Faculty Highlights

Listed below are some of many accomplishments of our Hollins faculty:

• John P. Wheeler Professor of Political Science Jong Ra chaired a panel entitled "Diagnosis of South Korean New Democracy" at the 2008 International Studies Association Convention, San Francisco.
  
  
• Assistant Professor of English Jennifer Boyle's "Interfacing Affect: The Hollins Community Project" has been published in the Proceedings of the First International Humanities, Arts, Sciences, and Technology Conference by Duke University Press.
  
  
• Susan Thomas, associate professor of political science and women's studies has organized two panels for the May 23-25 World Prout Assembly's "Building A New World Conference," in Radford, Virginia. On Friday, May 23 she will moderate a panel on domestic violence. Dr. Thomas will present her paper "Animal Rights and the American Left" and participate in a panel on animal rights on Saturday, May 24. For more information, please visit the conference website http://www.wpaconference.org/.
  
  
• Professor of English and Director of the MFA and Undergraduate Program in Creative Writing Jeanne Larsen and Hollins alumnae Heather Davis '89 and Mattie Quesenberry Smith '85 will each read from their recently published works on Friday, May 16 at 7 p.m. at Studio Eleven in Lexington, Virginia.
  
  
• Thorpe Moeckel, assistant professor of English, has poems in recent issues of Orion, Shenandoah, Field, and on the Friday, February 8 edition of Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac. Four of his poems are in the recent anthology Field Work: Modern Poems from Eastern Forests, edited by Erik Reece and published by University Press of Kentucky. New poems are forthcoming in Verse, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Gray's Sporting Journal. He has new essays in Permaculture Activist and Yale Angler's Journal as well as essays forthcoming in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, The Northern Agrarian, and The Iron Mountain Review. His new book of poems, Making a Map of the River, was just released by Iris Press.
  
  
• Film professors Klaus Phillips and Amy Gerber-Stroh attended the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, NC, April 2-6. Joining them as "Full Frame Fellows" were Hollins students Mary Heinzel '11, Samantha Blankenship '08, Amanda Looney '09, Angel Jackson '11, Natalie McKenzie '08, Rachel Bandy '10, Erika Gibson '11, St. Jon Clark '09, Alicia Crosby '08, Moira Glace '08, and Nicole Coleman '08.
  
  
• Assistant Professor of English Michelle Abate presented a paper, "'Bury My Heart in Recent History': Mark Twain's 'Hellfire Hotchkiss,' the Massacre at Wounded Knee, and the Dime Western Formula," at the Northeast Modern Language Association's annual conference, held this year in Buffalo, NY. Also, her essay "Trans/Forming Girlhood: Transgenderism, the Tomboy Formula, and Gender Identity Disorder in Sharon Dennis Wyeth's Tomboy Trouble" was published in the January 2008 issue of The Lion and the Unicorn, a peer-reviewed journal about children's literature from Johns Hopkins University Press.
  
  
• Four poems by Assistant Professor of English Pauline Kaldas were published in the anthology Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry, edited by Hayan Charara. The book has just been published by the University of Arkansas Press.
  
  
• Professor and Co-Chair of Dance and director of the Hollins/ADF M.F.A. in Dance Donna Faye Burchfield was interviewed along with Charles Reinhart, director of the American Dance Festival, on WNYC, New York City's flagship public radio station. They discussed the ADF's efforts in bringing modern dance to China.
  
  
• Sculptress and ceramics instructor Donna Polseno recently returned from Italy, where she was one of six participants in an international exhibition of ceramic sculpture in Tuscany. She spent two months living and working in Rome to create pieces for the exhibition, entitled "Conveta, Sculture Ceramiche," which is being shown in Certaldo, an historic hill town near Florence. The show opened March 16 and attracted hundreds of art appreciators, critics and news media; it will run through the end of June.
  
  
• Male Bodies, Women's Souls: Personal Narratives of Thailand's Transgendered Youth, a book by Associate Professor of Anthropology LeeRay Costa and Instructor in Women's Studies and Anthropology Andrew Matzner, was just announced as one of the finalists in the transgender category for the Lambda Literary Awards, to be held this May in West Hollywood, California.
  
