Category: Professional Notes

On Saturday, March 2, Kristen LePine performed a monologue that she wrote for 360º of America: FORCE MAJEURE at the Intersections Arts Festival at the Atlas Performing Arts Center in Washington, D.C. The performance was followed by a discussion with wine.

Mark Snyder, Assistant Professor of Music, had his multimedia work, Butterfly for processed clarinet, electronics and video performed at Appalachian State University on February 19th by clarinetist Andrea Cheeseman. The recital featured electroacoustic compositions that incorporate recorded sound and images.

Dr. Andrea Cheeseman is Associate Professor of Clarinet at Appalachian State University. An active and engaging performer, she has received invitations to perform at colleges and universities throughout the country as a soloist and chamber musician. She has performed for diverse festivals such as College Music Society Annual Meetings, the Montana/Idaho Clarinet Festival, the Michigan Contemporary Clarinet Festival and the Oklahoma Clarinet Symposium. She has been a regular performer at the Delta State University Electroacoustic Juke Joint Festival, and in the summer of 2003, Dr. Cheeseman was named first runner-up in the Mu Phi Epsilon International Competition.

Snyder also had his multimedia work, Alluvium for processed accordion, electronics and video performed at Montana State University on February 24th by accordionist Whitney Salo. It was programmed as part of the Sunday Night Multimedia Series, Beneath the Surface – A Concert of Sonic and Multimedia Art.

On February 20-21, Associate Professor of History and American Studies Nabil Al-Tikriti joined a workshop in London entitled “Iraqi Foreign Policy in a Changing Middle East.” Participants included over thirty area experts, party representatives, government officials, scholars, and journalists.  The closed workshop was sponsored jointly by the Middle East and North Africa Programme of the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House and the U.S. Institute of Peace of Washington, D.C. Six sessions covered a range of topics, including Iraq’s relations with Syria, the Kurdish Regional Government, the oil sector, and the Gulf states, as well as Iraq’s future role in the region. Chatham House plans to publish a summary report of workshop proceedings within the next few weeks.

Richard Finkelstein, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Professor of English, spoke in January at the 13th annual meeting of the National Conference on Science, Policy, and the Environment, held in Washington, D.C. His paper described the Climate, Environment and Readiness Action Plan (CLEAR) about which UMW has been in discussions with PD-16 area leaders. Also on the panel were environmental planners from the City of Philadelphia, and from San Francisco. In mid-February, the Dean also attended the annual meeting of the National Academy of Environmental Design to explore possible collaborations in the Fredericksburg/Spotsylvania area.

Paul D. Fallon, Associate Professor of Linguistics, presented a paper at the 41st annual meeting of the North American Conference on Afroasiatic Linguistics (NACAL), held at Yale University on 16-17 February 2013. His paper, “Appleyard’s Proto-Agaw vis-à-vis Ehret’s Proto-Cushitic” compared the historical reconstruction of the Agaw (Central Cushitic) languages of Eritrea and Ethiopia by two different scholars, analyzing 200 proposed roots and categorizing them. The paper contributes to the the study of Agaw and Cushitic linguistics by providing a critical assessment of two reconstructions of the same language family.

Rosemary Jesionowski, Assistant Professor of Studio Art, currently has a solo exhibition, Mapping Nowhere, on view at Randolph-Macon’s Flippo Gallery in Ashland, Virginia.  This is her third solo exhibition in the past year.  The body of work is a continual investigation of place, land, and how we identify ourselves through location.  How do we define ourselves by where we live?  How do others define us?  How does place define or even change us?  These images simultaneously reference a personal experience of place and an investigation of the relationship between people and place.  The exhibition will be on view through April 5.

See more of Jesionowski’s work on her website.

Elizabeth Franklin Lewis

Three articles previously published by Professor of Spanish Elizabeth Lewis on the late-Enlightenment dramatist María Rosa Gálvez were included in a new digital collection of the author’s life and work. The collection, edited by Helena Establier of the University of Alicante, Spain, is one of the newest additions to the Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, the most extensive collection of digital texts in Spanish. Two of the articles–”Breaking Chains: Language and Slavery in María Rosa Gálvez’s Zinda (1804).” Dieciocho.  20.2(Fall 1997)  and  “The Tearful Reunion of Divided Femininity in María Rosa Gálvez’s Neoclassic Theater.”Letras Peninsulares.  9.2(Fall 1996)—represent some of the earliest published studies on Gálvez. The third–“Crying Out for Feminine (Un)Happiness: María Rosa Gálvez’s Search For Sapphic Immortality”–was a chapter taken from Professor Lewis’s 2004 book Women Writers in the Spanish Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness.  Aldershot, Hants, England and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishers.

