Five members of the UCA English faculty presented papers at the 2011 joint conference of the National Popular Culture & American Culture Association in San Antonio, April 20-23. Wayne Stengel presented a paper called “Filmed Words Becoming Transformative Movie Images: the Vagaries of Adaption in Ford, Antonioni, and Kurosawa.” Mary Ruth Marotte gave a paper on “Why a Peggy Can’t Be a Don: Mad Men and the Rise of Feminism.” Conrad Shumaker spoke on “Gender, Culture, and the Definition of America in Sarah Orne Jewett’s A White Heron.”Mike Schaefer chaired a session on the Civil War and Reconstruction devoted to the theme of “Literary and Theatrical Representations of War,” and presented the paper “‘But That’s the Old Wound, You See’: The Effect of the Civil War on the Poetry of Ambrose Bierce. Jeff Johnson presented on “Appalachia and the Sertão circa 1900.”
Dr. Lorien Foote, associate professor of history, has been awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at the Huntington Research Library in Los Angeles. The highly competitive fellowship will fund two months of research at the library’s extensive manuscript and rare book collection. Dr. Foote is conducting research for a book that uncovers an extensive network of southern civilians who aided fugitives escaping from Confederate prison camps during the Civil War.
Dr. Brent Ruswick, visiting assistant professor of history, had an article, “Teaching Historical Skills through JSTOR: An Online Research Project for Survey Courses,” published in the February 2011 issue of The History Teacher.
Dr. Paige Reynolds, assistant professor, of the English Department, had her article “Female Piety in the Reign of Elizabeth I,” accepted for publication in the journal Explorations in Renaissance Culture.Dr. Brent Ruswick, visiting assistant professor of history, had an article, “Teaching Historical Skills through JSTOR: An Online Research Project for Survey Courses,” published in the February 2011 issue of The History Teacher.
Dr. Story Matkin-Rawn, assistant professor of history, has been chosen to participate in a summer institute of the National Endowment for the Humanities, entitled “African American Struggles for Freedom and Civil Rights, 1865-1965.” The program will be hosted by the W.E.B. DuBois Institute at Harvard University, under the direction of Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. It will brings in over a dozen leading scholars to facilitate discussion and introduce primary source materials on their areas of expertise, which include African American music, history, popular culture, and religion. Institute participants also collaborate in small groups to redesign their undergraduate classes and develop new curriculum.
Dr. Michael Yoder,associate professor of geography and director of the Master of Science in Community and Economic Development (MSCED) was awarded a grant by the Arkansas Humanities Council (AHC) to conduct research on four small cities in Arkansas. The project is titled “Highway Commercial Strips and Evolving Micropolitan Geographies of Arkansas.” The research will include archival and field work to examine the ways that automobile-oriented real estate development contributes to the sprawling of four micropolitan cities: Batesville, Blytheville, Hope, and Magnolia. The research will also address the complex relationships between those cities’ downtown areas and the automobile strips emanating from them.Dr. Michael Yoder, associate professor of geography, presented a paper titled “Micropolitan Sprawl in Arkansas: Annexation/Consolidation, and Retail and Industrial Land Use at the Urban Fringe” at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers in Seattle on April 16. The paper was part of a special session titled “Micropolitan America: Understanding Space in America’s Small Cities.” The paper compared patterns of sprawl of small cities with those of larger cities, and concluded that small cities mimic the spatial layouts of larger cities in some ways, but that small-city sprawl is a more recent phenomenon, and is more tightly clustered along arterial highways, which produces unique challenges for municipal governments lacking the resources to employ urban planners.
The Natural State of America, written and produced by Dr. Brian C. Campbell, assistant professor in the Department of Sociology, and directed by Terrell Case, Corey Gattin, and Timothy Wistrand won the Society for Applied Anthropology Applied Video Festival at the 71st Annual Meeting in Seattle, Washington. The film was screened at the award ceremony at the Grand Hyatt Theater in Seattle on March 30. Dr. Campbell received a prize of $250 and free registration to attend the conference. The prize money will be re-invested in the distribution for the film.The film trailer and information about the film cast, crew, and subject can be viewed at http://naturalstateofamerica.com/ and you can receive updates on local screenings if you “like” the film at http://www.facebook.com/NaturalStateofAmerica.
