The results of the fall 2008 Wiley Research Exposition are in. In the Social and Administrative Sciences division, Maja Graso (Ph.D. candidate, psychology) took first place, James Sanders (Ph.D. candidate, sociology) took second, and SoYean Lee (Ph.D. candidate, psychology) took third. In the Arts, Humanities, and Education division, Nathan Roberts (Ph.D. candidate, history), Lorelei Sterling (M.A. '09, history), and Laura Arata (M.A. '09, Ph.D. candidate, history) took first place for their joint paper and Brandon Chapman (Ph.D. candidate, anthropology) took third place.
Congratulations to the recipients of the 2009 WSU President's Awards, recognizing undergraduate and graduate students who exemplify exceptional leadership and service to the University and the community. Students are selected based on leadership and engagement consistent with the University's values of inquiry and innovation, character, teamwork, and diversity. Among the 44 awardees are Hardy Kweku Awadjie (B.A. '09, criminal justice; senior, political science), Megan Elizabeth Crenshaw (junior, communication and political science), Leola Dublin (Ph.D. candidate, American studies), Christian J. Granlund (senior, sports management and comparative ethnic studies), Amy Kahrmann Huseby (B.A. '09, English), Mary Jo Klinker (Ph.D. candidate, American studies), Miguel Macias (senior, sociology), Brenda Y. Meza Mejia (B.A. '09, sociology), Heather Lynn Swanson (Ph.D. candidate, clinical psychology), Sandy L. Thomas (senior, general studies), Joshua Urness (M.A. '09, political science), Noe Valdovinos Orozco (senior, comparative ethnic studies), Tom Westphal (B.A. '09, political science), Travis C. Widman (B.A. '09, political science), and Nicholas J. Zaharevich (B.S. '09, psychology).
WSU's Association for Faculty Women has announced the winners of this year's graduate awards for women:
AFW Founders' Award (Master's)
First Place: Courtney Helfrecht (M.A. '09, anthropology)
Runner-up: Chelsea Bloomberg (M.A. '09, music)
AFW Harriett B. Rigas Award (Doctoral)
Joint First Place: Jessica Schubert McCarthy (Ph.D. '09, English)
Loren Redwood (Ph.D. candidate, American studies) presented a paper, "Esperanza the Immigrant Women's Justice Initiative: Success Through Legal Advocacy for Immigrant Women Laborers in the South," on March 13 at the conference "Low Wage Immigrant Women's Labor," held at the University of Illinois at Chicago and sponsored by the Ford Foundation. Funding for research and conference attendance was provided by the Ford Foundation. The paper is currently being considered for publication by the Low Wage Immigrant Women's Labor Project. Redwood was also nominated for WSU's Outstanding Mentor of the Year for 2009.
Margo Tamez (Ph.D. candidate, American studies) was named the 2009 WSU Woman of Distinction in the student category. A poet, activist, mother, instructor, and student, she is also the cofounder of the Lipan Apache Women (El Calaboz) Defense, a land-based indigenous people's organization recognized by the United Nations. She is nationally and internationally recognized for her work in calling attention to the violent effects on indigenous women and families of the fence being built along the U.S.–Mexico border. She is well known for her poetry, having won awards from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Tucson Pima Arts Council, and others. Her nominator said, "Margo Tamez is a woman of distinction in her activism and creative work, which call attention to the struggles of all women against the violence of racism and sexism."
A group of WSU anthropology graduate students, along with professor Barry Hewlett (anthropology, WSU Vancouver), presented their current research at the 2009 Northwestern Anthropological Conference on (NWAC) April 9 in Newport, Oregon. With a reputation as primarily a meeting for archaeologists working in the Northwestern states, the NWAC provides an excellent local venue for student and experienced anthropologists to present papers to a regional audience and practice for larger conferences. The WSU session, consisting of students Mark Caudell, Mark Remiker, Casey Roulette, Kyla Rudnick (Pullman), Shane Macfarlan, and Adam Boyette (WSU Vancouver), was well received by the intrepid first-day, 8:00 a.m. audience. Their session, entitled "Integrated Perspectives in Ethnographic Science: Local Knowledge as Global Information," represented both the diversity and the unified core of the WSU program. Their papers examined a variety of anthropological issues from a background of strong science and ethnographic practice, with a view for potential global applications. Topics included cultural models of tobacco use, the local effects and organization of traditional product commodification, memory and reciprocity in social exchange, forager land rights, and benefits of traditional education, childcare, sex, and epidemic control practices. Organized by Boyette, the session was the third within four years to highlight the strong contributions of burgeoning and experienced WSU anthropologists.
