A Newsletter for UMW Faculty and Staff
Professor of Art History Joseph Dreiss
Professor of Art History Joseph Dreiss presented a paper entitled “The Aesthetics of Flow: Achieving Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Optimal Experience through Contemplative Practice with Visual Art” at the Virginia Humanities Conference at Virginia Wesleyan University on April 12-13, 2019.
Associate Professor of Middle Eastern Studies Nabil Al-Tikriti
The Middle East Report Online (MERO) published an article by Associate Professor of Middle Eastern Studies Nabil Al-Tikriti, entitled “Turkish Voters Upset Erdogan’s Competitive Authoritarianism.” In the course of this article, Professor Al-Tikriti analyzed the political and economic dynamics driving the results of the March 31, 2019 Turkish municipal elections, which proved a major defeat for the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).
“Turkish voters sent a strong message to its long-standing ruling party and its leader on March 31, 2019 that the government’s authoritarian turn has not fully succeeded,” Al-Tikriti said. “In nationwide municipal elections, for the first time in a quarter century, the political movement largely associated with Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan lost control over both the country’s economic and political capitals, as well as numerous other districts throughout the country…” Read more.
Assistant Professor of Religious Studies Jennifer Barry
Assistant Professor of Religious Studies Jennifer Barry published her first monograph, Bishops in Flight: Exile and Displacement in Late Antiquity, with the University of California Press.
A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org.
Book Abstract:
Flight during times of persecution has a long and fraught history in early Christianity. In the third century, bishops who fled were considered cowards or, worse yet, heretics. On the face, flight meant denial of Christ and thus betrayal of faith and community. But by the fourth century, the terms of persecution changed as Christianity became the favored cult of the Roman Empire. Prominent Christians who fled and survived became founders and influencers of Christianity over time.
Bishops in Flight examines the various ways these episcopal leaders both appealed to and altered the discourse of Christian flight to defend their status as purveyors of Christian truth, even when their exiles appeared to condemn them. Their stories illuminate how profoundly Christian authors deployed theological discourse and the rhetoric of heresy to respond to the phenomenal political instability of the fourth and fifth centuries.
Professor of English Chris Foss
Professor of English Chris Foss presented a paper entitled “My Favorite Comic Is Monster Girl: Helene Fischer’s Crip Re-appropriation of Monstrosity” as part of the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association national conference at the Wardham Park Marriott in Washington, DC. In his paper, Foss argued that for all the well-deserved accolades that have greeted Marjorie Liu’s Monstress and Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Helene Fischer’s humble and unheralded Monster Girl most fully realizes the transformative potential of a crip re-appropriation of monstrosity. Monster Girl features an autistic artist’s rendering of an autistic protagonist. It not only is explicitly engaged in illuminating the lived experience of disability, but it further constitutes a generative starting point for the further exploration of the metaphorical assumptions about disability and monstrosity while reaffirming the crucial role of the genre’s own hybridity in foregrounding such considerations. Even though it is only a short four-page comic, Monster Girl offers a complex tapestry of the nexus of disability and monstrosity, suggesting various enabling possibilities for a crip re-visioning of disabled monstrosity. Embodying the particularly promising potential such a hybrid genre holds for the deconstruction of traditional templates and the (re)construction of empowering alternatives to said monstrosity, it speaks to the wonderful extent to which such a comics text may productively produce excitement and empathy instead of hatred and horror.
Professor of Religious Studies Mary Beth Mathews
Professor of Religious Studies Mary Beth Mathews presented an invited paper, “Doctrine, Race, and Education: The American Baptist Theological Seminary and Jim Crow,” at Harvard University’s Symposium on Religion and Public Life in Africa and the Americas, sponsored by the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. She argued that African American theological seminaries in the American South are a neglected but necessary avenue for understanding how African American evangelicals negotiated racial barriers to education and constructed autonomous spaces for theological development.
Assistant Professor of Physics Maia Magrakvelidze
Assistant Professor of Physics Maia Magrakvelidze was awarded the 7th annual Chi Beta Phi Faculty Award. Chi Beta Phi is an interdisciplinary math and science honor society for undergraduates, which seeks to promote STEM disciplines and recognize academic achievements. The Faculty Award is a student-nominated award given to a professor in the STEM disciplines who demonstrates outstanding teaching and outreach to students. Students commented that Dr. Magrakvelidze is enthusiastic in the classroom, always willing to help students understand, and makes difference in their lives.
Professor of Psychological Science Mindy Erchull
Professor of Psychological Science Mindy Erchull was quoted in an article on MEA WorldWide entitled “‘Unrealistically perfect images’ on social media influencing more and more teens to go under the knife.” Professor Erchull said, “The answer to more and more teens opting for cosmetic surgeries lies in how these young kids perceive their own body image and their thought process built around it.” Read more.
Professor of Economics Steven Greenlaw
Professor of Economics Steven Greenlaw was quoted in an article on InsideHigherEd.com entitled “Forced to Fail Students?” The article examines an accusation by a former professor at Arizona State University who says he was fired for failing to adhere to grading quotas. “Asking professors to strictly follow a grade distribution is highly unusual,” Greenlaw said. “If a professor is giving out too many A’s, that might necessitate a conversation, but not a mandate to fail a specific proportion of the class.” Read more.
College of Business Dean Lynne Richardson
Read College of Business Dean Lynne Richardson’s latest column in The Free Lance-Star: “Have to” vs. “Get to.”
I LOVE QUOTES. And one of my favorite quotes of all time is from Charles Swindoll. He says, “We have a choice every day regarding the attitude we will embrace for the day … life is 10 percent what happens to me and 90 percent how I react to it. And so it is with you … we are in charge of our attitudes.”
Stephen Farnsworth, professor of political science
Political Science Professor Stephen Farnsworth continues to provide daily commentary in regional and national media on breaking news items. View a few of his current interviews: Liberal Democrats in Va. hope small-dollar donations can sway more voters in The Washington Post; Political Fallout of The Mueller Report on Newsradio WRVA; Democrats Slam Giuliani for Russia Comments, Mueller Report Released and Trump vs. Omar on CTV News Channel; and Individuals, Not Big Corporations, Top List of Political Donors on WVTF Radio IQ.
