A Newsletter for UMW Faculty and Staff
Associate Professor of History and American Studies Erin Devlin
Associate Professor of History and American Studies Erin Devlin’s interview on With Good Reason re-airs this week, June 25 through July 1, as part of the episode, “Wearing Down the Appalachian Trail.” With Good Reason airs Sundays at 2 p.m. on Fredericksburg’s Radio IQ 88.3 Digital and at various times throughout the week on stations across Virginia and the United States. Check the website for show times.
Camping, hiking, and enjoying the great outdoors are American pastimes. But for African Americans, gathering in public spaces has long been fraught. Erin Devlin discusses the racism that was built into America’s national parks. Listen here.
Assistant Professor of History Erin Devlin
Assistant Professor of History and American Studies Erin Devlin will be featured on an episode of ‘With Good Reason’ radio on WVTF Radio IQ beginning on Saturday, March 21. Devlin is working with Shenandoah National Park and four others throughout Virginia to examine the painful past and legacy of segregation in the parks and wilderness spaces and initiate more inclusive practices. Contracted by the National Park Services, she’s currently leading a unique study that will provide a more comprehensive picture of segregation in the parks through archival research and oral histories of those who experienced it. Once finished, the project will be used to develop more installations and resources – such as the one Devlin and her students recently completed at the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park – that tell the stories of African American visitors to our national parks.
With Good Reason airs Sundays at 2 p.m. on Fredericksburg’s Radio IQ 88.3 Digital and at various times throughout the week on stations across Virginia and the United States. Check the website for show times.
UMW Associate Professor of Biology Deb O’Dell will be featured on “Do Cell Phones Cause Cancer?” on the With Good Reason public radio show. Her interview, which took place last August, is an encore presentation and will air August 3 to 9. The program is broadcast in Fredericksburg on Radio IQ 88.3 Digital on Sundays […]
Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing Laura Bylenok
Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing Laura Bylenok will be featured in an upcoming segment of With Good Reason on public radio stations across the country. An award-winning poet who stitches together her love of science with her passion for the written word, Bylenok will read from her recent collection on WGR’s Poetry That Heals, airing March 16 to 22.
“In college, [Bylenok] was fascinated with genetic engineering. Now, she manipulates language, not DNA,” says the show’s description. “Her recent book turns familiar forms into poetic laboratory experiments.”
Sharing selections from her book Warp, winner of the 2015 T.S. Eliot Prize, Bylenok describes her fascination with molecular biology and genetics, explaining her use of the words and concepts they conjure to put the human condition into prose. An inspiration for her poem Genome, she tells WGR host Sarah McConnell, before reading the piece on air, is a haunting image left by a past professor, an endocrinologist who sewed together pairs of living rats.
With Good Reason airs Sundays at 2 p.m. in Fredericksburg on Radio IQ 88.3 Digital. A complete list of broadcast times and audio files of the full programs (posted the week of the show) can be found online at www.withgoodreasonradio.org. Produced by Virginia Humanities for the Virginia Higher Education Broadcasting Consortium, With Good Reason airs on 100 stations in 33 states. Read more.
An interview with Associate Professor of Biology Deborah O’Dell will be featured on With Good Reason from Aug. 18 through Aug. 24.
The program is broadcast at 2 p.m. on Sundays on Radio IQ 88.3 Digital in Fredericksburg. You can find other broadcast times at: http://www.withgoodreasonradio.org/when-to-listen/
O’Dell will talk about her recent study that found cell phone radiation can cause changes to our cells in a program called Do Cell Phones Call Cancer?
The program will also feature Karen Ballen of University of Virginia Health Systems who says that for those diagnosed with blood cancer, the future is bright.
Later in the show, Richard Heller of Old Dominion University, will talk about new electro-magnetic treatments that are fighting deadly melanoma.