Tracee Nefertari Wilson (senior, anthropology and psychology) was inducted into the Golden Key International Honour Society this spring. She will graduate in August with a near-4.0 GPA despite driving over a hundred miles each way from Tacoma, Washington, to the WSU Vancouver campus to attend classes, having more than a dozen eye surgeries while in school, and taking care of two children. She is a member of several other honoraries and received a Harold and Jeanne Rounds Olsen writing award for her university writing portfolio, completed in 2006.
Lisa Anderson's (Ph.D. candidate, English) article "Justice to Ruth Morse: The Devolution of a Character in Martin Eden" appeared in The Call: The Magazine of the Jack London Society 10. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Jack London Symposium in Pasadena, California, in October 2008.
WSU will be well represented at the biennial conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment June 3–6 at the University of Victoria. Andrea Campbell (Ph.D. candidate) will present "Imagining Alternate Realities: Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis Trilogy and Rejecting the 'Natural'." Alumna Hilary Hawley (Ph.D. '06) will present "Learning from the Extinctathon in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake." Seth Huebner (M.A. candidate) and Jim Trout (Ph.D. candidate) will participate in "paper jam" sessions; Huebner will present "Ecocritical Dwelling at the Noontime of Modernity," and Trout will present "One More Strange Island: How Homer Wields the Pastoral as Cultural Critique." Julie Meloni (Ph.D. candidate) will participate in a roundtable discussion, "The Virtues of the Virtual: Using Blogs to Communicate Place across Space."
Pamela Chisum (Ph.D. candidate, English) presented at the Research Network Forum at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in March. The work-in-progress, titled "Identity Crisis in the Digital Age," explores the concept of digital identities and how students use them to negotiate daily meaning. Do students find their digital identities to be more "real" than their embodied identities? How do digital identities allow them to explore other behaviors? Can digital identities influence how a student writes? How do social networking tools such as MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and Second Life affect the technological (re)creation of self?
Erin Mae Clark (Ph.D. candidate, English) will present her paper "Telling the Tale of Trauma: 'The Tell-Tale Heart' and Nineteenth-Century Discourses on Trauma and Disability" as part of the Poe Studies Association's third International Edgar Allan Poe Conference, to be held in Philadelphia October 8–11.
Jared Colton's (M.A. candidate, English) abstract entitled "Toward a Reconciliation of the Theory and Practice of Invitational Rhetoric" was accepted for this year's RMMLA conference.
Pearce Durst's (Ph.D. candidate, English) paper has been accepted for the 2009 RMMLA convention in Snowbird, Utah, October 8–10. The paper, "Nuclear Rhetoric: The Rhetoric of Nonviolence," will be presented as part of the individual session "Writing Survival: Coping with and Learning from Violence in Literature."
Donna Evans and Julie Meloni (both Ph.D. candidates, English) have each been awarded a Harold and Jeanne Rounds Olsen Writing Across the Curriculum Graduate Fellowship for 2009.
Seth Huebner (M.A. candidate, English) will speak at the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment conference in Victoria, British Columbia, in June. His paper is on ecocriticism and ecological dwelling.
Jacob Hughes (Ph.D. candidate, English) presented portions of his master's thesis, "Shakespeare the Chaucerian," at Concordia University's Shakespeare Authorship Studies Conference in Portland, Oregon. His article "A Monstrous Pedagogy" will appear in the upcoming issue of the Rocky Mountain Review.
Amy Huseby (senior, English, WSU Vancouver) won this year's Emeritus Society Award for Research and Scholarship in the Arts and Humanities for her research essay "Cats, Birds, or Cows: Nietzsche on Women," completed for Collin Hughes' (clinical assistant professor, English) Humanities 303: Reason, Romanticism, and Revolution course.
Amber LaPiana's (Ph.D. candidate, English) panel proposal, "19th-Century Poetry vs. the Poetess," for the Society for the Study of American Women Writers conference, to be held in Philadelphia, has been accepted.
