A Newsletter for UMW Faculty and Staff
Professor of French Scott Powers
Professor of French Scott Powers’ essay, published in June 2020 in the journal Québec Studies, and entitled “Secularity, the Animal Other, and the ‘Fragilized’ Text in the works of Jean-François Beauchemin,” draws on secularization theory and animal studies to examine the works of Jean-François Beauchemin as unresolved negotiations between the religious and the secular.
Assistant Professor of Religious Studies Jennifer Barry
Assistant Professor of Religious Studies Jennifer Barry recently published a peer-reviewed article in the Journal of Christian Orthodoxy. The article, “We Didn’t Start the Fire: The Alexandrian legacy within orthodox memory,” is free and available to the public.
An abstract of the article includes the following:
If we think about the past and the way Christians constructed the signs and symbols of persecution, invariably something—or, someone—is on fire. In this article, I argue that the destruction of two significant Alexandrian holy sites, the Great Alexandrian Church and the Serapeum, tells us a great deal about how fifth-century ecclesiastical historians crafted episcopal legitimacy by using familiar tropes that signaled to their readers that a Christian persecution was underway. I conclude that how a bishop played with fire made all the difference in the story of Christian orthodoxy.
Associate Professor of Sociology Eric Bonds
Associate Professor of Sociology Eric Bonds and his students recently spoke at a Fredericksburg City Council meeting to discuss renaming the stretch of Route 1 that runs by the University of Mary Washington, according to an article in The Free Lance-Star.
The name, due to its associations with the Confederacy and slavery, has come under fire in several other localities in recent years. In 2016, UMW Assistant Professor of Sociology Eric Bonds and two students in his political sociology class asked City Council during one of its meetings to rename the highway because of Davis’ role in the Civil War and the fact that he’d owned more than 100 slaves during his lifetime.
The request evolved out of his desire for the students to do a community involvement project that would help them develop democracy skills and not simply vote in an election and then tune out. The class overwhelming voted on this project, and researched Davis and the history of the naming of the highway after him. Read more.
Stephen Farnsworth, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for Leadership and Media Studies.
Stephen Farnsworth, professor of political science and director of the University’s Center for Leadership and Media Studies, recently discussed his research on national and state-level efforts to suppress voter turnout in advance of the 2020 elections during an online discussion with NextGen activists.
A link to the conversation is available here: https://www.facebook.com/NextGenNorthCarolina/videos/588951375095206
Dr. Farnsworth also offered comments in the following regional and national news stories:
Large Virginia county ends immigration enforcement agreement (The Washington Post)
Gutzman Considering Bid to Become Virginia’s First Hispanic Lt. Governor (NPR)
Trump Holds Rally in Phoenix (CTV News Channel)
This is a ‘failure of political leadership’ (CTV News Channel)
Last fall, UMW students and city residents retraced the route of the Freedom Rides, the historic protest to desegregate interstate travel, organized by James Farmer. Members of the UMW community are working with the City to establish a historic marker on the site of the old bus station in Fredericksburg, the Freedom Riders’ first stop on their 1961 trip. Photo by Lynda Allen.
James Farmer Multicultural Center Assistant Director Chris Williams, Assistant Professor of History Erin Devlin and Assistant Professor of Historic Preservation Christine Henry were interviewed in The Free Lance-Star about their efforts to work with the City of Fredericksburg to establish a Virginia state historical marker at the site of the old bus station where the Freedom Riders stopped first in their quest to desegregate interstate transportation in 1961. The station formerly stood on the corner of Princess Anne and Wolfe streets, near where the fire station is now.
Some of the riders were arrested in North Carolina, South Carolina and Mississippi. In Anniston, Ala., a mob of Ku Klux Klan members slashed the bus’s tires as it attempted to leave the terminal, and later threw a firebomb at it.
UMW students and staff and community members visited the field where the bombing occurred last fall, as part of a trip recreating the journey of the Freedom Riders.
“To our surprise, there was no marker out there. No historical marker saying that right here, the original 13 Freedom Riders were fire-bombed,” said Chris Williams, assistant director of UMW’s James Farmer Multicultural Center, which organized the trip. “I was enraged and so were the students.”
Back home in Fredericksburg, Williams was still thinking about ways the story of the Freedom Riders and James Farmer could be told better—and that led to the idea of placing a highway marker at the site of the old bus station.
Williams, Devlin and Henry, in partnership with the City of Fredericksburg, have started the process of applying for the marker from the state Department of Historical Resources. Read more.
