Faculty Highlights: 2009
(Alphabetical by faculty member’s last name)
Ricky Allman (Art and Art History) was included in an exhibit at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, IL called Signs of the Apocalypse/Rapture which coincided with the publication of the book Signs of the Apocalypse/Rapture by Front Forty Press, www.front40press.com/sotar.php
- For exhibit info, see: www.hydeparkart.org/exhibitions/2009/07/signs_of_the_apocalypserapture.php
Barry Anderson (Art and Art History) exhibited “Intermissions,” a solo city-wide project involving 13 venues and numerous billboard sites around the Syracuse University campus and city of Syracuse, New York. Highlights included a solo exhibition at the Everson Museum of Art and a new video installation for the Light Work Gallery.
Architecture, Urban Planning + Design received national accreditation/candidacy status in 2009 from the national Planning Accreditation Board.
Scott Baker (Foreign Languages and Literatures) published an article; “The Insufficiency of Irony: The Evolution of Brecht’s Epic Theater,” Brecht Yearbook 34 (2009): 207-226. See: Political Intimacies/Politische Traulichkeiten. Friedemann J. Weidauer, ed. The Brecht Yearbook/Das Brecht-Jahrbuch 34.
Scott also presented four lectures in the Cockefair Series in fall 2009 titled: “Bertolt Brecht as Playwright and Poet.”
Virginia Blanton (English) was inducted into the Scholars Hall of Fame (2009) at her alma mater, Southwestern College.
Michelle Boisseau’s (English) fourth book of poetry, A Sunday in God-Years, was published (2009).
Mitchell Brian (Communication Studies) saw the world premier of his play Maul of the Dead in October, 2009 as part of the Coterie at Night Series.
Jie Chen (Mathematics and Statistics) and her collaborator published a research paper “A Statistical Change Point Model Approach for the Detection of DNA Copy Number Variations in Array CGH Data” in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics in 2009.
Robert Cohon, who has a joint appointment with the Department of Art and Art History and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, completed the installation of ancient Egyptian art at the Nelson-Atkins.
Frances Connelly (Art and Art History) has been invited to contribute a volume to the series on modernism published by Macmillan Palgrave.
Steve Dilks (English) is Director of Universal Design for Learning, an appointment that is part of a $1.3 million NSF grant called KC-Bancs, coordinated by Ronda Jenson in the Institute of Human Development and Kevin Truman, dean of the School of Computing and Engineering. The grant is designed to develop programs at UMKC, the Metropolitan Community College and Kansas City Community College, with a view to increasing the number of students with disabilities—including veterans with disabilities—majoring in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM).
Jenni Frangos (English) has been promoted to Editor of Eighteenth Century Theory & Interpretation, which has just moved to the University of Pennsylvania Press and now publishes four issues per year.
- See: http://ecti.pennpress.org/strands/ecti/journalInfo.htm;jsessionid=84975F8792543D1B6340CE210ED3044B
Gene Friedman (Theatre) received promotion to associate professor, with tenure, September 2009, in recognition of his national standing as a designer, historian and educator. In May 2009, Gene published The Eighteenth Century Liturgical Costume Collection of Zuni Pueblo, a catalogue and history of the oldest intact set of Catholic vestments in North America.
Michael Frisch (Architecture, Urban Planning + Design) was guest co-editor and co-author of the introductory essay with Jacob Wagner of the “Special Issue: New Orleans and the Design Moment,” Journal of Urban Design.
He also presented papers at national meetings.
The German Studies program, which began in the 2007-08 academic year with the introduction of a minor degree, graduated its first student in Fall 2009. This interdisciplinary, team-taught course of study encourages students to learn the German language as well as take classes across disciplines that focus on, or centrally include, the history and cultures of the German-speaking countries.
Elijah Gowin (Art and Art History) was honored when the Charlotte Street Foundation and Urban Culture Project’s Paragraph Gallery hosted “The Heaviest Flower,” an exhibition of recent photographic work by Gowin and Colby Caldwell in October-November 2009. An 80-page full-color catalog was published in conjunction with the exhibit.
Gregory Gutenko (Communication Studies) had six short film and video projects screened in 2009 at film festival venues across the country and in Canada. One of the six, “Flora’s Fancy Free,” an animation/live action dance film, took first place in its category at the ReelHeART Film Festival in Toronto.
Eric Hall (Mathematics and Statistics) worked on a paper on relative logical strengths of different forms of the axiom of choice for finite sets. This is a joint project with Saharon Shelah of Hebrew University and Rutgers University.
