Category: Professional Notes

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.

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, 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, 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.