  
• Associate Professor of Political Science Ed Lynch has been accepted for admission to the Academic Fellows Program of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. He will take part in an intensive, 10-day program in Tel Aviv, Israel, during June. The goal of the program is to offer information to teaching professionals about the latest trends in terrorists' ideologies, motives, and operations.
  
  
• Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Vladimir Bratic co-wrote a paper on the use of media for peacebuilding. The paper is written for Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict (GPPAC) and it sets out how a civil society organization working in the field of conflict prevention and peacebuilding should deal and interact with the media.
  
  
• Visiting Assistant Professor of English Thomas Beller's short story, "Night of the Terriers," is forthcoming in the spring issue of Another Chicago Magazine. Recent and forthcoming essays and articles include, "Shock and Aww," in the New York Times Book Review, "The Secret Life of Rachel Weisz," in Best Life, "Route 60: The Center of the World," in Travel and Leisure Magazine; and "Losing Everything," in Allure. He will be reading and giving a talk at NYU's summer writers conference, "Writers in New York," this June.
  
  
• Associate Professor of English T.J. Anderson III performed his poetry at the Roanoke Marginal Arts Festival. He also conducted a workshop on poetry and music and performing jazz poetry with The William Penn Trio at The Dumas Arts Festival on February 22-24.
  
  
• "European Central Bank: Monetary Policy and Economic Growth," a paper by Associate Professor of Finance & Economics Casimir Dadak, appeared in Arcana No. 78, pp. 52-69 (in Polish).
  
  
• Professor of English Rick Trethewey's critical/scholarly essay, "Politics, Nature, and Value in Wendell Berry's 'Art of the Commonplace,'" has recently appeared in Wendell Berry: Life and Work, The University Press of Kentucky, 2007. His poem, "Walking the Dream," has just been published in the Winter 2007 issue of Appalachian Heritage. A short story, "Jefferson Street," appears in Glimmer Train Stories (Spring 2008) and another story, "At Harry's," has just been published in the literary magazine, Panhandler (2008). His short story collection, The Difference of Things, was recently a finalist in the Parthenon Prize for Fiction Competition. He has been appointed to The Canada Research Chairs College of Reviewers.
  
  
• Dean of Academic Services Alison Ridley has been selected by the University of South Carolina's National Resource Center for the First-Year Experience and Students in Transition as one of the nation's Ten Outstanding First-Year Student Advocates. Chosen by a national panel of distinguished educators, Dean Ridley played an instrumental role in creating the innovative first-year seminar program launched here this fall, ensuring that students are engaged with faculty and peers in active, collaborative learning from the very beginning of their college experience.
  
  
• Associate Professor of Philosophy Michael Gettings' essay, "Tolstoy's Favorite Choir," appeared in The Grateful Dead and Philosophy. Another piece he wrote, "The Fake, the False and the Fictional: The Daily Show as News Source" appeared in the Daily Show and Philosophy. Each of these books consists of 15 or more contributions by philosophers and are intended to bring philosophical insights and approaches to a wider audience.
  
  
• Professor of Art Bill White is showing with Michael Ananian from UNC-Greensboro (last year's Artist-in-Residence at Hollins) and Janet Niewald from Virginia Tech at the Andrews Gallery at the College of William & Mary. The show opened November 8 and runs through December 7 in Williamsburg. The show was organized by Prof. Bill Barnes of the Painting program of the Art and Art History Department at W&M. The show highlights the three different points of view toward picture making and the content in the work, with a representative sample of eight to 10 works per painter.
  
  
• Bansi Kalra, professor of chemistry, and Professor David Lewis of Connecticut College have been awarded a research grant from the National Science Foundation. Their research will involve the investigation of the chemical mechanism of various important classes of organic chemical reactions. The broader impacts of this research involve the training of the next generation of scientists; in particular, this research is being carried out with undergraduate students. A Hollins student will be given a paid summer research position at Connecticut College for the next three summers (2008-2010).
  
  
• Lori Joseph, associate professor of communication studies, has just completed a short documentary film entitled One Helluva Hand. The film looks at what it means to be a woman rancher in Montana and is an outgrowth of her research interest in women who work in traditionally male occupations.
  
  
• Morgan Wilson, assistant professor of biology, has had a paper accepted for publication in The Condor, an international journal of avian biology published by the Cooper Ornithological Society. The paper is entitled "Are nestlings the cue for reduction of the adrenocortical response to stress in male Yellow Warblers breeding at high latitude?" and is co-authored with Rebecca L. Holberton, University of Maine.
   