College of Arts and Sciences Dean Keith Mellinger and Anand Rao, Professor of Communication and Director of the Speaking Intensive Program and Speaking Center at UMW, were recently interviewed by University Business about UMW’s new “COVID-19 in Context Course,” being taught over Zoom by over 40 faculty members to thousands of participants worldwide.
In just two days, enough professors from the University of Mary Washington agreed to donate their time to help launch a free coronavirus course in five weeks for students and the community this summer.
The popularity of the then-upcoming COVID-19 in Context online course, now still in session, rapidly grew after a faculty member was inspired by another school’s offering to pitch the idea to leaders at the Virginia public university. Soon, nearly 2,000 people enrolled in the free COVID-19 course, including more than 800 students. “It was a logistical nightmare,” says Keith Mellinger, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. “We had to ensure our more than 40 faculty members were on the same page and learn how to work with numerous departments that are typically not part of course development since we would be reaching such a large audience.” Read more.
Professor of Economics Steven Greenlaw
Professor of Economics Steve Greenlaw was recently interviewed in an article on Ed Surge entitled, “‘Better Every Semester’: How Faculty Use Open Educational Resources to Improve Courses.”
In addition to providing students with text and video content, courseware tools also have built-in nudges and assessments—sometimes personalized—that generate instant feedback about whether students are mastering the assigned material.
That data allows an entity like Lumen to “crunch the numbers and figure out where the problems are” with courseware texts and tests, then fix those problems, says Steve Greenlaw, a professor of economics at the University of Mary Washington, who has helped to produce OER resources for Lumen and for OpenStax, a nonprofit OER publisher, and who uses Lumen courseware with his own classes. Read more.
UMW College of Business Dean Lynne Richardson
College of Business Dean Lynne Richardson’s weekly column in The Free Lance-Star discusses how to enforce regulations in a company when it comes to employees with differing abilities. Read APPLYING RULES.
I heard a story that broke my heart. A young man on the autism spectrum has a job in a well-known organization. He made a snack purchase on the honor system at his office break room. When he scanned the item, he hit the wrong button and ended up canceling the transaction instead of charging it. But he didn’t realize what he had done and ate the item.
Later, he was confronted about stealing the $5 item. It’s my understanding that he didn’t explain what happened well, and was placed on suspension for a week. He thought he was going to lose his job, including his important benefits.
I first became aware of the situation while he was on suspension. A relative of his had shared the story and was concerned about what might happen. While I certainly had no way of knowing why he was suspended for a week over such a transgression, I was confident that he would not lose his job over it. The relative indicated he had worked there for 2½ years, had never been late, had never called in sick and volunteered to work late. He had even won a productivity award in a previous month. Read more.
Professor of Political Science and International Affairs Elizabeth Freund Larus
Elizabeth Freund Larus, Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, commented on Taiwan and U.S. politics on Squawk Box Asia, CNBC Asia, on June 9, 2020. Overblown promises, an ambitious presidential bid, efforts to move Taiwan closer to China, and the HK protests all contributed to the historic recall of Han Kuo-yu, mayor of Kaohsiung, Taiwan’s critical industrial city. Regarding the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Larus claimed that a Democratic administration may not be much kinder to China than the Trump administration.
View part of the interview at athttps://www.cnbc.com/video/2020/06/09/china-should-not-expect-an-easier-relationship-with-biden-professor.html
Assistant Professor of German Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich
Associate Professor of German Marcel Rotter
Associate German Professor Marcel Rotter and Assistant German Professor Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich penned a Letter to the Editor of The Free Lance-Star on an editorial cartoon that compared anti-racist protests to the infamous German pogroms known as “Kristallnacht”—or “Night of Broken Glass.” Read more.
Protests cannot be compared to Kristallnacht
It was with great dismay that we saw the June 3 editorial cartoon in The Free Lance–Star, a comparison of the infamous pogrom of Nov. 9, 1938, in Germany (often referred to as “Kristallnacht”—or “Night of Broken Glass”) with the anti-racist street protests of June 2020.
By its very definition, an editorial cartoon sheds light on a societal issue poignantly, quickly, and without the need for a long explanation. We were struggling to find an interpretation that would not be racist.
Do you really believe that protesters and looters are the same group of people?
This cartoon betrays at best an ignorance of history, and at worst a total lack of compassion for the plight of victims of racism in this country.
Marcel P. Rotter
Associate Professor of German
Jennifer Hansen–Glucklich
Assistant Professor of German
University of Mary Washington