Julie Meloni (Ph.D. candidate, English) has won the 2009 Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Student Travel Grant award for her paper "'How intensely I desire to be a Humboldt!' Scientific and Philosophical Influences on the Early Literature and Environmental Ethics of John Muir." The paper was presented at the NCSA conference March 26-28, where the award ceremony was held.
Pavithra Narayanan's (assistant professor, English, WSU Vancouver) English 342: Documentary Film Theory & Production class swept every award category at the Kenworthy Film Festival held April 3–5 in Moscow, Idaho. WSU Vancouver competed with films from WSU Pullman and University of Idaho. Read more >
Chris Ritter and Jim Haendiges (both Ph.D. candidates, English), along with Mike Garcia (M.A. '04, English), gave presentations at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in San Francisco. Their panel was titled "On Making Waves Without Falling Out of the Boat: The Experience of Composing an Electronic Dissertation" and chaired by Dr. Cynthia Selfe.
Sheri Rysdam (Ph.D. candidate, English) presented her work-in-progress "Confronting Politics in Composition Pedagogy" at the Research Network Forum in March at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in San Francisco. She presented her essay "Communities of Difference: Exploring the Political Economy of Communal Utopias in Multicultural Feminist Literature and Theory" at the MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States) conference in April.
Stephanie Schatz (M.A. candidate, English) presented "'Miniature Insanity': Lewis Carroll's Alice, Fractured Consciousness, and the Psychopathology of Victorian Child Madness" at the Literature and Pathology Conference, held in May at the University of California, Davis. She will present "'I Am Not Only Myself': Stereotype Threat and Critiques of Nationalism in South Asian Diasporic Narratives" at the RMMLA conference this fall.
Work by Heather Losey McGeachy (M.F.A. '09) has been chosen to adorn the Artist Expression 2009 release from Wine-By-Cougars; the honor was accompanied by a $500 scholarship. Artist Expression is an annual springtime celebration of a Cougar-connected wine and artwork by a member of that year’s graduating class. McGeachy drew inspiration from her fascination with wine cellars: the musty oak fragrance, symmetrical structure, and impending bounty held within each barrel. She also won the opportunity to illustrate the spring 2009 edition of LandEscapes, WSU's student-produced literary and fine arts journal.
Garric Simonsen (M.F.A. candidate) was awarded a one-month artist residency by the James and Janie Washington Foundation in Seattle. Simonsen is an Allied Art Association 2009 M.F.A. Scholarship winner; the associated exhibit ran May 5–39 in Richland, Washington. His work will also be displayed at the First Ever OZ-vitational at the Tinman Gallery in Spokane July 31 through August 22.
Visitors explore this year's M.F.A. Thesis Exhibition at the Museum of Art. Students exhibiting included Lauren McCleary, Toby Walther, Dustin Price, Heather Losey McGeachy, and Brad Dinsmore.
Walter Schlect (senior, German and English; minoring in Russian area studies) received a University Summer Course Grant from the German Academic Exchange and will be attending an intensive language and literature course in either Berlin or Essen, Germany, this summer.
Emily Rooney (B.A. '09, humanities) won both the Most Valuable Player and the Most Inspirational Player awards for the 2008 season of volleyball at WSU. Rooney, a 6-1 middle hitter, was one of three co-captains for the 2008 squad. She was the MVP of the Boise State Bronco tournament and named to the Idaho Classic all-tournament team. Rooney was second on the team with 226 kills, a .289 hitting percentage, and a 0.69 blocks per set average. She led the team with 19 service aces.
Nathan Roberts (Ph.D. candidate, history), Lorelei Sterling (M.A. '09, history), and Laura Arata (M.A. '09, Ph.D. candidate, history) won first place in the Arts, Humanities, & Education category at WSU's annual Wiley Graduate Research Exposition. Their poster was about the creation of the Lucullus V. McWhorter Digital Archives collection of the Nez Perce War of 1877, an outgrowth from Trevor Bond (WSU Libraries) and Robert McCoy's (assistant professor, history) History 438/596 Digital Archives class.
