Faculty & Staff

Faculty News

Spring 2012 - Dr. Lybeth Hodges, Dr. Jake Blosser, and Dr. Sara Fanning (history) served as judges for Texas History Day at the Keller Independent School District.  Winners for this event will go on to compete in a regional event to be held at the University of North Texas.  Winners of the regional event will then compete on the state level in Austin, with winners moving on to National History Day in Washington, D.C.

Spring 2012 - Dr. Jake Blosser (history) has been named to the National Advisory Board of Phi Alpha Theta.

Spring 2012 - Dr. Barbara Presnall (Government)  has been appointed to the Professional Development Committee of the Southern Political Science Association.

Fall 2011 - Dr. Jeff Robb (Government), Dr. David Rylander (School of Management), and Cynthia Maguire (Chemistry and Biochemistry) presented a paper, "Building Trans-Disciplinary Sustainability Studies into the College Curriculum," at the Eighth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic and Social Sustainability, Vancouver, British Columbia, January 10-12.

Fall 2011 - Dr. Jeff Robb (government) has been selected Vice-President of the Southwestern Association of Prelaw Advisors (SWAPLA).

Fall 2011 - Dr. Tim Hoye (government) has been appointed as a visiting professor, Harlaxton  College, in Grantham England for the Spring 2013 semester. Dr. Hoye will teach courses in global politics and politics and literature in the Harlaxton Study Abroad program.

Fall 2011 - Dr. Tim Hoye (government) served as a discussant on the panel "What Does Mass Man Do with His Soul? Popular Arts in Democracies," at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association in Seattle, Washington.

Summer 2011 - Dr. Jake Blosser (history) recently published an article "John Tillotson's Latitudinarian Legacy: Orthodoxy, Heterodoxy, and the Pursuit of Happiness" in Anglican & Episcopal History.

Summer 2011 - Dr. Timothy Hoye (government) recently published an article “Styles of Truth in Dazai Osamu’s Setting Sun” in Voegelinian Readings of Modern Literature, edited by Charles R. Embry and published by the University of Missouri Press.

Spring 2011 - Dr. Barbara Presnall (government) participated in a panel discussing the current state of women's rights at the Women in Film Dallas Festival.  Her panel followed the screening of a film, Iron Jawed Angels, depicting the work of Alice Paul and Lucy Burns in the struggle for women's suffrage. 

Spring 2011 - Dr. Kate Landdeck (history) was quoted in the New York Times on Sunday, April 24, 2011, on the life of Violet Cowden, a member of the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots of WWII.

Spring 2011 - Dr. Barbara Presnall (government) has been named by The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board as an expert participant in its Academic Course Guide Manual Learning Objectives Project. The goal of this project is to develop specific learning objectives for courses in the Board’s Manual, a manual serving as the academic transfer course inventory for all of Texas’ community and technical colleges. By developing learning objectives for the courses in the Manual, THECB hopes to promote transfer and improve the consistency of course content, thereby helping students become better prepared for their upper-division course work. Dr. Presnall will work with a mix of university and community college faculty on learning objectives for the Government core curriculum courses.

Spring 2011 - Dr. Jake Blosser (history) was named by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board to serve on its History Learning Objectives Work Group. The purpose of this work group is to determine a set of common learning objectives for the eight introductory level history courses that are part of the Lower-Division Academic Course Guide Manual. The common learning objectives will then be considered by the Academic Course Guide Manual Committee for inclusion in that manual.

Spring 2011 – A segment on NPR’s Morning Edition focusing on the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs), for which Dr. Kate Landdeck (history) served as consultant and contributor, received a Gracie Award from The Alliance for Women in Media for Outstanding Portrait and Biography. This segment also received recognition from theWhite House Press Association for an online package developed in consultation with Dr. Landdeck.  

Spring 2011 – Dr. Paul Travis (history) and Dr. Jeff Robb (government) presented a paper, “Conserving the Tallgrass Prairie,” at the Annual Meetings of the Missouri Valley Historical Association in Omaha, Nebraska.

Fall 2010 - Dr. Sara Fanning (history) presented a paper, "The Marketing of Haiti" at the Haiti and the Americas conference at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Florida.

Fall 2010 - Dr. Jake Blosser's (history) article, "John Tillotson's Latitudinarian Legacy:  Orthodoxy, Heterodoxy, and the Pursuit of Happiness", has been accepted for publication in Anglican Episcopal History.  It is currently scheduled to appear in the March 2011 issue.

Fall 2010 - Dr. Jake Blosser's (history) article, "Pursuing Happiness in Colonial Virginia: Sacred Words, Cheap Print, and Popular Religion in the Eighteenth Century" has been published in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography. 

Fall 2010 - Dr. Tim Hoye (government) presented a paper, “Social Darwinism and Race Consciousness in Japanese-American Relations,” at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in Washington D.C.. Dr. Hoye also served as chair of this panel, titled Race, Ethnicity and Politics: Voegelin’s Early Concerns.

Fall 2010 - Dr. Mark Kessler (government) served as a discussant on two panels, “Constitutionalism and the Question of Race,” and “Views of Law and Courts,” at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in Washington D.C.

Summer 2010 - Dr. Val Belfiglio (government) presented a paper, "The Mirror Image: A Connection between the Physical and Social Sciences," at the Fifth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences in Cambridge, UK.

Summer 2010 - Dr. Mark Kessler (government) delivered an invited talk, "Just Words?: The Constitution in Struggles for Social Justice," at Bates College, Lewiston, Maine.

Summer 2010 - Dr. Sara Fanning (history) has been awarded a fellowship to attend a summer seminar in U.S. history, sponsored by the Center for the Study of Early American History.  The seminar takes place at the General Henry Knox Museum in Thomaston, Maine.

Spring 2010 - Dr. Jake Blosser (history) received an award as NET (Neighbors Educated Together) Program Teacher of the Year.

Spring 2010 - Dr. Kate Landdeck (history) was recently featured in a CBS News article regarding the Women's Air Force Service Pilots receiving the Congressional Gold Medal.  She also contributed information to NPR.org to create a timeline of WASP service.

Spring 2010 - Dr. Jake Blosser (history) has been elected to a two-year term on the Phi Alpha Theta executive council.  This council, comprised of 5 faculty members from across the country, oversees the work of the national history honor society.

Spring 2010 - Dr. Mark Kessler (government) has been named to the editorial board of the Law and Politics Book Review. The Review is published by the Law and Courts section of the American Political Science Association.

Fall 09 - Dr. Kate Landdeck (history) 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 (government) 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 (history) and Dr. Jeff Robb (government) 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 (history) 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 (history) 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 (history) 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 (history) 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 (government) 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 (government) 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 (government) 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 (government, emeritus) 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 (history) 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 (government) serves as President of the Southwestern Association of Prelaw Advisors (SWAPLA) and as the delegate from SWAPLA to the Prelaw Advisors National Council.