A Newsletter for UMW Faculty and Staff
Ken Tyler, director of athletics, is the new president of the Capital Athletic Conference’s board of directors. He begins his two-year term in January.
Check out the full story:
http://www.cacsports.com/general_releases/gen1415/board_president_umw_tyler
Stephen Farnsworth, professor of political science and director of the University’s Center for Leadership and Media Studies, is the author of an opinion column entitled, “How Gerrymandering cost Virginia its Medicaid Expansion,” published in the Washington Post on Jan. 18. The column incorporates the results of a recent UMW statewide poll of Virginians.
2015 AHA Conference
At the Annual American Historical Association Conference, Jeffrey McClurken, Professor of History and American Studies and Special Assistant to the Provost for Teaching, Technology, and Innovation, presented in a number of venues. He ran a two-hour workshop on “Advanced Digital History Pedagogy” at the Getting Started in Digital History session. He presented “Student Historians and a Domain of One’s Own” in the Digital History Pedagogy session. He co-organized a Digital Drop-In Session where anyone could come by and ask experts in digital humanities questions about a new or ongoing projects. McClurken also was asked to comment with other current and former department chairs on a draft statement from the AHA’s Ad Hoc Committee on Professional Evaluation of Digital Scholarship. He ended the conference by leading sessions at THATCamp AHA–an unconference exploring the intersection of humanities and technology–on the future of THATCamp and on teaching digital history to undergraduates.
Helen Housley, Associate Professor, Theatre and Dance, received the 2015 Lessac Leadership Award on Jan. 10, 2015. The award, which is presented by the Lessac Training and Research Institute, honors a member ‘for years of service toward the growth and direction of the Lessac Institute.’ Housley has served as the Institute’s Treasurer since 2009.
University of Mary Washington psychologists Miriam Liss and Holly Schiffrin say that finding happiness in life doesn’t come from having more material possessions.
“There’s really no way to be all in at work, all in as a parent, all in as a partner or spouse and all in in other social roles like volunteering,” said Liss who coauthors the recently released book Balancing the Big Stuff: Finding Happiness in Work, Family and Lifewith her colleague. “You have to find out what works for you to give balance in life.”
Liss and Schiffrin explore how to achieve this balance in an upcoming interview on Virginia’s Public Radio Program With Good Reason, which airs Jan. 24 through Jan. 30.
In the radio show, they discuss how to avoid working or parenting in excess, how to focus on what is intrinsically motivating, and how to work toward gender equality in the home and workplace in order to give concrete steps toward reaching harmony among our roles in life.
With Good Reason is a program of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. The show airs weekly in Fredericksburg on Sundays from 1-2 p.m. on Radio IQ 88.3 Digital. The show also airs broadcast on public radio stations in Alaska, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and Washington D.C. To listen from outside of the Fredericksburg area, a complete list of air times and links to corresponding radio stations can be found at http://withgoodreasonradio.org/when-to-listen. Audio files of the full program and its companion news feature are available online at http://withgoodreasonradio.org/2015/01/where-did-you-come-from.
Liss and Schiffrin are international experts on the subjects of happiness, gender issues and intensive and helicopter parenting. Liss is the recipient of the prestigious 2015 Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council of Higher Education of Virginia (SCHEV). Schiffrin is president of the Virginia Academic and Applied Psychologist Academy of the Virginia Psychological Association.
Balancing work and family also is personal for Liss and Schiffrin. While maintaining full teaching and research loads, they also are raising young children.
Jim Groom, executive director of teaching and learning technologies, presented the keynote at the University of Oklahoma’s 2015 Academic Technology Expo discussing the vision undergirding the Domain of One’s Own initiative that originated at UMW. The presentation, “Domain of One’s Own: Digital Agency in the 21st Century,” explored the importance of providing students, faculty, and staff with an innovative, web-based platform for owning, managing and migrating the digital work they create over the course of their academic careers.
Paul D. Fallon, Associate Professor of Linguistics, presented a poster at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, held in Portland, Oregon, from Jan. 8-11, 2015. His poster, “The Qualitative Lexicostatistics of Central Cushitic (Agaw)” applied a new method to analyze the layers of vocabulary and EthioSemitic borrowings in this language family of Eritrea and Ethiopia. As a member of the American Dialect Society, whose meeting was held concurrently, Fallon also participated in the voting of the ADS “Words of the Year” for 2014. The overwhelming winner of 2014 Word of the Year was #blacklivesmatter.
Ben Odhiambo Kisila, associate professor of earth and environmental sciences, and his former UMW research students Elyse Clark, Sunnan Yoon and Laura Pilati had their research paper, “Hydroacoustic and spatial analysis of sediment fluxes and accumulation rates in two Virginia reservoirs, USA” published in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Science and Pollution Research.
Stephen Farnsworth, professor of political science and director of the University’s Center for Leadership and Media Studies, has appeared in a number of media outlets discussing the sentencing of former Governor Bob McDonnell over his federal corruption conviction as well as the start of the 2015 Virginia legislative session, including the Washington Post, National Public Radio, WUSA-TV, WJLA-TV, the Richmond-Times Dispatch, and Reuters.
Jason James, Associate Professor of Anthropology, contributed a chapter entitled “Restoration and Redemption: Defending Kultur and Heimat in Eisenach’s Cityscape” to a new collected volume on East German cities. Entitled Bloom and Bust: Urban Landscapes in the East Since Unification and published by Berghahn books, the volume focuses on the transformation of East German cities and their place in the cultural landscape of unified Germany.