February 21, 2026

EagleEye

A Newsletter for UMW Faculty and Staff

Dasgupta Presents at Popular Culture Conference

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Shumona Dasgupta, Associate Professor of English, presented a paper on Bollywood and the Partition, entitled “Mothers of the Nation: Gender and Identity in Indian Partition Cinema,” at the 29th annual Mid-Atlantic Popular and American Culture Association conference in Baltimore (November 8-9, 2018). The paper has since been nominated for the MAPACA Donald Award, which recognizes an outstanding paper and presentation delivered at MAPACA’s annual conference. ​

Larus Offers Insight on 2018 Taiwan Elections

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Dr. Elizabeth Freund Larus, professor of Political Science and International Affairs, participated in the panel discussion “Midterm Elections in Taiwan and the United States: What Happened and What are the Implications for Taiwan-China-U.S. Relations?” organized by the Foreign Policy Research Institute and hosted by the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Manhattan, N.Y., November 26. She offered insight on the impact of the election results on the U.S.-Taiwan security calculus, which can be viewed at https://udn.com/news/story/6813/3504484.

In addition, Dr. Larus was recently quoted in the Financial Times about the 2018 Taiwan elections.  “The election results have introduced a high degree of uncertainty in cross-Strait relations and the U.S.-Taiwan security calculus,” said Dr. Larus. To read the article, visit https://www.ft.com/content/266c5896-f03a-11e8-9623-d7f9881e729f.

Farnsworth Discusses New Presidency Book on C-Span

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Stephen Farnsworth, professor of political science and director of the University’s Center for Leadership and Media Studies, discussed his new book, “Presidential Communication and Character: White House News Management from Clinton and Cable to Twitter and Trump” at the Fall for Book Festival, held at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA.

The book talk was recently broadcast on C-Span. Link here: https://www.c-span.org/video/?452900-3/discussion-presidency

 

 

Purdy Contributes to WHO Database on Research Priority-Setting

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Britnae Purdy, Project Coordinator in the Office of Title IX, has published an article titled “An analysis of research priority-setting at the World Health Organization – how mapping to a standard template allows for comparison between research priority setting-approaches” in the journal Health Research Policy and Systems. By reviewing 116 documents published over 15 years by the WHO, the researchers extracted 2145 research priorities and categorized them according to disease group, priority-setting method utilized, stage in the research cycle, and document type in a common database. The goal of this interactive and open-access database is to emphasize the importance of a standardized priority-setting approach and encourage the establishment of such by the WHO Global Observatory on Health R&D. This report and database features work conducted by Purdy as a 2015 Duke University Global Policy fellow in the Special Programme for Research and Training in Neglected Tropical Diseases (TDR).

Lauren McMillan Presents on the Rappahannock Indigenous Cultural Landscape Project

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Lauren McMillan, assistant professor in the Department of Historic Preservation, presented at the Rappahannock Native American Day on November 17th as part of the Rappahannock Tribe of Virginia’s celebration of Native American Heritage Month. The audience included the chief and members of the Rappahannock Tribe, the Secretary of the Commonwealth, representatives from the National Park Service, and other members of the public.

McMillan presented research resulting from the Field Methods in Archaeology course taught in the summer 2018 session, in which she and students partnered with the Rappahannock Tribe and St. Mary’s College of Maryland on the Rappahannock Indigenous Cultural Landscape Project. McMillan’s specific area of research focuses on the study of clay tobacco pipes and their decorative motifs to understand trade, interaction spheres, identity formation, and consumer choice.

Foss Publishes Book Review on New Wilde Biography

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Professor of English Chris Foss has published a book review of Nicholas Frankel’s critical biography Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years (Harvard University Press) in the most recent number of The Historian.  Foss endorses Frankel’s very readable book as an important revisionist take on Wilde’s life after prison, positing the longstanding insistence upon Wilde’s “decline and martyrdom” misrepresents his actual resilience.  Wilde undeniably struggled with social opprobrium and creative self-doubt, not to mention relative poverty and ill health, but his “frank and unapologetic attitude” toward the openly gay lifestyle he pursued during his final four years shows him to have understood “his erotic relations with other men as a matter of personal identity,” leading Frankel to insist that “Wilde’s greatest achievement in exile was himself.”  With over 13,000 subscribers, The Historian is one of the most widely circulated history journals worldwide.

John Broome Presents at National Education Conference

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John P. Broome, associate professor in the College of Education, co-presented, “White-ish: An Investigation of the Educational Resources of the National Women’s History Museum,” with Dr. Lauren Colley (University of Alabama) at the College and University Faculty Assembly of the National Council for the Social Studies 2018 National Conference in Chicago, IL. This work explores the teaching materials provided by the national museum and coded for the representation of diverse women through the tenets of Critical Race Theory, White Social Studies, and Intersectional Feminism. Findings included  patterns of inherent whitenss in their materials; consistent with research on marginalized women in curriculum and textbook studies. Using Gay’s (2018) culturally responsive teaching, and the “symbolic curriculum”, we provide insights and examples for the inclusion voices of diverse women through primary sources in K-12 classrooms.

