Category: Professional Notes

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, 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, 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, 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 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.