Dene Grigar (English, WSU Vancouver) published “Transgressing the Limits: Narratives of Scientists in Literature” in the August issue of The Scientist. She presented this paper at the fourth European Society of Literature and Science, held in Amsterdam in June.

Greg Yasinitsky (music) has recently published “Sao Paulo Nights” for jazz band with Kendor Music and “Jazz Mass” with Sound Music Publications.

Travis Pratt (criminal justice) coauthored with Travis Franklin and Cortney Franklin (both Ph.D. candidates, criminal justice) an article that appeared in the July/August 2006 issue of the Journal of Criminal Justice titled “Examining the Empirical Relationship between Prison Crowding and Inmate Misconduct: A Meta-Analysis of Conflicting Research Results.”

Michiyo Hirai (psychology) is lead author of the chapter “Exposure Therapy for Phobias” in the Handbook of Exposure Therapies, edited by Dean Lauterbach and David C.S. Richard and recently published by Academic Press.

Robert Eddy’s (English) coauthored article “Should We Invite Students to Write in Home Languages? Complicating the Yes/No Debate,” Composition Studies 31(1), has been reprinted in Second Language Writing in the Composition Classroom: A Critical Sourcebook, edited by Paul Kei Matsuda et al. and published by Bedford/St. Martin’s and the National Council of Teachers of English.

On the horizon

Robert Eddy and Victor Villanueva’s (both English) composition reader Alternatives: Writing the Academy/Writing Cultures will be published by McGraw-Hill in 2007. Eddy is also completing a rhetoric under contract to McGraw-Hill on the intercultural and racialized dimensions of writing from sources.

Robert Bauman (history, WSU Tri-Cities) has signed a contract with the University of Oklahoma Press for the publication of his book From Watts to East L.A.: Race and the War on Poverty in Los Angeles. Bauman’s book will be part of the series Race and Ethnicity in the American West, edited by Quintard Taylor. It will be published in the summer of 2008.

Student Activities and Awards

Brent J. Oneal (Ph.D. candidate, psychology) has been invited to present his dissertation research at the annual conference for the Washington Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers in February. The title of the presentation will be “Initial Psychometric Properties of a Treatment Planning and Progress Questionnaire for Adolescents Who Sexually Abuse.”

Allyson Wolf (Ph.D. candidate, American studies) has accepted a position as coordinator for Whitman County’s Crime Victim Service Center at Alternatives to Violence of the Palouse. Funded by the Victims of Crime Act and distributed by the Office of Crime Victims’ Advocacy, this new program serves victims and survivors affected by a wide range of crimes, including cyber crimes, arson, elder abuse, robbery, trafficking, and hate crimes. Services include 24-hour telephone or in-person crisis intervention; emergency, confidential shelter; legal and medical advocacy; information and referral; and community education. Please call 1-877-334-ATVP to access free and confidential services.

Marta Plazola (M.A. candidate, speech and hearing sciences) has been selected to participate in the 2006 American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) Minority Student Leadership Program. Plazola will participate in a set of leadership-focused educational programs and activities at the annual convention of the ASHA, to be held in Miami in November.

Megan L. Olson (Ph.D. candidate, psychology) and Paul Kwon’s (psychology) poster “Perfectionism and Negative Life Events: The Interactive Effects on Dysphoria” was presented at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, held in New Orleans in August.

Shital Pavawalla (Ph.D. candidate, psychology) and Maureen Schmitter-Edgecombe (psychology) published “Long-term Retention of Skilled Visual Search following Severe Traumatic Brain Injury” (Pavawalla’s master’s thesis) in the Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society 12(6).

The English Graduate Organization (EGO) had its first Sexual Harassment Awareness Training session on August 23, with forty-one graduate students attending. According to Raúl Sánchez (director, Center for Human Rights), who facilitated the meeting, EGO is the first association of graduate students to plan and host their own training session. Sanchez confirmed he’ll now be able to point to English graduate students as an example of student action in regards to sexual harassment awareness training and prevention.