Plus, there’s a whole field of cancer research devoted just to developing treatments for the treatments — medications that can help ease the punch of chemotherapy side effects.Kimberly Lane of Radford University and her team are researching ways to ease the side effects of a potent chemotherapy drug used against with colon cancer.
Join With Good Reason’s Facebook page at (http://www.facebook.com/pages/With-Good-Reason-radio/203141233005 ) and link to the show on the site, or subscribe to our podcast: www.tinyurl.com/wgrpodcast
Audio files of the full program and its companion news feature will be posted the week of the show to the website:
In the show, “It’s a Jungle Out There,” Mentore discusses her research with the Waiwai, an indigenous people of Guyana, and how she discovered the path of a special songbird from the rainforest to New York City.
Mentore has been conducting ethnographic research with the Waiwai and Makushi people of Guyana since 2002, focusing on their perceptions of the environment and emerging relations with urban Guyanese as well as conservation and development NGOs in the region.
One thread in her research began upon observing the Waiwai trapping and selling a particular species of seed-finch, which she discovered was being transported to urban areas in coastal Guyana and smuggled into Guyanese diasporic communities in New York. She found that they are key players in a favorite pastime among coastal Guyanese men, a singing competition between birds known as ‘birdsport.
“Birdsport is far more than recreational,” said Mentore, whose research sheds light on the complex economic and environmental connections between indigenous communities and urban centers in 21st century Amazonia. “For the men of all backgrounds who participate, it provides an alternative means of social achievement in one of the poorest countries in the Western hemisphere.”
With Good Reason is a program of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. The show airs weekly in Fredericksburg on Sundays from 1-2 p.m. on Radio IQ 88.3 Digital. To listen from outside of the Fredericksburg area, a complete list of air times and links to corresponding radio stations can be found athttp://withgoodreasonradio.org/when-to-listen. Audio files of the full program and its companion news feature will be available online at http://withgoodreasonradio.org/?p=25912.
Mentore is an expert in environmental transitions and critical development theory, with regional specializations in Amazonia and the Caribbean.
Since joining UMW in 2010, Mentore has launched a summer study abroad course in Guyana called Ethnographic Field Methods. She also teaches anthropology courses relating to economics, food, medicine and gender, in addition to classes on Amazonian societies, environment and development narratives and ethnography.
Mentore has been published in The Social Life of Achievement, Anthropology and Humanism and the Journal of Cultural Geography. She is currently waiting publication for her paper titled “The Force of the Imaginary: At Play in the Field of Conservation Economics and Amerindian Sociality.”
Mentore is a member of the American Anthropological Association, the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America Society and the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. She is also a board member for the journal Environment and Society.
She received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Virginia and her doctoral degree from Cambridge University.
During Professor of English Mara Scanlon’s encore interview, to be broadcast June 27 to July 3, she discusses Walt Whitman and his time as a nurse during the Civil War in a show entitled “America the Beautiful.”
In a project that involved collaboration with three other universities, Scanlon worked on a digital humanities project, “Looking for Whitman: The Poetry of Place in the Life and Work of Walt Whitman,” which was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The full interview will be available beginning the week of the show at http://withgoodreasonradio.org/2015/06/america-the-beautiful-2/.
Associate Professor of Psychology Mindy Erchull’s encore interview will be broadcast July 4 to 19. In this program, entitled “The Innocence Project,” she discusses love and jealousy and the link to abusive relationships. Based on findings from a recent survey, Erchull suggests that women who see jealousy as a positive thing may be more likely to find themselves in abusive relationships.
The full interview will be available beginning the week of the show at http://withgoodreasonradio.org/2015/07/the-innocence-project/.
With Good Reason is a program of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. The show airs weekly in Fredericksburg on Sundays from 1-2 p.m. on Radio IQ 88.3 Digital. To listen from outside of the Fredericksburg area, a complete list of air times and links to corresponding radio stations can be found at http://withgoodreasonradio.org/when-to-listen.