Honors and achievements – Summer 2015

Kristin Arola, associate professor and director, Digital Technology and Culture, English, was among 12 invited speakers at the inaugural Indiana Digital Rhetoric Symposium at the University of Indiana, where she presented “Ayaangwaamizin: Digital Texts, Cultural Rhetoric, and an Ethic of Care.” She also presented—via Skype—”Slow Composition: An Indigenous Approach to Making” at the Conference on College Composition and Communication.

James Brozik, associate professor, chemistry, published “A fluorescent approach for identifying P2X1 ligands” in Neuropharmacology.

Todd Butler, associate professor and chair, English, published “The Cognitive Politics of Writing in Jacobean England: Bacon, Coke, and the Case of Edmund Peacham” in the current issue of Huntington Library Quarterly. Butler also co-led a seminar on “Early Modern Prose” at the 2015 Shakespeare Association of America meeting in Vancouver, BC.

Paula Coomer, instructor, English, was named writer-in-residence for Clearwater Writers, a new writers colony near Syringa, Idaho.

Lori Beth De Hertogh, doctoral candidate, English, published “Reinscribing a New Normal: Pregnancy, Disability, and Health 2.0 in the Online Natural Birthing Community, Birth Without Fear” in the journal Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology. She presented “Strategies for Designing and Facilitating Digital Writing Workshops” at the 2015 Conference on College Composition and Communication in Tampa, Fla. She also contributed the classroom assignment “Crafting Personal Ethnographies” to the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory Pedagogy Project.

Sabreen Yamini Dodson, principal assistant, physics and astronomy, embarked on her happy retirement after 29 years of service to WSU.

Elizabeth Francese, Edie-Marie Roper, and Alex Way, graduate students, English, presented papers for the panel “Language and Power in First-Year Composition: Translating Sociolinguistics, Subjectivity, and Critical Consciousness” at the Tenth Annual Conference on the Teaching of Writing in Storrs, Connecticut.

Alexander Fremier, assistant professor, biological sciences, published “Modeling the influence of salmon spawning on hyporheic exchange of marine-derived nutrients in gravel streambeds” in Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences.

Dene Grigar, professor and director of Creative Media and Digital Culture, English, WSU Vancouver, was invited to deliver the panel presentation “New Collecting—Curating after New Media” at the International Symposium for Electronic Arts in Vancouver, BC, where she will curate an exhibit of electronic literature and media titled New Text. She also was invited to the panel “Author, Student, Programmer, Peer: Valuing Heterogeneous Teams in Networked Knowledge Production” at the 2015 Scholarly Communication Institute at Duke University.

Tomie Gowdy-Burke and April Strawn, instructors, English, co-presented “Cross-Cultural and Re-appropriated: Using Fairy and Folk Tales in the (University) ELL Classroom” at the Palouse Language and Culture Symposium.

Jon Hegglund, associate professor, English, delivered the invited talk, “Matter Over Mind: Character and Environment in Joyce and Tati,” and facilitated a brown-bag discussion about modernist narrative and the Anthropocene at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma. He also presented “Rethinking the Actant: Object Participants and Non-Narrative Agency” at the 2015 conference of the International Society for the Study of Narrative in Chicago.

Seven members of CAS were honored at the second annual Faculty and Staff Appreciation Day ceremony hosted by the Associated Students of WSU.

Exceptional Professor Award:

Joe Huseby, instructor, politics, philosophy, and public affairs;

David Makin, instructor, criminal justice and criminology

Outstanding Staff Member Award:

Frank Hill, academic advisor and instructor, history;

Joseph Kremer, graduate instructor, sociology;

 Michelle Leusink, instructor, chemistry (not pictured)

Best Advisor Award:

Kristin Cutler, instructor, sociology, and advisor to the Sociology Club

Cougar Award:

David Wollkind, professor, mathematics

Leeann Hunter, clinical assistant professor, English, presented “‘A Selfish Desire to Stand Apart from the Many’: Conduct Manuals, Professional Identity, and Dinah Craik’s Olive” at the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Conference in Atlanta.

Kota Inoue, assistant professor, foreign languages and cultures, published “Uneven Space of Everyday Modernity: The Colonial Logic of Tanizaki Jun’ichiro’s A Fool’s Love” in Japan Forum, the Official Journal of the British Association for Japanese Studies.

Pedro Jiménez-Mejías, postdoctoral researcher, biological sciences, published “Taxonomy of the tribe Apieae (Apiaceae) revisited as revealed by molecular phylogenies and morphological characters” in Phytotaxa.

Michael Johnson, instructor, critical culture, gender, and race studies, was appointed to the state of Washington Clemency and Pardons Board.

Jeffrey Jones, professor, and Kanika Choughule, postdoctoral student, chemistry, published “Interspecies differences in the metabolism of Methotrexate: An insight into the active site differences between human and rabbit Aldehyde Oxidase” in Biochemical Pharmacology.

C. Richard King, professor, critical culture, gender and race studies, was named a WSU humanities fellow for 2015-16.

Nicholas Krebs, doctoral student, critical culture, gender and race studies, published “Confidently (Non)cognizant of Neoliberalism: Kanye West and the Interruption of Taylor Swift” in The Cultural Impact of Kanye West (Palgrave Macmillan).

Mark Kuzyk, Regents professor, and Benjamin Anderson, postdoctoral student, physics and astronomy, published “Wavelength dependence of reversible photodegradation of disperse orange 11 dye-doped PMMA thin films” in Journal of the Optical Society of America.

