Assistant Professor of Business Raji Kunapuli presented a solo-authored paper, titled “Effect of Abstract Language on Critics’ Selection of Referents for IPOs” at the Southern Management Academy Conference in San Antonio, TX.

Assistant Professor of Mathematics Noelle Sawyer was the American Institute of Mathematics’ Invited Speaker at the Modern Mathematics Workshop at the SACNAS NDiSTEM conference in Phoenix, AZ on October 30. She presented “Unique Equilibrium States for Geodesic Flows.”

Professor of Education Michael Kamen was an invited presenter, along with Retired Project WILD State Coordinator Kiki Corry and Leander ISD Elementary Science Coordinator Jennifer Kaszuba, to lead “Hike Through the Guide” for the first of the WILD Webinar series, a professional development webinar for Project WILD facilitators.

Associate Professor of Communication Studies Lamiyah Bahrainwala and Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Jaishikha Nautiyal received the Monograph of the Year Award for their co-authored article “Queer desi kinships: Reaching across partition.” The article appears in the Tier-1 journal QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, and articulates non-Western, and specifically South-Asian, queer praxes. The award is from the National Communication Association’s GLBTQ Division. The article can be read here.

Director of Study Abroad and International Student Services Monya Lemery facilitated the “Member Mingle: Solo/Small Office Social” for the Forum on Education Abroad virtual networking series on October 18.

Director of Study Abroad and International Student Services Monya Lemery presented “ Funding Strategies and Scholarships” at the Texas International Monthly virtual meeting on October 9.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper presented the keynote lecture at the inaugural concert of the 2024 Corcoran Music Festival, hosted by George Washington University. The centerpiece of the concert was the previously unheard “Five Spiritual Songs in High and Low Keys” of Margaret Bonds, which Cooper published in August 2024 ([Ann Arbor]: Videmus).

Assistant Professor of Biology Kim McArthur co-authored a research article recently accepted in the Journal of Comparative Neurology, presenting the results of her Spring 2023 sabbatical (funded, in part, by the Sam Taylor Fellowship). The article, titled “Structure and topography of facial branchiomotor neuron dendrites in larval zebrafish (Danio rerio),” uses a combination of single-cell labeling, in vivo fluorescence microscopic imaging, and 3D tracing to provide evidence that early synaptic input to motor neurons may be determined by the relative location of their dendrites in the developing hindbrain. This work contributes to our growing understanding of the importance of early spatial organization for the development of neural circuits.

Assistant Professor of Sociology Amanda Hernandez presented preliminary insights from her project, “Teaching Christianity and Whiteness in Turbulent Times,” at the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (SSSR) conference in Pittsburgh from October 17–20.

Assistant Professor of Education Marilyn Nicol had her essay, “Disrupting epistemology and coalescing community: Disability activism on social media,” published in the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies. Trends in critical disability studies have taken issue with the absence of representations of disability beyond images of heroism or charity cases. In addition, an absence of representation in cinema and literature reinforces an existing bias that individuals with disabilities are uninteresting and have less value than nondisabled people (Beckett et al.; Hodkinson). The article explores the frontier of disability activism on social media as a space where new onto/epistemologies grapple among existing biases of disability. The article is available here.

Sam Irizarry ’23 was an invited panelist at the Texas Communicators Network meeting focused on the topic “Connect & Conserve Through Social Media.” He represented Hill Country Conservancy, where he enhances the organization’s online presence through content strategy, social media management, and digital storytelling. More information about the panel can be found here.

Assistant Professor of Education Raquel Sáenz Ortiz published the manuscript “Solidarity in labor organizing: The alliance between the Black Panther Party and the United Farm Workers,” in the Black History Bulletin (BHB), volume 87, issue 2. The manuscript examines the collaborations between the Black Panther Party and the United Farm Workers in the 1960s and 1970s and includes a project-based lesson on solidarity in labor organizing for a high school U.S. History course. This manuscript is part of a special issue on African Americans and Labor.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Bonnie Sneed has been re-elected to a three-year term as the National Treasurer for the College Music Society (CMS). She has been instrumental in creating best accounting practices for the organization. She also chaired the Oversight Committee for the External Consultant to look at the structure and processes for CMS. She also successfully encouraged the organization to apply for ERC funding, which earned CMS a significant governmental return of monies to be used for financial needs of the Society. Her new term will expire at the end of 2027.

Dante Medina ’26 presented a poster titled “Using Molecules to Store Energy” at the Southwest Regional Meeting of the American Chemical Society in Waco, TX. This presentation resulted from research done with Professor of Physics Steve Alexander.

Dominic Mashak ’26 presented a poster titled “Finding Molecules with Large Hyperpolarizabilities” at the Southwest Regional Meeting of the American Chemical Society in Waco, TX. This presentation resulted from research done with Professor of Physics Steve Alexander during the summer of 2024.

Assistant Professor of History Bryan Kauma presented his forthcoming paper, “‘Critical but stable’: Agricultural Propaganda, Politics and Hunger in Zimbabwe,” at the Young Scholars Initiative, Exploring the Dark Side of the Moon: The History of Economics in the Global South workshop on October 17.

Jodi Glenn-Millhouse ’25, Kaiden Salaz ’26, Annalina Slover ’26, and Carolyn Waldie ’26 presented posters on their research on how photosynthetic diatoms adapt their light-harvesting under light and magnesium stress at the Southwest Regional Meeting of the American Chemical Society in Waco, TX. Their presentations resulted from research done with Assistant Professor of Chemistry Sara Massey.

On October 18-19, Professor of Political Science Eric Selbin, one of the founding members of the Resistance Studies Network, presented a chapter in progress at the 20th Anniversary meeting of the Resistance Studies Network at the University of Göteborg, titled “Why do We Say “Resistance” When We Mean Struggle? An Entangled Anarchival Approach.”

On October 16, Professor of Political Science Eric Selbin presented a pedagogical chapter in progress at Umeå University’s Department of Political Science Pedagogy and Practice Seminar, “everythingisconnectedtoeverything: People as the Makers of His/Her/Theirstory and his/her/theirstory.”

Professor of Political Science Eric Selbin attended the Living Democracy Symposium at the University of Maryland on October 10 and participated in the Decentering Whiteness Workshop, inspired in part by his co-authored book with Meghana Nayak ’97, Decentering International Relations.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Bonnie Sneed recently judged the All-State Region auditions at Stony Point High School. Senior music education student Emma Duncan ’25, recommended by Dr. Sneed, was also asked to serve as a judge for this competition. Hundreds of students sang to be selected for All-Region, and less than 100 will continue on to the next level of All-State auditions. Every year, more than 70,000 students audition for instrumental and vocal ensembles across the state, and fewer than 2,000 are chosen to perform in February at the state music educators conference.

Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson was an invited participant in the Third Coast Central America Collaborative at Texas Christian University from October 17-18, where she presented “The Flowers’ Story: Emerging Racial Categories and their Socio-ecological context on the British Coast of Central America in the late 1700s.”

Professor of Psychology Traci Giuliano published an article with several current SU undergraduates, including Georgia Micknal (first author) ’25, Samantha Gonzales ’26, Lauren Levee ’27, Gabrielle Fullard ’27, and Kalista Esquivel ’26. The article is titled “(Don’t) hit me up: The effects of initiator gender and setting on perceptions of date initiation” and will be published in the December issue of the North American Journal of Psychology.

Staff Instructor in Spanish Noelia Cigarroa-Cooke and Professor of Spanish Carlos de Oro presented the paper “Monstruosidad y poder: Alegorías de la injusticia en Sin señas particulares y La llorona” at the 77th annual convention of the Rocky Mountains Modern Language Association in Las Vegas, NV, on October 10-12.

On October 15, Visiting Assistant Professor of Theatre Amy Rebecca King spoke at the book launch for Critical Acting Pedagogies: Intersectional Approaches. The book launch was held at RADA (The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art) in London and online, broadcast in America and the UK. Her chapter, “Liberating Casting and Training Practices for Mixed-Asian Students,” was one of 10 academic writings highlighted at the event.

Professor of Communication Studies Valerie Renegar presented a paper at the 9th meeting of the Nordic Rhetoric Association in Copenhagen, Denmark. The University of Copenhagen has distinguished itself as one of the finest rhetoric programs in Europe and is making a worldwide impact in rhetorical studies. The conference theme was “Technology in Transition,” and Dr. Renegar, along with her co-authors Dr. Stacey Sowards from UT Austin and Dr. Kristi Cole from NC State, presented a new piece on digital collaboration in research and teaching, and explored ways that these collaborations can function as mentoring opportunities. They focused on building and engaging in digital collaboration and the importance of horizontal mentoring and developing vulnerable relationships outside of an individual institution.

Part-time Professor of Creative Writing Chelsey Clammer ’05 recently had a personal creative essay published in Under the Gum Tree. Her essay, “Growth,” looks at the experience of a tumor extraction and the end of a relationship. The essay is the featured piece for the journal’s Fall 2024 issue. The issue can be purchased (print or digital) here.

Biochemistry major Samantha (Sam) Hazen ’26 has been selected as a finalist for the American Chemical Society (ACS) Agricultural and Food Chemistry Division (AGFD) Undergraduate Poster Competition. As part of the award, Sam will receive $1,000 in travel expenses to attend the spring ACS National Meeting in San Diego, CA, where she will present her poster, titled “Comparison of phenolic composition, flavonoid content, and antioxidant properties among cacao nibs sourced from different origins.” The poster is based on research that Sam is completing with Professor of Chemistry Emily Niemeyer. The ACS AGFD competition was created to showcase the research talents of undergraduate students, and all finalists participate in a poster symposium with the possibility of winning additional cash prizes.

Mathematics and biochemistry major Brian Armijo ’25 presented “A Hidden Markov Model for Parkinson’s Disease Progression” at the Texas-Louisiana Section Meeting of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). His poster presents preliminary work on his mathematics capstone under the supervision of Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton. Armijo is also a Dixon Scholar and Southwestern’s first Goldwater Scholar in 30 years.

Senior Research and Instruction Librarian Katherine Hooker and Instruction and Student Success Librarian Emily Thorpe spoke at the 2024 Texas Library Association’s Library Instruction Round Table Summit on October 11. Their presentation was titled “Pirates, Puzzles, and Pathways: Gamifying Library Instruction for First-Year Success” and discussed scavenger hunts, breakout kits, and digital escape games that SLC has been designing and implementing since 2021 to successfully enhance traditional library instruction methods.

Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Raquel Moreira has published the article “Invoking ethnic identity in the service of right-wing rhetoric: an analysis of 2022 Latina republican candidates in South Texas,” with Dr. Arthur Soto-Vásquez of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in Communication, Culture, and Critique. The essay examines campaign ads from three Latina GOP candidates in South Texas, in which Moreira and Soto-Vásquez identified the strategic deployment of conservative ethnic identity that disavows racialized identity through anti-immigrant rhetoric. Instead of moderating anti-immigration discourse, as has been suggested by observers on how to attract Latine voters, these candidates instead redirect the immigrant threat narrative towards other subgroups of Latines. The article can be found here.

Associate Professor of German Erika Berroth participated in the 48th annual conference of the German Studies Association from September 26-29 in Atlanta, GA. Berroth’s research paper, “Marica Bodrožić und Deniz Utlu’s ‘Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten’ – Reflections on the Curated Virtual Audio Archive Dichterlesen.net,” contributed to a series of panels organized around the topic of literary kinships in contemporary German literature. Berroth also served as a commentator for panel presentations in this series.

Associate Professor of German Erika Berroth hosted the annual fall conference for the Texas Chapter of the American Association for Teachers of German at Southwestern University. The conference brought together German educators across instructional levels and institutions, which is important for developing cohesive curricular pathways to success from middle and high schools to college, especially with focus on IB and AP programs that can earn participants college credits. The conference program included teaching and learning with AI, networking among programs, support for new colleagues, and publicly engaged humanities initiatives at the state and national levels. Participants earned continuing education credits.

Garey Chair and Professor of Mathematics Alison Marr, along with colleagues she met while presenting on a panel at MathFest 2019, published an article titled “Domino Antimagic Squares and Rectangles” in Recreational Mathematics Magazine. The article can be found here.

Chemistry major Jodi Glenn-Millhouse ’25 gave a talk titled “Investigating the Effects of Decreased Magnesium Concentrations on Phaeodactylum tricornutum F710 Fluorescence” at the Fall Undergraduate Research Symposium (FURS) at the University of Texas at Austin on October 5. She was awarded the Best Presentation Award in Chemistry. Her talk resulted from research done with Assistant Professor of Chemistry Sara Massey.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Bonnie Sneed delivered the pre-concert lecture for the Waco Symphony Orchestra performance on October 3. She led concertgoers in a discussion about Mexican composer Arturo Márquez and American composers George Gershwin and Aaron Copland.

The Communication Studies Department was well-represented at the 2024 Biennial Public Address Conference. This is a highly-selective, invitation-only conference that showcases scholarship and responses from leading scholars in Rhetoric and Communication Studies. The University of Texas at Austin hosted this conference September 22-25. Associate Professor of Communication Studies Lamiyah Bahrainwala (LB) was one of the eight invited plenary speakers to the conference. She delivered an address, titled “Caste is not a metaphor,” as a call to the field to grapple with its ignorance of caste, and to reckon with how caste bolsters “model minority” and white supremacist discourses. Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Raquel Moreira responded to Dr. Angela Aguayo’s plenary, “Youth Production as Public Address,” in which she articulated a series of questions regarding the potential of networked space to produce liberatory content. Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Jaishikha Nautiyal participated in a panel titled “Anti-DEI legislation in Texas” and presented her work on “anaerobic rhetoric,” in light of the anti-DEI legislation in Florida, based on a forthcoming publication in Quarterly Journal of Speech.

Part-Time Assistant Professor of Music Jeanne Hourez released her third CD, dedicated to “Quartet of the End of Time” by Olivier Messiaen. The album was recorded under the Ladoga Records Label, with Hank Landrum, Zongheng Zhang, and Bobae Lee. It can be heard here.

Director of Fraternity and Sorority Life Jeff Doyle was interviewed for the Higher Ed Demand Gen podcast on “The Secret To Building Your Personal Brand on LinkedIn for Higher Ed.” The episode was released last week and can be found here. 

Professor of Environmental Studies Joshua Long published a chapter titled “The Coloniality of Climate Apartheid” in the Routledge reader, Confronting Climate Coloniality. Long’s contributions were also highlighted by the editor, Dr. Farhana Sultana, in promotional materials and he will be serving on upcoming panels in which this work will be featured. More information is available here.

Assistant Professor of Sociology Amanda Hernandez published her first monograph, “Intersectional Identities of Christian Women in the United States: Faith, Race, and Feminism” (2024, Lexington Books). Based in content analysis, interviews, and survey data, Hernandez problematizes the view that Christianity and feminism are contradictory identities. More information is available here.

