David Cain, distinguished professor of religion, presented a paper, “‘The Gleam of an Indication’—Adventures of the Text,” served as a commentator and addressed a “Pastor’s Workshop” on Kierkegaard’s relation to ministry at the sixth International Kierkegaard Conference at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minn., in June. He set up a Kierkegaard photographic exhibit for the Søren Kierkegaard Society during the American Academy of Religion’s 100th annual meeting in Atlanta in October. Cain’s essay “Why Kierkegaard Still Matters” was published in Why Kierkegaard Matters: A Festschrift in Honor of Robert L. Perkins, and the essay “ ‘But What Have You Done Here!’: Kierkegaard’s Interesting Loss of the Interesting” was published in the International Kierkegaard Commentary: The Point of View.
Debra Hydorn
Debra L. Hydorn, professor of mathematics, gave an invited presentation on community service-learning in statistics at the eighth International Conference on Teaching Statistics (ICOTS) held in Ljubljana, Slovenia in July. Her presentation, “Combining On- and Off-Campus Service-Learning in a Statistics Methods Course,” described how students in MATH 210 Statistical Methods provide statistical consulting for students enrolled in Biology Professor Kathy Loesser-Casey’s BIOL 385 Human Physiology. ICOTS is held every four years and is organized by the International Association for Statistical Education. According to the conference website, the main purpose of ICOTS is to “give statistics educators and professionals around the world the opportunity to exchange information, ideas and experiences, to present recent innovation and research in the field of statistics education, and to expand their range of collaborators.”
Jeffrey McClurken
Jeffrey McClurken, associate professor and chair of history and American studies, co-organized, with the Fredericksburg Area Museum and the National Park Service, and moderated a speakers’ forum on secession—the local kickoff event of the Sesquicentennial of the Civil War. About 600 people attended the November event, which was combined with a tour of historic Brompton’s grounds: http://www.famcc.org/index.php?option=com_eventlist&view=details&id=77:years-of-anguish-lecture-series
McClurken co-organized the Archiving Social Media workshop held at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University in October. A number of UMW faculty and staff participated. Read about the workshop at http://archivingsocialmedia.org.
McClurken gave the keynote address, “Teaching and Learning with Student-Generated, Online, Creative and Public New Media,” at James Madison University’s Teaching and Learning with Technology conference in October. Visit http://sites.jmu.edu/tlt2010/conference-schedule/keynote-speech/
McClurken continues to write for the ProfHacker column in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Check out his posts at http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/author/jmcclurken.
McClurken and Tim O’Donnell, associate professor of communication, used TED talks in their freshman seminar in fall 2009, and the magazine FAST COMPANY took note in the recent article at http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/148/how-ted-became-the-new-harvard.html?page=0,2
Larry Lehman
Larry Lehman, professor of mathematics, published the article “Recursive Sequences and Polynomial Congruences” in Involve, a journal dedicated to faculty-student research papers in mathematics. The article was co-written with Christopher Triola ’09 and is based on an undergraduate research project performed during the 2007 Summer Science Institute at Mary Washington.
Nabil Al-Tikriti
Nabil Al-Tikriti, associate professor of history, made presentations entitled “Shifting Borders and State Prerogatives: Iraqi Provincial Border Changes from the Ottoman Era to Today” at the July WOCMES conference in Barcelona, “Messiah Lovers, Sola Scriptura, and the Early Evolution of both an Ottoman Islam and Protestantism” at the October WHA conference in Istanbul, and “Iraqi Provincial Border Changes from the Ottoman Era to Today” at the November JIIA Workshop on the Developing Environment of Middle East Peace in Tokyo. He also submitted book reviews of Adeed Dawisha’s Iraq: A Political History from Independence to Occupation for the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, and Orit Bashkin’s The Other Iraq: Pluralism and Culture in Hashemite Iraq for the quarterly journal History: Reviews of New Books.
James Gaines
James F. Gaines, professor of French, had a book, “Moliere and Paradox: Skepticism and Theater in the Early Modern Age,” published in August by Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH+Co. of Tubingen, Germany. The 151-page book offers a wide perspective on Moliere’s major plays and is designed to help students of theatre and philosophy and French literature specialists. In addition, Gaines presented the paper “The Problem of the Species in Cyrano de Bergerac’s Etats et empires de la lune and Modern Science Fiction” at the Society for Seventeenth-Century French Studies’ annual conference at Royal Holloway College, University of London in September.
Eric Lorentzen
Eric G. Lorentzen, associate professor of English, gave a talk, “Doing British Literature and Popular Culture: Critical Pedagogy in the University Literature Classroomd,” at the “Culturing the Popular” conference at Converse College in Spartanburg, S.C., in September.
Janusz Konieczny
Janusz Konieczny, professor of mathematics, published four research articles (the last two as a co-author): “Centralizers in the semigroup of injective transformations on an infinite set” in the Bulletin of the Australian Mathematical Society, “Infinite injective transformations whose centralizers have simple structure” in the Central European Journal of Mathematics, “Automorphisms of endomorphism semigroups of reflexive digraphs” in Mathematische Nachrichten, and “Minimal paths in the commuting graphs of semigroups” in the European Journal of Combinatorics. He was an invited speaker at the “Workshop on Universal Algebra, Complexity and Constraint Satisfaction Problems” in Lisbon, Portugal, and gave an invited seminar talk at the Center of Algebra of the University of Lisbon, Portugal.
Dawn Bowen
Dawn Bowen, associate professor of geography, had a paper, “Resistance, Acquiescence, and Accommodation: The Establishment of Public Schools in a Conservative Old Colony Community,” published in the Mennonite Quarterly Review in October, as well as two entries published in the Encyclopedia of Geography. In November, at the annual meeting of the Southeastern Division of the Association of American Geographers, she presented a paper, “Experiential Learning in the Field: Short-Term Study Abroad Programs,” and was elected to the organization’s Honors Committee.
Gary Richards
Gary Richards, assistant professor of English, recently published two articles. “The Artful and Crafty Ones of the French Quarter: Male Homosexuality and Faulkner’s Early Prose Writings” is included in Faulkner’s Sexualities, a volume published by University Press of Mississippi in 2010. The second article, “Queering Katrina: Gay Discourses of the Disaster in New Orleans,” appeared in the 2010 special issue of the Journal of American Studies devoted to the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.