Dr. Clayton Crockett, associate professor of religion and director of religious studies, was accepted for a 2011 NEH Summer Seminar for College and University Teachers on “The Study of Religion,” to be held in Charlottesville, VA. The NEH sponsors between 10-15 seminars each summer, and “The Study of Religion” is a competitive program with 16 applicants selected out of over a hundred for a three-week program, July 16-29. The seminar will be run by two leading scholars in Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, and participants will attend seminars designed to improve their understanding and develop their teaching on important topics concerning the academic study of religion as well as pursue their own research projects. Acceptance into the seminar comes with a stipend of $2700. During the seminar, Dr. Crockett will do research on cognitive sciences and evolutionary biology and neurology, and study their significance for contemporary understandings of religion.
Indiana University Press has just published the book Race in American Science Fiction, by Isiah Lavender III,associate professor in UCA’s English department. The book argues that “racial alterity is fundamental to the genre’s [i.e., Science Fiction’s] narrative strategy,” and discusses writers like Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, and Ursula K. Le Guin, as well as Octavia Butler, Charles Saunders, and other African American novelists.
Dr. Jim Shelton, professor of philosophy and member of the Philosophy and Religion Department, gave two lectures in China during Spring break. One lecture, “The Theory of Knowledge of Moritz Schlick,” was presented to philosophy graduate students of East China Normal University in Shanghai. The second, “Was Descartes a Mental Substance?” was presented to undergraduates in philosophy at the Zhejiang Gongshang University in Hangzhou.
Raymond-Jean Frontain, professor of English, delivered an address titled “Since That I May Know: Donne, Salvation, and the Biblical Basis of Poetic Action” following his inauguration as the 26th president of the international John Donne Society. He also read a paper titled “Donne’s A Litanie the ‘change to evennesse,’ and the Orality of Salvation” at the 60th annual meeting of the South Central Renaissance Conference in St. Louis. Most recently he has published “Donne’s Suns and the Condition of More,” John Donne Journal 29 (2010); “James Coco, AIDS, and the Genesis of A Perfect Ganesh,” ANQ: American Notes and Queries 23 (Fall 2010); “Mutual admiration: Sondheim and McNally,” Sondheim Review 17 (Spring 2011); and “Donne, Tagore, and Love’s Passing Moment,” Papers on Language and Literature 47 (Feb. 2011).
Jesse Butler, assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion, has a new article published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies (Volume 18, No. 2, 2011). Dr. Butler’s article, titled “Introspective Knowledge of Experience and Its Role in Consciousness Studies” offers a philosophical critique of recent work on first-person methodologies in the study of consciousness and presents a new model for understanding our knowledge of our own conscious experiences. He will also be presenting related work at two upcoming conferences: the Midsouth Philosophy Conference in Memphis, TN and the annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness in Kyoto, Japan.
Benjamin Rider, assistant professor of philosophy, had two journal articles published during Spring 2011: “A Socratic Seduction: Philosophical Protreptic in Plato’s Lysis” in Apeiron, a journal for ancient Greek and Roman philosophy and science, and “Self-Care, Self-Knowledge, and Politics in the Alcibiades I” in Epoche, a journal publishing articles on the history of philosophy.English Departments Hosts Fifth Annual English Graduate Conference on Literature
The Department of English held its fifth annual English Graduate Conference on Literature April 14-15 in the UCA Student Center. The conference theme this year was “Shakespeare: Pedagogy, Scholarship, Performance,” and featured as keynote speaker Dr. Jacqueline Vanhoutte, associate professor in the Department of English at the University of North Texas, whose Nolte-Behrens lecture was entitled “‘Age in Love’: Falstaff at the Court of Elizabeth I.” Conference participants and others were also entertained by the poet Greg Brownderville, 2007 winner of Arkansas’s prestigious Porter Prize for literature. A total of 43 papers were presented by English graduate students as well as undergraduate English majors and minors; this is the largest number of papers in the history of the conference. Prizes were given to Jeremy Ellis for his paper “The Structure of Ideals in Antony and Cleopatra” as the Outstanding Undergraduate Paper; and to Sarah Sweatt Orsborn for her paper “‘Parts unparted’: Julian of Norwich’s Theology of Wholeness” for the Outstanding Graduate Paper given at the conference