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Washington State University
CAS Connect September 2015

Honors and achievements

Members of the College of Arts and Sciences community do excellent work that is recognized across the University and around the world.

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Valerie Adrian
Adrian
Ashley Colby
Colby
Pierce Greenberg
Greenberg
John Schreiner
Schreiner

Several graduate and doctoral students in sociology presented at the American Sociological Association meetings in Chicago. Valerie Adrian, WSU Vancouver, presented “Finding Empathy on Craigslist: Using Technology to Teach Social Problems” at the Society for the Study of Social Problems conference, and presided over a roundtable session, “Family Leave and Flexible Work Arrangements.” Ashley Colby presented “Structures and Meanings in Subsistence Food Production,” which she also presented at the Society for the Study of Social Problems conference. Pierce Greenberg presented “Towards a Resource-Based Environmental Inequality: A Case Study of Coal Waste Impoundments in Appalachia” and “Social Movements Research and Access to Information: Insights and Applications.” Jon Schreiner, WSU Vancouver, presented “Measurement Errors that Reduce Accuracy of Racial and Ethnic Identification in the U.S. Decennial Census.”

kristin-arola_88x106Kristin Arola, associate professor, English, presented “Digital Rhetoric as Confessional” at the Computers and Writing Conference at the University of Wisconsin-Stout.

Bawa AvantikaAvantika Bawa, assistant professor, fine arts, WSU Vancouver, curated the most recent volume of Drain, a refereed on-line journal published biannually and featuring visual art, essays, creative writing, reviews, and other literary work.

Nancy BellNancy Bell, associate professor, English, presented “The Discourse Completion Task as a Method for the Study of L2 Humor” at the International Society for Humor Studies conference in Oakland, Calif., and presented “Humor Theory and Pragmatics: Conformity and Creativity in Humorous Interaction” at the International Pragmatics Association conference in Antwerp, Belgium. She also coauthored Humor in the Classroom: A Guide for Language Teachers and Educational Researchers (Routledge).

Peter BoagPeter Boag, professor and Columbia Chair in the History of the American West, history, delivered the invited lecture “Gender and the Historicity of Patricide: A Case Study from the 19th-Century North American West,” at the international workshop “Honour Thy Father and Thy Mother: Violence Against Parents in the North of Europe” at Oxford University, England.

Ashley BoydAshley Boyd, assistant professor, English, presented “Social Justice and Young Adult Literature: An Exploration of Possibilities, Places, and Critical Pedagogies” and “Teaching Autobiography to Promote Social Advocacy: Exploring Complex Causes through Young Adult Literature” at the Conference on English Education at Fordham University in New York City, and participated in the roundtable “Critically Assessing Our Social Justice Assessments.” Her co-authored article, “Batteries, Big Red, and Busses: Using Critical Theory to Read for Social Class in Eleanor & Park” appeared in the inaugural edition of Study and Scrutiny: Research on Young Adult Literature.

Kimberly BurwickKim Burwick, instructor, English, won the 2015 Sonora Review Prize for her lyric essay “Wings of Gasoline.”

Peter Chilson
Chilson
Rebecca Goodrich
Goodrich
Debbie Lee
Lee
Donna Potts
Potts
Linda Russo
Russo
Jennifer Lodine Chaffey
Chaffey
Roger Whitson
Whitson

Several faculty in English, Peter Chilson, Rebecca Goodrich, Debbie Lee, Donna Potts, and Linda Russo, read their creative work in the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment Conference plenary “A Gathering of Palouse Writers” in Moscow, Idaho. In addition, Russo presented on the panel “Ecopoetic Interdisciplinary Actions”; Goodrich presented a short essay “Five Mice”; Lee presented “Cottage Industry: Eco-Touring in the English Lake District”; Jennifer Lodine-Chaffey presented “Objects of Desire: Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Poetic Modernism of Things”; and Roger Whitson presented “Scale, Toxicity, and Extraction in the Digital Humanities.”

Aurora Clark
Clark
Yasaman Ghadar
Ghadar

Aurora Clark, associate professor, and Yasaman Ghadar, doctoral candidate, chemistry, coauthored “Influence of Aqueous Ionic Strength Upon Liquid: Liquid Interfacial Structure and Microsolvation” in Fluid Phase Equilibria.

Omar CornejoOmar Cornejo, assistant professor, biological sciences, and Brian Kemp, associate professor, anthropology and biological sciences, coauthored “Genomic evidence for the Pleistocene and recent population history of Native Americans” in Science.