Hoping to spark a little downtown revival, students in Andrea Mason's (instructor, English) English 402 class, Technical and Professional Writing, recently designed and donated storefront historical displays for businesses in Colville and Kettle Falls. Michael Schwartz (M.A. candidate, history) helped coordinate the project as part of his graduate assistantship with WSU's Center for Civic Engagement. Read more >
Matt Grimes
WSU received top honors at the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival held in February at the University of Idaho. First place awards went to the WSU Jazz Big Band, directed by Greg Yasinitsky (regents professor, music), and WSU VOJAZZ, directed by Kathleen Hollingsworth (instructor, music). A first place award also went to bassist Matt Grimes (B.M. '09, music performance; B.S. '09, neuroscience), who studies with Frederick "Dave" Snider (instructor, music). The Hampton Festival is one of the biggest events of its kind, attracting more than 15,000 students from around the world.
A recording of John Sterling's (M.A. '08, music) composition "Lorelei's Rose," as performed by members of the WSU Jazz Big Band, was included on a CD featuring students from the top jazz studies programs in the nation. This CD was showcased and distributed internationally in a recent issue of Jazziz magazine, one of the top journals in jazz. Guitarist and composer Sterling made the recording while a student at WSU.
The WSU SaxBand, directed by Greg Yasinitsky (regents professor, music), presented an invited performance at the North American Saxophone Alliance (NASA) Region 1 Conference (Northwest states), held at the University of Idaho in April.
Amy Burton received the Chancellor's Award for Student Achievement at WSU Vancouver's spring commencement ceremony. Burton received her bachelor of arts in public affairs with a 3.7 GPA. Attending school and participating in internships accounted for only part of Burton's time. She is also the primary parent of two young boys and works up to 25 hours per week as a massage therapist. "When you have a dream, it may take time and hard work, but you have to be true to yourself. I hope my kids will learn from my example," said Burton.
Psychology graduate students Carolyn Anderson, Kristine Olson (WSU Vancouver), Adriana Seelye, Jennifer Self, Alexandra Terrill, and Xiaojing Xu received GPSA Travel Awards for spring 2009. Anderson, Terrill, Xu, and Sterling McPherson received GPSA Registration Awards for spring 2009.
Lee Daffin (Ph.D. candidate, experimental psychology) has been awarded a spring 2009 T.A. Excellence Award by WSU's Graduate and Professional Student Association.
John M. Roll (associate dean of research, nursing; Ph.D. '94, psychology) and Joni T. Howard (Ph.D. candidate, psychology) published "The Relative Contribution of Economic Valence to Contingency Management Efficacy: A Pilot Study" in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis 41.
Jillian Laggart (senior, psychology) was awarded a summer research grant from the WSU Alcohol and Drug Abuse Program.
Linda J. Thompson, Sharon Sowell (M.A. candidate, psychology), and John M. Roll (associate dean of research, nursing; Ph.D. '94, psychology) have published the chapter "Effects of Methamphetamine on Communities" in Methamphetamine Addiction: From Basic Science to Treatment (Guilford Press, 2009), edited by Roll, Richard A. Rawson, Walter Ling, and Steven Shoptaw.
Congratulations to the Michael Steele (assistant professor, psychology) lab, who presented these posters at the Midwest Conference on Pediatric Psychology in Kansas City in April:
Sarah Whitley (Ph.D. candidate, sociology) received the 2009 Distinguished Service Learning Award in the faculty/instructor category from the Center for Civic Engagement (CCE) at WSU. Whitley is recognized for her commitment to service and learning through instruction of the Sociology 102 class as well as her commitment to the community. Last fall, Whitley involved her Sociology 102 students in research and advocacy to increase WSU student awareness of hunger and homelessness issues during the CCE-sponsored National Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week. Christine Oakley (clinical assistant professor, sociology) said that Whitley's goal is "…not just to help students understand issues academically, but to enable them to understand the social world around them."
Two speech and hearing sciences graduate students, Elise Benadom and Heidi Marvicsin, are founding members of the new Riverpoint Interprofessional Education and Research Student Group (RIPER). The group's goals are to forge cross-professional connections and promote dialog about important healthcare topics.
The student-written play Commitments by Dana Bensel (senior, theatre arts) was selected as a regional finalist by the Kennedy Center/American College Theatre Festival and showcased at the 2009 Northwest Drama Conference. This is the seventh time that work from WSU's student playwriting program has been presented at this conference.
The Chronicle, College of Liberal Arts, Washington State University