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Pulitzer grant funds coup coverage

By Phyllis Shier, College of Arts and Sciences

After navigating a coup and rebellion in West Africa with funding from a Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting grant, a Washington State University English professor will share his first-person account in an e-book for a Washington Post publication.

Creative writing professor Peter Chilson’s investigative journalism will be the basis for the e-book, to be released early in December by Foreign Policy magazine. Tentatively titled We Never Knew Exactly Where: Dispatches from a Borderland in Africa, the book addresses the turmoil in Mali over the last year and how those problems relate to the legacy of Africa’s colonial borders.

Peter Chilson with Tuareg nationalists
Peter Chilson with Tuareg nationalists at the Mentao Red Cross refugee camp in northern Burkina Faso.

Chilson received a grant from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting to cover the crises from Mali and neighboring Burkina Faso for six weeks from mid-May to early June. The Pulitzer Center partners with worldwide media agencies to provide coverage on issues of global importance underreported in mainstream American media. Chilson was one of four writers to receive grants to cover borderland disputes around the world. » More …

Dioxin causes disease, reproductive problems across generations

Michael Skinner
Michael Skinner

By Eric Sorensen, WSU science writer

Since the 1960s, when the defoliant Agent Orange was widely used in Vietnam, military, industry, and environmental groups have debated the toxicity of one of its ingredients, the chemical dioxin, and how it should be regulated.

But even if all the dioxin were eliminated from the planet, Washington State University researchers say its legacy would live on in the way it turns genes on and off in the descendants of people exposed over the past half century.

Writing in the journal PLoS ONE, biologist Michael Skinner and members of his lab say dioxin administered to pregnant rats resulted in a variety of reproductive problems and disease in subsequent generations. The first generation of rats had prostate disease, polycystic ovarian disease, and fewer ovarian follicles, the structures that contain eggs. To the surprise of Skinner and his colleagues, the third generation had even more dramatic incidences of ovarian disease and, in males, kidney disease.  Continue story →

Faculty use funding to improve education

Thanks to grants from the Smith Teaching and Learning Endowment, thousands of undergraduates are benefiting from new or revised classes and teaching innovations at Washington State University.

“We are very pleased by the innovations developed by these skilled and thoughtful educators with the funding from the Smith grants,” said Mary F. Wack, vice provost for undergraduate education and dean of the University College. “They each made a great difference to academic experiences of the undergraduates in their classes and programs. And they serve as models to other faculty at WSU and nationally.”

The most recent six $5,000 grants allowed seven faculty members to implement their ideas to improve educational programs, including David Leonard (critical culture, gender, and race studies), Pamela Lee (fine arts), Allyson Beall (environment), and Tom Dickinson (physics and astronomy). They addressed either of two issues of importance at WSU today: improving student engagement in large classes and integrating environmental sustainability concepts into courses. Continue story →

WSU professor ready to help ‘decode’ pop culture

Buddy Levy
Buddy Levy

Television personality, author, and Washington State University clinical associate professor of English Buddy Levy will appear at all three days of Emerald City Comicon, the largest comic book and pop culture convention in the Pacific Northwest. The gathering will be March 1–3, 2013, at the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle.

Levy is a co-star of the hit television series “Brad Meltzer’s Decoded” on The History Channel. The show finds Levy and company traveling the globe in search of answers to longstanding mysteries and legends, including the Lincoln assassination, the D.B. Cooper skyjacking, UFOs, and secret societies.

Levy also is an established author and freelance journalist.

Also appearing at Comicon will be Sir Patrick Stewart (Capt. Jean-Luc Picard in “Star Trek: The Next Generation”), Billy Dee Williams (Lando Calrissian from “Star Wars” films), and Walter Koenig (Chekov from “Star Trek”).

Get tickets and more information at the Emerald City Comicon website.

Homeless women’s stories shared in book, video

Book cover

By Brenda Alling, WSU Vancouver

Homeless women’s stories as shared in a book by a Washington State University faculty member are featured in a two-part video to be broadcast on cable TV six times in the next two weeks.

The video, “Women Surviving Homelessness,” includes Desiree Hellegers, WSU Vancouver associate professor of English, and narrator-activists whose stories are featured in Hellegers’ 2011 book, No Room of her Own: Women’s Stories of Homelessness, Life, Death, and Resistance (Palgrave Macmillan). Hellegers is a founding co-director of the Center for Social and Environmental Justice at WSU Vancouver.

Her book is based on extended interviews with 15 women gathered over nearly 20 years. It illuminates the physical challenges of homelessness on bodies already compromised by health issues and harrowing conditions, including routine threats of sexual and physical violence. Continue story →