WSU English professor Donna Potts was selected to serve as chair of the English department in the College of Arts and Sciences.
Potts said she was encouraged to run for the open position because of her commitment to the department.
She said she wants the faculty in the department to have a voice and be able to design their course the way they want to. However, some courses, like English 101, already have a structured curriculum.
“I consider myself an advocate for the faculty. I represent the faculty,” Potts said. “What I’m trying to do is to have a committee of faculty that is advisory, so that it’s not me from top down, reviewing people.”
From the moment he tweeted “covfefe” in the middle of the night, President Trump has been perplexing his millions of Twitter followers with cryptic messages ranging from vague threats to North Korea to his retweets of Islamophobic videos without any comment.
But on Monday, a curious person by the name of Scott Free caught the Internet’s attention.
The unfamiliar proper noun appeared in Trump’s remarkable tweetstorm Monday, in which he wished a long prison sentence on his former personal lawyer Michael Cohen and insisted longtime adviser Roger Stone would not testify against him, leading some to question whether the statements amounted to witness tampering.
Brians
People have been assigning wrong origins or spellings to the age-old idiom for years, according to the 2008 book“Common Errors in English Usage” by Paul Brians, a retired English professor at Washington State University.
People might think the term has something to do with Scottish people (or an unfortunate “Scott”) or that it is “scotch-free,” somehow related to whisky. Others, Brians noted, have erroneously believed “scot-free” alludes to Dred Scott, the slave who sued for his freedom only to lose in an 1857 Supreme Court case.
Dissects writings by Baldwin, Morrison on black male protagonists
A WSU professor’s new book exploring the successes of black males in literature recently won the 2018 Award for Creative Scholarship, announced at the College Language Association (CLA) annual convention banquet.
Oforlea
Aaron Oforlea, associate professor at WSU, published his book, “James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and the Rhetorics of Black Male Subjectivity,” in 2017.
The book is a dissection of multiple writings by prominent black authors James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, he said.
In his writing, he explored how the two writers conceptualized the challenges their black male characters navigated throughout their books, Oforlea said.
“I wanted to know, intellectual curiosity, I guess, what helps us be successful,” he said. “How black men, specifically how these fictional characters, are imagined to be successful by these authors.”
The WSU Office of Research presented awards to eight faculty members, including three in the College of Arts and Sciences, for their outstanding achievements in research, as part of opening ceremonies for WSU Research Week.
Kim Christen
The Creative Activity, Research and Scholarship Award went to Kim Christen, professor in the Department of English, director of the Digital Technology and Culture Program, director of the Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation, and director of Digital Initiatives for the College of Arts and Sciences.
Christen has generated more than $4 million in external funding, including WSU’s first institutional grant from the Mellon Foundation. She has leveraged this support to create and sustain interdisciplinary projects and workspaces, most prominently establishing with WSU Libraries the new Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation.
She directs several digital humanities projects, including the Plateau Peoples’ Web Portal, a collaboratively curated site of Plateau cultural materials; Mukurtu CMS, a free and open source content management system and community digital archive aimed at the unique needs of indigenous communities; and the Sustainable Heritage Network, an online community of people dedicated to making the preservation and digitization of cultural heritage materials sustainable, simple, and secure.
Tammy Barry
An Exceptional Service to the Office of Research Award went to Tammy Barry, professor in the Department of Psychology. Barry co-chairs the Research and Arts Committee & the Centers, Institutes, or Laboratories task force, and provides outstanding support for the many Office of Research initiatives.
Peter Reilly
The awards included a prize for submitting the best idea to the National Science Foundation’s 2026 Idea Machine, a competition to help set the U.S. agenda for fundamental research in science, technology, engineering and mathematics and STEM education. The winner of this award is Peter Reilly, associate professor in the Department of Chemistry, for his idea “Ultra-High Mass Spectrometry: The Next Frontier.”
Two Hollywood production companies have optioned WSU English instructor Buddy Levy’s Conquistador: Hernan Cortes, King Montezuma, and the Last Stand of the Aztecs, with plans to turn the epic tale into a TV series.
Overbrook Entertainment, a company whose partners include actor Will Smith, and MOTOR optioned the book after discussions started last fall.
Published by Bantam Books in 2008, Conquistador chronicles the demise of the Aztec Empire as Hernán Cortés imprisons its leader, Montezuma, and captures what was then the most populous city in the world in what Levy called “the costliest single battle in history.” Some 200,000 Aztecs died.
“I knew from the beginning when I wrote it that it had cinematic value,” said Levy. “Not necessarily from my writing, though I hope that’s part of it. It’s just a whopper of a tale.”
The project now faces the usual challenges: financing scripts for a pilot and other episodes, getting the interest of A-list talent for premier roles like Cortés, Montezuma and their interpreter, La Malinche, and finding a time when the principals are free. Levy himself is rushing to finish Labyrinth of Ice, a book about the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition that saw 18 of its original 25-man crew perish in the Canadian Arctic.
WSU English professor Donna Potts was selected to serve as chair of the English department in the College of Arts and Sciences.