Dr. Broome also served as “Discussant” for the session entitled, “Social Studies Education and Race, Part II: Critical Conversations in Teacher Education”. His talk, “Considering Trauma: Race/ism, Critical Theory, and Social Studies Teacher Education”, synthesized the four papers presented, and provided considerations into how teacher educators: 1) develop and execute critical race-based activities, 2) prepare future teachers to discuss race beyond colleges of education, and, 3) consider the limitations of theory and publications when capturing the process.

Dr. Broome’s research interests focus on the intersection of social studies and race/ism, equity, and whiteness. He earned his B.A. in Government from The College of William & Mary, a M.Ed. in Curriculum & Instruction (Secondary Social Studies) from George Mason University, and a Ph.D. in Education (Social Studies Education) from the Curry School of Education and Human Development at the University of Virginia. Before joining UMW, Dr. Broome taught secondary social studies in public and private schools in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Cooperman Joins Editorial Board of “Political Behavior”

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Associate professor of Political Science Rosalyn Cooperman has been invited to join the editorial board of Political Behavior, a peer-reviewed journal that publishes original research in the general fields of political behavior, institutions, processes and policies.

The journal is published in association with the Elections, Public Opinion and Voting Behavior section of the American Political Science Association.

Al-Tikriti Presents Paper, Joins Book Prize Panel at MESA Conference

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Associate Professor of Middle East History Nabil Al-Tikriti presented a paper entitled “The Imam’s Cut: Ghaza’ Norms in the Ottoman Age of the Caliphate“ on Sunday, November 18. The presentation took place on a panel titled “Ruler of the East and the West: Notions of Universal Rule in Early Modern Ottoman History, 1400-1800” in San Antonio at the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) Conference.

The paper abstract was: “At some point between June 1509 and his death in February 1513, the Ottoman royal Şehzade Korkud completed an Arabic legal manual attempting to clarify what he considered doctrinally correct allocation of human and material plunder in a theater of war. Entitled Hall ishkal al-afkar fi hill amwal al-kuffar (A Solution for Intellectual Difficulties Concerning the Proper Disposal of Infidel Properties), the text appears to have had two primary purposes: to rationalize property allocation among victorious participants in the ghaza’ military economy, and to define licit sexual relations with concubines and captives.

Korkud’s text can be read as an attempt to fit an evolving imperial law of war into older shari‘a norms of conquest administration. While the manual’s legal scholarship falls squarely within the Shafi‘i tradition of siyar (campaign rules) literature, at the time it provided a fresh synthesis of older rulings answering to particularly Ottoman concerns.

One of the key claims Korkud made was the decisive role agents of the imam must play in adjudicating, taxing, and allocating both human and material plunder. Ensuring that the imam’s fifth is properly administered, implicitly by Ottoman state officials, provided a religio-political case for imperial control over the ghaza’ economy, as well as over other issues related to the laws of war and taxation. In light of caliphal titulature periodically floated during Bayezid II’s reign, Hall ishkal al-afkar predicated itself on Ottoman justifications for universal rule as the caliphal authority.

Demonstrating the continuing relevance of such siyar campaign literature, in 2013 a small Istanbul press, ISAR, published a scholarly introduction, full Turkish translation, and complete facsimile of Hall ishkal al-afkar. With this paper, I shall attempt to situate this text within its broader Ottoman and Islamic context, as well as suggest possible connections between this text and recent allegations of regulated sexual slavery by Da‘sh in Iraq and Syria.”

The panel summary was as follows: “It is commonly assumed that Ottoman sultans did not deploy the title ‘caliph’ with any efficacy or intent until the reign of Abdülhamid II (d. 1918), whose interest in the title was diplomatically motivated. Recent studies have demonstrated, however, that there is a much longer and richer history to the notion of caliphate, in its mystical-theological sense, as part and parcel of Ottoman political thought.

This panel aims to investigate early modern Ottoman notions of caliphate as an expression of Ottoman political ambition for universal rule. Caliphate, or the notion of divinely ordained rule, was employed by Ottoman authors to argue universal supremacy synchronically and diachronically.

Synchronically, the notion of universal caliphate served to claim superiority over contemporary polities. Diachronically, the same concept was employed to compare the Ottomans with preceding Islamic dynasties, intimating both enduring permanence and culmination.

The panel engages with Ottoman political writing on the concept of divinely ordained universal rule in two key ways. First, we aim to show that the Ottoman dynasty grappled with the notion of caliphate from early on. From bolstering claims to superiority over their archenemies, the Safavids, to regulating the realm of law and legitimacy, the title ‘caliph’ had a lot to offer to the Ottoman authorities in the early modern period. Second, and more significantly, we locate an intellectual territory beyond the administrative-pragmatic uses of the title ‘caliph’. Ottoman discussions of caliphate comprised sophisticated discussions about the nature of divine authority and its relation to sacral authority framed in rich mystical, philosophical, and ethical traditions. This panel aims to acknowledge the historical dynamism of the Ottoman notions of caliphate, while showing that questions of caliphate and of divine legitimation were never the realm of the political center exclusively. They were simultaneously the realm of the mystic, the theologian, and the ‘ulama.”

Panel Participants’ List: