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September 2008
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Faculty Notebook
Faculty Members Earn Promotions,
Tenure
Bart Dredge,
who joined Austin College’s faculty in 1994, has been promoted to
professor of sociology effective this fall. The rank of full
professor at Austin College is reserved for those faculty members
whose careers reflect outstanding cumulative achievement.
Faculty considered for promotion
to professor have demonstrated excellence in teaching and in
research, publication, or other professional work that supports
distinguished teaching and continued intellectual growth. Superior
performance in areas such as advising, program development,
committee service, and other institutional leadership are required.
A faculty member normally completes a minimum of six years of
successful full-time teaching at the rank of associate professor
before consideration for promotion.
Alessandro Garganigo,
English; Julie Hempel, Spanish; Elena Olivé, Spanish;
and Ivette Vargas-O’Bryan, religion, were granted tenure and
promotion to associate professor effective fall 2008.
Faculty members considered for
tenure are evaluated on teaching, professional development, and
service to Austin College, with teaching as the most important
factor in evaluation. Tenure is a contractual agreement for
continued appointment until retirement unless the faculty members
resigns or is dismissed for cause. Austin College tenure-track
faculty members are normally considered for tenure in the sixth year
of probationary service. In some pre-arranged instances, a faculty
member may receive credit at another institution toward satisfying
the probationary period for full-time teaching experience.
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Faculty Appointed to Leadership
Roles as Academic Division Deans
The appointment this fall of
Patrick Duffey, professor of Spanish, as dean of
Humanities completes a cycle of recent updates in the deans’
positions at the College.
In fall 2007, Steve
Goldsmith, professor of biology, and Jerry Johnson,
professor of business administration and economics, began terms
as deans in the divisions of Sciences and Social Sciences,
respectively.
The appointments were made
by President Oscar C. Page upon advice from Mike
Imhoff, vice president for Academic Affairs, who consulted
with division faculty.
The appointments are made
for a term of six years. Each dean coordinates the departments
of the division, supervises staff and facilities, monitors and
requests budgeted funds, coordinates new faculty searches,
conducts reviews and evaluations of faculty, and assists
individual faculty members in support of teaching, advising,
scholarship, and other professional activity. Due to heavy
administrative duties, deans customarily teach two courses each
in the fall and spring terms and may occasionally teach a
January Term course.
The appointments follow the
completion of service as divisional deans in summer 2007 and
2008 by E. Don Williams, professor of mathematics and
Chadwick Chair in Mathematics; Howard Starr, professor of
psychology; and Bernice Melvin, professor of French and
Margaret Root Brown Chair of Foreign Languages.
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Annual Awards Honor Faculty Accomplishments
Awards presented at the close of
each academic year recognize faculty members’ service to the College
community, teaching excellence, and individual scholarship. One
recipient each from the Sciences Division and Social Sciences
Division is selected for each honor. The Humanities Division selects
two recipients for each award due to its larger number of faculty.
TEACHING: Light Cummins,
professor of history; James Johnson, professor of classics;
Melanie Fox Kean, assistant professor of economics; and
Kelly Reed, associate professor of biology.
SCHOLARSHIP: Nathan Bigelow,
assistant professor of political science; Wayne Crannell,
associate professor of music; Michael Higgs, associate
professor of mathematics and computer science; and Jacqueline
Moore, professor of history.
SERVICE: Peter Anderson,
associate professor of English; Truett Cates, professor of
German; David Griffith, associate professor of business
administration; and Donald Salisbury, associate professor of
physics.
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 Traveling the world is one of
the perks of the job for most Austin College professors. Jackie
Moore, professor of history, has taken advantage of that perk on
numerous JanTerms and study abroad trips since coming to the College
in 1994. One of Jackie’s most memorable trips is a JanTerm 2005 trip
after the December 26, 2004, Indian Ocean Tsunami. Austin College
students quickly gathered medical supplies and more than $4,000 in
donations that students in Jackie’s course, “Thailand, Cambodia,
Myanmar: Temples & Empires,” delivered to a relief agency in
Thailand. “Being able to make a contribution to those countries was
the most rewarding,” she said.