Garey Chair and Professor of Mathematics Alison Marr and Duncan Chair and Professor of Mathematics Fumiko Futamura presented at the 2024 Fall Central Sectional Meeting of the American Mathematical Society in San Antonio, TX. Dr. Marr presented her talk, “Domino Antimagic Configurations,” in the Special Session on Enumerative Combinatorics, and Dr. Futamura presented her talk/workshop, “Drawing in Geometry Students with Drawing Puzzles,” in the Special Session on Inquiry Oriented Learning in the Mathematics Classroom.

Regional Associate Director of Admission Jaime Gonzalez recently co-presented “Beyond Translated: Shared Bilingual Resources” at the National Association of College Admission Counseling’s national conference, alongside Shana Castillo from Rice University and Katie Ascencio from the Achieve Program. Their session provided shared admission counseling resources to better serve Latinx and Spanish-speaking bilingual families throughout the college search process.

Assistant Professor of English Sonia Del Hierro presented at the fourth annual La Chola Conference at East Los Angeles College on September 27-29. This conference centers Chola identities and communities, bringing together activists, artists, and scholars. Dr. Del Hierro’s talk, “Las Cholas’ Sartorial Scripts: A Chicana Feminist Analysis,” presented part of her research on the ways fashion has constituted political and cultural tools against racism, sexism, and colonialism. The program can be found here.

Professor of English Michael Saenger published an essay titled “Shakespeare and Multilinguistic Affairs: A Strategy for Reading Across Borders” in Contemporary Readings in Global Performances of Shakespeare, edited by Alexa Alice Joubin. The book is published by Bloomsbury Academic as part of The Arden Shakespeare series.

Assistant Professor of Mathematics Noelle Sawyer co-organized the hybrid conference, Big Ideas in Dynamics and Geometry. The event was held at University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) and on Zoom on September 27-29, and was co-organized with Benjamin Call and Laura Schaposnik at UIC. Big Ideas in Dynamics and Geometry focused on the intersections of dynamics and geometry and exposing early career mathematicians to future research directions. Additionally, the conference served as the kickoff event for the fourth semester of the reading program for early career mathematicians, Big Ideas in Dynamics, also organized by Benjamin Call and Noelle Sawyer.

Professor of Theatre Desiderio Roybal designed the scenery and stage properties for I’m Proud of You  by Tim Madigan. This production is a staged adaptation of Madigan’s novel, I’m Proud of You: My Friendship with Fred Rogers. The play chronicles the true and extraordinary bond between Tim Madigan, a Texas author and reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and Fred Rogers, the iconic TV host of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. This production will be the inaugural production in Penfold Theatre’s new and permanent theatre venue in Round Rock, TX. Roybal also served as a theatre consultant on the new venue, which will be the first professional theatre in Round Rock. The production showcases Professor Emeritus Rick Roemer and SU alumnus Zac Carr ’11 as actors. SU Scene Shop Manager Monroe Oxley is the Technical Director for this production. Additionally, the stage and seating risers were designed and constructed by Oxley using a build crew that included Connor Bustos ’26 and Ash Zunker ’25. The production runs October 4-26.

Professor of English Michael Saenger published a blog post at the Times of Israel, titled “How to Spot Antisemitism.” It can be read here.

Associate Professor of Art History Allison Miller gave a virtual invited presentation on “Purple in Early China” to a Chinese art history class at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. on September 23.

Lord Chair and Professor of Computer Science Barbara Anthony attended the 21st International Conference on Cooperative Design, Visualization, and Engineering in Valencia, Spain, in September. She presented a paper co-authored with Mark Mueller ’24 on “Course scheduling made easier: A user-friendly web-based timetabling tool using PyGLPK,” which is available here. The article details how, using ideas from operations research, it is possible to develop an integer linear program capturing constraints on course schedules, use Python and PyGLPK to find a solution, and package that within a more user-friendly and publicly available web interface.

Professor of English Eileen Cleere delivered a paper at Baylor University’s Armstrong Browning Library as a part of EVENT 2024, a hub conference sponsored by the North American Victorian Studies Association on September 19–21. Her paper was titled “Laugh Track: Pregnancy and Pronatalism in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.”

Professor of Environmental Studies Joshua Long was featured in an article appearing in Texas Monthly, titled “Is America Ready for More Than One Kind of Weird?” The article can be read here.

Professor of Environmental Studies Joshua Long presented a poster titled “The Right to Retreat? Interrogating the xenophobic politics of urban climate retreat,” and co-presented a lecture on the topic of “Climate Havens” at the RC21 Common City Conference in Uppsala, Sweden from September 10–13.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper published “Two Moon Songs for Women’s Chorus and Piano” by Florence B. Price (Fayetteville, AR: ClarNan). The volume comprises two songs – “The Moon Bridge” by Mary Rolofson Gamble and “The New Moon” by Liza Lee Follett – that may be described as loving maternal musical reflections on the magic of moonlight in a young daughter’s imagination. Price published both works separately in 1930, “The New Moon” with a dedication to her friend Estella Bonds (mother of Margaret Bonds), but those editions are long out of print. Cooper’s edition hopes to help them find a new place in modern musical life.

Assistant Professor of Kinesiology Tatiana Zhuravleva, along with her colleagues from Southwestern University and New Mexico State University, published an article titled “A Holistic Focus of Attention Enhances Vertical Jump Performance Among Inexperienced Individuals” in the Journal of Motor Behavior.

Assistant Professor of Philosophy Zinhle ka’Nobuhlaluse virtually presented a working draft of a book chapter titled “The Interlocking Nature of Apartheid Praxis” at a workshop on “Apartheid as Method for Worldmaking after Empire: Encountering histories, presents, and continuities of Apartheid in South Africa,” held at the University of the Witwatersrand on September 17. The workshop aims to provide authors with feedback towards an edited volume on Critical Apartheid Studies.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Ariel Wood exhibited their work in a group show in Dallas. The show, titled “Sculpture School: Concrete,” was the culmination of a summer residency based on the theme of concrete. Their work will be on view at Sweet Pass Sculpture Park until November 16. View documentation images of the exhibition and accompanying catalog at sweetpasssculpturepark.com.

Buoyed by the momentum built on sabbatical, Garey Chair of Biology Romi Burks continued her work on the intersection between chocolate and liberal arts education by sharing her knowledge as the featured STEM kick-off speaker at Schreiner University on September 4 with a talk titled “Chocolate Covered Science: Connect what you love to eat with what you love to study.” Following that event, Burks attended the Dallas Chocolate Festival on September 7, where she contributed to a panel discussion on the crisis in the chocolate industry, along with entrepreneur Kate Weiser of Kate Weiser Chocolates and Jimmy Steward of Guittard Chocolate. Afterwards, Burks gave a solo presentation titled “Educated by Chocolate: How to build your chocolate knowledge one bite at a time.” Burks has also been invited to give this talk again at the Northwest Chocolate Festival, along with a second presentation titled “Separating Fact from Fiction in the Science of Chocolate.” These lectures will take place the first weekend of October.

Supported by a sabbatical leave, Garey Chair of Biology Romi Burks recently published the first paper out of the lab on environmental DNA in the journal Management of Biological Invasions, in collaboration with several undergraduate researchers and colleagues. The paper, titled “Snail slime in real time: Challenges in predicting the relationship between environmental DNA and apple snail biomass,” describes how extrapolations can fail between snail abundance and the amount of genetic material produced by apple snails under cold conditions. The results have implications for estimating the size of non-native invasive populations. Student co-authors include Cassidy Reynolds ’24, Esmeralda Rosas ’24, Cynthia Bashara ’23, and Lillian Dolapchiev ’23, along with alumni collaborator Dr. Matthew Barnes ’06 from Texas Tech University and Dr. Chris Jerde from UC Santa Barbara, who provided assistance in data analysis. The open access paper can be read here, as #6 in the table of contents of the journal issue.

History and biology alumna Katherine Montgomery ’23 presented a paper, titled “A Crafty Woman in a Mangled World: The Intersection of Art and Facial Reconstruction in Anna Coleman Ladd’s Mask Making,” at the Virtual Graduate Conference of the Southern Association for the History of Medicine held on September 13. Katherine originally worked with Chair and Associate Professor of History Joseph E. Hower on this project during her history capstone course. After graduation, she worked with Associate Professor of History Jethro Hernández Berrones to turn her project into a piece for publication. Her presentation explored the intersections of gender, disability, surgery, and military history to highlight the innovative work in the field of prosthetics of Anna Coleman in the late 1910s.

Vice President for Academic Affairs and Professor of Political Science Alisa Gaunder gave a virtual talk titled “Women in Executive Office: Constraints and Opportunities for Success” to students at Centro Universitario Anglo Mexicano (CUAM), a preparatory high school in Mexico, on September 11.

Kudos to Director of the Center for Career and Professional Development Adrian Ramirez and Sr. Associate Director of the Center for Career and Professional Development Alexandra Anderson. The Princeton Review ranked the Center for Career and Professional Development (CCPD) as #2 in the nation for “Best Career Services,” up from our #5 ranking last year. The CCPD remains #1 in the State of Texas.

On July 31, Director of Fraternity and Sorority Life Jeff Doyle, Ph.D., presented “What’s Missing from Student Success Analytics?” to 3,300 members of the Future of Higher Education community.

Art history and theatre graduate Gabriella Gonzalez Biziou ’12 starred in and associated-produced a beautifully executed short film titled Foolhardy Love. Gabriella is returning to Texas this month to promote the film, which follows a couple confronted with two very different desires for their future. An official selection for the Beverly Hills Film Festival 2024, Foolhardy Lovescreens in Austin at the Austin Under the Stars Film Festival on Thursday, September 12 at 7:30 p.m., and at the Austin Spotlight Film Festival on Saturday, September 14 at 7:00 p.m. The film has been nominated for Best Narrative (at both festivals), Best Director, Best Actress (at both festivals), and Best Actor. The trailer can be viewed here.

Seth Sagen ’26 was recently awarded the Assistant Concertmaster position with the Central Texas Philharmonic, a professional orchestra in the Austin area. He is a violin major and student of Assistant Professor of Violin and Viola Jessica Mathaes. Seth won an audition in order to receive this highly competitive violin leadership spot with the orchestra.

Professor Emeritus of Music Kiyoshi Tamagawa was invited to edit and expand the 2024-25 Prescribed Music List (PML) for solo pianists participating in the annual Texas State Solo and Ensemble Contest of the University Interscholastic League (UIL). Hundreds of high school pianists from across the state participate in this event, which culminates in a final audition before an expert adjudicator in Austin in late May of every year. They earn a rating and a possible designation of Outstanding Soloist. Tamagawa’s revisions, which are now in effect, substantially increased repertoire choices for participants, including for the first time many works by women composers and composers of color.

Lord Chair and Professor of Computer Science Barbara Anthony co-authored a paper, titled “New Bounds on the Performance of SBP for the Dial-a-Ride Problem with Revenues,” that was presented on September 5 at ATMOS 2024, the Symposium on Algorithmic Approaches for Transportation Modeling, Optimization, and Systems. The paper, published in the Dagstuhl Open Access Series in Informatics, has co-authors Christine Chung of Connecticut College, Ananya Das of Middlebury College, and David Yuen.

Part-Time Assistant Professor of Music and Artist in Residence Hai Zheng Olefsky is excited to share this season’s release of the Amazon documentary “The Story of Art in America,” where she is featured in season 3, episode 2. This episode highlights Georgetown artists, including painter and art instructor Carol Light, textile artist Gary Anderson, muralist and portrait artist Devon Clarkson, and concert cellist Hai Zheng Olefsky. “The Story of Art in America,” an award-winning docuseries created by acclaimed film director Christelle Bois and produced by executive producer Pierre Gervois, explores the art scenes in various American cities and towns. The series features in-depth interviews with artists and art historians, highlighting the role of the arts in American society and its historical significance. The documentary is now available on Amazon Prime, offering a glimpse into Georgetown’s vibrant arts scene. Georgetown Arts and Culture Program Manager Amanda Still remarked, “It’s been an unforgettable experience to participate in this project… We are so proud of the members of our arts and culture community for the eloquent way they have demonstrated the impact of arts, culture, and history in Georgetown.” The episode can be viewed here.

Recent graduate Ian Klepcyk ’24 and Professor of Psychology Fay Guarraci published one of two submitted entries in the Encyclopedia of Sexual Psychology and Behavior, published by Springer. This entry also includes videos Ian filmed in the lab as a companion to the written submission. The entry can be read here.

Assistant Professor of Education Raquel Sáenz Ortiz attended the International Migration Research Network (IMISCOE) annual conference in Lisbon, Portugal in July. She presented, with Melina Bountris ’22, “Culturally responsive instructional strategies for immigrant-origin youth in Austria,” based on research conducted while Melina was completing a Fulbright Teaching Assistantship in Austria. She also presented, with Zehra Çolak of Utrecht University, “Co-constructing a pedagogy of radical belonging: Pláticas on teaching for social justice,” which is based on a chapter that has been accepted to be published in the Handbook of Social Justice in Education. In addition, Dr. Sáenz Ortiz co-led a workshop, titled “Towards decolonial futurities: On reimagining the university,” along with Zehra Çolak of Utrecht University, Zakia Essanhaji of VU Amsterdam, Dounia Bourabain of Hasselt University, and Leila Mouhib of Université libre de Bruxelles and Université de Mons.

Assistant Professor of Education Raquel Sáenz Ortiz published the manuscript “Radical Love: Liberatory Pedagogical Praxis for Black and Latinx Youth in an Alternative School,” in the International Journal of Learner Diversity and Identities. The manuscript highlights a case study conducted by Dr. Sáenz Ortiz in an alternative school in the northeastern United States where most students were Afro-Caribbean. The article is available here.

Assistant Professor of Economics and Business Raji Kunapuli presented a paper, titled “Leveling the Playing Field: Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to Modify Language and Accent Expectancies in High-Stakes Pitching,” at the annual Academy of Management Conference in Chicago.

Professor of Education Michael Kamen and his Faculty-Student-Project student, Sydney Jackson ’27, virtually presented a poster, titled “Successful Play-Based Programs: Case Studies,” at the International Society of Cultural-historical Activity Research Conference 2024: Inclusiveness as a Future Challenge, in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. They reported on their analysis of twenty interviews with teachers, parents, and administrators from three play-based programs in New York City, Oxford, UK, and Billund, Denmark.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper published the first edition of Florence B. Price’s three-movement trio titled Moods for flute, clarinet, and piano. A number of fragmentary manuscripts for this important late work – a series of “moodscapes” that reflect the compositional and stylistic diversity Price had achieved by the mid-1940s – have long been known, but they did not permit reconstruction of the complete work. Cooper’s edition is based on two previously unknown autographs that were found in an apartment in Chicago and donated to the University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville, in 2023.

Visiting Professor of Theatre Amy Rebecca King, along with her colleague Robert Torigoe, published a chapter entitled “Liberating Casting and Training Practices for Mixed-Asian Students” in Critical Acting Pedagogy: Intersectional Approaches. The chapter, which examines the history of multiracial representation and offers practical inclusive pedagogical approaches, can be found here.

