Palgrave-Macmillan recently published “Preservation and National Belonging in Eastern Germany: Heritage Fetishism and Redeeming Germanness,” by Jason James, associate professor of anthropology. The book explores the ways in which everyday citizens grapple with a difficult past through heritage. It seeks to shed new light on the everyday politics of heritage and memory by highlighting the dynamics of longing, fantasy, fetishism, and local performance.
Chad Murphy is Featured Guest on NPR
Chad Murphy, assistant professor of political science, was a featured guest on National Public Radio during the October 6th segment “Does Early Voting Prompt Hasty Choices?”
Murphy’s op-ed “The Sooner People Vote, the Better” appeared in USA Today on Sunday, Sept. 30.
Matthew Johnson Publishes Article on History News Network
Matthew Johnson, James Farmer Postdoctoral Fellow in Civil Rights and Social Justice, published the article “Affirmative Action’s Unlikely Allies” on George Mason University’s History News Network. The History News Network publishes op-eds by prominent historians each week.
Stephen Farnsworth Reaches an International Audience
Stephen Farnsworth, professor of political science and director of the Center for Leadership and Media Studies, discusses the importance of voter registrations to the presidential election in “Obama Steps Up App War to Woo Wavering Voters.” The article appears in the Wednesday, Oct. 10 issue of The Times of London.
Farnsworth also was a featured guest on National Public Radio during the segment “Virginia Senate Candidates Square Off in Debate” on Tuesday, Oct. 9.
A Bittersweet Farewell
My name is Cathy Finn-Derecki and I have had the privilege of working at UMW for the past 12 years, most of the time in the capacity of managing our public web presence. Other opportunities beckon, and it’s time I move on to a position closer to home in Charlottesville. I leave with a full heart and enormous gratitude for what was given to me here. The people here had faith in me, guided me and followed along with me on a ride that was truly exciting, creative, at times infuriating, but never, ever boring.
UMW gave my life a new direction that I had not anticipated when I first arrived. As John Lennon says, “Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.” No phrase defines my life at Mary Washington more succinctly than that. And the life that has happened here, for me, is far beyond any plans I could have hatched.
Thank you, UMW, for giving me a home. Keep up with my steady stream of unsolicited opinions as I move out of UMW Blogs and into my new domain, http://transparentuniversity.org. Twitter: http://twitter.com/@saracup, Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/cathy.finnderecki.
One parting thought: If I could change the UMW tagline in one way, it would be this: “Where great minds get to play.” When work is play, you truly have something to be grateful for.
Mathematics Students Present at JMU
Three UMW mathematics majors, Morgan Brown, Peter Slattery, and Andrew Cole, traveled to the Shenandoah Undergraduate Mathematics and Statistics conference – SUMS at JMU on Saturday, Sept. 29. The students presented their work completed under the direction of Dr. Leo Lee. Morgan gave a talk “How to Win Every Time” and Peter presented his poster “The Wave Equation in One Dimension”.
Chris Kilmartin is Featured Guest at DSLCC, 10/24
Christopher Kilmartin, professor of psychology, will present three sessions at Dabney S. Lancaster Community College (DSLCC) on Wednesday, Oct. 24 in observance of Domestic Violence Awareness Month. He will present “Guy-Fi: The Fictions that Rule Men’s Lives,” a hybrid storytelling, lecture and multimedia presentation, from 9:15 to 10:15 a.m. at the Rockbridge Regional Center in Buena Vista and from 11:50 a.m. to 1 p.m. at DSLCC’s Moomaw Center in Clifton Forge.
Kilmartin will perform “Crimes Against Nature,” his original solo performance piece, from 6 to 7 p.m. at DSLCC’s Moomaw Center.
In addition to the three presentations open to the public, he will speak during classroom visits with DSLCC students enrolled in the practical nursing and massage therapy programs.
For more information, visit http://dslcc.edu/.
Dave Toth & Collaborators Win Grants
At the end of September, Assistant Professor of Computer Science Dave Toth and his colleagues from Merrimack College, Jimmy Franco (Chemistry) and Charlotte Berkes (Biology), were awarded two grants of supercomputing time to search for drugs to cure histoplasmosis and inhibit HIV. Their research team was awarded a total of 1,818,365 hours of compute time on the 40th fastest computer in the world, worth about $148,778. Toth will use the Ranger supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center to conduct virtual screens of millions of molecules to find the best leads. Franco and Berkes will then test the best leads in their labs to determine how effective they are and try to devise better molecules based on the structure of the most effective molecules. The granting entity, the NSF-funded organization known as the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), awards grants of compute time to scientists, engineers, social scientists, and humanists for computationally intensive research.
DTLT Presents at ELI Fall Focus Session
A Culture of Innovation from umwnewmedia on Vimeo.
Martha Burtis, Jim Groom, Tim Owens and Andy Rush of UMW’s Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies (DTLT) presented on Tuesday, October 2 at the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative’s Online Fall Focus Session on the theme of innovation in higher education. The basic question guiding the presentation, which was centered around the seven minute video above, was the following: how does a university like UMW consistently foster innovative projects like UMW Blogs, ds106, and, more recently, A Domain of One’s Own?
There’s no one adequate stock answer to such a question, so when preparing the presentation DTLT decided to interview students, faculty, and staff around campus to get a broader sense of the culture of innovation happening at UMW. What DTLT got in return for its labors was quite compelling. The video was shot and edited by Andy Rush, and it’s just a teaser for a much larger documentary that DTLT is planning on making this semester to start chronicling and narrating the culture of innovation at UMW.
Joseph Dreiss Presents at SLSA Conference
On Sunday, September 30, Professor of Art and Art History Joseph Dreiss presented a paper at the 26th Annual Meeting of the
Society for Literature, Science and the Arts (SLSA)
which was held in Milwaukee, Wis. The paper, “Direct Encounters with Nonhuman Nature: The Landscape Interventions of Andy Goldsworthy,” was presented as part of the Arts and Ecologies session. Fellow panelist and presenters were Elizabeth Kessler, Stanford University, who presented on “Alignments: Earthworks, Astronomy, and Instrumentality” and Christine Filippone, University of Pennsylvania, who presented on “The Human Use of Human Beings?: Feminism and Systems Theory in Public Sculpture and Ecological Art.”
The Society for Literature, Science and the Arts is an interdisciplinary society devoted to the study of the interrelationship and dialogue between the science, engineering, technology and the arts.