During her 2007– 2008
sabbatical, Jackie travelled to India, England, France, Hawaii, New
York, and Washington, but it was a 2,500-mile research trip this
summer that recently intrigued her most — and she never left Texas.
“I was stunned with the diversity of the different parts of the
state and with just how flat south Texas plains actually are,” said
Jackie of the trip to research her book, Cow Boys and Cattle Men:
Nineteenth Century Class and Masculinity on the Texas Frontier,
to be published in late 2009 by New York University Press. “I saw
desert, mountains, hills, rivers, land-locked sand dunes, beaches,
cities, small villages, and even a picnic area made of giant,
painted metal teepees.”
Though Jackie enjoyed her
travel-intensive sabbatical, she is just as happy to be in the
classroom this fall. She’s particularly interested in teaching
within an area of her research specialty in the course “Gilded Age
and Progressive Era, 1877–1919.” This period of American history
“has everything — great scandal, but also great reform, spectacular
economic and technological achievement alongside spectacular
poverty, and Teddy Roosevelt to boot,” Jackie said.
Jackie’s teaching usually
includes aspects of women’s experiences in history, like Emily
Austin’s. She said it’s important that her students know the
obstacles women have overcome and what rights exist today, and are
able to look critically at situations instead of assuming equality
exists.
Jackie said she benefited from growing up in an
era where she felt that being a woman was not a barrier to
achievement, but admitted that not everyone shared her beliefs. She
said the view that women achieve positions based on affirmative
action measures instead of their own merit is a sign that women
still face perceptual barriers. “As Emily Austin shows, in reality,
women have been running things very capably all along so it should
be no stretch of the imagination to think that a woman could be as
good at the job as anyone else,” Jackie said.
Jackie finds the diversity of
experiences and academic courses in her role at Austin College as
broad as the geographic diversity of Texas. “I love the flexibility
I have to teach a variety of courses and the opportunity to take
students abroad for JanTerm to places they would never go by
themselves,” she said. The College’s commitment “to make a positive
contribution to the world,” as exemplified by the emergency relief
trip to Thailand, is yet another reason she’s proud to be a part of
Austin College.
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Jeff Czajkowski,
assistant professor of economics, presented the research paper
“Run from the Water, Hide from the Wind: Toward a Better
Understanding of the Costs of Not Evacuating from a Hurricane”
in July at the 2008 Hazards and Disasters Researchers Meeting,
held near Boulder, Colorado. This summer, he continued research
in this area in conjunction with Emily Kennedy ’09, a
math and economics major.
 Peter DeLisle,
the Leslie B. Crane Chair in Leadership Studies and director of
the College’s Posey Leadership Institute, was the principal
instructor of the Leadership Development Conference this August
hosted by the Texas Engineering and Technical Consortium and All
Across Texas. He will lead another session in Dallas in October.
Sessions include topics such as leadership effectiveness,
project management, formal communication, and engineering ethics
in the workplace. Approximately 60 engineering students from
across the state participated in the week-long program. The
state-sponsored program also promotes collaboration among
engineering colleges and allows students to interact with
engineering professionals and learn about various career
specialties. In August, representatives on hand included those
from Raytheon and Texas Instruments as well as the Texas Corp of
Engineers. Will Rusinko ’09, a member of the Posey
Leadership Institute who plans a career in engineering, served
as a teaching assistant and facilitator at the conference.
DeLisle hopes to include Austin College computer science
students in future conferences.
Daniel Dominick,
associate professor of music, became president of the South
Central Division of the College Orchestra Director’s Association
in February. The Sherman Symphony Orchestra, conducted by
Dominick, will perform its 200th concert, the Tchaikovsky Sixth
Symphony (Pathetique)on October 25.
Kirk Everist
and Brett Boessen, assistant professors of
communication studies, led Sherman-area aspiring filmmakers to
release their creativity in Script-to-Screen workshops this
summer. Each provided a workshop offered to assist individuals
working on the 24-Hour Script-to-Screen Short Film Contest
sponsored by the Sherman Arts Festival held September 20. In
addition to exploring creativity, the faculty members offered
insight on narrative story telling, script writing, and filming.