Professor of Education Michael Kamen is one of seven co-authors of the recently published chapter “Teacher Educators’ Perspectives, Beliefs, and Practices,” in the book Re-Exploring Play and Playfulness in Early Childhood Teacher Education: Narratives, Reflections, and Practices. His section is titled “Playing to Learn and Teaching with Play in a Science Methods Course at Southwestern University.” The book can be found here.

Assistant Professor of Kinesiology Tatiana Zhuravleva, along with her colleagues, presented research on “A Holistic Focus of Attention Enhances Vertical Jump Performance Among Division 1 Football Players” at the annual North American Society for the Psychology of Sport and Physical Activity.

Professor of Mathematics and John H. Duncan Chair Fumiko Futamura signed a book contract with Princeton University Press for a general audience book tentatively titled Projecting Spaces. The book is primarily about 2D art and how artists set the stage for their visual stories by playing with oblique and linear perspectives (this is where she sneaks in a little mathematical analysis), enhanced and impossible realities (more math), flatness and depth (math), and movement and still snapshots (physics?). The artwork explored in the book ranges from Renaissance paintings to 3D billboards and Radiohead t-shirts, and artists range from Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer to Hokusai and Njideka Akunyili Crosby. The book will likely come out in 2027.

In July, Part-Time Assistant Professor of Music and Artist in Residence Hai Zheng Olefsky was invited to serve as a guest judge for the 2024 Colburn-Pledge Music Scholarship Competition by Musical Bridges Around the World (MBAW), a nonprofit organization dedicated to multicultural arts and social impact. MBAW’s mission is to celebrate our shared humanity by making global arts accessible to everyone. The Colburn-Pledge Music Scholarship offers college tuition assistance to young string players aspiring to careers in classical music.

Director of General Chemistry Labs Dilani Koswatta and Director of Organic Chemistry Labs Carmen Velez presented a poster on their collaborative project titled “Fostering STEM Interest Through Chemistry Connections with the Community” at the 2024 Biennial Conference on Chemical Education, held on July 29 at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, KY. This community-engaged learning (CEL) project connected chemistry and biochemistry senior capstone students, general chemistry lab students, and 5th graders from Georgetown’s Annie Purl Elementary in an outreach activity designed to spark curiosity about chemistry in young students.

Director of Organic Chemistry Labs Carmen Velez presented a workshop titled “Fueling Education Transformation: The Dynamic Chemistry of Community-Based Learning” at the 2024 Biennial Conference on Chemical Education, held on July 29 at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, KY. The workshop focused on community-based learning (CBL), an educational approach that connects students with community partners to enhance academic learning, civic engagement, and empathy. Participants explored best practices using the Chemistry for the Community (CFTC) curriculum, reviewed examples of CBL implementation, and developed personalized CBL plans by mapping community assets and defining student outcomes.

English major and Associate Editor at Penguin Random House Lydia Gregovic ’19 recently published her first novel, titled The Monstrous Kind. The novel, a fantasy retelling of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, is set to release in early September and can be pre-ordered here.

Associate Professors of Business Gaby Flores and Hazel Nguyen, along with colleagues, published an article titled “The only  daughter effect: Examining the impact of child gender on a CEO’s hiring decisions” in Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal. The paper, which examines gender bias in top management hiring, can be found here.

The Texas Section of the Mathematical Association of America recently held officer elections and finalized positions for the Executive Committee. Professor and Garey Chair of Mathematics Alison Marr has been elected to serve in the three year Chair role (Chair-Elect, Chair, and Past-Chair). Associate Professor of Mathematics John Ross has also been appointed as the Digital Media Editor.

Four faculty members were active at MathFest, the national meeting of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA), on August 7-11, in Indianapolis, IN. Associate Professor of Mathematics John Ross presented “Turning a Geometry Project into a Geometry Festival” in the contributed paper session on “Building Community in Mathematics Departments.” Professor and Garey Chair of Mathematics Alison Marr presented “Difference Distance Magic Oriented Graphs” in the MAA invited paper session (aligned with an MAA invited address) on “Matching and Labelings in Graphs.” Marr also served on the panel “Creating Successful Study Abroad Programs in Mathematics” to discuss the mathematics courses she offered as part of Southwestern’s London program. Professor and Lord Chair of Mathematics Fumiko Futamura co-led a workshop, “Geometric Puzzles and Brain Teasers in Perspective Art,” with Annalisa Crannell of Franklin & Marshall College and Marc Frantz of Indiana University. This was sponsored by the MAA special interest group “Mathematics and the Arts.” Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton presented “Student Modeling Projects in Sports” in the contributed paper session on “Math and Sports.” She also co-organized the contributed paper session “Differential Equations Student Activities and Projects, Big and Small” with Brian Winkel of SIMIODE, Rosemary Farley and Patrice Tiffany of Manhattan College, and Pushpi Paranamana of St. Mary’s College.

Professor of Political Science Bob Snyder presented his paper “The US and Iran: Understanding the Breakdown in Relations” at the International Studies Association’s conference at the University of Rijeka in Rijeka, Croatia in June.

Professor of English Michael Saenger was flown to Toronto to participate in a video documentary on his little brother, Mohan Govindasamy, aka Launders. Govindasamy was matched with Saenger through the Toronto office of Big Brothers / Big Sisters, and he is currently a major figure in e-sports. The video can be seen here.

Assistant Professor of Sociology Amanda Hernandez served as an invited panelist for “Where There Is Oppression: Doing Sociology in Challenging Times and Places,” at the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting in Montreal.

Assistant Professor of English Sonia Del Hierro co-presented “Rasquachismo: A Chicana Digital Humanities Praxis” on August 9 at DH2024, the annual conference of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations.

Professor Emeritus of Biology Ben Pierce was appointed to the Bell and Coryell Counties Biological Advisory Team, which will assist in the development of a regional habitat conservation plan for these two Texas counties.

Professor Emeritus of Music Kiyoshi Tamagawa performed a recital on the TGIF Concert Series at the First Presbyterian Church of Santa Fe, NM in June. His program was a reflection on the intertwined personal and musical relationships of Robert and Clara Schumann and their protégé and friend Johannes Brahms and included music of all three composers.

Assistant Professor of Sociology Amanda Hernandez, Assistant Professor of Sociology Adriana Ponce, Assistant Professor of Political Science Alexander Goodwin, Assistant Professor of History Bryan Kauma, and Assistant Professor of English Sonia Del Hierro had their abstract “Teaching With Color: Thematic Hires and the Politics of Teaching in Texas” accepted as a special feature for the 10 Year Reflection Special Issue on pedagogy and hope in the Journal for the Sociology of Race & Ethnicity. The article will be both a pedagogical reflection on hope in the classroom and on thematic hires. The issue will be available in early 2025.

Associate Professor of Art History Allison Miller gave the presentation, “The Form-Matter Nexus in the Early Chinese Intellectual Tradition and its Implication for the Genealogy of Chinese Art” on the panel, “Rethinking the Form-Matter Nexus after the Material Turn” on June 25 at the CIHA (Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art) conference in Lyon, France.

This summer, Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies Meagan Solomon participated in the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB) Publishing Workshop to support her Mellon Publicly-Engaged Humanities project, Malflora, a forthcoming multimedia platform dedicated to publishing and preserving Latina/e lesbian stories. In the workshop, she learned from a wide range of speakers who work in book, magazine, and multimedia publishing and helped produce Issue 7 of the online magazine, PubLab. As an art director for the magazine, she curated a portfolio of Anel I. Flores’ paintings focused on lesbian intimacy, bodily autonomy, and queer liberation, which you can access here.

Assistant Professor of Violin Jessica Mathaes performed as a soloist with the Grand Teton Music Festival Orchestra in Jackson, WY this summer. She also led the orchestra as concertmaster. Named “one of 2024’s top US Classical Music Festivals” by BBC Music Magazine, the Grand Teton Music Festival is an eight-week concert series that draws from top orchestra musicians throughout the world, and is led by music director Sir Donald Runnicles.

Professor of English Michael Saenger has been invited by Old Dominion University’s Institute for Jewish Studies and Interfaith Understanding to take part in their new series, “The Nosh: Taking a Bite Out of Hard Conversations.” Saenger will co-facilitate discussion on the current Israel-Palestine conflict and its impact on American academics.

Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Raquel Moreira has published the essay “Working for the miracle: A critical, visual analysis of Disney’s Encanto,” along with co-authors Raisa Alvarado of California State University, San Bernardino and Carlos Flores of California State University, Sacramento, in the International Journal of Communication.The essay proposes a visual analysis of Encanto, with particular attention to the cultural tensions and ideologies that surround the film, including paratexts produced by Encanto fans via the streaming platform TikTok. Although the film remains notable for its stylistic displays of Latine identities and experiences, its visual choices remain situated in western, settler-colonial ideologies of oligarchical governance, mestizaje, and postracism. The visual analysis of Encanto and its related paratexts contributes to scholarship on the labor of cultural translators on behalf of Disney, expanding it to include unaffiliated Disney audiences who digitally articulate histories of imperialism, displacement, and their contemporary counterparts for public audiences. The International Journal of Communication is an open access, double-blind peer-reviewed journal that is consistently among the top quartile of journals in communication with highest citation metrics worldwide. The essay can be read here. 

This summer, Visiting Assistant Professor of Theatre Amy King directed Cats at the Georgetown Palace Theatre. Recommended by SU’s Ride the Cyclone  director Kristen Rogers, King collaborated with Evelyn Hoelscher of the Spaces of Fontana Dance Company and music director Michael Rosensteel on a contemporary take on the classic production. The production runs Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30 p.m., and Sundays at 2:00 p.m. from August 2 through September 8. Tickets can be purchased here.

Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson presented “Lucy’s Story: The Surprising Tale of an Enslaved Black Woman in British Central America in the 1770s” as the inaugural webinar for the Government of Belize’s Institute of Social and Cultural Research-National Institute of Culture and History Research Lab Series 2.0 on July 24. It was well attended and is posted on the ISCR-NICH YouTube channel, available here.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper’s work in editing and publishing previously obscure music by Florence Price and Margaret Bonds was the subject of an interview article published in the August 2024 issue of American Music Teacher. The article can be read here.

Director of Admission Rebecca Rother and Regional Associate Director of Admission Jaime Gonzalez served as faculty co-chair, higher education and operations team, for the Admission and College Counseling Institute, a program run by the Texas Association of College Admission Counseling. They helped to engage new professionals on the high school and college sides of the enrollment process. The conference was held at Schreiner University in Kerrville, TX from July 15–18.

Associate Professor of German Erika Berroth participated in a collaborative event, “Tree Cultures ad Kew,” co-convened by Interdisciplinary Research at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and the University of Derby. Bringing together researchers and practitioners from the humanities and from arboriculture, participants explored how we understand and regard the value of trees in both historical and cultural contexts. The symposium showcased emerging literary and environmental history scholarship on trees and tree spaces, and fostered discussions around how the arts and humanities can contribute to debates on trees, past, present, and future. The symposium was held at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, a UNESCO World Heritage site of immense arboreal, botanical, and conservation interest. Kew’s treescapes foregrounded the symposium’s discussions, and participants had the opportunity to engage in guided tree walks of Kew’s tree collections and of Kew’s Wood Xylarium.

Scene Shop Manager Monroe Oxley’s 10 minute play Overduewill be performed at the Tumbleweed Festival in Lubbock, TX, presented by The Lubbock Community Theatre, on August 9 and 10.

Assistant Professor of Music Ruben Balboa had the distinct privilege of performing at the 2024 American Viola Society Festival and Primrose International Viola Competition in Los Angeles, CA, where he gave the world premiere of “Tejano Suite for Viola and Piano,” a piece he commissioned by Alex Molina Shawver. The suite is an exploration of both genre and identity, delving into the Tejano or Conjunto genre, which includes folk music developed in the Texas-Mexico border region over centuries of cultural conflict, fusion, and synthesis. Each movement of the suite incorporates characteristic rhythmic material from common conjunto dances, while the harmonic and formal idioms remain true to the composer’s unique style.

Assistant Professor of Music Ruben Balboa and colleagues Ames Asbell, Kathy Steely, Martha Carpetyan, and Tim Washecka, had the honor of presenting and performing together at the 2024 American Viola Society Festival and Primrose International Viola Competition in Los Angeles, CA. Their presentation, entitled “AVS Festival Ensemble Commissions Retrospective: Works by Bunch, Colberg, and Vanderveer,” featured a retrospective with brief, recorded interviews with each composer and a performance of their works.

Former Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science Katie Aha, Catherine Hiebel ’22, and Linsey Jensen ’23 co-authored an article, titled “Turning to the Radical Right: Examining Subnational Variation in Radical Right Support after Ethnic Minority Success in East Central Europe,” which has been accepted for publication in Electoral Studies.  This article started as a 2021 SCOPE project. Jensen is currently in a dual M.A./M.Sc. program, recently completing a M.A. in European History, Politics, and Society at Columbia University, and starting a M.Sc. in Culture and Conflict in a Global Europe at the London School of Economics in the fall. Hiebel will be starting a M.Sc. in International Politics at Trinity College Dublin in the fall.

Assistant Professor of History Bryan Kauma attended the 29th Southern African Historical Society (SAHS) at the University of Johannesburg on June 26-27, where he presented fieldwork notes from Mellon PEH Summer Fellowship-supported research on commodities, trade, and pre-colonial African society.

Assistant Professor of History Bryan Kauma attended the Institute for Global Law and Policy Global Scholars Academy in Stellenbosch, South Africa on June 28, where he presented his paper titled, “‘Put it in their food’: Food, Power, and Control in southern Zimbabwe.”

Professional Academic Advisor Hayley Harned has been elected as one of the twelve National Academic Advising Association (NACADA) Emerging Leaders for 2024-2026. The Emerging Leaders Program provides a structured platform that aims to build an inclusive and sustainable community of strong NACADA leaders. The program is a cohort of professionals focused on building leaders for the next generation of NACADA engagement. We are proud of Hayley’s accomplishment and excited for her continued growth and development in the field of advising!

On June 23, Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies Meagan Solomon led a community teach-in at Alienated Majesty Books entitled “No Pride in Genocide: A Teach-In on Zionist Pinkwashing.” The teach-in focused on defining and dismantling pinkwashing, or the process of promoting LGBTQ+ rights to appear progressive while simultaneously upholding oppressive systems that directly harm LGBTQ+ people, such as settler colonialism and occupation. The teach-in was part of a larger series of educational events in Austin focused on Palestinian liberation, which enabled a broader public to engage in critical dialogue informed by activist-oriented scholarship.

Associate Professor of Business Debika Sihi published an article titled “Sustainability and Marketing: Examining the Digital Impacts” in the book Advances in Digital Marketing and eCommerce  by Springer. She virtually presented this work examining the developing standards, measurement, and disclosure of environmental impacts related to the advertising industry at the Digital Marketing and e-Commerce Conference held June 26-28 in Barcelona, Spain.

Sierra Rupp ’23 had her Senior Seminar paper, “From Fields to Frontlines: The Relationship Between Drug Trafficking & Armed Conflict,” directed by former Associate Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnor, published in The Pi Sigma Alpha Undergraduate Journal of Politics.  Rupp is currently in Kyrgyzstan on a Critical Language Scholarship for Russian and this fall will be on a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship in Spain. Her generous acknowledgements recognize the role of the political science department in general and her various professors in this process. You can find the article here.

Assistant Professor of Physics Cody Crosby co-authored “Endometrial decidualization status modulates endometrial microvascular complexity and trophoblast outgrowth in gelatin methacryloyl hydrogels” in the journal npj Women’s Health  with Dr. Samantha Zambuto and the Harley Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The work was published open-access and can be downloaded here.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper gave an invited presentation for the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library’s Summer Educator Institute, “It’s Tricky: American Music and Culture.” Titled “Teaching American Classical Music in Color: Stories, Journeys, and Portraits Old, New, and Yet to Come,” Cooper’s presentation was about the ethical and moral imperative of challenging both the perception of a Black/White color line in classical music and the de facto creation of said color line via endless reiterations of canonical compositions by mostly-long-dead-canonical composers, most of whom are European and/or male, and about ways in which today’s educators can liberate themselves from the fetters of canonical domination.

Assistant Professor of Kinesiology Jennifer Stokes recently published the “Anatomy and Physiology Student Accommodations Handbook” through the Human Anatomy and Physiology Society (HAPS). Serving as Chair of the Curriculum and Instruction-Accommodations Subcommittee, Stokes, in collaboration with 16 HAPS colleagues, researched, vetted, and produced a 64-page guide to assist instructors in meeting student accommodations by identifying meaningful alternatives to existing protocols in anatomy and physiology laboratories based on best practices supported by current research and the concepts of universal design. The goal is to make anatomy and physiology laboratories as inclusive and accessible as possible, allowing all learners to achieve their desired level of success. This new HAPS publication was also featured in a workshop, “Implementing Inclusive Teaching Practices in Anatomy and Physiology Labs,” led by Stokes, at the HAPS Annual Conference in St. Louis from May 25-29.

Assistant Professor of Sociology Amanda Hernandez published a feature article in the Summer edition of the magazine Conscience,  titled “Are There Christian Feminists? How White Supremacy Impacts Our Assumptions About Identity.” In the article, Hernandez highlights the role that white supremacy plays in the common assumption that feminism and faith are at odds.

Professor of Theatre Sergio Costola published an essay entitled “Lucrezia Borgia Triumphal Chariot: Notes on Performance Documentation” in Skenè. Journal of Theatre and Drama Studies,  10.1 (2024): 61-80, Memory and Performance, Classical Reception in Early Modern Festivals. The Monographic Section was edited by Francesca Bortoletti, Giovanna Di Martino, and Eugenio Refini. The essay can be read here.

Assistant Professor of Political Science Alexander Goodwin was the keynote speaker for the Georgetown Juneteenth Celebration on June 15. This was the 72nd Annual Celebration of Juneteenth in Georgetown sponsored by the Georgetown Cultural Citizen Memorial Association (GCCMA). Juneteenth is a recognition and celebration of June 19, 1865 as the day that the enslaved people in Texas were informed that the Emancipation Proclamation had been signed on January 1, 1863 to free them from slavery. On June 17, 2021, President Joe Biden signed a bill into law making Juneteenth a national holiday.

Assistant Vice President of Admission Christine Bowman presented at the Higher Education Consulting Association Annual Conference in Atlanta. She was a member of the Professional Development Institute, where she led a workshop on understanding the financial aid process and collaborated on a session regarding student transitions and support throughout the college search experience.

Professor of Theatre Desiderio Roybal served as a theatre staging and venue consultant for Penfold Theatre’s new home in Round Rock, TX. This is the first professional theatre venue in Round Rock. Penfold Theatre will open its 17th season and continues its mission of telling intimate stories of empathy and hope, curating performances by premier local artists, and nurturing theatremakers of today and tomorrow. The opening of this facility will also provide other performing artists access to affordable space at a time when venues are disappearing.

Professor of Theatre Desiderio Roybal designed scenery and is the scenic charge artist for Magnolia Musical Theatre’s production of Footloose the musical, running July 10 through August 10 at Hill Country Galleria Pavilion in Bee Cave, TX. This professional production is directed by Professor Emeritus of Theatre Rick Roemer, with technical direction by Scene Shop Manager Monroe Oxley. Students Connor Bustos ’26 and Em Hoover ’27 collaborated with Roybal and Oxley as academic interns in scenic fabrication and scenic art. Alumni Kyle Bussone-Peterson ’24 and Alex Cannata ’24, along with students Ashlyn Zunker ’25 and Olivia Hynes ’27 are scenic carpenters and painters.

Associate Professor of History Jethro Hernández Berrones was invited to participate in a workshop of the “Seminar of the social and cultural history of health and disease in Mexico,” held at the Institute of Historical Research, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Discussants contributed their chapters for an upcoming volume on hidden histories of health and disease in Mexico in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Professor Hernandez Berrones’ contribution, titled “Recovering the relics of modern medicine in Mexico: Homeopathy, vitalism, and religion, 1853-1912,” examines the associations between heterodox religious and medical systems in the construction of a plural therapeutic market place in modern Mexico.

Associate Professor of Chinese Carl Robertson delivered an invited presentation titled “Beautiful Writing and the Art of Living: An Introduction to Chinese Writing,” for International Chinese Language Day at the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in Washington D.C. on April 20.

Associate Professor of Chinese Carl Robertson presented an invited lecture in Chinese, entitled “Translation and Cultural Communication: How a Twentieth-Century Concept of Chinese Language Transformed the Language of Western Poetry,” addressing AI in light of the revolutionary effect of Ezra Pound’s theories and translation of Chinese language, as part of the series “Professional Lecture Forum on Foreign Languages,” at the Translation Department of Huazhong Agricultural University in Wuhan, Hubei, China on June 11.

Associate Professor of Chinese Carl Robertson presented an invited lecture in Chinese, entitled “Who is Writing? Comparing Ideas of Self in Understanding Chinese Calligraphy” for the Fujian Scholar Forum, held at Fujian Normal University in Fuzhou, Fujian, China, on June 5.

Associate Professor of Chinese Carl Robertson delivered an invitational keynote address in Chinese, entitled “Excellence in Teaching through Collaboration and Empathy,” dedicated to the memory of Professor of Art Star Varner and in partial fulfillment of her charge, to the “China-US College Chinese Language Teachers Association” (unofficial translation of the recently inaugurated 中美高校中文教师联) at Xiamen University in Xiamen, China, on May 31.

Assistant Director of Study Abroad and International Student Services Laura Ramsel has been selected by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) and the Institute of International Education (IIE), to attend the Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship Program Advisor Workshop, hosted by the University of Houston on July 12. Interest in the workshop was competitive.

Professor of History Melissa Byrnes has been appointed as a production editor for H-France Review.

Professor of Education Michael Kamen, Retired Project WILD State Coordinator Kiki Corry, and Leander ISD Elementary STEM Coordinator and Project WILD Facilitator Mark Corry presented “Polishing the GEMS: Improving PD through Lesson Study” at the 2024 Coordinator Tri-Conference and Training for Project WILD, WET, and Learning Tree state coordinators and facilitators. Kamen and Corry were also invited facilitators for state coordinators observing and collecting observation data on combined WILD, WET, Learning Tree at a pre-conference workshop for local educators.

Professor of Education Michael Kamen and Associate Professor of Curriculum Instruction and Learning Sciences at Texas A&M-Corpus Christi Debra Plowman published “There Are No Word Problems in Real Life–To Keyword or Not to Keyword” in the Summer 2024 newsletter of the International Consortium for Research in Science and Mathematics Education. Their quarterly column tells the ongoing story of the fictional character, Ian Quiry, as he studies and struggles to learn how to be an effective elementary school STEM teacher. The newsletter can be read here.

Senior Director of Conference and Event Sales Sally Cameron, Head of Distinctive Collections and Archives Megan Firestone, and Senior Director of Marketing & Communications Kristen Paxson, have been recognized for their exceptional leadership and dedication by graduating from Leadership Georgetown’s 2023-2024 Class. This prestigious program, a nine-month community leadership initiative by the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce, focuses on professional development and education to empower current and emerging leaders. The program aims to deepen participants’ understanding of community dynamics and the critical role leadership plays in ensuring long-term success. On June 5, Cameron, Firestone, and Paxson celebrated their graduation, marking a significant milestone in their professional journeys and their commitment to community development.

Institutional Research Analyst Hal Hoeppner, alongside Director of Community-Based Learning at Georgia Institute of Technology Sarah Brackmann, presented “Who is doing what? Moving beyond Self-Reporting to Track HIPs” at the annual Association of Institutional Research (AIR) Forum. The presentation was about how Southwestern tracks student participation in Study Abroad, Internships, Undergraduate Research, and Community Engaged Learning without relying on student surveys.

Associate Professor of Theatre Kerry Bechtel designed the costumes for The Star Spangled Girl  at Unity Theater in Brenham, TX. This classic Neil Simon comedy required 15 distinct costumes from the late 1960s for the three main characters. Unity Theater is a professional theatre company located in beautiful Washington County, attracting theatre artists and patrons from both the Austin and Houston areas. The Star Spangled Girl  runs through June 30.

Professor of Kinesiology Scott McLean and students Kevan Kennedy ’24 and Emma Williams ’24 presented a poster entitled “Comparison of Overground, Motorized Treadmill and Non-Motorized Treadmill Gait” at the American College of Sports Medicine Annual Meeting in Boston, MA.

Associate Professor of Communication Studies Lamiyah Bahrainwala presented on a featured “supersession” at the Rhetoric Society of America biennial conference. The panel focused on climate catastrophes, and Bahrainwala spoke about manual scavenging among Dalits, the framing of Muslims as “climate culprits,” and the ongoing green colonialism of Palestine.

Professor of Theatre Sergio Costola was the keynote speaker for the International Conference “RAPPRESENTARE GLI ESTE. La comunicazione del potere Estense entro e oltre i confini della signoria” in Ferrara, Italy from May 23-25.

Assistant Professor of Chemistry Sara Massey gave a talk titled “Fluence-dependent transient absorption reveals the functional connectivity of red chlorophyll sites in cyanobacterial PSI” at the North American Photosynthesis Congress, held June 3-6 in Atlanta, GA. She conducted the research with Lexi Fantz ’21 along with collaborators from Swarthmore College, the University of Chicago, and the University of Sheffield.

Associate Professor of Psychology Carin Perilloux and her students, Lainey Gutierrez ’25, Jaxson Haynes ’25, Maryn Medlock ’25, Cassidy Reynolds ’25, and Lauren Sanders ’24, presented a poster titled “Developing the Self-Perceived Parental Effort Scale (SPES)” at the annual convention of the Association for Psychological Science in San Francisco, CA on May 25.

Professor of History Melissa Byrnes reviewed Katharina Fritsch’s book, The Diaspora of the Comoros in France: Ethnicised Biopolitics and Communitarianism, for H-France. It can be read here.

Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Raquel Moreira presented two papers at the Rhetoric Society of America Conference, held in Denver, CO, May 23-27. Moreira presented the essay “The Place of Blackness in U.S. Constructions of Latinidad,” in which she investigates Anzaldúa’s legacy of mestizaje and hybridity as foundational for the absence of studies about Blackness and antiblackness in Latine Communication Studies. Additionally, she presented on the failures of media literacy and “informational bootstraps” approaches in the classroom in the face of growing monetized and organized disinformation campaigns.

Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Raquel Moreira was among 30 scholars invited to participate in the Viral Movements Symposium, hosted at Penn State on May 14 and 15. The symposium was organized by Lisa Flores, the Josephine Berry Weiss Chair of the Humanities, and featured scholars from the humanities and life sciences to discuss the topics of (im)mobility, (mis)information, and (mis)management.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper published the first edition of the complete four-movement version Florence B. Price’s valedictory opus, Dances in the Canebrakes, for Piano Solo, with ClarNan Editions (Fayetteville, AR). Price actually began work on the music that would become this suite in early 1929, and returned to the idea repeatedly over the next twenty-four years. Finally, in what was to be the last year of her life, she was ready to publish it and made preparations to do so – but died before the edition could come out (it was copyrighted five months to the day after her death and published shortly thereafter). That edition soon went out of print, however, and consequently the Dances in the Canebrakeshave been known mostly in the orchestral arrangement prepared by Price’s colleague William Grant Sill. Cooper’s edition makes her music newly available as she conceived it, also including an appendix that provides the original version of final movement (this titled Chicken Feathersinstead of Silk Hat and Walking Cane). Interested folk can hear three of the suite’s movements in the landmark recording on pianist Althea Waites’s 1987/1993 album Black Diamonds here.

Lord Chair and Professor of Computer Science Barbara Anthony co-authored a paper in the journal Optimization Methods and Software. “Maximizing the number of rides served for time-limited Dial-a-Ride” shows that for a particular variant of the offline Dial-a-Ride problem, no polynomial-time algorithm will serve the optimal number of requests, unless P = NP. It then describes k-Sequence, an approximation algorithm that repeatedly serves the fastest set of k remaining requests, and bounds its performance. The paper can be read here.

Professor of Environmental Studies Joshua Long published a paper titled “Reckoning Climate Apartheid” in the journal Political Geography. That paper, which examines global systematic climate injustice, can be found here.

Professor of Environmental Studies Joshua Long presented a paper titled “Avoiding Adaptation as Partition” on May 16 at the Human Geographies of Adaptation Conference at the University of Bergen in Bergen, Norway.

Professor of Environmental Studies Joshua Long presented a flash talk on May 13 titled “Reframing Existential Adaptation” at the Theory of Change Workshop hosted by Imagine Adaptation in Bergen, Norway.

Director of Study Abroad and International Student Services Monya Lemery has been nominated and elected to serve on the Forum Council beginning July 1, for a three-year term. The Forum Council serves as part of the shared leadership of The Forum on Education Abroad, along with the Board of Directors and the Forum staff. One of the primary roles of Council members is to represent the Forum membership and the greater field of Education Abroad and communicate the interests and needs of the field of Education Abroad to The Forum.

Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson has just published “Lucy’s Story: The Surprising Tale of an Enslaved Black Woman in British Central America in the 1770s” in Anthropology Now. The article can be read here.

Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies Meagan Solomon participated on a panel entitled “Atravesades Igniting through Art, Community, and Place-Making” with co-panelists Anel Flores and T. Jackie Cuevas at El Mundo Zurdo Conference in San Antonio. She presented her paper, “Somos Lesbianas: Chicana Lesbian Place-Making and Place-Taking En Comunidad,” which examines how Chicana lesbians take up art and writing as vessels for challenging oppressive forces and building coalition in the 1991 anthology “Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About.” edited by Carla Trujillo. In her paper, Solomon examines how Chicana lesbians integrate and redefine cultural customs in their creative expressions of self, spirituality, and familia that push back against the heteropatriarchal logics of Chicano nationalism. Underscoring the anthology form as a critical source of feminist coalition, she asserts that the voices featured in Chicana Lesbians intervene in dominant discourses on Chicana lesbian life toward a shared state of conocimiento - a spiritual and activist consciousness that tasks us with imagining and enacting new worlds.

Professor of Psychology Traci Giuliano has a chapter entitled, “Making Personal Connections with Social Psychology,” appearing in the forthcoming book (to be published in August), Teaching Social Psychology.

Professor of Communication Studies Valerie Renegar furthered her research agenda on the rhetoric surrounding stepmothers by presenting on Kamala Harris as an antidote to traditional stepmother stereotypes in Barcelona, Spain at the International Conference on Gender Research in late April.

Head of Distinctive Collections & Archives Megan Firestone was the featured speaker for the City of Georgetown’s Main Street Program Breakfast Bites meeting. She presented “From Storefronts to Stories: Preservation & Local Business History,” highlighting materials held in Distinctive Collections related to Georgetown businesses.

Head of Distinctive Collections & Archives Megan Firestone presented at First Friday for Preservation Georgetown on the impact of the Williamson County courthouse on the architecture of downtown, plus presented an overview of the new Historic Downtown Georgetown Walking Tour, a joint project between the City of Georgetown and Preservation Georgetown.

Professor of Art History and Margarett Root Brown Chair in Fine Arts Kimberly Smith published four “in-focus” essays in the exhibition catalogue, Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider(Tate Publishing, in association with Yale University Press). The essays address specific collaborations and relationships in the Blue Rider movement, and are titled: “The French Connection,” “Else Lasker-Schüler and Franz Marc’s Mail Art,” “Reiterinnen: Women Riders,” and “Fritz Burger: The Art Historical Connection.” The catalogue was edited by Natalia Sidlina, and published in conjunction with the landmark exhibition, “Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider” at the Tate Modern, London, on view until October 20, 2024.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper contributed an invited guest post to the Women’s Song Forum blog. Titled “Florence Price, Motherhood, and Loss,” the post draws on archival research and textual and musical analysis to explore the relationship between “Brown Arms (To Mother),” which Price composed (on her own poem) at the twentieth anniversary of her mother’s unimaginably painful decision to sever all ties to Price and renounce her race, spending the rest of her life passing as white, and “To My Little Son” (poem by Julia Johnson Davis), which she composed at the thirtieth anniversary of the death of her son Tommy, who died of malaria two days before his sixth birthday. Cooper discovered the manuscript for “Brown Arms (To Mother)” several years ago and released its first published edition this past January. Interested folk can read this post here.

Head of Distinctive Collections & Archives Megan Firestone presented at two sessions, “Top Topaz Picks” and “Adult Book Pairings for Programming,” during the Texas Library Association Annual Meeting held April 16-19.

Professor of Education Michael Kamen and Assistant Professor of Curriculum Instruction and Learning Sciences at Texas A&M-Corpus Christi Debra Plowman published a chapter titled “Slide Rules: To the Moon and Back” in Collaboration to Advance Science & Mathematics Education: Panamá City, Panamá, published by the International Consortium for Research in Science and Mathematics Education. The publication can be read here.

Director of Advising and Retention Jennifer Leach served as a panelist for a NACADA: The Global Community for Academic Advising webinar on April 22. The panel was titled “The Advisors’ Role in Retention” and was hosted by the Small Colleges & Universities Advising Community & Probation/Dismissal/Reinstatement Issues Advising Community. The panel focused on the advisor’s role in retention and explored how advisors at small institutions can help students successfully navigate the processes of probation, dismissal, or reinstatement.

On April 25, Visiting Assistant Professor of Biology Kyle Wilhite and his Ph.D. advisor, Mike Ryan, published a paper in Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiologytitled “Condition dependence in the sexual communication system of the túngara frog.”

Assistant Professor of Mathematics Noelle Sawyer was the Keynote speaker at the inaugural Mid-Atlantic Regional Math Alliance Conference. Her talk was titled “I am not a Mathematician” and contained a guide to current issues in the field of mathematics, current issues in academia, recent student arrests on US campuses at protests, and some advice for faculty who want to do better. The talk was intended to guide some discussion and goals of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Math Alliance.

Part-time Assistant Professor of Applied Music Katherine Altobello’s voice student Will Mallick ’24 has been cast in leading roles with theater companies around the Georgetown and greater Austin area this year. At the Palace Theatre, Mallick performed the title role “Daniel” in Once on this Island, the title role “Chad” in Disaster, supporting roles “Lord Savage” and “Spider” in Jekyll and Hyde, and supporting role “Kodaly” in She Loves Me. He will soon perform the title role of “Jimmy Ray” in Bright Star. Mallick performed “Kenickie” in Greasewith Summer Stock Austin, and is soon to perform the title role “Emmett” in Legally Blondeat Zilker Hillside Theater. Please congratulate Will Mallick on his incredible success these past twelve months! Altobello has been Mallick’s voice teacher for four years.

Garey Chair and Professor of Chemistry & Biochemistry Maha Zewail-Foote co-authored a paper in a top journal, Briefings in Bioinformatics.She and her co-authors showed that DNA damage is localized within cancer-forming sequences across the human genome. This multidisciplinary research involved a unique collaboration with UT Austin professors in various disciplines.

Senior Research and Instruction Librarian Katherine Hooker presented a poster at the Texas Library Association’s annual conference on April 17. “Three Ring Library Circus (But in a Good Way): Leaning into the Theme with Creative Instruction for Creative Students” summarized three-part library instruction delivered to students in Associate Professor of Theatre Kerry Bechtel’s “Design Fundamentals” course. Students learned via an online escape game, a collaborative Padlet, and an InfoGuide, all highly customized around the course’s vibrant circus theme.

Sabrina Woodward ’25 presented the paper “Motocicleta lúdica/Playful motorcycle” at the Latin American and Latinx Studies Symposium held at Rollins College on March 22. Her presentation was based on the course “Leisure and Play in Latin America” (Fall 2023) that Sabrina took with Associate Professor of Spanish María de los Ángeles Rodriguez Cadena, who mentored her to present at the Symposium.

Assistant Professor of Anthropology Naomi Reed (panel organizer) and Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson (panel chair), along with two SCOPE undergraduate students, Rose Reed ’25 and Kalista Esquivel ’26, presented their panel “Unsilencing the Past: How Oral Histories Give Voice to Black and Latinx Students at Southwestern University” on April 18 at the Southwestern Social Science Association Conference in New Orleans, LA. Dr. Johnson discussed the foundational history of the University and the founding of The SU Racial History Project. Dr. Reed discussed the liberatory potential of oral histories and why this particular method is key to unsilencing the voices of the oppressed at a predominantly white institution. Rose presented the oral history of Lynette Philips, a Black woman who attended Southwestern University between 1980-1984, played basketball for the university, and was very active on campus. Kalista presented the oral history of Eva Mendiola, a Mexican-American woman who attended Southwestern University from 1972-1975 and founded the volleyball team, which was the first women’s sports team on campus. Future plans include submitting these student papers to a special issue of an oral history journal. The conference program can be viewed here.

Professor of Education Michael Kamen was elected to the position of second vice president (becoming the first vice president and president over the following two years) of The Association for the Study of Play (TASP). He will serve as conference chair for the 2026 TASP conference. TASP is the premier professional organization in academia dedicated to interdisciplinary research and theory construction concerning play throughout the world since 1973. The Association’s broad multidisciplinary focus includes the fields of anthropology, biology, communication studies, cultural studies, dance, ecology, education, ethnology, folklore, history, kinesiology, leisure studies, musicology, philosophy, psychology, recreation, sociology, and the arts.

Graduating senior education major Leora Ammerman ’24 has earned selection for the prestigious and nationally competitive Fulbright U.S. Student Program fellowship, to serve as an English Teaching Assistant (ETA) in Spain for 2024-2025. Leora will be able to leverage the elementary and special education certifications she’s earning at SU to be a highly prepared ETA. Congratulations to Leora and her faculty champions!

French and psychology double major Sarah Woods ’21 is now a Ph.D. student at the University of Utah, studying cognition and neural science in the department of psychology. She was recently selected as a recipient of the prestigious and nationally competitive National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. Congratulations to Sarah and her SU faculty champions who prepared her for this next step!

At the GiveCampus Partner Success Days in San Antonio on April 16, Director of Annual Giving Lauren Strilich and Assistant Director of Annual Giving Jayden Hughes ’21 presented their work, entitled “Stop, Collaborate and Listen: Building Cross Campus Partnerships.” This presentation focuses on leveraging and collaborating with campus partners for successful fundraising.

University Chaplain and Director of Spiritual Life Ron Swain presented the Student Leadership for Racial Justice Award, which is named in his honor, at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, PA on April 12. This Award was created at Swain’s alma mater in 2020, during the 50th anniversary of his graduation from Duquesne. The Award is presented annually to students who have demonstrated authentic passion for diversity, equity, and inclusion through education, engagement, and advocacy at the University or in the city of Pittsburgh. This year’s recipients are Lei’Asha Battle, a junior nursing major, and Jakobie Green, a junior Finance major, both from Sarasota, FL.

Professor of Communication Studies Bob Bednar presented a plenary talk titled “Bringing the Archives Out of the Archives: Mobilizing and Reframing University Archives in Critiques of Campus Commemorative Landscapes” at the Austin Archives Bazaar, held at Scholz Garten in Austin on April 14. The talk described the experience of developing the Placing Memory Interactive Story Map in Summer 2023 with Megan Firestone, Head of Distinctive Collections and Archives, and a team of 11 student researchers: Bettina Castillo ’24, Max Colley ’24, Adrianna Flores-Vivas ’24, Lainey Gutierrez ’25, Teddy Hoffman ’24, Hannah Jury ’24, Shawn Maganda ’24, Harper Randolph ’25, Andrea Stanescu ’24, Michelle Taing ’24, and Ava Zumpano ’25.

Two East Asian Studies faculty members, Associate Professor of Art History Allison Miller and Visiting Professor of Economics Maorui Yang, and two students attended the ASIANetwork conference in Atlanta, Georgia from April 12-14. Natalie Davis ’27 presented her poster titled, “Dueling Depictions: Zhang Zhixin and the Politics of Femininity in Chinese Scar Art.” Kate Medlock ’26 presented her poster titled, “Reviving the Past: A Mid-Western Zhou Jade Pendant and its Neolithic References.” Maorui presented on the panel, “Teaching and Research in the Liberal Arts: ASIANetwork-Luce Postdoctoral Fellows.”

Associate Professor of German Erika Berroth’s engagement with the German speaking community was instrumental in securing a gift to Southwestern University’s Distinctive Collections: Uwe Lemke’s extensive Perry Rhodan collection, donated by his widow Mary Duffy. The many volumes of this epic narrative represent Germany’s most successful and longest running science fiction series that started in 1961, arguably the most successful science fiction novel series in the world. This gift makes Distinctive Collections and Archives currently the only library in the USA that can provide access to a German language collection of the Perry Rhodan series.

Natalie Davis ’27 was named as runner-up for ASIANetwork’s McJimsey student essay award for her paper, “Dueling Depictions: Zhang Zhixin and the Politics of Femininity in Chinese Scar Art.” Natalie received funding to present her work at the ASIANetwork annual conference in Atlanta.

Four art history students presented their research at the virtual SUNY New Paltz Undergraduate Art History Symposium from April 11-14. David Salvania ’27 presented his paper titled, “Feng Zikai’s Advocation of Unity within Shanghai through the Subtlety of Cartoons.” Natalie Davis ’27 presented her paper titled, “Dueling Depictions: Zhang Zhixin and the Politics of Femininity in Chinese Scar Art.” Ceridwen Grady ’24 presented her paper titled, “Accessibility Archive: Finding Sensory Equity in Olafur Eliasson’s Installations.” Hannah Chock ’24 presented her paper titled, “Invitation and Alienation: Semiotic Constructions of Holy Bodies in Caravaggio’s Madonna di Loreto.”

Sociology major Elena Clark ’24 was selected as the first place winner in the prestigious Alpha Kappa Delta national undergraduate paper competition for her capstone project titled “‘Freedom of the streets’ or ‘Barriers to success?’ Factors that Predict Attitudes About Homelessness In The United States.” Elena competed against sociology majors from R1s, liberal arts universities, and other schools across the country. Her award comes with a cash prize and travel money to the August 2024 American Sociological Association (ASA) meeting in Montreal, Quebec, where she will participate in the ASA Honors Program, present her paper, and receive her award at the AKD Awards Ceremony. Professor of Sociology Maria Lowe served as Elena’s faculty mentor for this project.

Recent political science grad and newly elected Phi Beta Kappa member Sierra Rupp ’23 has earned one of the State Department’s prestigious Critical Language Scholarships to study Russian this summer in Kyrgyzstan. Sierra is also one of SU’s two winners of the State Department’s 2024-2025 Fulbright U.S. Student Program fellowship for an English Teaching Assistantship to Spain. Previously, she was also the winner of a CLS Spark award for Summer 2024 to study beginning Russian. Congratulations to Sierra for such outstanding accomplishments!

From a pool of more than 5,000 applicants, biochemistry/mathematics junior and Dixon Scholar Brian Armijo ’25 was selected as a 2024 Goldwater scholar - SU’s first ever! The Goldwater Scholarship Program, one of the oldest and most prestigious national scholarships in the natural sciences, engineering, and mathematics in the United States, seeks to identify, encourage, and financially support college sophomores and juniors who show exceptional promise of becoming this nation’s next generation of research leaders in these fields.

Olivia Bakke ’25, Logan LeBlanc ’25, and Abby Ryan ’25 competed in the National Collegiate Digital Marketing Championships hosted by Baylor University on April 10-11. They competed in all the events and demonstrated outstanding team camaraderie. Logan won the Viral Competition on YouTube marketing.

Associate Professor of Communication Studies Lamiyah Bahrainwala (LB) published an article along with co-author Dr. Jaishikha Nautiyal in the journal QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking. The article, “Queer Desi Kinships: Reaching across Partition,” offers ethnographic accounts of how casteism, anti-Muslim sentiment, and anti desi-queerness diminish desi solidarities in white and western contexts, including academia. They argue that the 1947 Partition of Pakistan and India is still ongoing, and worldwide. Dr. Nautiyal is also joining the Communication Studies Department in Fall 2024, and we are very lucky to have her. The article can be read here.

