Faculty Highlights 2011-12
Provost Rick Pointer summarizes various academic accomplishments at the end of each montly faculty meeting.
Scott Anderson has been busy producing a series of illustrations for a variety of newspapers and magazines around the country including the Phoenix New Times, Minnesota City Pages, Creative Loafing Tampa, the Scottsdale Times, and most notably, the Wall Street Journal. I also want to make mention that Scott serves as the faculty advisor to the students who put together the college yearbook, the Westmont Citadel. Yesterday we received word that the 2010-2011 Westmont Citadel was awarded a Gold Medal from the Columbia Scholastic Press Association. A total score of 929 points out of 1000 possible was awarded, with an astonishing perfect score of 200 out of 200 points in the subcategory of photography, and a near-perfect score of 194 points out of 200 in the subcategory of design.
Kathryn Stelmach Artuso has received the Ruth Vande Kieft Award from the Eudora Welty Society for the best annual essay on Welty by a junior scholar. The award includes publication in the Eudora WeltyReview of her essay, "Transatlantic Rites of Passage in the Friendship and Fiction of Eudora Welty and Elizabeth Bowen."
John Blondell recently went to England where he chaired the annual conference of the world theater network interACT.
Alister Chapman has published an excerpt from his forthcoming book on John Stott in The Living Church, an American Episcopal Church newspaper. The article is entitled “The Principled Floater.”
Steve Contakes also co-authored an article with a Westmont student entitled “Josiah Parsons Cooke Jr.: Epistemology in the Service of Science, Pedagogy, and Natural Theology” which appeared in Hyle - International Journal for Philosophy of Chemistry. Steve also gave two conference papers during the summer “Chemistry as a Source of Wisdom: The Chemistry Curriculum as a Tool for Exploring Faith-Science Dialogue” at the Annual Meeting of the American Scientific Affiliation, and “Exploring Foundational Faith-Science Issues through Chemistry” at the Pedagogy of Faith in the Science Classroom Conference at Indiana Wesleyan University. Finally, he and Tremper Longman participated in a panel on academic freedom at the Science, Theology, and the Academy Christian Scholars conference at Pepperdine this past May.
Now let me mention several faculty who have recently received grants. Jesse Covington has received a grant from the Charles Koch Foundation to assist his research in political theory. As I mentioned briefly at Faculty Retreat, Steve Contakes and Claudia Scott collaborated on a proposal that has been funded by the Institute for the Scientific Study of Religion and provides our library with over two hundred key books on the history of science and on the “science and religion” conversation; and Biology department faculty, Eileen McMahon and Steve Julio, have secured funding for the completion of a "Comprehensive Fluorescence Imaging Workstation" which consists of 3 major pieces of research equipment. Westmont was initially offered a Matching grant challenge from the Hedco Foundation. That challenge was then met with 2 grants from the Stamps and the Mericos foundations. In total, we have received about $180,000 for equipment purchases.
On other fronts, four of our faculty co-presented last month at Baylor University’s annual symposium on Faith & Culture. The conference theme this year was on “Educating for Wisdom in the 21st Century University.” Jesse Covington, Lesa Stern, Sarah Skripsky, and Maurice Lee lead a 90 minute colloquium on the topic “Christian Formation and the Liberal Arts: Critical Engagement and Application.” Their work is based on their responses to a book by Calvin professor, Jamie Smith entitled Desiring the Kingdom. The four of them had been in a faculty reading group last year that discussed Smith’s book. In January these four colleagues present their material to the rest of us in the context of a Faculty Exchange.
I am also pleased to announce that we recently received word that the Lilly Fellows Program in Humanities and the Arts has decided to fund a mentoring grant proposal for $12,000 written and submitted by Deborah Dunn, our Director of Faculty Mentoring. We were informed that their Board found this to be a “model application.” I will give Deborah the opportunity in the future to explain what the grant will allow us to do next year but I want to take this moment to express publicly my thanks for her efforts in securing this grant.
