Honors and achievements

Ten College of Arts and Sciences educators were inducted to the WSU Teaching Academy in recognition of their innovative and passionate approaches to teaching: Andrea Aebersold, clinical assistant professor,English, Tri-Cities; Cassandra Gulam, instructor, foreign languages and cultures, Vancouver; Nick Cerruti, senior instructor, physics and astronomy; Sheila Converse, clinical assistant professor, music;Sabine Davis, instructor, foreign languages and cultures; Donelle “Dee” Posey, clinical assistant professor,psychology; Clif Stratton, assistant clinical professor, history; Mark Swanson, associate professor,environment; Samantha Swindell, clinical associate professor, psychology; and Kate Watts, instructor,English.

Emily Anderson, assistant professor, history, published a new book, Christianity and Imperialism in Modern Japan: Empire for God (Bloomsbury Press).

Greg Atkins, doctoral candidate, history, won the WSU Graduate and Professional Students Association Graduate Teaching Assistant Excellence Award for Summer/Fall 2014. Atkins also received an Alice O. Rice Graduate Fellowship from the Thomas S. Foley Institute for Public Policy and Public Service.

Scott Blasco, assistant professor, and Brian Carter, instructor, music, premiered Blasco’s composition “Plank to Plank”—a setting of Emily Dickinson’s poem of the same name for tenor voice, amplified percussion, and computer—at the Electroacoustic Barn Dance electronic music festival at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

Ruth Boden, assistant professor, music, is featured in a short film premiered at the Kendal Mountain Festival in England. Andante follows Boden as she backpacks and climbs with her cello to the summit of the Matterhorn in the Wallowa Mountains of Oregon. The film was inspired by her ongoing research project “Music Outside Four Walls.”

Sena Clara Creston, clinical assistant professor, fine arts, Tri-Cities, completed a residency and exhibited work in the Lo-Fi Arts Festival, featuring site-specific art engaged with a 360-acre former farm landscape near Arlington, Wash. Creston was chosen to participate based on her proposal forSemilla Besada, a biomorphic installation she made from thousands of spent shotgun shells she collected in rural shooting pits and wove into an enterable structure reminiscent of a tree, monster, and candy-colored playhouse.

Asaph Cousins, associate professor, biological sciences, Judith McDonald, professor, mathematics, and Louis Scudiero, clinical associate professor, chemistry, were recognized in the 2015 WSU Martin Luther King Community Celebration for their contributions to the Office of Multicultural Student Services’ Team Mentoring Program.

Robert Dillon, professor, mathematics, co-authored the paper “Bipolar janus particle assembly in microdevice” in the December issue of the journal Electrophoresis.

Steven Hoch, professor, history, published a new book: Essays in Russian Social and Economic History(Boston: Academic Studies Press).

Caren Goldberg, assistant professor, and Katherine Strickler, faculty researcher, environment, guest-edited a special issue of the journal Biological Conservation, which includes 11 papers on the detection of aquatic species using the DNA that animals release into the environment through normal biological processes.

Dene Grigar, associate professor, English, and director, Creative Media & Digital Culture, Vancouver, delivered a graduate colloquium lecture, “Curating and Preserving Electronic Literature,” at the University of Coimbra, Portugal, and a full-day workshop on curating at the Post-Screen Festival at the University of Lisbon.

Craig Hemmens, professor and chair, criminal justice and criminology, published the article “You Can Look But You Better Not Touch: The Supreme Court Endorses Police Invasion of Privacy in Maryland v. King” in Criminal Law Bulletin, Jan. 2015.

Tim Kohler, Regents professor, anthropology, received the American Anthropological Association’s Alfred Vincent Kidder Award for Eminence in the Field of American Archaeology.

Debbie Lee, professor, English, published a review of Gary Ferguson’s The Carry Home: Lessons from an American Wilderness in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Lee and Kirk McAuley, associate professor and director of undergraduate studies, English, published an essay, “Romantic Recycling: The Global Economy and Secondhand Language in Equiano’s Interesting Narrative and the Letters of the Sierra Leone Settlers,” in Global Romanticism: Origins, Orientations, and Engagements, 1760–1820 (Bucknell University Press).

William Lipe, professor emeritus, anthropology, was guest editor and contributing writer for a recent issue ofArchaeology Southwest Magazine devoted to the archaeology and cultural landscapes of the Cedar Mesa area of southeastern Utah. Lipe also authored the article “Breaking ground: The Neolithic arrives in the American Southwest” in the British magazine Current World Archaeology.

Faith Lutze, associate professor, criminal justice and criminology, received the 2015 WSU Martin Luther King, Jr., Distinguished Service Award.