A research project devised by James Wise (psychology, WSU Tri-Cities) for his summer Psych 306: Industrial/Organizational Psychology class will be presented at this year’s international meeting of the Society for Human Performance in Extreme Environments (HPEE), being held October 15–16 in San Francisco.
Wise taught the class as a directed research and development project, asking students to imagine themselves an industrial/organizational psychology consulting company called in to prepare the staffing and operations basis for an international consortium financing a first-generation Helium 3 Lunar Mining Facility, planned for ~2020. Project considerations included number and gender composition of crews, work schedules and lunar stay durations, training regimens and performance appraisals, communications protocols, habitat design, and environmental protections.
There has been significant international work on the establishment and design of a Helium 3 Lunar Mining Facility, led mostly by the Russian and European Space Agencies. This student project was the first to build on the established HPEE literature base and apply corporate industrial/organizational psychology practices to foreseeable base operations.
The students who worked on the project are Pamela Sloughter (senior, psychology), Christopher La Plante (sophomore, psychology), Laura Cardenas (junior, general studies), Ryan Lawrence (senior, management information systems), Nan Shi (B.A. ’06, digital technology and culture), Angela Freeman (junior, general studies), and Deborah Upington (B.S. ’04, psychology).

Alumni News

Daniela Hugelshofer (Ph.D. ’06, psychology), Paul Kwon (psychology), Robert Reff (Ph.D ’06, psychology), and Megan Olson (Ph.D. candidate, psychology) have published “Humor’s Role in the Relation between Attributional Style and Dysphoria” in the European Journal of Personality 20(4).

Introducing the CLA Proposal Support Team

The Proposal Support Team (PST) works out of the College of Liberal Arts dean’s office to facilitate faculty efforts to obtain extramural grants and fellowships. The goal is to provide support that allows CLA faculty to 1) double CLA extramural funding over the next five years and 2) dramatically increase the visibility and impact of CLA research and creative activity.

The PST comprises Susan Cunnington, grant editor/information coordinator; Susan Ross, associate dean for corporate and foundation-funded research; and Paul Whitney, associate dean for agency-funded research.

The PST offers the following assistance to faculty: identifying funding sources; timely notification of funding opportunities for individuals and teams; development of white papers/letters of inquiry; development of funding strategies appropriate to career stage; proposal preparation and submission assistance; budget pre-approval; serving as liaisons with OGRD; development of on-line tools and guides for CLA scholars; coordinating in-house reviews of draft proposals; and cultivating and supporting major fellowship applications.

If you have questions or a project to discuss, contact any member of the PST or visit the Proposal Support Web site.

Rare Coast Salish Weavings at Museum of Anthropology

Examples of Coast Salish textile weaving by Susan Pavel, part of the traveling exhibit SQ3Tsya’yay: Weaver’s Spirit Power, are on display through December 15 at the Museum of Anthropology.

"This exhibition will have broad appeal," said Barbara Brotherton, curator of Native American art at the Seattle Art Museum. "Not only are the works visually stunning, but collectively they tell a story about a dedicated individual who has embarked on a life’s mission to bring back something cherished."

"Inherent to Salish weaving are the teachings," said Michael Pavel (education), Susan Pavel’s husband. "The most important of these teachings is unity, which teaches our society that individual fibers are weak until twisted together. Like individuals of a family, community, tribe, or nation, we are weak until we learn to work together in unity, to realize that our beauty and strength is inherently brought to life together and not when we are alone."

"Weaving is not merely what I do, weaving is a way of looking at the world," said Susan Pavel, an apprentice of master Salish weaver and Skokomish tribal member Bruce (subiyay) Miller. Pavel, who is Hawaiian and Filipino, studies and embraces her husband’s Twana culture and tradition and has been given the ancestral name sa’hLamitSa by his family.

Coast Salish textile weaving is a relatively unknown art form, but according to Pavel there was a time when fiber weaving was as highly esteemed as carving. "Our hope and intention is to continue to build interest in the art form by educating our people and the public at large about Coast Salish weaving," she said.

"Susan is extremely proficient in the practice of weaving," said Brotherton. "While she invokes a traditional ethos in her work, she freely allows herself to try new things. I’m continually surprised by the beauty and sublimity of her work."

Pavel will lead a noon Art a la Carte demonstration and presentation on Coast Salish weaving Thursday, November 2, in the Bundy Reading Room.

October Events at WSU Tri-Cities

October 2–19
Patrick Holbrook: Invited Solo Exhibition in the Art Gallery (CIC 102).

October 25
Public Academy: “Hanford—Past, Present, and Future,” the Herbert M. Parker Foundation lecture andpanel discussion. Keynote speakers; Governor Christine Gregoire and PNNL Deputy Director Mike Lawrence.
3:00 p.m., East Auditorium.

October 27
Poetry/Fiction Reading Series: Paula Coomer and Kathleen Flenniken. Open mic after the featured readers.
8:00 p.m., location TBA.

October 30–November 16
Collections: Art, Kitsch, and Other Personal Treasures: Juried Group Exhibition in the Art Gallery (CIC 102).

Fellowship Bridges Disciplines, Universities

Two Ph.D. students at Washington State University (WSU) have been accepted into a prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) fellowship program that aims to bridge the gap between anthropology and biology and produce professionals versed in evolutionary approaches integrating the study of biology and culture.

More formally known as "Model-based Approaches to Biological and Cultural Evolution," the program is informally called IPEM, which stands for IGERT (Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship) Program in Evolutionary Modeling. The IGERT program is funded by the NSF, which will contribute approximately $3 million dollars towards IPEM training over the next five years. WSU and the University of Washington (UW) are partners in this training, with students admitted to UW spending a semester at WSU, and students admitted to WSU spending two quarters at UW.

IGERT fellows will be supported for two years—with the possibility of a third year of funding—at the rate of $30,000 per year plus full tuition and an annual supplement for research expenses of up to $8,000.

"The dollar amount associated with these grants is substantial," said Tim Kohler (anthropology), coauthor of the NSF grant proposal. "For that reason, plus the prestige of the NSF association, and the cross-disciplinary nature of the program, these are very desirable fellowships."

"I think cross-disciplinary collaboration and research is essential for meaningful science," said Meredith Schulte (Ph.D. candidate, anthropology), winner of an IGERT fellowship. "The boundaries and limits of specific disciplines were created by humans, the scientists rather than the world they are studying. I think allowing for cross-disciplinary collaboration and research allows for new questions to be asked and a more complete understanding of many topics."

Students enter IPEM through the Department of Anthropology or the School of Biological Sciences at WSU or through the Department of Anthropology at the UW. Fellows form research teams across these universities and disciplines, allowing them to draw on relevant expertise in either sponsoring university. In addition, they have the opportunity to pursue research at partner institutions: the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico; the Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity, with branches in England, Scotland, and Canada; Le Centre Universitaire de Recherche et de Documentation en Histoire et Archéologie, Central African Republic; and the University of Costa Rica.

2006 Visiting Writer Series Begins

Tuesday, October 3 • Museum of Art • 7:30 p.m.
Lola Haskins has published eight collections of poetry, most recently Desire Lines: New and Selected Poems (BOA, 2004). Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Christian Science Monitor, London Review of Books, Beloit Poetry Journal, Georgia Review, and Prairie Schooner and has been broadcast on NPR and the BBC. Among her awards are the Iowa Poetry Prize, two NEA’s, the Emily Dickinson/Writer Magazine prize from the Poetry Society of America, and narrative poetry prizes from the New England Review and the Southern Poetry Review.

Thursday, October 26 • Museum of Art • 7:30 p.m.
Paula Coomer holds a B.S. in nursing from Oregon Health Sciences University (1989), an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Idaho (1999), and is a former public health nurse and commissioned officer with the U.S. Public Health Service. From 1991 to 1996 she worked to develop public health and community health nursing programs on the Nez Perce and Coeur d’Alene Indian reservations in Idaho. Coomer’s fiction, poetry, and nonfiction have appeared in several dozen journals, anthologies, and publications. Her poetry collection Devil at the Crossroads was recently released from Sandhill, along with Road, a single-poem chapbook.

The Visiting Writer Series is sponsored by the Department of English and the Museum of Art; additional support for Lola Haskins’ reading is provided by VPLAC. Future readings will include Ann Pancake on November 16 and Robert Olen Butler and C.S. Giscombe in the spring. For more information, contact Aimee Phan at 509-335-7309 or aphan@wsu.edu.