Category: Professional Notes

Steve Griffin, professor emeritus of art at the University of Mary Washington, is a recipient of a 2012-2013 Artist Fellowship from the Virginia Commission of the Arts.

The Virginia Commission of the Arts awards fellowships annually to artists residing in Virginia in recognition of creative excellence and to support their pursuit of artistic excellence. Griffin is one of five Virginia artists honored in the field of painting. Each artist will receive a fellowship of $5,000.

Griffin, an accomplished photographer, painter and printmaker, was awarded a Virginia Museum of Fine Arts professional fellowship in 2011. His work has appeared in more than 150 local, regional and national exhibitions.

Griffin joined the UMW faculty in 1983 and taught printmaking, photography, drawing and design courses for 25 years. He received a bachelor’s degree from the University of South Dakota and a master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin.

Artist Fellowships from the Virginia Commission of the Arts are offered on a rotating basis to Virginia artists in the disciplines of crafts, photography, sculpture, fiction, music composition, choreography, painting, works on paper (prints and drawing), poetry, playwriting and filmmaking. The Virginia Commission for the Arts is the state agency that supports the arts through funding from the Virginia General Assembly and the National Endowment for the Arts. The commission distributes grant awards to artists, arts and other not-for-profit organizations, educational institutions, educators and local governments and provides technical assistance in arts management.

Two professors and one recent alumnus of the Department of English, Linguistics, and Communication presented at the Modern Language Association Conference that met Jan. 3 through 6 in Boston, Mass. Assistant Professor Zach Whalen presented the paper “OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and the Vestigial Aesthetics of Machine Vision” on the panel Reading the Invisible and Unwanted in Old and New Media. Associate Professor Gary Richards presented the paper “Tennessee Williams and the Burden of Southern Sexuality Studies” on the panel The South and Sexuality. Alumnus Tyler Babbie, ’08, presented the paper “Another Term: Richard Aldington and Imagism(e)” on the panel From Imagism to “Amygism” to Vorticism.

Professor of Classics, Philosophy and Religion James E. Goehring’s book “Politics, Monasticism, and Miracles in Sixth Century Upper Egypt: A Critical Edition and Translation of the Coptic Texts on Abraham of Farshut” has been published.

This volume contains a critical edition and translation of the Coptic texts on Abraham of Farshut, the last Coptic orthodox archimandrite of the Pachomian federation in Upper Egypt. While past studies have focused on the origins and early years of this, the first communal monastic movement, Goehring turns to its final days and ultimate demise in the sixth century reign of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I. He examines the literary nature of the texts, their role in the making of a saint, and the historical events that they reveal. Miracle stories and tendentious accounts give way to the reconstruction of internal debates over the decrees of the Council of Chalcedon, political intrigue, and the eventual reordering of the communal monastic movement in Upper Egypt.

2012. XIV, 160 Seiten (Studien und Texte zu Antike und Christentum 69). ISBN 978-3-16-152214-7 fadengeheftete Broschur € 49,– eBook erscheint im Dezember

On Thursday, Dec. 20, Nabil Al-Tikriti delivered a presentation in Turkish entitled “II Bayezid Oğulları Arasındaki Taht Kavgası / The Fight Between the Sons of Bayezid II for the Throne” to the “Symposium of the Sultan Beyazit II” in Istanbul, Turkey. The symposium was sponsored by Kültür Kenti Vakfı (Cultural City Foundation), Beyoğlu Municipality, Galatasaray University, and Mimar Sinan University. The symposium program included several prominent Ottoman historians.

In the course of this presentation, Prof. Al-Tikriti engaged with current debates about Ottoman family values by pointing out that Bayezid II’s extended family members carried out nearly a dozen murders of other family members between 1481 and 1522.

The conference program can be accessed here.

Andréa Livi Smith, assistant professor and director of the Center for Historic Preservation, published her article entitled “The Young Preservationist: Findings from the First Undergraduate Historic Preservation Education Symposium” in the peer-reviewed journal Preservation Education & Research. PER is the scholarly journal of the National Council for Preservation Education.

The article is derived from the first Undergraduate Historic Preservation Education Symposium, organized by Dr. Smith and hosted by UMW in June 2010. Dr. Smith is currently organizing the second iteration of the symposium, to be held this summer.