G. Derrick Hodge (Sociology) co-edited a book with Merrill Singer, The War Machine and Global Health.
Jessica P. Hodge (Criminal Justice and Criminology) completed her book, Gendered Hate: Exploring the Gender Category of Hate Crime Law and it is scheduled for publication by in spring 2011 by Northeastern University Press under the University Press of New England. The book involved a case study of New Jersey’s bias crime statute. (Their 2011 catalog is not yet online.)
Christie Hodgen (English) won a Pushcart Prize in 2009 for a short story “Tom & Jerry” published in Ploughshares in 2008.
Alexander Holsinger (Criminal Justice and Criminology) completed work on the fourth edition of Correctional Contexts an edited volume that will be published by Oxford University Press dealing with the American correctional system. See: www.oup.com/us/catalog/he/subject/CriminalJusticeCriminology/Corrections/Corrections/?view=usa&ci=9780199751464
Kristi Holsinger (Criminal Justice and Criminology) continues to work closely with the Family Court to provide service learning opportunities for students. This unique program gives students real-world experience working with at-risk delinquent girls, and is a mutually beneficial relationship between UMKC and Jackson County.
Kristi Holsinger, Toya Z. Like and Jessica P. Hodge (Criminal Justice and Criminology) collaborated to write “Gender-specific programs: A glimpse of where we are and where we need to go.” This work examines the practices of one juvenile court system in the Midwest from many different perspectives to assess how adolescent females are being served and to identify areas for improvement. The article appears in Women, Girls and Criminal Justice (Volume 1, pp. 1-16).
Daniel Hopkins (Geosciences) reported publication of his article “Peter Thonning, the Guinea Commission, and Denmark’s Post-abolition African Colonial Policy, 1803-1850” in William and Mary Quarterly, October 2009.
Sungyop Kim (Architecture, Urban Planning + Design) published four articles and made numerous invited conference presentations based on his research on factors affecting transportation and transportation safety issues in the U.S. and abroad. One example is his work “New Immigrants and Transportation: An Analysis of New Immigrant Workers’ Work Trips” in Cityscape: A Journal of Policy Development and Research.
Toya Z. Like (Criminal Justice and Criminology) published work describing the history of school victimizations in the United States over the past twenty years. This work appears in the Handbook of Victimology, and can be found at: www.greenwood.com/catalog/C35935.aspx
She also is working closely with the Hickman Mills Prevention Coalition’s (HMPC) Youth 4 Change (Y4C) committee is centered on Y4C’s initiative to prevent and reduce alcohol and drug use among youth in the Southeastern portion of Kansas City. More information may be found at www.hmpreventioncoalition.org.
Felicia Londré (Theatre) was elected to a second term on the Board of the College of Fellows of the American Theatre. Her twelfth book, The Enchanted Years of the Stage: Kansas City at the Crossroads of American Theater, which last year won the George Freedley Memorial Award, was subsequently recognized with Jackson County Historical Society’s Education Award.
Jennifer Martin (Theatre) was the choreographer for Bare at Unicorn Theatre in Winesburg, Ohio and at the KC Repertory Theatre and Merry Wives of Windsor at Heart of America Shakespeare Festival. Martin published two papers at ATHE in New York: “Embedded Period Movement Directions in Shakespeare’s Texts” and “Defining Original Research for a Kinetic Journal.” The ATME Journal premiered with her kinetic article on “Using a Period Movement Score in Training, Rehearsal and Performance” based on Theodore Swetz’s production of The Country Wife featuring UMKC actors, designers, and technicians. Check it out at www.ATMEWEB.org – click on “Online Resources” and then on “ATME Digital Journal.”
Daniel McIntosh (Physics) was co-author of “Structural Properties of Central Galaxies in Groups and Clusters” in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, September, 2009. See: www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/122593922/issue
Beth Miller (Political Science) and Jennifer Lundgren (Psychology) noted the publication of “An Experimental Study of the Role of Weight Bias in Candidate Evaluation” in the journal Obesity, December 2009.
Kenneth Novak (Criminal Justice and Criminology) published an invited essay in Criminology and Public Policy entitled “Reasonable officers, public perceptions, and policy challenges.”
- Journal information may be found at www.wiley.com/bw/journal.asp?ref=1538-6473
Jennifer Phegley’s (English) collection of essays, co-edited with Andrew Maunder, has just been published by Palgrave/Macmillian (2010): Teaching Nineteenth Century Fiction.
Physics reported a range of research activities that reflected over $900,000 in external grants and contracts for calendar year 2009 as well as receiving three Good Teaching Awards in early 2010 by its faculty.