At the American Physiological Society’s Annual Meeting in Long Beach, CA from April 3-7, Assistant Professor of Kinesiology Jennifer Stokes presented her work, entitled “Collaborative Critical Thinking Problem Sets Enhance Student Perceived Learning and Promote Student Practice Outside of the Classroom.” This pedagogical research focuses on student collaborative learning and engagement in the Anatomy and Physiology classroom.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science Katie Aha presented a paper at the Midwest Political Science Association Annual Conference, held from April 4-7 in Chicago. The paper, “Gestational Surrogacy and Party Politics in Europe,” was part of a panel on “European Political Parties.” She also served as a discussant for a panel on “European Executive and Parliamentary Politics.”

Associate Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnor, Gerald Jones ’25, and Adrian Gonzalez ’25 presented their collaborative project, “Unraveling State Identity in the United States,” at the Midwest Political Science Association’s Annual Meeting April 3-5 in Chicago, IL. They were joined at the conference by SU alumna Alesha Lewis ’21, a current PhD student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, who presented her first-year graduate paper “Does Racial Trauma Influence Political Behavior in Marginalized People?”

Associate Professor of History Joseph Hower found time, between beignets, to chair and comment on a panel on “Environmental Justice in Postwar America” at the Organization of American Historians Conference on American History in New Orleans.

Computer Science majors Caleb Highsmith ’24, Alejandro Medina ’24, Travis Rafferty ’24, and Noah Zamarripa ’24 presented a poster on “SNITCH: Southwestern’s Newest Innovation to Cultivate Honor” which earned 3rd place at the 34th Annual Conference of the Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges: South Central Region on April 5 in Nacogdoches, TX. Their work, done in Professor of Computer Science Barbara Anthony’s capstone course, develops a web-based tool allowing a person to upload assignments and make judgments about the likelihood of the result having been generated by AI, with machine learning models that are constantly being evaluated and are automatically configured based on their performance. Travis also presented a poster on “Using Multi-Objective Quality Diversity to Evolve Complex Machines in Minecraft” that was joint work with Joanna Lewis ’24 done through a SCOPE project with Associate Professor of Computer Science Jacob Schrum.

Associate Professor of German Erika Berroth presented an invited talk on “Die Zukunft des Sprachenlernens in den USA: Visionen und Innovationen” (The Future of Studying Languages in the USA: Visions and Innovations) at the Goethe-Institut in Washington DC. The joint conference sponsored by the American Association of Teachers of German (AATG) and the Goethe-Institut brought together invited expert voices in education, administration, and professional organizations to collaborate on future oriented visions for the continued success of learning and teaching German across institutions, proficiency levels, and global networks.

Associate Professor of German Erika Berroth earned two DAAD materials grants to support teaching and learning in German Studies. The grants from Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst (German Academic Exchange Service) and the German Foreign Office provide two curated collections of German language titles: a collection of literary works published in 2023, and a collection of literature commenting on and reflecting current salient issues in German culture. Students will use the collections to study representations of diversity, inclusion, and anti-racism in German literature. Success with DAAD materials grants is made possible through Berroth’s work in community engagement as a DAAD Ortslektorin, serving to amplify and multiply the DAAD mission and motto “Change by Exchange.”

Associate Professor of German Erika Berroth mentored two students who presented their research projects at the 13th Undergraduate Research Conference in German Studies, organized by Moravian and Lafayette Colleges in Pennsylvania on April 6, 2024. This national conference brought together young scholars and their mentors for presentations and discussions of a range of interdisciplinary topics representative of German Studies. Isabella Moore ’25, double major in German and Environmental Studies, presented her comparative study on developments in the use of solar energy in Germany and the United States. Kendyl Feuerbacher ’27, double major in German and Studio Art with a minor in Design Thinking, presented her research on the increase of motivation for learning new languages through the use of video games.

Professor of Spanish Carlos de Oro presented the paper “Revelando el impacto y el trauma del conflicto armado: La espectralidad como estrategia cinematográfica en el cine colombiano del nuevo milenio” at the 2024 Southwest Council on Latin American Studies in Panama City, Panama.

Professor of Environmental Studies Joshua Long attended the Political Ecology Society and Society for Applied Anthropology conference in Santa Fe, NM from March 25-30. He served on a panel and presented a flash talk titled, “Extractivism and Climate Justice: Fueling the New Climate Colonialism.”

Professor of Sociology Maria Lowe and four sociology seniors attended the Southern Sociological Society annual meeting in New Orleans, LA from April 3-6. Each student also presented their capstone research. Elena Clark ’24 presented her paper titled, “‘Freedom of the streets’ or ‘Barriers to success?’ Factors that Predict Attitudes About Homelessness In The United States.” Liana Collins ’24 presented her paper titled, “Americans’ Attitudes About Second Language Learning in the U.S.” Carson Maxfield ’24 presented his paper titled, “Who is More Likely to Support Conspiracy Theories? Examining the Connections between Education, Gender, and Beliefs in Conspiracy Theory.” Brigit Reese ’24 presented her paper titled, “Hope, Nope, or Cope: Americans’ Perceptions about Climate Change in the 2020s.” In addition, Lowe, Reese, and Maxfield presented the preliminary findings from their faculty-student collaborative project titled, “Racialized Fears in White Spaces: The Frequency with Which Residents Worry About Being Perceived As Suspicious in Their Neighborhood.”

Professor of English Michael Saenger published an essay that was featured on the Times of Israel website, titled “Keeping the light on, in my campus office.” The essay advocates activism to combat rising antisemitism at American universities. He was nominated to join the Steering Committee of the new initiative he has helped to launch, discussed in the essay, Faculty Against Antisemitism Movement. The essay can be read here.

Professor of Psychology Traci Giuliano published an article entitled “Successfully publishing with undergraduate coauthors in psychology: Insights from faculty with top track records.” Coauthors are former students Will Hebl ’23 and Jennifer Howell ’09. The article can be read here.

Several Psychology faculty members and students presented papers at the annual meeting of the Southwestern Psychological Association in San Antonio. Professor of Psychology Traci Giuliano and student Megan Muskara ’24, presented a poster titled “Identifying predictors of the psychological benefits of travel.” Associate Professor of Psychology Carin Perilloux and students Lainey Gutierrez ’25, Jaxson Haynes ’25, Maryn Medlock ’25, Cassidy Reynolds ’24, and Lauren Sanders ’24 presented a poster titled “Developing the Self-Perceived Parental Effort Scale (SPES).” Assistant Professor of Psychology Karen Lara and students Mara Strohl ’25, Paige Chapman ’25, Tessa Elizondo ’24, Jessica Metcalf ’25, Hailey Brisco ’25, and Ashten Wheeler ’25 presented a poster titled “Children’s and Adults’ Reasoning About How Expected Wait Time Influences Preferences and Emotions.”

Gabriela Nicole Hislop Gomez ’26, Angel Rodriguez ’24, and Sabrina Woodward ’25 gave platform presentations at the Capitol of Texas Undergraduate Research Conference (CTURC) hosted at UT Austin. Their presentations were the result of work conducted in the bioprinting laboratory of Assistant Professor of Physics Cody Crosby.

Professor of Biochemistry and Garey Chair of Chemistry Maha Zewail-Foote presented “Biological and molecular consequences of oxidative damage on non-B DNA-induced genetic instability” at the 2024 American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology National Meeting.

Professor of Biochemistry and Garey Chair of Chemistry Maha Zewail-Foote delivered a presentation on effective strategies for improving diversity, inclusion, and belonging within undergraduate research laboratories at the 2024 American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology National Meeting. Her abstract was selected for the coveted spotlight talk for a special session on challenges and best practices in running a research program primarily with undergraduate students.

Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson presented the paper “The Crawford Family Line: Subaltern Socio-Ecological Formations on the British Coast of Central America in the 1700s” at the Political Ecology Society/Society for Applied Anthropology 84th Annual Meeting on March 27 in Santa Fe, NM.

Visual Content Producer Todd White and Head of Distinctive Collections & Archives Megan Firestone won a Texas Library Association Branding Iron Award in the digital communications category for an academic library for their work on the Behind the Artifactseries.

The A. Frank Smith, Jr. Library Center (SLC) has been named a winner of the Texas Library Association’s “Branding Iron” awards, recognizing outstanding library marketing. Senior Research and Instruction Librarian Katherine Hooker created a pirate-themed interactive library treasure hunt to orient students to the spaces and resources of SLC. Head of Distinctive Collections and Archives Megan Firestone designed a temporary tattoo of the first SU Pirates logo and provided these as prizes for completing the treasure hunt activity. The project won for “Best External Communication” from an academic library.

Head of Distinctive Collections & Archives Megan Firestone was added to the acquisition board for the Williamson Museum.

Head of Distinctive Collections & Archives Megan Firestone presented on women’s education at Southwestern University and creation of the Ladies Annex for Preservation Georgetown’s First Friday on March 1.

Professor of English Michael Saenger was invited to contribute to the Antisemitism Studies program at Gratz College. In pioneering its new Masters program in Antisemitism Studies, Gratz College joins the expertise of its own faculty with experts from around the world.

Assistant Professor of Anthropology Naomi Reed and investigative journalist Brittney Martin received a 2024 Gracie Award for Best Investigative Feature [Radio ‐ Nationally Syndicated Non‐Commercial] for their podcast series “Sugar Land.” The Gracie Awards celebrate women in media. More info can be found here.

In 2023, Professor of Biology Romi Burks contributed to a United States Department of Agriculture - Agriculture Research Services (USDA-ARS) effort to communicate the latest science on the invasive apple snail that occurs across the southeastern region of the United States. The content of that Apple Snail Workshop, entitled “Apple Snails: Discussion of past problems and future solutions for an emerging pest in the United States agriculture/aquaculture,” now appears published in World Aquaculture, the magazine for the World Aquaculture Society. Recent Burks’ Lab researcher, now professional scientific illustrator, Lauren Muskara ’21 provided the photograph of an apple snail laying eggs on a pylon that the authors chose for the cover of the article. The full article can be read on page 46 here.

Four Mathematics faculty and five students participated in the 2024 Meeting of the Texas Section of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA), held March 22-23 in San Marcos, TX. Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton presented “Mathematical Modeling Projects.” Shelton also performed administrative duties as past Representative of the Texas MAA to the association level MAA Congress, and she served as the Department Liaison. Assistant Professor of Mathematics John Ross participated in Project NeXT sessions. Professor and Garey Chair of Mathematics Alison Marr and Professor and Lord Chair of Mathematics Fumiko Futamura attended. Alley Koenig ’24 presented “Subtractive Edge Magic Labelings” resulting from the capstone project supervised by Marr, and Kathryn Altman ’24 presented “​​Difference Distance Magic Oriented Graphs,” also supervised by Marr. ​​Amanda Mejia ’27, Camille James ’27, and Kate Dennis ’27 participated in the Calculus Bowl. 

Professor and Garey Chair of Mathematics Alison Marr and Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota-Duluth Bryan Freyberg published the paper “Neighborhood Balanced Colorings of Graphs” in Graphs and Combinatorics. The article can be read here.

Professor of Biochemistry and Garey Chair of Chemistry Maha Zewail-Foote co-organized and led a well-attended 90-min workshop titled “Unlocking Your Career Success Through Networking and Mentorship” at the 2024 American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology National Meeting. Workshops were selected based on proposal submissions. 

Assistant Professor of History Soojung Han was invited to give a talk in the “Asia in Depth” series at Georgetown University. Her talk was titled “The Rise of the Shatuo Turks: Identity Formation in Medieval China.”

Professor and Austin Term Chair in English Eileen Cleere presided over the 39th meeting of INCS (Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies) in Cincinnati, OH, March 21-24, under the theme of “Trans-Turns in the Nineteenth Century.” In addition to whipping Board votes for a successful overhaul of the organization’s bylaws and constitution and announcing prizes and initiatives at the membership banquet, Cleere chaired a panel on “Theorizing Trans-historically.”

Professor of Computer Science Barbara Anthony co-presented “BA versus BS Degrees in Computer Science” at the Innovations and Opportunities in Liberal Arts Computing Education-affiliated event at SIGCSE 2024, the ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education in Portland, OR. The working group considered the computer major requirements of 100+ liberal arts colleges, highlighting commonalities and differences in the BA and BS offerings as well as some of the implications for programs and students.

Associate Professor of Business Debika Sihi and Student Researcher Abigail (Abby) Ryan ’25 presented their research project, “Proactively Leveraging Generative AI Tools in Marketing Courses: A Process for Prompt Engineering Assignments” at the Marketing Management Association’s Spring Educators Conference on March 21-22.

The cello studio of Part-Time Assistant Professor of Music and Artist in Residence Hai Zheng Olefsky participated in a masterclass led by guest artist Joshua Gindele on March 21 at the Caldwell-Carvey Foyer. Professor Gindele, a cello professor at the Butler School of Music at the University of Texas at Austin and a founding member of the prestigious Miro Quartet, conducted the session and provided valuable insights to the performers. During the masterclass, Anna Martens ’24, the first cellist of the SU Orchestra, performed a cello solo piece by Bach and the first movement of the Elgar Concerto, accompanied by Part-Time Instructor of Music David Utterback. Additionally, the Sarofim Piano Trio, a student trio coached by Professor of Music Kiyoshi Tamagawa, also performed a rendition of Shostakovich’s Trio Op. No. 2 in E minor at the event.

Professor of History Melissa Byrnes presented as part of “New Directions in the Historiography of Post/Colonial France: A Book Panel,” at the Society for French Historical Studies annual meeting at Hofstra University.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper presented a keynote lecture titled “The Cost of Being Fanny Mendelssohn” at each of two concerts offered as part of a Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel festival given by the Capitol Hill Chorale in Washington, D.C., under the direction of Frederick Binkholder of Georgetown University.

Associate Professor of Theatre Kerry Bechtel worked as a costume buyer for Amazon Pictures’ new series “Fallout.” Alumnus Jonathan Knipscher ’03 was the Associate Costume Designer on the project. The show premieres on April 11, 2024. The series trailer can be seen here.

Professor of Education Michael Kamen and Assistant Professor of Curriculum Instruction and Learning Sciences at Texas A&M-Corpus Christi Debra Plowman published “It’s Done with Mirrors” in the Winter 2024 newsletter of the International Consortium for Research in Science and Mathematics Education. Their quarterly column tells the ongoing story of the fictional character, Ian Quiry, as he studies and struggles to learn how to be an effective elementary school STEM teacher.

Assistant Professor of Physics Cody Crosby co-authored “Fabrication and Characterization of Quad-Component Bioinspired Hydrogels to Model Elevated Fibrin Levels in Central Nervous Tissue Scaffolds” in the journal Gels with Dr. Dany Munoz-Pinto and his undergraduate laboratory at Trinity University. The work was published open-access and can be downloaded here.

Professor of Spanish Katy Ross and Andrea Stanescu ’24 presented their paper “La doble alteridad en Carmen & Lola” at the Northeastern Modern Languages Conference in Boston, MA, March 8-10.

Professor of Religion Elaine Craddock published the article “Divine Power and Fluid Bodies: Tirunaṅkai Communities in Tamil Nadu” in the International Journal of Hindu Studies this March. The article can be read here.

