About the College | Achievements

GRANTS AND RESEARCH

Monica Biradavolu (sociology) received a $992 grant from NIH to conduct a focus group for her project, "Provider's attitudes to HIV/AIDS services toward the severely mentally ill in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area." 

Vivian Feggan's (Dean's Office) book, The Gathering Place: Ordinary Women; Extraordinary Lives, was accepted by the Virginia Festival of the Book, and she will be presenting on a panel entitled "Why we write what we write."

Douglas Fox (chemistry) was awarded $158,476 by the National Institute for Standards and Technology for the first year of a three year project called "Lignocellulosic Materials as Intumescing Flame Retardants for Bio-based Polymer Composites."

Gregory Harry (physics) received a $12,028 grant from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) for his project "Coating Thermal Noise in Advanced LIGO."

Sarah Irvine Belson (SETH) is the PI on a partnership with the City Year program to provide graduate education to a cohort of City Year participants. The City Year program includes three separate graduate programs in the School of Education, Teaching, and Health: (1) a Master of Education (MEd) program with a concentration in Educational Policy and Leadership; (2) a Master of Arts in Teaching  (MAT) program, and (3) a Master of Arts in Special Education: Learning Disabilities (MA) Program.  City Year is a non-profit organization that brings young people (most of them recent college graduates) together to complete one year of full-time community service in high-need school districts around the country.

Anastasia Snelling (SETH) was awarded a $20,000 grant by Kaiser Foundation Health Plan of the Mid-Atlantic States (KFHPMAS) for her project, "Food Waste Data Collection Project".

APPOINTMENTS AND HONORS

Richard Breitman and Allan Lichtman (history) were named Distinguished Professors. This is the university’s highest professorial rank and recognizes outstanding teaching, service, and nationally and internationally recognized scholarship.

Consuelo Hernandez (language and foreign studies) received the Antonio Machado Poetry Accesit Award for “Polifonía sobre rieles,” Madrid, Spain. She was one of six awardees among 1,097 participants from 29 countries.

Dan Kalman (mathematics and statistics) was awarded the Beckenbach Book Prize by the Mathematical Association of America for his book Uncommon Mathematical Excursions: Polynomials and Related Realms.

Time honored Pete Muller, BA history '05, as the Best Photographer on the Wire.

Richard Sha (literature) was awarded a NEH Fellowship to undertake the project, “Imagining the Imagination: Science and British Romanticism, 1750-1832.”

PUBLICATIONS AND PRODUCTIONS

Naomi Baron (language and foreign studies) wrote the forward to Digital Discourse: Language in the New Media, Crispin Thurlow and Kristine Mroczek, eds., Oxford University Press.

Matt Boerum, studio manager and instructor of audio technology, released his first solo album "Cold Hearted Disaster"  on February 11 at Iota Club & Cafe.

David Keplinger (literature) released an album of songs based on lyrics written 160 years earlier by his great-grandfather. He’s also just published a translation of a book of poems called House Inspection by Carsten Rene Nielsen. He worked with Nielsen on it in Denmark in the summer of 2010.

Gail Humphries Mardirosian (performing arts), Myra Sklarew (literature, emerita), and Nina Shapiro-Perl (anthropology) contributed chapters to the forthcoming book, The Power of Witnessing: Reflections, Reverberations, and Traces of the Holocaust: Trauma, Psychoanalysis, and the Living Mind.

Paul Oehlers's (performing arts) composition, Protolith for marimba and electronic playback was accepted by Ablaze Records for its CD release, Electronic Masters, Vol. 1. The piece was premiered by Nobue Matsuoka at the International Community of Auditory Display Conference and was accepted for the 2012 UAHuntsville News Music Festival. Oehlers also composed music and served as post-production sound supervisor for six short films for AU's Investigated Reporting Workshop in conjunction with Frontline for PBS. The short films examine the issues of border security and illegal immigration. And he composed the film score for SOC faculty member Carolyn Brown's documentary On the Line. The film has been airing on PBS affiliates across the country this year. 

The Japanese translation of the most recent edition of Jeffrey Reiman's (philosophy) book The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison was published.

Andrea B. Rugh, PhD anthropology '78, has published International Development in Practice with academic publisher Palgrave Macmillan.

SPEAKER's CORNER

Lacey Wootton and Glenn Moomau (literature) presented a paper, "Contingent Faculty Can Have a Voice in the 21st Century Academy: Lessons and Suggestions from Term Faculty" at the AAUP Shared Governance Conference.

Richard Sha (literature) presented two papers, “Rethinking Sympathy: Shelley, Mirror Neurons, and Emotion Theory” and “Rethinking Materiality in the Poetry of John Keats,” at the annual Modern Language Association Meeting, Seattle.

IN THE MEDIA

Kim Blankenship (sociology) hosted an episode of C-SPAN's Book TV program "After Words," interviewing Eric Klinenberg about his book "Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone." 

Kyle Dargan (literature) discussed the strong literary community in Washington and talks about the relationship between poetry and government with the Washington Post.

On WAMU 88.5’s The Diane Rehm Show, Kimberley Leighton (philosophy) discussed how adopted children are using their DNA to find their biological family.

On MSNBC’s Jansing & Company, Allan Lichtman (history), discussed the importance of the Iowa Caucus. He also discussed the Iowa Caucus on Canada’s Business News Network.

After being brought in by city council leaders as a national expert to consult on Chicago’s redistricting process, Allan Lichtman (history) told the Chicago Tribune that the dueling groups of aldermen need to show that population variances among wards were designed to protect African-American and Latino voters and preserve racial harmony.

On WAMU 88.5’s The Diane Rehm Show, Peter Starr, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, discussed Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal, a book about a hitman out to assassinate French President Charles de Gaulle.