A Newsletter for UMW Faculty and Staff
Stephen Farnsworth
Stephen Farnsworth, professor of political science and director of the university’s Center for Leadership and Media Studies, and Stephen P. Hanna, professor of geography, had opinion columns on the changing nature of Virginia politics published in the Washington Post and the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
Stephen Hanna
Professor of History Jeffrey McClurken’s lecture “Before the Battle of Fredericksburg” will air on C-SPAN on Saturday, Dec. 8 at 6 p.m. and again at 10 p.m.
McClurken’s lecture, which was originally presented at the Fredericksburg Area Museum and Cultural Center in October, discusses the Civil War leading up to December 1862, when the Battle of Fredericksburg was fought. Using the words of politicians, military officers, journalists and locals from the 1860’s, McClurken sets the state for the battle by discussing the political situations in the North and South, and tracing changes in Union and Confederate commands.
Janusz Konieczny, professor of mathematics, has published a research article, Centralizers in the infinite symmetric inverse semigroup, in the Bulletin of the Australian Mathematical Society.
Roberta Gentry, assistant professor of special education, recently presented three presentations at the Council of Exceptional Children Teacher Education Division conference in Grand Rapids, Mich., on Nov. 6 -10, 2012. The titles of the presentations were: What do special education teachers and their mentors discuss in an online mentoring site? What is electronic mentoring and how can it be utilized in special education? and Using electronic mentoring to support special educators. Also, while at the conference, Gentry attended training and became certified as a National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) program reviewer.
Larry Lehman, professor of mathematics, presented a paper entitled “Suborders of Quadratic Polynomials Modulo Primes” at the fall meeting of the MD-DC-VA Section of the Mathematical Association of America, held at Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Va., in October 2012.
On Thursday, Nov. 8, Nabil Al-Tikriti delivered a paper entitled “The Ties that Bind: Ottoman Sea Ghazis from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean” to the 1st International Congress of Eurasian Maritime History (Turkish Naval History), hosted by Piri Reis University in Istanbul, Turkey. The conference website and conference program is available in the links, and the abstract of the paper delivered is as follows:
“In the first decade of the sixteenth century, several sea ghazis with little known prior experience grew active in the Indian Ocean, and came to be known as the “Rumis” in their new theatre of action. At first the active combatants appear to have acted somewhat independently, arriving in the Red Sea with Ottoman logistical support, Mamluk financial backing, and uncertain knowledge of what lay ahead. In time what began as an uncertain partnership grew into a regular Ottoman intervention designed to explore, exploit, and trade within the Indian Ocean basin.
In this paper, I plan to explore the first “Rumis” to venture into the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, particularly examining their connection to their Ottoman backers and their prior Mediterranean careers. In the course of this prosopographical examination, I hope to uncover what trends may have emerged between such individuals as Kurdoğlu, Hussein al-Kurdi, Şehzade Korkud, Kemal Reis, the Barbarossa brothers, and others who made a name for themselves in either theatre of operations. In so doing, one of the primary questions I hope to explore is the degree to which early moves from the Mediterranean to Indian Ocean theatres was a centralized effort.”
Lisa Ames, LMS Admin, joined Brown University, and the University of Maryland in a panel presentation at Educause 2012 held in Denver last week. Titled “Moving to the Cloud,” the three universities answered key questions and shared the stories, trials, tribulations, and successes with moving from their respective LMS to an LMS in the Cloud.
Eric Lorentzen, associate professor of English, presented a scholarly paper at a special session of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association Annual Convention in Raleigh/Durham, N.C., on Nov. 11. In the paper, entitled “Interdisciplinary Pedagogy in Literature: Dickens and Cultural Studies,” Lorentzen argued for the efficacy and exigency of adopting a cultural studies/critical pedagogy in the university literature classroom, and delineated the benefits of this methodological praxis through his treatment of Charles Dickens. He also served as secretary for a second panel on inter-disciplinarity in the humanities entitled “On the Human.”
Professor of English Mara Scanlon delivered an invited paper for a panel of the H.D. International Society at the South Atlantic Modern Language Association Convention in Durham, N.C., on Nov. 9. The paper, “‘Dot tick we are here’: H.D. on Art, Vision, and Codebreaking,” focused on modernist writer H.D.’s use of telegraphy and Morse code in several works as a metaphor for the unsayable (those elements of art and vision that transcend or resist translation or language) and to establish a model for the appropriate audience, or “receiving stations,” for modern literature.
The Center for Strategic and International Affairs, a think-tank in Washington D.C., published Assistant Professor of Political Science Surupa Gupta’s article “FDI in Retail: How Can It Benefit India’s Farm Sector?” The article appeared in the Nov. 2012 issue of the Center’s publication. Gupta’s research was funded through a Jepson Fellowship.