CAS Department Updates June 2015
Office of the Dean
Below are the names of the faculty members in the College of Arts and Sciences who were recently tenured and/or promoted. The work of these faculty members is testimony to the very high standards set in this College. Their records of scholarly and creative accomplishments, their success as teachers, and their contributions to their professions, the University, the College, and the community are impressive indeed.
The College of Arts and Sciences Full Professor Lecture Series was established in fall 2007 to give faculty members newly promoted to the rank of “full” Professor the opportunity to share with the university community a single piece of their research or an overview of their research with the goal of communicating a sense of the excitement of the intellectual problems that have energized their careers. This tradition will continue in the coming year and all are invited to attend.
Promotion to Professor
• Eileen Burgin, Political Science
• Kelley Helmstutler Di Dio, Art and Art History
• Nancy Dwyer, Art and Art History
• Kathy Fox, Sociology
• Giuseppe Petrucci, Chemistry
• Tom Visser, History
• Luis Vivanco, Anthropology
Promotion to Associate Professor with Tenure
• Mildred Beltre, Art and Art History
• Pablo Bose, Geography
• Anthony Grudin, Art and Art History
• Jinny Huh, English
• Valeri Kotov, Physics
• Ching Selao, Romance Languages and Linguistics
• Rashad Shabazz, Geography
• Jennifer Sisk, English
Promotion to Senior Lecturer
• Erica Andrus, Religion
• Judith Christensen, Psychological Science
• Margaret McDevitt, Art and Art History
• Shelley Warren, Art and Art History
Faculty Research Support Awards – Spring 2015
• Ellen Andersen, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science. The Joan Smith Faculty Research Award: With This Ring, I Thee Wed: The Legal and Political Fight for the Right to Marry
• Bryan Ballif, Associate Professor, Department of Biology: Identification of Chagas Disease Vector Blood Meal Sources Using Protein Mass Spectrometry
• Alice Fothergill, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology: Children of Katrina Index Creation
• Hilary Neroni, Associate Professor, Department of English: Feminist Film Theory and Cléo from 5 to 7
• Nicole Phelps, Associate Professor, Department of History: The United States in the World: US Consuls Abroad, 1789-1924
Interdisciplinary Experiential Engagement Funds – Spring 2015
Designed to increase the range of interdisciplinary courses providing "real-world” learning experiences:
• Deborah Ellis, Associate Professor, Department of English, and Andrew Barnaby, Associate Professor, Department of English: Shakespeare 2016 – the Soliloquies on Film
• William Falls, Professor and Chair, Department of Psychological Science, and Steven Zdatny, Professor, Department of History: War and Genocide: An Interdisciplinary Course
Dean’s Lecture Awards for 2015-2016
The following professors were chosen as recipients of the Dean’s Lecture Award for the upcoming academic year:
• Gregory Bottoms, Professor of English, will present the fall 2015 Dean’s Lecture.
• Dianna Murray-Close, Associate Professor of Psychological Science, will present the spring 2016 Dean’s Lecture.
This is the judgment of the Dean’s Lecture Award Committee. The committee members were impressed by how well the accomplishments of both professors fit the requirements of the award: excellence in scholarship combined with the ability to translate it into stimulating teaching. Each recipient of the Dean’s Lecture Award will receive $1,000 in research support. Exact dates and lecture topics for each professor will be announced in the fall.
APLE Summer Stipend Recipients
The 2015 APLE Summer recipients were recently chosen and will be awarded funding from the Dean’s office to work on summer research projects. This year’s recipients are Jessica Soldkin and a joint project by Lucas Grigri and Alexander Rosenberg. APLE Summer Stipends provide a summer salary of $3,000 for undergraduate students. Typically, two stipends are awarded each year.
Jessica will be collaborating with History Assoc. Professor Abigail McGowan. Jessica will travel to London to do archival research at the British Library. The title of their project is Behind the Lines: The Partitions of British India and British-Mandated Palestine, 1935-1950. Lucas and Alexander will be working with Geography Assoc. Professor Pablo Bose. Their project title is A Qualitative Study of Refugee Resettlement in Greater Burlington, VT. They will focus their research on Burlington’s Old North End neighborhood, with plans to extend their research to neighborhoods in Winooski and South Burlington. They will conduct visual documentation of businesses and homes in the Old North End to develop a database of patterns and changes to the local community.