Professor of Religion and Environmental Studies Laura Hobgood spent part of spring break in Los Angeles being interviewed and filmed for a documentary focusing on women as leaders and healers in early and medieval Christianity. The documentary, tentatively titled “Immortality Key,” will be a feature length motion picture when it is completed.

Associate Professor of Art History Allison Miller gave an invited presentation on February 26 in a webinar organized by the Association for Chinese Art History titled “Chinese Art History in the Undergraduate Curriculum.”

Assistant Professor of Mathematics Noelle Sawyer recently published a review in Nature of the documentary Journeys of Black Mathematicians: Forging Resilience. The review can be read here.

Associate Professor of Spanish Abby Dings and coauthor Tammy Jandrey Hertel of the University of Lynchburg presented a talk titled “The study abroad experiences of heritage Spanish speakers” at the Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics (GURT) in Washington, D.C., March 1-3, 2024. This year’s theme was “Education Abroad: Language, Learners, and Communities.”

Professor and Austin Term Chair of English Eileen Cleere published an article in the most recent issue of the Children’s Literature Association Quarterly. The essay, “Girls on Fire: Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1861), Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown (1943), and the Adolescent Sublimation of Victorian Sensation” was reworked from a Paideia Lecture, and can be read here.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper led a virtual seminar on the subject of the politics of the CREDO of W.E.B. Du Bois and Margaret Bonds with the combined choirs of the University of California, Berkeley. Attended by about eighty singers and several community members, the seminar was offered in preparation for the choirs’ upcoming performance of the Bonds/Du Bois CREDO.

Associate Professor of Communication Studies Lamiyah Bahrainwala and SU students R’Yani Vaughn ’24 and Sydney Wahl ’24 attended the 2024 Western States Communication Association (WSCA) Undergraduate Scholars Research Conference in Reno, NV. Lamiyah supervised R’Yani and Sydney’s senior projects, which were anonymously reviewed and competitively selected for presentation: “Exploring Depictions of Black Motherhood in the Music Industry,” R’Yani Sydnee-LeChe’ Vaugn, and “From Samoan Warrior to American Traitor: The Media Framing Creations plus Exceptionalism, Nationalism, and Masculine Perfectionism Reactions that hanger the Course of Football Star Manti Te’o’s Life,” Sydney Lee Wahl. Senior scholars as well as the WSCA President themself spoke with these students and attempted to recruit them to their graduate programs. Congratulations to these impressive students!

Assistant Professor of Music Ruben Balboa served as a jury member for the 2024 Primrose International Viola Competition. As one of the most renowned string instrument competitions in the world, the Primrose International Viola Competition features the world’s best and most promising young violists.

Lerchen Zhong, a sophomore at Westwood High School in Austin and a piano student of Professor of Music Kiyoshi Tamagawa since 2019, has been awarded one of fifteen Texas Young Masters arts awards for 2024-2025. Texas Young Masters is a joint program of the Texas Cultural Trust and the Texas Commission on the Arts that focuses on talented young artists in grades 8-11. Recipients, selected through competitive application and audition, receive the title of Young Master and are awarded renewable grants of $5,000 per year for further study in their chosen arts disciplines. In addition to his piano studies, Lerchen was selected as Assistant Concertmaster of the Texas All-State Symphony, the top All-State orchestra, in February.

Gabriela Nicole Hislop Gomez ’26, Noor Nazeer ’24, and Angel Rodriguez ’24 presented their research talks at the Texas Academy of Science (TAS) 2024 Annual Meeting hosted at UT Permian Basin in Odessa. Noor and Angel were awarded first place in the chemistry/biochemistry and physics/engineering sections, respectively. Their presentations were the result of work conducted in the bioprinting laboratory of Assistant Professor of Physics Cody Crosby.

Associate Professor of German Erika Berroth served as an Evaluator for the National German Exam, administered through the American Association of Teachers of German. The National German Exam is administered each year to over 15,000 high school students of German. The exam, now in its 64th year, provides individual diagnostic feedback, rewards students through an extensive regional and national prize program, and creates a sense of accomplishment. Exam results provide teachers a means of comparing students in all regions of the country, as well as programmatic data to help inform curricular decisions. For over 60 years, the Federal Republic of Germany, through the German Foreign Office and its Pedagogical Exchange Service, has provided the AATG/PAD National German Exam Scholarship, a three-week trip to Germany. Berroth’s outreach and support for teachers and learners of German facilitates transitions from high school to college level German curricula and the enjoyment of lifelong learning.

Head of Distinctive Collections and Archives Megan Firestone presented on the development of downtown Georgetown prior to 1915 and the use of Sanborn Maps to the Georgetown Sertoma Club.

Associate Professor of German Erika Berroth hosted a campus exploration day for 15 students from Germany and their teachers on February 29. The students from Paul-Klee-Gymnasium in Augsburg participate in the German American Partnership Program, GAPP, with Westwood High School in Round Rock. Established in 1972, the German American Partnership Program facilitates bilateral transatlantic exchanges between schools in the U.S. and Germany. With a substantial network of participating schools and over 400,000 participants over the years, GAPP is the largest bilateral exchange program between the U.S. and another country. Berroth’s sustained engagement in this form of community outreach connects and supports German educators across institutions and increases guidance for students of languages, who are encouraged to integrate experiences abroad into their educational paths. Southwestern students and GAPP participants enjoyed opportunities for increasing their intercultural knowledge and competence.

Associate Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnor and former Senior Director of Integrative Learning Sarah Brackmann recently published a piece in Inside Higher Ed Jobs  about how to engage in nonpartisan voter engagement efforts in today’s polarized political climate. They were invited to write the piece based on their presentation on the SU Votes coalition’s strategies for increasing voter registration and engagement at the AAC&U conference in January 2023. It can be found here.

Assistant Professor of Economics Chandrayee Chatterjee presented her co-authored paper titled “Spillover Effects of Advertising: Do TV Advertisements for Non-Food Health Products Promote Healthy Food Choices?” at the American Marketing Association Winter Academic Conference at St. Pete’s Beach, FL, on February 25. The paper was accepted for a session in the competitive paper category.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Theatre Amy King wrote, directed, and produced a staged reading of her new play Finger Lickin’ Goodat the Jones Theatre in February. The cast included students Jason Bui ’27 as Raymond, Kyle Bussone-Peterson ’24 as Kevin, and Connor Bustos ’26 on stage directions. They were joined by guest Gina Houston in the leading role of Alice and Director of Business Internships and Assistant Professor of Business Andy Ross as Jim, etc., in his acting debut! The reading was also performed at Austin Community College in Highland Park.

Assistant Professor of Physics Cody Crosby published a review titled “Open-source extrusion 3D bioprinters: Trends and recommendations” in the journal Bioprinting. The publication evaluates the latest syringe extruders that have been designed to extrude bio-inks and offers concrete recommendations to ensure that this technology remains inexpensive and open-source. The process involved building and testing the five most popular designs available in the literature, as seen in Figure 2. The paper can be accessed for free for 50 days here.

The violin studio of Part-Time Assistant Professor of Applied Music Jessica Mathaes performed in a masterclass by guest artist Sandy Yamamoto on Saturday, February 24, at Caldwell-Carvey Foyer. Professor Yamamoto is a violin professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a founding member of the renowned Miro quartet. Mathaes’ students performed violin solo works in front of a live audience, with a real-time critique by the guest artist. The Sarofim String Quartet (a student quartet coached by Mathaes) concluded the masterclass with a Beethoven Op. 18 No. 4 performance.

Professor of Mathematics Alison Marr attended the Joint Mathematics Meetings in January in San Francisco, where she spoke about the Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education (EDGE) Summer program as an invited panelist in the AMS Committee on Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Panel Discussion: Successful Programs that Support Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.

Professor of Mathematics Alison Marr gave the keynote address titled “The Edges of my Mathematical Life” at the Yellowhammer Network of Women in the Mathematical Sciences Workshop at the University of Alabama.

Professor of History Melissa Byrnes gave a guest lecture at the University of Maryland-College Park on “Race and Activism in France: From the Algerian War to #BLM.” While in the DC area, she also gave invited talks at American University and Georgetown University about her recent book, Making Space: Neighbors, Officials, and North African Migrants in the Suburbs of Paris and Lyon

Assistant Professor of Mathematics Noelle Sawyer gave two invited talks in February. On February 7th, she spoke at the University of Illinois Chicago about geodesic currents and how to use them as a tool. On February 12, she spoke at the University of Wisconsin-Madison about a work in progress with her collaborators on statistical properties of CAT(0) spaces.

Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies Meagan Solomon participated in the Association for Jotería Arts, Activism, and Scholarship Conference in Los Angeles, CA, from February 15-18. With co-discussants X’andrí and Alexandra Salazar, she presented on a roundtable entitled “The Pleasures and Intimacies of Jotería Spacemaking Within and Beyond the University.” Their roundtable focused on the necessity of cultivating spaces to exist and commune as jotería (queer Latinxs) against continued assaults on our humanity. As politicians and their constituents continue to target and alienate LGBTQ+ folks, this roundtable asserted that jotería spacemaking is an act of survival.

Kathryn Altman ’24 and Alleen Koenig ’24 gave a poster presentation at the Nebraska Conference for Undergraduate Women in Mathematics (NCUWM). Their poster was on the summer research they performed in which they used mathematical modeling to study the effects of gravitropism on the structure of tomato plant root system architectures.

Associate Professor of Education Alicia Moore, Visiting Professor of Education Deborah Shepherd, and Rebecca M. Giles (University of South Alabama) published the article, “Preparing Early Childhood Teachers to Create Inclusive Literacy,’” in English in Texas: A Journal of the Texas Council of Teachers of English Language Arts. The essay highlights the importance of “mirror” texts for young children, which allow students to see their identities highlighted through books and analysis.

Part-Time Assistant Professor of Applied Music Jessica Mathaes was selected to lead the Grand Teton Music Festival Orchestra as concertmaster this summer. Hailed as “one of the top 10 classical music festivals in the US” (Financial Times), the Grand Teton Music Festival takes place in Jackson, Wyoming. In its 63rd season, the festival is eight weeks long and is a destination for top orchestral players from world-renowned orchestras. Mathaes will lead the orchestra in July, with Sir Donald Runnicles conducting.

Assistant Professor of Economics Chandrayee Chatterjee was invited to present her work in the Economics Seminar Series at the Department of Economics and Decision Sciences at Western Illinois University. She presented her paper titled “Spillover Effects of Advertising on Health Behavior and Nutritional Choices” virtually on February 16th.

Professor of English Michael Saenger co-authored an op-ed in the Times of Israel with David Mikics, Moores Distinguished Professor in the Department of English and the Honors College, University of Houston. The article “Trouble at the Modern Language Association” opposes academic antisemitism and extremism and advocates for dialog and diversity in American campus life.

Part-Time Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Katharine Hodgdon has been appointed as a contributor for The Wall Street Journal’s Critical Thinking Resources publication. This resource summarizes articles appearing in the Journal and provides thought-provoking, free-response questions to be used for class discussions. Katharine’s contributions will focus on informative and persuasive communication techniques utilized by reporters and journalists to explain current events.

Professor of Theatre Desiderio Roybal was invited to join the Board of Directors for the Palace Theatre, Georgetown, TX.

Assistant Professor of Physics Cody Crosby, alongside three outstanding Southwestern alumni and current students (Domenic Cordova ’23, Angel Rodriguez ’24, and Nina Woodward ’24), published an article in HardwareX that demonstrated the development of an open-source bioprinting extruder for Ender-series 3D printers. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ohx.2024.e00510

Associate Professor of Communication Studies Lamiyah Bahrainwala gave an invited lecture at Arizona State University on January 16, 2023. The virtual talk discussed the role of the critic and public scholarship to graduate students in a Research Methods seminar.

Assistant Professor of Math Noelle Sawyer is a Mathematically Gifted and Black 2024 Black History Month honoree. You can find the profile here.

Assistant Professor of Anthropology Naomi Reed was invited to present at the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration Historical Studies of Texas Symposium on February 9th and 10th in Austin, Texas. On the roundtable “Community-Based Scholarship,” she explored who gets to be “community” when decisions are being made about forgotten Black cemeteries such as The Bullhead Camp Cemetery (the current resting place of the Sugar Land 95). She discussed how the Texas Antiquities Code requires community input when remains are discovered and how the broader Black descendant community of the 95 has been ignored, thus resulting in subpar memorialization efforts by the local school district that owns the land the bodies are buried on.

Chair & Associate Professor of Kinesiology Ed Merritt presented a talk, “Simple Strategies to Incorporate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion into Existing Kinesiology Lessons and Curriculum,” at the American Kinesiology Association Leadership Workshop on January 25 in Albuquerque, NM.

Part-Time Assistant Professor of Applied Music and Concertmaster of the Austin Symphony Jessica Mathaes’ student Seth Sagen ’26, a violin performance major, performed in the violin section of the Austin Symphony on their Masterworks concerts February 9-10 at the Long Center.

Assistant Professor of English Sonia Del Hierro gave a public talk in a Modern Language Association webinar where she co-presented her recent collaborative publication, “Radical Collegiality and Joy in Graduate Education,” included in the edited collection Graduate Education for a Thriving Humanities Ecosystem.

Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Raquel Moreira published the article, “Rhetorics of authentic hybridity and the racially mobile mestiça in ‘Girl from Rio,’” in the Quarterly Journal of Speech. The essay challenges common readings of Latinidad’s racial hybridity as a transgressive in-betweenness against the Black/white racial binary, focusing instead on how this rhetorical construction produces racial mobility, specifically toward whiteness. The Quarterly Journal of Speech is the field’s most prestigious journal, a peer-reviewed publication of the National Communication Association.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper wrote the program note for the first performance of Florence Price’s Symphony No. 3 by the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. The performance is another milestone in the ongoing Florence Price movement, as a major orchestra that, even just ten years ago, had never even considered performing any of her music finally elected to recognize her significance by granting her a place in its repertoire.

Part-Time Faculty Member in the English Department Chelsey Clammer ’05 and had her recent lyric essay, “The Ruins of What Never Was,” published in Volume 4 of iO Literary Journal, available here.

Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson’s work on Belize was featured in the January 19, 202, JSTOR Daily.

Professor of Religion and Environmental Studies Laura Hobgood had three chapters published in edited volumes in January and February. “Blessings of Pets in Jewish and Christian Traditions” and “Companion Animals” in Animals and Religion, Routledge Press (ed. D. Aftandilian, B Ambros, and A. Gross) and “Animals and Religion” in Religion and Nature in North America, Bloomsbury Press (ed. L. Kearns and W. Bauman).

Professor of English Michael Saenger published “The University after October 7” in TELOSscope, which is part of Telos: Cultural Theory of the Contemporary.

Professor of Education Michael Kamen presented a roundtable session, “Polishing the Gems, Professional Development for Project WILD facilitators Through Lesson Study,” at the Association for Science Teacher Education in New Orleans annual conference. He discussed the results of a pilot project he conducted with Kiki Corry, former Project WILD coordinator for the state of Texas.