David Makin, clinical assistant professor, criminal justice and criminology, published a new book, DNA and Property Crime Scene Investigation: Forensic Evidence and Law Enforcement (Routledge).

David Marcus, professor, psychology, authored a new paper, “Is the Dodo Bird Endangered in the 21st Century? A meta-anlaysis of Treatment Comparison Studies” in the journal Clinical Psychology Review.

Otwin Marenin, professor, criminal justice and criminology, delivered the keynote address at the Nepal Institute for Policy Studies conference on International Experiences: Sharing on Roles and Structures of Security Agencies in the Federal Democratic System in Kathmandu. His presentation, “Theoretical Dimensions and International Practices on Roles and Structures of Security Agencies in the Federal Democratic System,” laid out the main challenges Nepal will face as it moves toward a federal governance system and provided potential models for adaption. His address was supported by the Swiss Government and the Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces.

Laurie Mercier, professor, history, received the Sproul Visiting Scholar Fellowship in the Canadian Studies Program at the University of California Berkeley for spring 2015. She also recently published essays in two new books: “Probing Memory and Experience: The Untapped Potential of Oral History (Re)Collections,” in Oral History, Community, and Work in the American West (University of Arizona Press); and “Confronting Race and Creating Community: Idaho’s Ethnic History,” in Idaho’s Place: A New History of the Gem State (University of Washington Press).

Donna Potts, professor, English, recently presented “How an AAUP [American Association of University Professors] Chapter can Transform your Campus” at Gonzaga University in Spokane and “Rape Myths and Rape Culture” at Washington’s Sexual Assault Prevention Conference, University of Washington.

Linda Russo, clinical associate professor, English, won Subito Press’s first creative non-fiction and lyric essay prize for her forthcoming book of essays To Think of Her Writing Awash in Light, which focuses on the work of Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, Anne Waldman, and others.

Jeffrey C. Sanders, associate professor, history, was a fall visiting scholar at the Charles Redd Center at Brigham Young University where he conducted research about the environmental history of children in the atomic west for his book, Children and the Environment in the Postwar West, to be published through Cambridge University Press.

Shannon Scott, assistant professor, music, delivered the lecture “New Options for the Clarinet Concerto by Mozart” and performed in a flute and clarinet recital of music by Arthur Gottschalk and Andre Jolivet at the national conference of the National Association of Collegiate Wind and Percussion Instructors in St. Louis, Mo.

arol Siegel, professor, English, Vancouver, edited and contributed to a special issue of Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge. Siegel is also slated to present at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference in Montreal, Canada.

Clif Stratton, clinical assistant professor, history, won the Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching Award from the American Historical Association, the largest organization of historians in the United States.

Pamela Thoma, associate professor, critical culture, gender, and race studies, has been busy. She authored the chapter “Neoliberal Maternal Discourse, Tiger Mothers, and Asian American Mother-Daughter Narrative” recently published in the collectionMothering in East Asian Communities: Politics and Practices (Demeter Press, Toronto). Her chapter discusses narratives by Asian American women that challenge the idealization of mothering, particularly the style made famous by Amy Chua’s controversial memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.

Thoma also presented an invited lecture at Sophia University’s Institute of American and Canadian Studies in Tokyo: “Mutating Figures in Postfeminist North American Chick Culture: Pregnant Teens, Tiger Mothers, and Orphan Clones,” a discussion of the shift in North American postfeminist popular culture from a focus on the single-career woman, primarily concerned with caring for herself, to the working mother, primarily concerned with caring for others.

In addition, Thoma guest-edited and wrote the introduction for a special volume of the journal Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies, “Contemporary Asian American Literature and Popular Visual Culture.”

Marina Tolmacheva, professor, history, presented “The Indian Ocean in Arab geography: Transmission of knowledge between formal and informal geographical traditions” at the international symposium Circulation of Ideas and the History of Geographical Knowledge: hierarchies, interactions and networks, which was convened by the Commission for the History of Geography of the International Geographical Union at the Federal University in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Roger Whitson, assistant professor, English, delivered an invited lecture, “Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities,” as part of Indiana University’s colloquium series at the Catapult Center for Digital Humanities and Computational Analysis. Whitson’s book with Jason Whittaker, William Blake and the Digital Humanities: Collaboration, Participation, and Social Media, was released by Routledge this month.

The WSU Jazz Big Band, including Greg Yasinitsky, Regents professor and director, and Denise Snider and Brian Ward, instructors, music, was featured in concert at the international conference of the Jazz Education Network in San Diego, Calif.