Louis Potts (History) reported that he lectured at the Middelburg Center for Transatlantic Studies for three weeks on the topic of “The American Revolution.”
Noah Rhee (Mathematics and Statistics) published a paper (co-authored with J. Ding and J. Kolibal) titled “Integral and non-negativity preserving Bernstein type polynomial approximations” in International Journal of Computer Mathematics.
Stephanie Roberts (Theatre) co-directed the first year Discovery Project, The Tempest, with Carla Noack. She also choreographed and coached movement for UMKC’s world premiere of The Master and Margarita. Her original show Boom! An International Lost and Found Family Marching Band enjoyed a successful run at the Kansas City Fringe Festival and at the St. Mane in Lanesboro, MN. In August, she presented a session on “Ensemble Awareness and Availability” at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education conference in New York City.
Over the last year Ron Schaeffer (Theatre) directed Brighton Beach Memoirs at the Black Hills Playhouse in South Dakota. The show employed one graduate acting student, Grant Prewitt, one graduate scenic designer, Evan Hill, and one just-graduated stage manager, Laura Krouch. In fall 2009, he directed I’ll Be Back Before Midnight at the American Heartland Theatre in Kansas City, as well as The Laramie Project for UMKC.
Liana Sega (Mathematics and Statistics) and her collaborators published a paper “Acyclic complexes of finitely generated free modules over local rings’’ in the international journal Mathematica Scandinavica.
Max Skidmore (Political Science) noted that his most significant accomplishment in 2009 was seeing to completion the UMKC Accreditation Self Study 2007-2009. Skidmore served as Steering Committee Chair.
New Letters, edited by Robert Stewart (English), won the trifecta—three national awards for literary publishing in 2010. See: www.newletters.org/Pushcart2010.asp
New Letters on the Air won a NEA/NPS grant for preserving recordings, awarded to Robert Stewart and Angela Elam. See: http://cas.umkc.edu/english/publications/Fall2009NewsletterIssue%202.pdf
Tom Stroik’s (English) book, Locality in Minimalist Syntax, was published by MIT Press (2009) and a collection of essays on his linguistic theory also appeared, published by John Benjamins Publishing (2009).
- http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11785
- www.benjamins.com/cgi-bin/t_bookview.cgi?bookid=LA%20144#toc
Craig Subler (Art and Art History) was selected as an artist in residence at Scuola Internatinale DeGrafica in Venice, Italy for six weeks during the summer of 2009.
- See: www.scuolagrafica.it
Joy Swallow (Architecture, Urban Planning + Design) was named 2009 Educator of the Year by The American Institute of Architects / Kansas City Chapter.
Theodore Swetz (Theatre) played the role of Bengalsky in the department’s world premiere of The Master and Margarita written by Ron Hutchinson and directed by Barry Kyle. This past summer he played Polonius in the critically acclaimed production of Hamlet led by alum Todd Carlton Lanker (who played Hamlet) and directed by Kyle Hatley, Assistant Artistic Director of the Kansas City Rep.
Kati Toivanen (Art and Art History) and Michelle Boisseau (English) collaborated to do the book cover artwork for Bousseau’s book A Sunday in God-Years.
Wayne Vaught and Clancy Martin (Philosophy) had their reader on professional ethics published by Oxford University Press.
- See: www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/?queryField=author&query=vaught&view=usa&viewVeritySearchResults=true
Hristo Voulov (Mathematics and Statistics) published “Asymptotic Behavior of the Solutions of a Nonlinear Difference Equation,” in the Journal of Difference Equations and Applications.
Jacob Wagner (Architecture, Urban Planning + Design) was guest co-editor and co-author of the introductory essay with Michael Frisch of the “Special Issue: New Orleans and the Design Moment,” Journal of Urban Design.
He also completed grant-funded research and presented papers at national and regional conferences.
Randall Wray (Economics) along with his co-PI William Mitchell of the University New Castle (Australia) completed the first phase of a multi-year project funded by the Asian Development Bank. They produced three papers and organized a conference held in Almaty, Kazakhstan to work with researchers from the Central Asian Republic nations (CAREC) addressing the project’s topic: “Developing a sustainable macroeconomic policy response to the global financial, energy and food crises in the CAREC countries.”
Xin Yan (Mathematics and Statistics) published with his co-author Xiao Su Linear Regression Analysis: Theory and Computing.
Yong Zeng continued to do his research with an active NSF grant entitled “Statistical Analysis of the Filtering Models with Marked Point Process Observations: Applications to Ultra-High Frequency (UHF) Data” in 2009.
