Faculty News

Fall 09 - Dr. Kate Landdeck served as an invited academic expert in Marquette University's Centennial of Women Celebration. Dr. Landdeck gave several talks during the celebration, including speaking before a formal reception preceding the staging of a theater production of "Censored on Final Approach" about the role of the WASP forces in World War II, an area of her expertise. She also spoke about her research on the WASP, some of which she conducted in the Women's Collection at TWU, at a bookstore in Milwaukee and  to the ROTC at their formal "Dining In."

Fall 09 - Dr. Valentine Belfiglio presented "Endogamous and Exogamous Marriages among Italian and Mexican Texans" at the 4th International Interdisciplinary Social Sciences Conference in Athens, Greece.

Fall 09 - Dr. Paul Travis and Dr. Jeff Robb wrote and presented a paper, "L.O. Crosby and Environmental Destruction and Reconstruction," at the Annual Meeting of the Gulf South Historical Association, in Pensacola, Florida.

Fall 09 - Dr. Jake Blosser has been nominated for the National Council for Phi Alpha Theta, a national honor society for the discipline of history.

Fall 09 - Dr. Sara Fanning recently published “The Roots of Early Black Nationalism: Northern African Americans' Invocations of Haiti in the Early Nineteenth Century,” a chapter in Maurice Jackson and Jacqueline Bacon’s African Americans and the Haitian Revolution, published by Routledge.

Fall 09 - Dr. Jake Blosser's article, "Pursuing Happiness in Colonial Virginia: Sacred Words, Cheap Print, and Popular Religion in the Eighteenth Century" has been accepted for publication in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography.

Fall 09 - Dr. Lybeth Hodges has been appointed by the Texas State Board of Education as one of three academic experts charged with reviewing the social studies curriculum for state public education.  Dr. Hodges will offer expert testimony to the State Board of Education in September.

Fall 09 - Dr. Tim Hoye chaired a panel at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, held in Toronto Canada, September 3-6, 2009. Dr. Hoye presented a paper on this panel, focusing on Chinese Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain. Among the panelists was Samah Elhajibrahim, who received her B.A. and M.A. degrees in Government at TWU. Ms. Elhajibrahim is now a doctoral student in political science at the University of Pennsylvania.

Fall 09 - Dr. Barbara Presnall has received The Humphries Award for Dedication to TWU. This award is named for Jesse H. Humphries, a member of the original faculty in 1903 who was recognized nationally for her work in education for women. Dr. Presnall has had a distinguished career at TWU and is teaching during the fall semester of 2009 at Harlaxton College in England.

Fall 09 - Dr. Mark Kessler has been selected by the Law and Society Association to serve on the Harry J. Kalven, Jr. Prize Committee for the 2009-2010 year. The prize is awarded annually for "empirical scholarship that has contributed most effectively to the advancement of research in law and society." The prize honors lifetime achievement and is given in recognition of an influential body of scholarly work.

Summer 09 - In July 2009, the Society of Police Futurists International presented Dr. Jim Alexander with their PFI INNOVATION AWARD for "inspired and outstanding contribution to the advancement of policing in the 21st Century."  The plaque was presented at the PFI Annual meeting in Chicago in recognition of his work in helping to found the Public Safety Leadership Consortium in 2007.

Spring 09 - Dr. Jake Blosser was one of fifteen people invited to join the 2008-2009 colloquium “Forms of Religious Experience in the 17^th-Century British Atlantic” hosted by the Folger Institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. During the past year, Dr. Blosser published “Irreverent Empire: Anglican Inattention in an Atlantic World”  in Church History and a review essay, "Cultural Identity in the Colonial South," in Itinerario: The International Journal on European Expansion and Overseas Interaction. Dr. Blosser also presented the paper “Inattentive Anglicans: Prescriptive Calls to Family Prayer and Parochial Response in William Douglas’s Virginia” at a faculty and staff colloquium at Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Virginia.  Dr. Blosser made six trips to the seminary’s archives in 2008-09 while researching parochial inattention in colonial Virginia

Summer 08 - to Present - Dr. Jeff Robb serves as President of the Southwestern Association of Prelaw Advisors (SWAPLA) and as the delegate from SWAPLA to the Prelaw Advisors National Council.