Debbie Lee, professor, English, published “Dale Flynn’s Blood” in Broad Street Magazine. The magazine also nominated her essay for a Pushcart Prize. Lee was one of four people who read from their works at the Flight of Writers in conjunction with the University of Idaho’s literary journal Fugue.

Claudia Leeb, assistant professor, politics, philosophy and public affairs, was named a WSU humanities fellow for 2015-16.

Buddy Levy, clinical associate professor, English, was the featured presenter at the Boise (Idaho) City Department of Arts and History Fettuccine Forum, where he delivered “Get in the Helicopter: Lead a Life of Adventure By Going With Your Gut and Taking Risks.” He also authored “Best of Boise” in the April issue of Alaska Airlines Magazine, Horizon Edition.

Dean Luethi, assistant professor, music, is performing with the Richard Zielinski Singers at the 50th International Choral Song Festival in Miedzyzdrojoe, Poland, in June.

Philip Marston, professor, and Daniel Plotnick, doctoral candidate, physics and astronomy, published “Symmetric and asymmetric reversible quasi-holographic processing of dual transducer sonar for feature extraction and analysis” in Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

Kirk McAuley, associate professor, English, was awarded a 2015–16 Fulbright Research Grant at the National Library of Scotland to continue working on his second book manuscript, Invasive Species: The Economy and Ecology of British Empire Writing. He also presented “‘Making a Home in Nature’: The Evolution of Robinson Crusoe’s Ecological Consciousness” at the 2015 American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies conference in Los Angeles. Two paper proposals by McAuley were accepted for presentation: at the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment at the University of Idaho, and at the 14th International Congress for Eighteenth-Century Studies in Rotterdam, Netherlands.

David Moffett, professor, biological sciences, published “Fluid absorption in the isolated midgut of adult female yellow fever mosquitoes (Aedes aegypti)” in Journal of Experimental Biology.

Cara Monroe, research associate, anthropology, published “Detection of cytosine methylation in ancient DNA from five Native American populations using bisulfite sequencing” in PLOS One online.

Amber Morczek, doctoral candidate, criminal justice and criminology, published “Pornography: The Mass Production of Sexual Violence,” about the connection between violence toward women and Internet pornography, and “The Synergistic Connection Between Sexual Violence and Rape Culture,” in successive issues of The Sexual Assault Report.

Vilma Navarro-Daniels, associate professor, foreign languages and cultures, was elected to serve a two-year term as secretary of the International Association of Feminine Hispanic Literature and Culture.

Tahira Probst, professor, psychology, coauthored “The relationship between safety–production conflict and employee safety outcomes: Testing the impact of multiple organizational climates” in Work and Stress.

Casey Roulette, postdoctoral researcher, anthropology, published “High prevalence of cannabis use among Aka foragers on the Congo Basin and its possible relationships to helminthiasis” in American Journal of Human Biology.

Linda Russo, clinical associate professor, English,  launched her second book of poetry, Meaning to Go to the Origin in Some Way (Shearsman Books), with a reading in Moscow, Idaho, and a panel presentation at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference in Minneapolis, Poetry of the Plains, High Desert, and Prairie. A poem from this collection is included in Make It True: Poetry from Cascadia (Leaf Press). Russo’s poems recently appeared or are forthcoming in the Australia-based Journal of Poetics Research, the Eratio Poetry Journal, and Leaf Litter #5. Russo is also a guest commenter on Jacket2, the University of Pennsylvania’s online journal of contemporary poetry and poetics.

Maureen Schmitter-Edgecombe, professor, psychology, coauthored “Self-awareness and traumatic brain injury outcome” in Brain Injury.

Hubert Schwabl, professor, biological sciences, published “Variation in song system anatomy and androgen levels does not correspond to song characteristics in a tropical songbird” in Animal Behaviour.

Carol Siegel, professor, English, presented “Between Jews: The Coen Brothers’ Double Address in ‘Inside Llewyn Davis,’” from her project on Jewish double consciousness and double address in cinematic representation of Jews, at the Society for Cinema Studies International Conference in Montreal. She presented a revised version at the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Conference in New Orleans.

Michael K. Skinner, professor, biological sciences, is editor-in-chief of a new open-access journal from Oxford University Press, Environmental Epigenetics.

Matthew Avery Sutton, professor, history, is among 48 scholars nationwide appointed “Distinguished Lecturer” by the Organization of American Historians for 2015-2018. Sutton also was named a WSU humanities fellow for 2015-2016.

Kevin Swearingen, doctoral candidate, chemistry, published “Integrated separation scheme for measuring a suite of fission and activation products from a fresh mixed fission and activation product sample” in Journal of Radioanalytical and Nuclear Chemistry.

Israt “Lipi” Turner-Rahman, instructor, history, received the President’s Leadership Award for advancing leadership and engagement at WSU.

Shannon Tushingham, assistant director, anthropology museum, received the 2015 WSU Libraries’ Excellence Award, which recognizes a non-library WSU faculty or staff member who has shown consistent support for the WSU Libraries.

Jeff Vervoort, professor, environment, coauthored “Hf isotopes in detrital and inherited zircons of the Pilbara Craton provide no evidence for Hadean continents” in Precambrian Research.

Roger Whitson, assistant professor, English, published the essay “Critical Making in the Digital Humanities” in the second edition of Introducing Criticism in the Twenty-First Century (Edinburgh University Press). He also presented “Computational Victorian History: Gibson and Sterling’s The Difference Engine as Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities” at the 2015 Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Conference in Atlanta.

Ann Yasinitsky, clinical associate professor, and Greg Yasinitsky, professor and director, music, presented concerts and masterclasses at conservatories in Ferrara and Pescara, Italy.