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A Guide to Arts and Sciences' News, Events and People | November 2011 |
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Contents Arts and Sciences Magazine Now Online Students Give Thanks Aping Around Newcomer on TSPPPA's Critical Role SEH Breaks Ground Celebrating Scholarship Fulbrights Awarded to Alumni Examining Disability in Higher Education Roosevelt Papers Project on the Move Chinese Speech Contest New Books Awards and Recognition Select Published Works
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Arts and Sciences Magazine Now Online 
Columbian College's GW Arts & Sciences print magazine, which will arrive in alumni mailboxes this week, is now online. The magazine features the breadth and depth of Columbian scholarship and impact over the past academic year, including the extraordinary research of our faculty, the learning opportunities of our students, the engagement of our alumni, and the philanthropic support of our donors. Enjoy reading our latest issue and please send us your comments at ccasnews@gwu.edu
or post your thoughts on Twitter @gwucolumbian or on our Facebook page. We welcome your feedback! (Let us know if you do not receive your alumni copy. We may need to update your address.)
Students Put "Thanks" into Thanksgiving 
What are you most thankful for? In the spirit of the season, we posed that question to a group of Columbian College students as they prepare to either go home for the Thanksgiving break or hunker down on campus to gear up for the final push toward exams. As to be expected, most responses included a nod to family, friends, and merciful faculty members, but there were a few surprises (Justin Beiber's new album?) along the way! Read more.
Aping around at the National Zoo 
Over at the Smithsonian's National Zoological Park, "aping around" is more than just
an expression. At the Think Tank exhibit, part of the Ape Mind
Initiative, Professor of Speech and Hearing Sciences Francys Subiaul
and his student interns are researching how primates, including human
children, learn from others using computer-based games as well as
specially-designed problem-boxes and tools. "The way orangutans and humans learn by trial and error is very similar, more similar than I expected," said Subiaul. "However kids blow the orangutans out of the water when you change the assignment from an individual learning task of trial and error to an imitation task when you show them the order beforehand and ask them to repeat it." Read more. Kathryn Newcomer on TSPPPA's Critical Role 
Columbian College's Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration (TSPPPA) boasts top-ranked graduate programs that are educating tomorrow's analysts, leaders, managers, and researchers in the public and nonprofit sectors. At the school's helm is Kathryn Newcomer, a Fulbright scholar, internationally recognized expert on program evaluation, and a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration. This month, Newcomer talked about TSPPPA's unique role in the heart of the nation's capital, the success of the school's graduates, and the ongoing research of its faculty.
Read more.
Science and Engineering Hall Breaks Ground 
With the ceremonial turn of more than a dozen golden shovels in the earth, ground was officially broken on the new 400,000-square-foot Science and Engineering Hall, a state-of-the-art facility that will provide transformative and integrated learning and lab spaces for the biological and physical sciences, and the engineering and applied sciences. The building will nearly double the amount of space currently available for those disciplines and will reflect the latest pedagogical thinking about how students learn science most effectively. Read more.
Celebrating Scholarship 
Columbian College faculty continue to be at the forefront of scholarship. This year, 57 new books spanning the breadth and depth of the arts and sciences were written and published by Columbian College faculty; and 15 faculty members
received external scholarships, including five fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and four Fulbright Scholarships. In addition, 79 new externally funded research grants were awarded to faculty from institutions such as the Department of Energy, National Science Foundation, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Institutes of Health, and National Archives and Records Administration. Read more.
Columbian College Young Alumni Win Fulbright Scholarships 
Five Columbian College alumni are spending the 2011-12 academic year teaching and conducting research in Europe, Africa and Asia as winners of Fulbright Scholarships. Through Fulbright's U.S. Student Program, the award recipients are examining a wide range of issues, including the role of fast food in Egypt's diet and obesity rates, and community radio's impact on sustainable development in Senegal. The recipients are Sarah Conner, BA '11; Carolyn Kerchof, BA '10; Caitlin Loehr, BA '10; Victoria Roman, BA '11; and Virginia (Kristin) Van Nest, BA '10.
Read more.
Symposium Examines Disability in Higher Education 
Columbian College Dean Peg Barratt
welcomed educators, practitioners, and students from across the U.S. to a two-day symposium on how disability studies and the disability culture are transforming higher education. "Composing Disability: Writing, Communication, Culture" also explored how academic spaces and programs might be generated to respond to the transformation. Among the disciplines represented at the symposium were disability and deaf studies, writing studies, education, and global cultural studies. Panel discussions focused on the impact of specific disabilities on the processes of writing and culture-building and, on a broader level, what constitutes disability and the differences between disability categories and diagnoses. The symposium is one the first to move the dialogue beyond physical disability and into other areas, such as autism and mental illness.
Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project: New Volume, New Site 
After years of intense work by students and staff, the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project
will release Volume II of the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers in early 2012. Published by the University of Virginia Press, the volume covers the years 1949 through1952, examining Roosevelt's human rights work at home and abroad. The Papers Project also launched a new interactive webpage "First Lady of the World" that allows users to track Roosevelt's trek through the Pacific and Great Britain during World War II, the Middle East and Asia in the early 1950s, and the Soviet Union in 1957. Roosevelt went to many other parts of the world, and the project's undergraduate interns are currently adding details of her travels to Central and South America, Morocco, Japan, and postwar Germany to the interactive site.
Read more.
Columbian College Hosts GW's First Chinese Speech Contest 
On November 6, Columbian College hosted GW's first Jiangsu Cup Chinese Speech Contest, a rigorous competition for non-native students in the Washington, D.C., region. The 31 finalists and special prize participants-students from GW, American, Georgetown, University of Maryland, University of Virginia, and Washington & Lee-competed for prizes ranging from full graduate or summer study scholarships at China's Nanjing University to an eight-day summer tour in Jiangsu Province. Among the winners was GW student Tim Quinn
who was awarded a full scholarship. In addition to Columbian College, the contest was sponsored by the Jiangsu International Cultural Exchange Center and Institute for International Students at Nanjing University. Read more.
New Books Assistant Professor of English Holly Dugan authored the book The Ephemeral History of Perfume: Scent and Sense in Early Modern England. Robyn Walensky, BA '84, a national news reporter for "The Glenn Beck Show" and "The Blaze", authored the book Beautiful Life? The CSI behind the Casey Anthony Trial & My Observations from Courtroom Seat #1. Awards and Recognition Tessa Basford, a PhD candidate in industrial/organizational psychology, received the 2011 American Psychological Association Dissertation Research Award. Assistant Professor of Anthropology Robin Bernstein received a Grand Challenges and Explorations $100,000 grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to support her project "Breastmilk Bioactives and the Defense of Gut and Growth". Assistant Professor of Chinese Language and Literature Liana Chen served as NPR's historical linguistics consultant in October. She recited lines from the Kunqu Opera classic Mudan ting (The Peony Pavilion). Ann Doucette, director of the Midge Smith Center for Evaluation Effectiveness Research and professor of evaluation and health policy, spoke at the World Innovation Summit on Education on "Measuring Progress" in educational reform. Eric Federing, BA '82, received the Vice-Chancellor's Internationalization Award from the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. The Columbian College Geography Team competed against three other universities to win the Mid-Atlantic Division of the American Association of Geographers World Geography Bowl. Team members were graduate students Colin Reisser and Kate Schindler, and undergraduates Alex Pommer, Kelsey Nyland, and Raynell Cooper. Professor of Mathematics Valentina Harizanov gave a plenary lecture at the International Conference on Algebra, Mathematical Logic, and Applications at the Sobolev Institute of Mathematics in Novosibirsk, Russia. Heather A. Higginbottom, MA '99, was confirmed by the U.S. Senate as deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget. Linda Jacobs-Condit, an audiologist with the Speech and Hearing Sciences Department, earned her third American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) ACE award in 2011 and was re-elected to ASHA Audiology Advisory Council. Professor of East Asian Languages and Literature Young-Key Kim-Renaud received the 2011 "Honorable Korean Award" from the Korean American Foundation. She also co-authored "Agreement in Korean Revisited" in Inquiries into Korean Linguistics with Assistant Professor of Korean Miok Pak. Kathryn E. Newcomer, director of Columbian College's Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration, was appointed to a second three-year term on the National Science Foundation Business & Operations Coordination Committee. Associate Professor and Chair of Anthropology Brian Richmond was awarded a $332,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to conduct fieldwork for his study, "Hominin Footprints, Fossils, and Their Context in the Early Pleistocene of Koobi Fora, Kenya". Assistant Professor of History and Media and Public Affairs Nina Seavey of the GW Documentary Center won the Italian National Olympic Committee Cup in Milan for her documentary 4th & Goal. Assistant Professor of Chinese Phyllis Zhang was elected to the Board of Directors, Chinese Languages Teachers Association. Select Published Works Part-time faculty member in the Department of Music Herman Burney released a new album, Offering. Ingrid Creppell, associate professor of political science, published "The Concept of Normative Threat" in the latest issue of International Theory. Ruth Weintraub Professor of Biology Gustavo Hormiga co-authored "Tangled in a Sparse Spider Web: Single Origin of Orb Weavers and Their Spinning Work Unraveled by Denser Taxonomic Sampling" in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Tayler Lofquist, BA '11, wrote "A History of Red Planet Capital, Inc." in the Fellows Review published by the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress. Robert Griggs Assistant Professor of Biology Alex Pyron co-authored "Extinction, Ecological Opportunity, and the Origins of Global Snake Diversity" in the Wiley Online Library. Assistant Professor of Japanese Takae Tsujioka published "Idioms, Mixed Marking, and the Base-generation Hypothesis for Ditransitives in Japanese," in the Journal of East Asian Linguistics. Maida Withers, professor of dance, wrote a blog post for the Phillips Collection on her impressions of the "Degas's Dancers at the Barre: Point and Counterpoint".
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