On the return trip from a recent visit to South Africa, Donald Rallis missed a connecting flight to Washington, D.C., yet still managed to teach his classes–from a hotel room at London’s Heathrow Airport.
David Cain, distinguished professor of religion, presented a paper, “‘The Gleam of an Indication’—Adventures of the Text,” served as a commentator and addressed a “Pastor’s Workshop” on Kierkegaard’s relation to ministry at the sixth International Kierkegaard Conference at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minn., in June. He set up a Kierkegaard photographic exhibit for the Søren Kierkegaard Society during the American Academy of Religion’s 100th annual meeting in Atlanta in October. Cain’s essay “Why Kierkegaard Still Matters” was published in Why Kierkegaard Matters: A Festschrift in Honor of Robert L. Perkins, and the essay “ ‘But What Have You Done Here!’: Kierkegaard’s Interesting Loss of the Interesting” was published in the International Kierkegaard Commentary: The Point of View.
Anthropology and Egalitarianism is a provocative and accessible introduction to key ideas in cultural anthropology, focusing on the experience of fieldwork and the concept of culture. Writing in a deeply personal style and using material from his field work in three dramatically different locales–Indonesia, West Africa and Monticello the historic home of Thomas Jefferson–Eric Gable shows why the ethnographic encounter is the core of the discipline’s method and the basis of its unique contribution to understanding the human condition. Gable weaves together vignettes from the field and discussion of major works as he explores the development of the idea of culture through the experience of cultural contrast, anthropology’s fraught relationship to racism and colonialism, and other enduring themes.
Indiana University Press
Debra L. Hydorn, professor of mathematics, gave an invited presentation on community service-learning in statistics at the eighth International Conference on Teaching Statistics (ICOTS) held in Ljubljana, Slovenia in July. Her presentation, “Combining On- and Off-Campus Service-Learning in a Statistics Methods Course,” described how students in MATH 210 Statistical Methods provide statistical consulting for students enrolled in Biology Professor Kathy Loesser-Casey’s BIOL 385 Human Physiology. ICOTS is held every four years and is organized by the International Association for Statistical Education. According to the conference website, the main purpose of ICOTS is to “give statistics educators and professionals around the world the opportunity to exchange information, ideas and experiences, to present recent innovation and research in the field of statistics education, and to expand their range of collaborators.”
Jeffrey McClurken, associate professor and chair of history and American studies, co-organized, with the Fredericksburg Area Museum and the National Park Service, and moderated a speakers’ forum on secession—the local kickoff event of the Sesquicentennial of the Civil War. About 600 people attended the November event, which was combined with a tour of historic Brompton’s grounds: http://www.famcc.org/index.php?option=com_eventlist&view=details&id=77:years-of-anguish-lecture-series
McClurken co-organized the Archiving Social Media workshop held at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University in October. A number of UMW faculty and staff participated. Read about the workshop at http://archivingsocialmedia.org.
McClurken gave the keynote address, “Teaching and Learning with Student-Generated, Online, Creative and Public New Media,” at James Madison University’s Teaching and Learning with Technology conference in October. Visit http://sites.jmu.edu/tlt2010/conference-schedule/keynote-speech/
McClurken continues to write for the ProfHacker column in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Check out his posts at http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/author/jmcclurken.
McClurken and Tim O’Donnell, associate professor of communication, used TED talks in their freshman seminar in fall 2009, and the magazine FAST COMPANY took note in the recent article at http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/148/how-ted-became-the-new-harvard.html?page=0,2