Greg Kinzer,
assistant professor of English, will present a paper,
“Morphology, Consilience, and Metaphor: Natural History as
Poetic Method,” at the Modernist Studies Association Conference
in Nashville, Tennessee, in November. The paper examines the
influence of Darwin and the scientific practices of early 20th
century natural historians on modernist poets, especially
Marianne Moore. He also will participate in a seminar discussion
on “Modernist Gene/alogies,” which asks how the understanding of
evolution and genetics developed in modernist/modern culture. In
addition, Kinzer will present the paper “Reiteration as Noise:
Joan Retallack’s ‘The Woman in the Chinese Room’” at the annual
conference of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts
in Charlotte, North Carolina, in November.
 Jerry Lincecum,
professor emeritus of English, and Peggy Redshaw,
professor of biology, are taking their Telling Our Stories
autobiography program in a little different direction this fall.
They have joined with Kelly Reed, associate professor of
biology, and other members of Austin College’s Relay for Life
team, ’Roos Fighting Cancer, to compile and publish a thematic
book of stories, Contemplating Cancer: Stories of Life, Love,
Laughter, and Loss. The book will contain stories written by
cancer survivors, as well as family members and friends of
cancer patients. More than 55 stories have been collected, with
experiences dating as far back as 1930. Several contributions
have come from faculty, staff, and alumni. Publication of the
book is scheduled for early November. All profits will go to the
American Cancer Society for research. In June, Lincecum and
Redshaw made a Gideon Lincecum Chautauqua presentation at the
Botanical Research Institute of Texas in Fort Worth, Texas. They
also conducted a workshop for teachers in grades 4–8 at the Star
of Texas Museum in Washington County, giving free copies of
Gideon’s book Science on the Texas Frontier and
demonstrating ways to use original historical and scientific
writing in the classroom.
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Troncalli Receives Award for Research
Pursuit
Andra Troncalli,
assistant professor of physics, has received a Cottrell College
Science Award from Research Corporation, providing nearly
$45,000 for her project “Investigation of Vortex Pinning
Anisotropy in the High Temperature Superconductor YBa2Cu3O7-8.”
She received an additional
$9,000 from the Austin College Priddy Grant for the work.
“Columnar defects have
proven to be highly effective at pinning vortices in high
temperature superconductors,” Troncalli said.
“However, most studies have
been performed with the defects oriented either perpendicular
to, or at large angles relative to, the superconducting Cu-O
planes of YBa2Cu3O7-8. No study has investigated the effects of
columnar defects introduced parallel to the superconducting Cu-O
planes. We will perform a systematic study in which we compare
the effects of columnar defects introduced parallel and
perpendicular to the superconducting Cu-O planes.”
The award is for two years
and covers equipment, supplies, stipends for the faculty member
and a student, and travel funds to conduct research at other
institutions.
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September 2008
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Where are they now?
 Dan Schores,
Associate Professor Emeritus
of Sociology
If he’s not on a river cruise in
Holland or Belgium or on some other excursion, Dan Schores,
associate professor emeritus of sociology, is likely to be
found somewhere near Austin College.
He said his days leading
JanTerms in the Caribbean fed his travel interest, but now that he’s
footing the entire cost of travel, he doesn’t globetrot quite so
often.
That’s not to say Schores is
sitting at home. He and his wife, Marie, keep their days full
serving in numerous organizations in Sherman. Dan preaches on a
regular basis in southeastern Oklahoma Presbyterian churches and
serves as president of the Texoma Senior Foundation, which collects
donations for senior service agencies in the area. He also leads the
Austin College Elderhostel program, an informal learning opportunity
for citizens older than 55; works with the Alpha Phi Omega national
service fraternity, which Schores helped establish on campus; and
finds time to attend plays, musical performances, and sporting
events at Austin College.
When he’s not serving the
community, Schores enjoys woodcarving as a member of the Texoma
Woodcarving Guild and keeps up with the subjects that interested him
most in his 25-year academic career that started at Austin College
in 1969. He often speaks to community organizations, covering topics
such as the southwest American Indians or Victorian homes in north
Texas.
Whether on a river in Holland,
in a pulpit in Oklahoma, or at a podium in Sherman, Schores hasn’t
seemed to lose a step since retiring from the faculty in 1994.
Contact him at1513 Yarborough, Sherman, Texas 75092.
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