  
• Marilyn Moriarty, professor of English, has been accepted as a Visiting Artist/Visiting Scholar at the American Academy of Rome for three weeks this summer.
  
  
• "The Effects of Exposure and Microbes on Hatchability of Eggs in Open-Cup and Cavity Nests," a paper by Professor of Biology Renee Godard, Assistant Professor of Biology Morgan Wilson, Associate Professor of Psychology Bonnie Bowers, Jessica Frick '05, and Paul Siegel of Virginia Tech, has been accepted for publication by the Journal of Avian Biology, an international journal and one of the top ornithology journals. Also, "Eastern Bluebirds Do Not Avoid Nest Boxes with Chemical Cues from Two Common Nest Predators," a paper by Renee Godard, Bonnie Bowers and Morgan Wilson, was published in the January issue of the Journal of Avian Biology. "Agkistrodon contortix (Copperhead) Diet," a paper by Renee Godard, Morgan Wilson, Christina Rock '06 and Benjamin Cash, was published in Herpetological Review.
  
  
• Professor of English R.H.W. Dillard has been named the 2007 winner of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP)/George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature. The award is given annually to a living individual who has demonstrated exceptional generosity to writers. The AWP will officially present the award to Dillard at their annual conference on March 1 in Atlanta.
  
  
• Rick Michalski, assistant professor of psychology, has been asked and has agreed to serve as associate editor for the journal Evolutionary Psychology. He has authored two chapters for the edited volume Evolutionary Family Psychology. He is the first-author on one chapter on sibling relationships and is the second-author on the other chapter on grandparental relationships. He also is the first-author on a chapter to be published in the Handbook of Personality Testing and Measurement on evolutionary personality psychology. In addition to these chapters, he has one manuscript recently published in Human Nature titled "Upset in Response to a Sibling's Partner's Infidelities." Two additional manuscripts on siblicide have been accepted for publication in the journals Homicide Studies and Journal of Forensic Sciences. In addition to these publications, he has co-authored manuscripts with three Hollins University students. With these students he is the co-author of a contribution that is in press in the Encyclopedia of Psychology and Law on the psychology of homicide, a manuscript that is currently under review, and a manuscript that will be submitted for publication consideration shortly.
  
  
• A group of paintings by Cathryn Hankla, professor of English, received a runner-up designation in the recent New American Paintings competition for the Mid-Atlantic region. A total of 750 artists entered, the work of 40 will be published, and eight were named runners-up. The juror was Stephen Bennett Phillips, Curator of the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.
  
  
• Joseph Ametepe, associate professor of physics, co-authored the article, "Analysis and Kinetic Model of a High-Pressure KrI Excimer Emission in a Novel Capacitively Coupled RF Lamp," published in Applied Physics B.
  
  
• These Gardens is a collaborative book consisting of 29 poems about gardens by Professor of English Jeanne Larsen and 26 still-life flower drawings by Professor of Art Jan Knipe. Professors Larsen and Knipe were assisted by three students: Jessi Lawson, who helped bind the limited edition of 30 copies; and Ashley Miller and Melissa Miller, who helped design and print the books. Larsen's latest book is Willow, Wine, Mirror, Moon: Women’s Poems from Tang China (BOA Editions, Ltd.)
  
  
• Jim Downey, associate professor of philosophy, article, “A Fallacy In The Intentional Fallacy,” has been accepted for publication, and is forthcoming, in the journal Philosophy And Literature.
  
  
• Erika Latty, assistant professor of biology, has co-authored an article with Michael J. Papaik, Charles D. Canham, and Kerry D. Woods that has been accepted for publication in the Canadian Journal of Forest Research. The article is entitled, "Effects of an Introduced Pathogen on Resistance to Natural Disturbance: Beech Bark Disease and Windthrow."
  
  
• Joan Ruelle, university librarian, was one of only five students selected for the first class in the Managerial Leadership in the Information Professions (MLIP) Ph.D. program at the Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science in Boston. Students were selected for the MLIP program based on their leadership potential and capacity for rigorous scholarship. The first class represents the results of a competitive admissions process in which only 15 percent of the applicants were accepted.
  
  
  
  
  
  

050608