Professor of History Melissa Byrnes gave a public talk on the history behind the book and recent Netflix series, All the Light We Cannot See, at Lark & Owl Booksellers in Georgetown.

Assistant Professor of Kinesiology Jennifer Stokes and current SU student Mila Fisher ’24 published an article entitled A Single 10-Minute E-cigarette Vapor Exposure Reduces Tidal Volume and Minute Ventilation in Normoxia and Normobaric Hypoxia in Adult Rats in Cureus, an open-access journal for medical sciences.

Assistant Professor of Kinesiology Jennifer Stokes, current SU student Mila Fisher ’24, and alumni Alicia Peters ’23 published an article entitled Fourteen-day E-Cigarette Exposure Disrupts Ventilation Patterns and Serum IL-1B Levels in Adolescent Rats in the Journal of Student Research.

Assistant Professor of History Bryan Kauma presented a paper titled, ‘‘Agriculture is a scam!’: Modified seeds, fertilizers and the agrarian fallacy among African grain farmers in colonial Zimbabwe, the 1950s to 1979, at the European University Institute, Knowing the planet: Environment, technology, and development in the 19th and 20th centuries workshop.

Assistant Professor of History Bryan Kauma published an article in the journal Critical African Studies, ‘Our stomachs are still hungry’: The colonial state, African Nutrition and small grains in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), c.1950 to 1970s.

Professor of Religion Elaine Craddock published an article titled “Un/Desirable Encounters at the Intersections of Caste, Class and Religion” in the journal Feminist Review in December.

Assistant Professor of Sociology Adriana Ponce participated in the Sociologist for Women in Society (SWS) 2024 winter meeting in Santa Ana Pueblo, New Mexico, from January 25 to 28. She presented her project, “The Intersectional Landscape of Stepparents in the U.S.: What’s Next?,” which advocates for an intersectional, feminist approach to stepparenting research, in preparation for a Faculty-Student Project (FSP).

Professor of History Melissa Byrnes was part of a roundtable on “Difficult Conversations in the Liberal Arts Classroom” that followed a workshop by the same name at the American Historical Association’s annual meeting in San Francisco, CA. Mercedes Chervony ’23 presented her research, “From the Chicago Freedom Movement to Cabrini-Greene: The Limitations of Legal Activism and the Foresaking of the Projects,” at an undergraduate lightening round, also at the American Historical Association’s annual meeting in San Francisco, CA.

Director of Organic Chemistry Labs Carmen Velez and Assistant Professor of Physics Cody Crosby, alongside several outstanding Southwestern undergraduate alumni and students (Kristie Cheng, Nina Woodward, Noor Nazeer, and Gabriela Nicole Hislop Gomez) published an article in the Journal of Chemical Education that describes the adaptation of gelatin methacryoyl (GelMA) hydrogels to the undergraduate laboratory. The authors found that their methods reinforced chemistry laboratory skills introduced students to a new discipline (biomaterials), and increased student interest in the medicinal applications of materials. The article was additionally featured by ACS as a supplementary journal cover designed by Lauren Muskara, a Southwestern alumnus.

Assistant Dean of Strategic Initiatives and Professor of Spanish Laura Senio Blair had her article titled “Unlocking the Door to Shadow and Substance: Nona Fernández’s La dimensión desconocida” published in the 50th issue of the journal Ciberletras: Revista de crítica literaria y de cultura. Learn more here.

Professor of English and Austin Term Chair Eileen Cleere has been elected to the Presidency of INCS, the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Association. Effective January 1, 2024, Cleere will lead the international organization for a two-year period, convening the annual convention in Cincinnati, OH, in 2024 and Genoa, Italy, in 2025. The organization has hundreds of active members who write and publish in multiple languages, ranging from English, History, and Art History to Environmental Studies, Feminist Studies, and Gender and Sexuality Studies. Learn more about the organization here.

Professor of Political Science Eric Selbin presented a paper at the most recent International Studies Association-Global South Caucus Conference in Bangkok entitled “Global South Stories of IR: An Entangled Anarchival Prosopographic Approach.” He also served as Chair for a panel titled Exploring Synergies: Revealing the Dynamics and Impact of South-South Cooperation.

Assistant Professor of Kinesiology Tatiana Zhuravleva, along with her colleagues from New Mexico State University, the University of Texas-Austin, and the University of Nebraska-Kearney, published an article titled ‘The Effects of PETTLEP Imagery and Action Observation on Strength Performance of a Leg Extension and Flexion Task’ in the Journal of Imagery Research in Sport and Physical Activity (JIRSPA).

Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy Gwen Daugs presented a paper at the 2024 Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association titled “Moral Panic and Gender: Michel Foucault, Toby Beauchamp, and the Safety of Children.”

Visiting Assistant Professor of Biology Kyle Wilhite published a paper titled “Ripple effects in a communication network: anti-eavesdropper defense elicits elaborated sexual signals in rival males” in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B on December 20, 2023. This research was a multi-national collaboration with Purdue University, The University of Texas at Austin, VU University in the Netherlands, the University of Tennessee Knoxville, the University of Antioquia in Colombia, and The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper published two new volumes of previously unknown compositions by Florence Price: Seven Songs on Texts of African American Poets and 12 Pieces for Piano Solo (both Fayetteville, AK: ClarNan Editions) and released these in tandem with sixteen videos performed and produced by African American artists; four of these videos were produced with assistance from Southwestern. The volume of songs was released in both the original settings for medium voice and a separate edition for high voice (because we all want to keep the sopranos happy). Totaling about 54 minutes worth of music, the 19 pieces in these volumes reveal the breadth and richness of Price’s musical imagination and span her active composing career from 1929 to the early 1950s. Those interested in hearing the Seven Songs on Texts of African American Poets can check out this YouTube playlist, and those interested in hearing the 12 Pieces for Piano Solo can check out this YouTube playlist. Listeners should, however, be forewarned that after listening to either or both of these playlists, they might experience what one listener dubbed #ThePriceEffect: a highly emotional state that mingles joy at this music’s entry into public life with a wide range of other emotions triggered by the music itself and sorrow that such genius that the political economy of the music industry and higher education allowed these works to remain unknown for decades – depriving audiences, teachers, and (most of all) students of their beauties.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science Katie Aha attended the Southern Political Science Association Annual Conference in New Orleans. Her paper with Linsey Jensen ’23, “Patterns of Radical Right Support in Czechoslovakia’s Successor States,” was part of a panel titled Left, Right, and Center, and she also served as chair and discussant for the panel European Political Institutions.

Professor of English Michael Saenger presented a paper at the Modern Language Association Convention in Philadelphia. His paper, “Double Tongue: Multiple Languages in Shakespeare,” examines the theoretical status of linguistic mixture in the early modern period. At the convention, Saenger also advocated for social justice and academic freedom at the Delegate Assembly of the Modern Language Association, and his activism was covered in the national press. Saenger published an op-ed on the struggles of the organization, which was presented as a Featured Post in the Times of Israel. He then presented an invited talk on Academic Engagement Network’s Short Course in Phoenix, “A Break in Discourse after October 7.”

Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics Jeffrey Easton presented a paper at the Fourth North American Congress of Greek and Latin Epigraphy in Chicago on January 8-9. The paper “An (Almost) Unspeakable Office,” explored a textual crux in a public Latin inscription of the early Roman Empire to reconsider the nebulous world of administration and distribution of civic and military authority in the early and middle Roman Republic.

Professor of History Melissa Byrnes published her book Making Space: Neighbors, Officials, and North African Migrants in the Suburbs of Paris and Lyon as part of the France Overseas: Studies in Empire and Decolonization Series at the University of Nebraska Press.

Assistant Professor of Mathematics Noelle Sawyer was featured in a video interview in the Meet a Mathematician series on December 30th, 2023. The mission of Meet a Mathematician is to share stories of mathematicians from different backgrounds, especially from historically excluded groups, with the aim of introducing students to role models and fostering a sense of community. Watch the video here.

Professor of Spanish Katy Ross had an article, “Las técnicas de reproducción asistida y la donación: el caso de Samanta Villar,” published in the Revista de ALCE SXXI, Journal of Contemporary Spanish Literature and Film.

Professor of Computer Science Barbara Anthony and her co-authors, Christine Chung of Connecticut College, Ananya Das of Middlebury College, and David Yuen, published their article “Earliest Deadline First is a 2-approximation for DARP with Time Windows” in the proceedings of the International Conference on Combinatorial Optimization and Applications.

Assistant Professor of Biology Kim McArthur presented a virtual poster at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in November 2023. Her poster, titled “Mapping the dendrite topography of facial motor neurons in larval zebrafish,” presented preliminary results from her sabbatical research, gathering evidence to test the hypothesis that the relative positioning of a neuron’s dendrites can determine which synaptic inputs that neuron receives– thereby determining its functional role in a neural circuit.

Professor of Education Michael Kamen and Assistant Professor Debra Plowman (A&M -Corpus Christi) published “Solving Word Problems with Understanding” in the Fall 2023 newsletter of the International Consortium for Research in Science and Mathematics Education. Their quarterly column tells the ongoing story of the fictional character, Ian Quiry, as he studies and struggles to learn how to be an effective elementary school STEM teacher.

Associate Professor and Chair of Communication Studies Lamiyah Bahrainwala (LB) attended the 2023 National Communication Association conference, the discipline’s flagship conference, in National Harbor, MD:

1. LB presented on three panels: a roundtable discussion on extractivism and energy justice, a roundtable discussion on the “bamboo ceiling” about challenges undercutting Asian scholars, and a co-authored-paper presentation on de-whitening consent amidst COVID-19 rhetoric.
2. LB received a Top Paper Award for her co-authored paper from the Critical/Cultural Studies Division.
3. LB assumed responsibility as elected Vice Chair of the Feminist and Gender Studies Division and will plan the division’s NCA Program for 2024.
4. LB chaired a panel on misogyny in international media.

In August of this year, Part-time Assistant Instructor of Applied Music Katherine Altobello ’99 was the featured guest Resident Artist alongside Grammy-nominated pianist Austin Haller at the iconic Spiritual Retreat Center, Holden Village, located in the remote North Cascade Mountains of Washington State. Altobello and Haller led daily musical workshops, choral programs, and performed a contemporary-classical concert for voice and piano titled “Hope and Healing.” Holden Village offers visitors a unique opportunity to step into the wilderness to form and renew their relationship with God, the earth, and each other. Over the course of more than 60 years, Holden Village has been transformed from a copper mining town to a vibrant place of education, programming, and worship where everyone is welcome and embraced. For more information, visit www.holdenvillage.org.

Part-time Assistant Professor of Music and concert cellist Hai Zheng Olefsky has continued coaching the top high school cellists in Austin. Her cello students have won the first stand cello chairs for Texas Region 26-All Region High School Symphony Orchestra this school year, and her students also won the cello audition for All-State Orchestra sponsored by TMEA (Texas Music Educator Association) and All-State Orchestra sponsored by TPSMEA (Texas Private School Music Educator Association).

Associate Dean of the Faculty & Associate Professor of History Jessica Hower published the chapter, “Utopia’s Empire: Thomas More’s Text and the Early British Atlantic World, c. 1510-1625,” in Thomas More’s Utopia, edited by Phil Withington and Cathy Shrank (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023). The piece explores the broad context in which one of the most famous–and incompletely understood–books of the sixteenth century were written and read, arguing that doing so allows us to come to a fuller understanding of the nature, significance, and utility of Utopia and of the empire created alongside it.

Assistant Professor of History Bryan Kauma published a co-authored piece in the Routledge Handbook of Environmental History. The paper titled “Future Directions” was a collaborative work by six scholars across six time zones, reimagining the future of environmental history. You can find the book here.

Assistant Professor of History Bryan Kauma attended and presented his paper Unholy Alliances! Hunger, Politics and Control in Southern Africaat the African Studies Association Annual Meeting held in San Francisco from Nov. 30_Dec. 3. In this paper, Kauma explores the politics and weaponization of food by political and cultural elites in postcolonial southern Africa.

Professor of History Melissa Byrnes published a coedited volume on Fertility, Family, and Social Welfare between France and Empire: The Colonial Politics of Population. The book is the first in the New Directions in Welfare History series published by Palgrave Macmillan. It examines issues of race, demography, medicine, and social policy from the 17th century to the 20th across the breadth of the French Empire (including Algeria, Canada, Cambodia, India, and Senegal). In addition to cowriting the introduction, she contributed a solo-authored chapter, “Criminal Fertility: Policing North African Families after Decolonization,” which traces the connections between sexuality, surveillance, population control, and police power in the Lyon suburb of Villeurbanne.

Part-Time Assistant Professor of Applied Music Jessica Mathaes presented a violin masterclass at Baylor University on Nov 27.

Assistant Professor of Anthropology Naomi Reed presented her poster presentation, “From Convicts to Ancestors: Resurrecting the Humanity of the Sugar Land 95,” at The American Anthropological Association Conference in Toronto, CA on November 16, 2023, where she explored the impact of white redemptive narratives–in media, archaeology reports, history curriculum, and cemetery signage–of Black history on the memorialization efforts of the Sugar Land 95 in Fort Bend County, TX.

Assistant Professor of Sociology Amanda Hernandez presented “‘My Last Evangelical Hold Out’: Pro-Life, Pro-Choice, and Everything in Between” at the American Academy of Religion Conference in San Antonio, TX.

Associate Professor of Spanish Abby Dings and coauthor Tammy Jandrey Hertel of the University of Lynchburg presented a talk titled “Language Variation and Standard Language Ideologies in Spanish Classrooms” at the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) Annual Convention and World Languages Expo held November 17–19 in Chicago, Illinois.

• Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Raquel Moreira participated in the following activities at the National Communication Association Annual Conference in National Harbor, MD, on November 15–19:

1. Presented on the necessity to decolonize childhood in the panel, “Intimate Freedoms: Building Decolonial Relations across Communicative Contexts.”
2. Presented on rethinking and rebuilding gendered and racialized structures in the panel, “Comadrisma Collective: Envisioning and Co-creating Communities of Care.”
3. Participated as an invited scholar in NCA’s Scholars’ Office Hours.
4. Participated as a mentor in La Raza’s Mentorship Gathering.
5. Chaired the NCA Mentorship and Leadership Council business meeting.
6. Responded to four papers in the session, “Narratives on Race, Nation, Masculinity, Anti-Blackness, and Fat-Phobia.”
7. Participated in both the NCA Executive Community and the Legislative Assembly meetings as a voting member.

Professor of Mathematics Fumiko Futamura wrote a grant proposal on behalf of the Japan-America Society of Greater Austin (JASGA) for the Japan Foundation’s Japan-America Society Capacity Building Grant Program. She currently serves as a board member of JASGA, a non-profit organization that provides Japanese classes, cultural programming, and events in the Austin area. She learned a great deal about grant writing through this process and valuable conversations with the associate program director. The proposal was accepted, and JASGA received $26,625 to support its programs and staff.