Yuan-Jen Chiang, professor of mathematics, coauthored a research article “Transversally f-harmonic and Transversally f-biharmonic Maps between Foliated Manifolds” published in the JP Journal of Geometry and Topology. It generalizes their previous joint publication concerning the 4th order elliptic systems of partial differential equations of foliated Riemannian manifolds.

Steven Harris

Associate Professor of History and American Studies Steven Harris’ book “Communism on Tomorrow Street” is now available through The Johns Hopkins University Press.

The book explores the role of mass housing and urban planning in the post-Stalin Soviet Union and argues for a new understanding of the Khruschchev-era apartments known as khrushchevka.

On Tuesday, Feb. 12, Nabil Al-Tikriti delivered a lecture entitled “Troubled Man, Troubling Legacy: T.E. Lawrence, 1888-1935” as part of the Chappell Great Lives lecture series at Dodd Auditorium on the UMW campus. The prezi visuals which accompanied the presentation can be accessed here: http://prezi.com/bjyci7hkur_a/te-lawrence-troubled-man-troubling-legacy/.

The Great Lives series official video production can be accessed here: www.umw.edu/greatlives/2013/02/14/video-lawrence-of-arabia/.

In advance of the lecture, The Free-Lance Star published an opinion piece by Prof. Al-Tikriti regarding T.E. Lawrence, which can be accessed here: http://fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2013/022013/02102013/752750/index_html?page=1.

Here is the entire text of the opinion piece, published by The Free-Lance Star on Sunday, February 10:

“RARE IS THE individual who attracts over 40 biographies within decades of his or her departure from this world. Thomas Edward Lawrence, whose troubled legacy we will examine in Dodd Hall on Tuesday starting at 7:30 p.m. is one of those rare specimens.

Certain facts about his biography are well-known to casual observers, usually informed by David Lean’s 1962 film classic, “Lawrence of Arabia.” As everyone knows, Lawrence organized and led the Great Arab Revolt, which delivered the Arabs from the terrible Turkish yoke and overturned the mighty Ottoman Empire. He was more a sensitive scholar than a classic warrior, and was reluctantly pressed into service to help his country in its hour of need. He shied away from the limelight, and hated the attention he received as a result of his fame.

While each point is defensible, all are interpretations that have reached the public only after several levels of distillation. The real story is far more complicated.

Lawrence was indeed a complex man, a visionary of sorts who as a child craved to be recognized as a hero and then grew arguably insane as an adult due to his success in this realm. He welcomed the publicity offered by the prominent American journalist Lowell Thomas, the individual most responsible for shaping the legend of “Lawrence of Arabia.” He carefully managed his own image and was not above reminding people who he was when they were either unaware or uninterested in his fame. By the end of his life, he had developed a series of personality quirks that suggested borderline psychosis, and the account of his death never fully satisfied all observers.

Real contention about Lawrence springs from his legacy and the overall British legacy in the Middle East following the Great War. The popular narrative suggests that without the “Arab” uprising, the “Turks” would never have been defeated, as well as that, without Lawrence, there would have been no “Great Arab Revolt.” Neither of these propositions passes without intense criticism in the region itself. While those participating in Lawrence’s military endeavor were certainly Arab when they weren’t loyal soldiers of the British crown, they never numbered more than a few thousand, and were never more than an idealistic core of committed activists leading a motley crew of criminals, opportunists, and tribal raiders interested far more in the violent privatization of spoil and plunder than the ideals of national liberation.

As difficult as it has been for subsequent Arab and Turkish nationalists to recognize, the vast majority of Ottoman subjects in what is today the eastern Arab world were loyal to their empire to the end. In many cases, they were loyal beyond the end, as when Iraqi peasants appealed to Mustafa Kemal to rescue them from their new British overlords in the early 1920s.

Lawrence, who repeatedly claimed in his own classic “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” to have been tortured by his irreconcilable loyalties to both the British Empire and Arab independence, was capable of a ruthless pursuit of his often inconsistent agenda. He was aware of allied agreements destined to betray British promises made to the Hashemite family, and he believed that Jewish settlement of Palestine need not conflict with the rights of the indigenous Palestinians. He felt that putting Faisal on the throne in the newly created country of Iraq, and his brother Abdullah in the equally unknown Transjordan, discharged his obligations to the Arab cause. Much like today’s Obama administration, Lawrence found the judicious use of air power to be modern, humane, and more efficient than alternative methods of exerting sovereign control over recalcitrant populations.

Although this individual’s illegitimate birth, proclivity for whippings, misanthropic and chaste approach to sexual relations, and extreme personality tendencies are all psychologically fascinating, our talk on Tuesday evening will focus more on public interpretations of his legacy than his private demons. Those planning to attend should do their utmost to first screen Lean’s film classic, as all good history should begin with a great flick.”