Classics
Associate Professor Jacques Bailly has been awarded a Tytus Fellowship (a short-term library fellowship) from the University of Cincinnati to continue work on his sabbatical project examining Plato’s Theaetetus.
English
Professor Tony Magistrale just signed a contract with Palgrave Macmillan for a new book, The Shawshank Experience: Tracking the History of the World's Favorite Movie.
Associate Professor Helen Scott was this year’s recipient of the Graduate Student Senate Excellence in Teaching Award.
Daniel Lusk, Lecturer Emeritus, received news that his genre-bending short essay, "Bomb," which first appeared in the literary journal New Letters (University of Missouri-Kansas City), has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and will appear in the 2016 anthology Pushcart Prize XL: Best of the Small Presses.
History
Professor Steve Zdatny spent spring semester 2015 on sabbatical leave in Paris. Supported by a Fulbright Senior Scholar grant and a post as Visiting Research Scholar at the School for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences, Zdatny continued working on his book—a study of the history of hygiene in France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—while presenting his scholarship to audiences in Paris, Toulouse, and Oslo.
Political Science
Walter F. Baber and Professor Robert V. Bartlett published “Consensus and Global Environmental Governance: Deliberative Democracy in Nature’s Regime” in the MIT Press, 2015.
Professor Eileen Burgin recently published "War Over Words: Reinterpreting 'Hostilities' and the War Powers Resolution," in The BYU Journal of Public Law 29 (1): 99-148.
A resolution in memory of Professor Emeritus Alan Wertheimer was passed by the Vermont House of Representatives (H.C.R. 165), May 13, 2015.
This year's recipient of the Student Life Award "Best New Club" is the Political Science Department's Political Science Club! Recognized earlier this year by SGA, the Political Science Club has hosted numerous events, garnering the support and interest of many students from all majors, faculty members, and political figures throughout the state. The Political Science Club aims to rally students who share an interest and passion in all areas of Political Science and will return next fall with more events and meetings. For more information, contact the Political Science Club at polsclub@uvm.edu. (A picture of Marta Plociennik, POLS Club President, holding the award certificate is on the Political Science Department website.)
Sophomore political science student Sophia Hoffacker '17 has been awarded the prestigious Udall Scholarship. She is a College of Arts and Sciences student pursuing a double major in environmental studies and political science.
Colin Kamphuis, a sophomore political science and economics double-major, has been awarded prestigious Boren Scholarship.
Romance Languages and Linguistics
Joseph Acquisto's third book, The Fall Out of Redemption: Writing and Thinking Beyond Salvation in Baudelaire, Cioran, Fondane, Agamben, and Nancy was published in April.
Six linguistics students presented their research on the Vermont dialect at two conferences this semester: the McGill Canadian Conference on Linguistics for Undergraduates, where they gave the opening talk, and the UVM Student Research Conference. Their work, which was advised by Prof. Julie Roberts, showed that rather than disappearing, the Vermont accent is changing but remains unique in the region. The students, all majors in linguistics, were Sarah Bellavance, Nicholas Chappel, Aidan Holding, Julia Moreno, Jessica Suriano, and Rebecca Wheeler.
Tina Escaja was a Scholar in Residence at New York University for the spring semester. She was also the Keynote speaker at an event in Mexico where she launched an International Anthology Un tren cargado de sueños. Tina preformed “Destrucivist/a” at both Syracuse University and Hobart and William Smith College, and was part of the "Celebration of Burlington Poets" on April 4th, at the Fletcher Free Library in Burlington. She presented her books, Respiración Mecánica and Caíca Libre/Free Fall, at the McNally Jackson Library in New York on May 1st.
Juan Maura edited a collection of five essays entitled "Ciencia, progreso y ética protestante en Unamuno y Santayana." It can be found at http://www.aecid.es/Centro-Documentacion/Documentos/documentos%20adjuntos/CH_775_enero2015.pdf
The Department welcomed Sherri Rigby as the new Office Coordinator this April. She came to the department from the Registrar’s Office, where she had worked as Assistant to the Registrar.
Theatre
Summer Shakespeare in the Royall Tyler Theatre returns! The partnership between the UVM Department of Theatre and the Vermont Shakespeare Company continues with the bard's timeless romantic tragedy, Romeo and Juliet. Performances in the RTT are August 14 thru 16. Tickets and Additional information.