And speaking of Calvin, I received an email announcement of their upcoming 2012 summer seminars and noticed that our own Charlie Farhadian will be leading a two-week seminar there on “Globalization & Worship: Soundings from the Worldwide Church.”
Jamie Friedman has co-edited a brand new book from Palgrave/Macmillan entitled Grief, Guilt, and Hypocrisy: The Inner Life of Women in Medieval Romance Literature. Her own essay in the volume is “Between Boccaccio and Chaucer: The Limits of Female Interiority in the Knight’s Tale.”
Jamie Friedman has published a book review in The Medieval Review on Frederick Kiefer's Masculinities and Femininities in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
Scholar-in-Residence Bob Gundry has had four pieces appear. He has had lengthy reviews published in two recent issues of Books and Culture, and a review in Reviews in Biblical Literature. His article, “The Hopelessness of the Unevangelized,” in Themelios.
Bob Hamel is in production right now on a professional stage makeup design for Out of The Box Theatre Company's upcoming production of "Evil Dead, The Musical". OBTC is a Santa Barbara based theatre company specializing in high quality, innovative, community based musical theatre.
Russ Howell has co-authored Mathematics Through the Eyes of Faith, a new volume in HarperOne’s longstanding series. Russ was both co-editor of the volume and author of several chapters. He reports that many other Westmont contributed to the book in some way. Ray Rosentrater was the lead co-author of two chapters, Patti Hunter was a peer reviewer for a chapter on the history of mathematics and faith, David Vander Laan acted as a “philosophical consultant,” and Lisa De Boer evaluated the chapter on beauty. In looking at the book myself, it strikes me as a wonderfully robust example of faith-learning integration.
Finally, last Saturday our Mathematics and Computer Science department hosted our first Imagine Math Day. 80 area high school students attended the day described as a “day of creative, collaborative mathematics.” Dave Hunter, Patti Hunter, and Russ Howell were especially involved in the event.
Steve Julio has also co-authored a piece with several student researchers for the journal Infection and Immunity. The article is called "A novel sensor kinase is required for Bordetella bronchiseptica to colonize the lower respiratory tract."
Tremper Longman has had two book chapters published. “Why Do Bad things Happen to Good People? A Biblical-Theological Approach,” in Eyes to See, Ears to Hear: Essays in Memory of J. Alan Groves . And “Wisdom as Paradigmatic in Scripture,” in Preaching Character: Reclaiming Wisdom’s Paradigmatic Imagination for Transformation. The new Expanded Bible has been published by Thomas Nelson. It is an in-line study Bible that Tremper Longman has produced along with Mark Strauss of Bethel San Diego and Dan Taylor recently retired from Bethel College... Both are Westmont grads...
Eileen McMahon presented a poster alongside her Major Honors student, Katherine Shaum, at the annual American Association of Immunologists (AAI) Conference. And then saw the fruits of over 6 years of work at Westmont, published in the journal Arthritis Research and Therapy. Her co-authors included a collaborator at Northwestern University and 7 Westmont students. The title of the article is “Characterization of a novel and spontaneous mouse model of inflammatory arthritis.” In September, this article was then the sole focus of a flattering editorial written by an Italian rheumatologist and published in the same journal. Both articles are attached.
Gary Moon has contributed a chapter to a new book entitled Religious and Spiritual Interventions in Counseling and Psychotherapy. Gary’s chapter is called “Prayer in Psychotherapy.” He has also recently published four magazine articles, two in Christian Counseling Today and two in Conversations: A Forum for Authentic Transformation.
And hot off the press from Dave Newton is Business Models for Entrepreneurial Ventures: Developing Sound Metrics for Long-Term Success. And though it has been out just a few weeks, the book has already been adopted for use in courses by about 25 colleges and universities across the country and the world. Dave just gave a talk based on the book at a conference at Oklahoma State University’s Spears Business School where he was named for 8th consecutive year a "Master Teacher of Entrepreneurship."
Allan Nishimura has published two recent articles, once again with many student co-authors. “Evaporation Rates of Alkanes and Alcohols on a Glass Surface As Observed by Optical Interference” appeared in The Chemical Educator and “Effect of Desorption of Alkanes on the Fluorescence of Methylnaphthalene on Alumina” appeared in the Journal of Undergraduate Chemistry Research.