Don DillmanDon A. Dillman, Regents professor, sociology, presented “Mistakes Being Made in the Rush to Web Surveys” at the American Association for Public Opinion Research conference. At the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee, he was the discussant for commissioned papers on the challenges associated with the use of smartphones for responding to surveys. Dillman also gave a keynote address, “Mixed-mode Solutions to the People Problems Facing Web Surveys,” to WEBDATANET, a European Union conference on internet data collection methodologies in Salamanca, Spain. With Michael Sullivan (PhD ’84) and colleagues, he co-presented “Measurement and Cost Effects of Pushing Household Survey Respondents to the Web for Surveys of Electricity and Gas Customers in the United States” at the European Survey Research Association biennial conference in Reykjavik, Iceland.

Courtney Helfrecht
Helfrecht
Courtney Meehan
Meehan

Courtney Helfrecht, doctoral candidate, and Courtney Meehan, associate professor, anthropology, coauthored “Sibling effects on nutritional status: Intersections of cooperation and competition across development” in the American Journal of Human Biology.

Desiree HellegersDesiree Hellegers, associate professor, English, WSU Vancouver, authored “From Poisson Road to Poison Road: Mapping the Toxic Trail of Windigo Capital in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms” in Studies in American Indian Literature. She also coordinated the panel presentation “Viet Nam: A Report Back,” based on her participation in a Veterans for Peace delegation marking the 40th anniversary of Vietnamese independence, to air on Portland, Ore., cable television in October. Her related article appeared in Counterpunch.

Craig HemmensCraig Hemmens, professor and chair, criminal justice and criminology, was selected to serve as editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed Criminal Law Bulletin (Thomson Reuters).

Christine HorneChristine Horne, professor, sociology, delivered the plenary address “Social Norms and Institutions” at Congressi Stefano Franscini, Monte Verita, in Ascona, Switzerland.

Leeann HunterLeeann Hunter, clinical assistant professor, English, presented “Daughters in the World: Financial Ruin, Professions for Women, and Daniel Deronda” at the North American Victorian Studies Association conference in Honolulu.

Virginia HydeVirginia Hyde, professor emeritus, English, guest-edited a special international issue of D.H. Lawrence Studies (Seoul University Press). She will present “From the Pueblos to Cambridge” at the national Modern Language Association conference in Austin about her decade of research, including discovery of new manuscript materials, for the Cambridge Edition of the Works of D. H. Lawrence, ‘Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays.’

Erik Johnson
Johnson

Emily Huddart Kennedy
Kennedy

Katrina Leupp
Leupp

Raoul Lievanos
Lievanos

Alair MacLean
MacLean

Several faculty in sociology presented at the American Sociological Association meetings in Chicago. Erik Johnson presented “Environmental Movements” and co-presented “The Social Origins of Evangelical Protestants’ Opposition to Environmental Spending”; Emily Huddart Kennedy presented “Small-p politics: Political Apathy and Civic Life in the Eat-Local Movement” and co-taught a workshop for the Environment and Technology section, “Teaching Race, Gender, and Colonialism within Environmental Sociology”; Katrina Leupp presented “Mental Health, Social Roles and the Gendered Life Course”; Raoul Lievanos presented “Socio-spatial Dimensions of Water Injustice: The Distribution of Surface Water Toxic Releases in California’s Bay-Delta” and “Within the Master’s House: Cumulative Impact, Precaution, and Contradictory State Spaces in Environmental Justice Policy” (he also presented the latter at the Association of American Geographers annual meeting); and Alair MacLean, WSU Vancouver, presented “Race and Class in the Iraq-Era Armed Forces.” She also co-presented: “Historical Change in Labor Market Outcomes among Veterans, 1967-2013” at the International Sociological Association Research Committee on Social Stratification and Mobility in Tilburg, Netherlands.

David LeonardDavid Leonard, professor and chair, critical culture, gender, and race studies, delivered the keynote at the Association of American Colleges & Universities TIDES (Teaching to Increase Diversity and Equity in STEM) Institute at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, focused on developing culturally competent STEM pedagogies.

Kelvin LynnKelvin Lynn, Regents professor, physics, coauthored “Green photoluminescence in ZnO crystals: a combined study using positron annihilation, photoluminescence, and hall measurements” in the Journal of Materials Science Materials in Electronics.

