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.
Xiaofeng Zhao
Xiaofeng Zhao, assistant professor of business administration, published two papers as leading author, “B2B E-Hubs and Information Integration in Supply Chain Operations” in Management Research Review and “General System Theory and Information Integration in Supply Chain Management” in the proceedings for the Decision Sciences Institute annual meeting. He also presented the latter paper at the DSI meeting in San Diego, Calif., in November. In addition, Zhao reviewed two papers for the International Journal of Physical Distribution and Logistics Management (IJPDLM) and the International Journal of Logistics Management.
The IJPDLM identified Zhao as a leading researcher in the field and invited him to review for the journal, which covers leading edge developments and discussions of current developments in the fields of physical distribution and logistics that facilitate the interchange of information among business planners and researchers on a worldwide basis.
Elizabeth Larus
Elizabeth Freund Larus, professor of political science and international affairs, presented the paper “Taiwan after the Global Financial Crisis: Where Do We Go from Here?” at the 52nd meeting of the American Association for Chinese Studies in Winston-Salem, N.C., in October. She also presented the paper “Taiwan’s Reaction to the Global Financial Crisis” at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in Philadelphia in September.
Holly Schiffrin
Holly H. Schiffrin, assistant professor of psychology, wrote the opinion-editorial essay “Does Money Buy Greater Happiness?” for The Free Lance-Star, which published the article Oct. 3. The essay also was published by numerous other newspapers, including the Miami Herald, the Denver Post and the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star-Tribune. Read the column at http://www.fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2010/102010/10032010/577905.
In addition, Schiffrin presented a poster, “The Impact of Affect on Cognitive Processes,” with students Caitlyn Yantis, Rebecca Groman, Allie Sleeman, Elinor Tuhy and Eric Zupko at the Association for Psychological Science conference in Boston in May.
Mark Scharf
Mark Scharf, adjunct instructor, had his full-length play Keeping Faith produced by the Twin Beach Players of Chesapeake Beach, Md. in November. His one-act play Empires Fall was presented as a staged reading by the Run of the Mill Theatre in Baltimore in December, and his full-length Fortune’s Child will be presented in a staged reading by the Baltimore Playwrights Festival in January. In addition, his play for young audiences, The Machine, was accepted by Pioneer Drama Services for May 2011 publication.
Leo Lee
Jangwoon “Leo” Lee, assistant professor of mathematics, presented the talk “Mathematical Analysis of Models” at the US-Korea Conference on Science, Technology, and Entrepreneurship in Seattle in August. Lee also presented the poster “On Solving a Boundary Control Problem Using the Domain Decomposition Method” at the conference. In addition, he refereed a journal paper published in Mathematics and Computers in Simulation. He had the article “Finite Element Approximations of Stochastic Optimal Control Problems Constrained by Stochastic Elliptic PDEs” accepted for publication in the Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications.