Category: Professional Notes

On March 10, Associate Professor of Linguistics Paul D. Fallon presented a paper at the joint conference of the 2013 Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics. He also presented at the 44th Annual Conference on African Linguistics, held at Georgetown University in Washington, DC from March 7-10, 2013 that was attended by scholars from around the U.S. and from over 25 countries. His paper, “Coronal Ejectives and EthioSemitic Borrowing in Proto-Agaw,” argued that the Central Cushitic (or Agaw) languages of Ethiopia and Eritrea originally had ejectives (a type of consonant with glottal constriction) and are not simply the result of borrowing from neighboring EthioSemitic languages such as Ge‘ez, Tigré, Tigrinya, and Amharic.

A lecture from Assistant Professor of Historic Preservation Michael Spencer’s American Building class will air this weekend on C-SPAN 3. The lecture and class session, focused on Spencer’s work at the Mary Washington House, will air on Saturday, March 16 at 8 p.m. and midnight and on Sunday, March 17 at 1 p.m. A crew from C-SPAN filmed the class session at UMW in January.

Professor and Chair of Economics Robert Rycroft’s book, The Economics of Inequality, Poverty and Discrimination in the 21^st Century, has been published.

The interdisciplinary book consists of 32 chapters in two volumes. Four chapters are written by UMW faculty members, including Rycroft, Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology Kristin Marsh, Associate Professor of Economics Shawn Humphrey and Associate Dean for Operations and Outreach in the College of Business Kimberly Kinsley. UMW alumni Christine Exley ’09 and Matthew Parrett ’98 also wrote chapters.

Director of the Center of Teaching Excellence and Innovation Mary Kayler, Instructional Technology Specialist in the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies Tim Owens and Professor in the College of Education George Meadows will present their research study “Inspiring Maker Culture through Collaboration, Persistence, and Failure” at the peer-reviewed Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education (SITE) on Thursday, March 28 in New Orleans. The study examines the first freshmen seminar in UMW’s ThinkLab. The paper will be housed in EdITLib, the Digital Library for Education and Information Technology designed to facilitate learning, discovery and innovation by connecting scholarly research on Educational Technology/E-Learning with learning opportunities.

Stephen Farnsworth, professor of political science and director of the university’s Center for Leadership and Media Studies, recently delivered a lecture entitled “Journalism and U.S. Foreign Policy” in Washington, D.C., as part of the U.S. State Department’s Institute for International Education Visitor Leadership Program for North Africa and the Middle East.

In addition, Farnsworth has been interviewed recently by several news outlets for stories relating to the Virginia legislative session, including the Washington Post, the Washington Times, the Washington Examiner and WAMU-FM, Washington’s national public radio station.