David MarcusDavid Marcus, professor, psychology, was named chair of the Department of Psychology. He also authored “A Big Tent of Dark Personality Traits” in Social and Personality Psychology Compass.

Pavithra NarayananPavithra Narayanan, associate professor, English, delivered an invited talk, “Who’s Afraid of Andrew Wylie? Gatekeepers, Markets, and Knowledge Production,” at the international conference Writing (for) the Market—Narratives of Global Economy” at Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich, Germany.

Sue PeabodySue Peabody, professor, history, WSU Vancouver, published “Freedom Papers Hidden in His Shoe: Navigating Emancipation across Imperial Boundaries” in a special issue of French Politics, Culture, & Society, “The Politics of Empire in Postrevolutionary France.”

Caitlyn PlacekCaitlyn Placek, research assistant, anthropology, authored “Fetal Protection : The Roles of Social Learning and Innate Food Aversions in South India” in Human Nature.

Christine PortforsChristine Portfors, professor, biological sciences, was awarded a Herbert L. Eastlick Distinguished Professorship.

Tahira ProbstTahira Probst, professor, psychology, WSU Vancouver, received the 2015 Chancellor’s Award for Research Excellence.

Robert Quinlan
R. Quinlan
Marsha Quinlan
M. Quinlan

Robert Quinlan, associate professor, and Marsha Quinlan, associate professor, anthropology, coauthored “Vulnerability and Resilience of Sidama Enset and Maize Farms in Southwestern Ethiopia” in the Journal of Ethnobiology.

Maureen Schmitter-Edgecombe
Schmitter-Edgecombe

Maureen Schmitter-Edgecombe, professor, and Robert Fellows, graduate student, psychology, coauthored “Between-domain cognitive dispersion and functional abilities in older adults” in the Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology.

Dirk Scchulze-MakuchDirk Schulze-Makuch, professor, environment, authored “The Physical, Chemical and Physiological Limits of Life” in the journal Life.

Jennifer Sherman
Sherman
Lauren Scott
Scott
Rayna Sage
Sage

Jennifer Sherman, associate professor, sociology, WSU Tri-Cities, presented “Not Friends with the Right People: Gentrification, Stratification, and Marginalization in Amenity-Rich Rural Washington” at the Rural Sociological Society annual meeting in Madison, Wisc., where Lauren Scott, graduate student, and Rayna Sage (PhD Soc ’12) presented “Emotional Labor, Healthy Boundaries, and Self-Care in Rural Human Service Work.” Sherman also recently was named a Fellow with the Comparative Research Programme on Poverty (CROP) of the International Social Science Council for 2015-2018.

Brian SharplessBrian Sharpless, assistant professor, psychology, and director, WSU Psychology Clinic, coauthored Sleep Paralysis, Historical, Psychological and Medical Perspectives (Oxford University Press).

Pamela ThomaPamela Thoma, associate professor, critical culture, gender, and race studies, delivered an invited lecture, “Missing Children and Orphan Clones: Gender, Family, and Reproduction in Twenty-First Century Popular Narratives of American Decline,” at Simmons College in Boston. She also traveled to Dublin, Ireland, to present “Cute Entrepreneurialism: Anna Akana’s Ironic Self-Making and the Critique of Cute and Cool Creative Labor” at the Console-ing Passions 23rd International Conference on Television, Audio, Video, New Media, and Feminism.

Nathalie WallNathalie Wall, assistant professor, chemistry, and Jamie Weaver, doctoral candidate, chemistry, coauthored “Wet Chemical and UV-Vis Spectrometric Iron Speciation in Quenched low and intermediate level nuclear waste glasses” in the Journal of the Material Research Society.

Xueying Snow WangXueying Wang, assistant professor, mathematics, authored “Infleunce of human behavior on cholera dynamics” in Mathematical Biosciences.

Victor VillanuevaAn article by Victor Villanueva, professor, English, “Subversive Complicity and Basic Writing across the Curriculum” was chosen as the year’s best within the Journal of Basic Writing and was selected for inclusion in The Best of the Independent Rhetoric & Composition Journals 2014 (Parlor Press).

Roger WhitsonRoger Whitson, assistant professor, English, authored the chapter “Critical Making in the Digital Humanities” in Introducing Criticism in the 21st Century. His article “Steampunk Anachronisms: Queer Histories of the Digital Humanities” appeared in Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge; and he presented “Anthropogenic Steampunk: A Geology of the Victorian in China Mieville’s Iron Council” at the North American Victorian Studies Association conference in Honolulu.