The Westmont Philosophy Department has made a good showing in a fascinating new textbook: Just the Arguments: 100 of the Most Important Arguments in Western Philosophy. Described as “a concise, formally structured summation of one hundred of the most important arguments in Western philosophy”, the book includes entries by Mark Nelson on “The Contingency Cosmological Argument”, Jim Taylor on “Hume’s Problem of Induction”, and David Vander Laan on “David Lewis’s Argument for Possible Worlds”. On behalf of the department Mark reports that “We have not read any of the other entries, nevertheless we firmly believe that ours are the three best.”
Debra Quast, Director of Library and Information Services, has been elected to a three-year-term on the Board of Directors of the Statewide California Library Consortium. The Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium (SCELC) was established in 1986 to develop resource-sharing among the libraries of private academic institutions throughout California and represents 168 institutions. The consortium brings together nonprofit academic and research institutions to promote the effective use and dissemination of electronic information to libraries and their users
I want to congratulating Helen Rhee and Ed Noell. They are the recipients of the first Interdisciplinary Curriculum Development Grant for their proposal “Theology and Economics of Wealth and Poverty.” They will be putting a course proposal this year around that theme with the hope of team-teaching such a course in the future.
Along with some colleagues from UCLA, Steve Rogers recently coauthored a paper entitled "3D mapping of language networks in clinical and preclinical Alzheimer's disease," which was published in the journal Brain and Language. Four psychology students and Steve also presented 6 projects at the Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association. Among the focus of these projects was research examining the relationship between spirituality and frontal-temporal functioning, the impact of a family history of dementia on older adults' mood and personality, and how a change in spirituality influences cognitive performance.
Warren Rogers attended the annual conference of the Division of Nuclear Physics of the American Physical Society, held in East Lansing, Michigan. He has organized the "Conference Experience forUndergraduates," an event he first began in 1998, and now in its 14th year, funded by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Office of Nuclear Physics at the Department of Energy, which was held concurrently with the Division of Nuclear Physics conference. This year 134 undergraduate student nuclear physics researchers from over 80 institutions around the country participated in the conference in which they had opportunity to present their work to the professional community. Warren also chaired an invited talk session at the DNPconference entitled "Trends in Nuclear Physics."Ray Rosentrater’s article “Representational Efficiency” has been published in Mathematics Magazine.
Greg Spencer has recently received word that his book The Quieter Virtues will be coming out in Spanish translation.
Lesa Stern has co-written “Evaluation of Sexual Content in Teen-Centered Films From 1980 to 2007” for the journal Mass Communication & Society.
Jim Taylor is the guest editor of the current (10/13/2011) issue of the online journal, In Pursuit of Truth: A Journal of Christian Scholarship. The title of this special issue (for which he wrote the introduction) is, "Philosophical Perspectives on the Self and the Search for Meaning." There are four philosophical essays in the issue, and he is the author of one of them, which is entitled, "Physicalism, Dualism, Death, and Resurrection." In Pursuit of Truth is an online journal of the C.S. Lewis Foundation, and these papers were all delivered at the Philosophy Symposium of the C.S. Lewis Foundation's "Oxbridge 2008" conference in the cities and universities of Oxford and Cambridge in the summer of 2008. Jim was the director of that philosophy symposium.
Mitchell Thomas had a productive sabbatical last spring and summer during which he performed Wallace Shawn's Obie award winning one person play, The Fever, to audiences in Santa Barbara, Spokane, Los Angeles, and London. He also was appointed the first ever artist-in-residence at Santa Barbara's professional theatre company, the Ensemble Theatre.
Paul Willis is doing a poetry reading today at Simpson University, where he also spoke in chapel.
Jane Wilson has published an essay called “Motivational Flip: Teacher Talk to enhance intrinsic motivation to learn” in Forum for Christian Teacher educators: What role does Christian Higher Education play in the changing landscape of education?