A Newsletter for UMW Faculty and Staff
Professor Laura Mentore will be featured on the With Good Reason public radio program in an encore presentation that airs Aug. 19-25.
In the show, “It’s a Jungle Out There,” Mentore discusses her research with the Waiwai, an indigenous people of Guyana, and how she discovered the path of a special songbird from the rainforest to New York City. Read more.
Remembering the Lotus-Born, the recent monograph by Dan Hirshberg, assistant professor of religion, was reviewed in Reading Religion for the American Academy of Religion.
Gary Richards, Associate Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English, Linguistics, and Communication, was one of three invited members on a panel titled “Celebrating Allan Gurganus” at The North Carolina Writers Conference held in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, July 28-29. The conference honored Gurganus, the author of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, White People, Plays Well with Others, The Practical Heart, and Local Souls, among other books. Richards has published on Gurganus’ Plays Well with Others, reviewed his Local Souls, and routinely taught his works in Southern literature and contemporary U.S. fiction courses.
Kimberley Buster-Williams, vice president for enrollment management, gave the keynote address at Paskill, Stapleton and Lord’s summer conference. The conference was titled “The Making of a Super Recruiter: Making Good Recruiters Great.”
The conference, held July 20-21, 2017, in downtown Philadelphia, was designed to provide top Admission talent “next level training.” Led by PS&L consultants, participants were challenged to develop better internal communication skills, become more articulate representatives of their institution, hone their sales skills, and to move beyond the basics of Admissions 101. Participants were led through a series of workshops, utilizing small group breakout sessions.
The title of Buster-Williams’ address was “No Mud, No Lotus: Becoming a Super Recruiter.”
Philip Pierce, director of athletic development with UMW’s Athletics department, has been chosen by the Fredericksburg Regional Chamber of Commerce as one of the 29 fellows in its Leadership Fredericksburg program’s 2018 Class.
The fellows will take part in sessions from September through May that will include in-depth leadership skills development and meetings with various industry and community leaders. Each fellow will be paired with a trained mentor from the business community who will support his or her progress through the program. The participants will divide into teams to partner with an area nonprofit on an action learning project. Each team will present concrete results to the nonprofits next May.
Upon graduating in May, members of the 2018 class may join the Leadership Fredericksburg Alumni Association and have opportunities to serve on the Leadership Advisory Board, mentor future participants, take a leadership role in the Alumni, and help implement future programs. The Chamber will partner with David Corderman with Academy Leadership Associates and J.R. Flatter with Flatter and Associates to plan and implement the program.
Philip has been with UMW for four years. In addition to overseeing UMW Athletics’ Eagle Club and Corporate Partner Program, he works closely with University Advancement and Alumni Relations to provide and strengthen engagement opportunities with alumni, community members, parents and UMW athletic programs. Philip spearheads campus events like Eagle Nation Day, Eagle Madness and the UMW Athletics Gala. For consecutive years Philip has also led the UMW Athletics Leadership Academy, a three-day immersion in leadership development activities and discussion sessions for 30-40 student-athletes.
Edward Gray, Systems Integration and Support Specialist in UMW’s IT Support Services, has been appointed to the IT Service Management Forum’s USA Chapter Board of Directors. The Board provides guidance and support for the itSMF USA Local Interest Groups and Communities of Interest across the nation. Gray is filling a recent vacancy for the remainder of the calendar year, when scheduled elections occur.
At the Board of Directors’ face-to-face meeting on July 14, 2017, Gray assumed the role of Director of Content. Per the organization’s website, this role is “responsible for leading the development and maintenance of all content, intellectual property and programs which are consumed or utilized by our members and for their benefit.” Areas under this portfolio include Member Programs, Intellectual Capital (eBooks, white papers, video content, etc.), Research and all other forms of content and programs.
Gray has been at UMW for more than 16 years, serving in various IT roles. He earned an MS in Management Information Systems from UMW in 2010. He participated in the Leadership UMW inaugural cohort. He has also earned several technical and service management certifications. With respect to itSMF USA, he has served as the Manager for the itSMF USA Higher Education Community of Interest and as a Board and Interest Group (BIG) advisory committee member. For more on Gray, visit his website at http://www.edwardgray.com.
itSMF USA is a nonprofit association dedicated to building a community of professionals for the purpose of networking, knowledge sharing, and education to advance the service management profession and strengthen its members. For more information on itSMF USA, contact Edward Gray or visit their website at http://www.itsmfusa.org.
Gary Richards, Associate Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English, Linguistics, and Communication, recently presented at the Carson McCullers in the World: A Centenary Conference, held in Rome, Italy, July 14-16, 2017. His paper, Clock without Hands, Go Set a Watchman, and the Queering of Southern Integration, juxtaposed McCullers’ final novel with the apprenticeship novel of fellow Southern writer Harper Lee to examine these women’s writers most significant contributions to what has come to be called civil rights literature.
Doug Gately performed with the National Symphony Orchestra on July 20, 2017. Award-winning actors and Broadway veterans Tituss Burgess, Jane Krakowski and Judah Friedlander were the featured artists.
Maia Magrakvelidze, assistant professor of physics, presented the results of her research at the 48th Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics held in Sacramento, California, on June 5-9, 2017. Her presentations, in the Time-Resolved Electron Dynamics and Attosecond Spectroscopy, were titled “Attosecond relative delay among xenon 5p, 5s, and 4d photoionization,” and “Time-dependent local density approximation study of iodine photoionization delay.” These results are very important for current experiments for investigating the time delay in photoionization processes of different systems.
Mara Scanlon’s essay “Gender Identity and Promiscuous Identification: Reading (in) Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier” was recently published in The Journal of Modern Literature. The article focuses on the frequently overlooked narrator of West’s novel, set on the home front in the First World War. Scanlon interprets Jenny as an embedded reader of the novel’s main plot, a love triangle precipitated by a shell-shocked soldier’s amnesia, which Jenny’s own complicated desire further tangles. Positioned as such, Jenny breaches appropriate boundaries between herself and the “characters” of the main events, exhibiting a radical empathy called “promiscuous identification,” which finally troubles both her class and gender identity. Using theories of readership, Scanlon argues that Jenny’s zealous identification as a reader finally challenges the novel’s own stated moral and seemingly inevitable outcome, one dependent on a model of stable identity that Jenny radically undermines.