May 2013 Faculty Spotlight

Eddy Brown, Susan Fiksdal, Linda Moon-Stumpff, Bill Ransom, and Matt Smith

At its May 22 meeting, the Evergreen faculty unanimously nominated Eddy Brown, Susan Fiksdal, Linda Moon-Stumpff, Bill Ransom, and Matt Smith for emeritus status. The Board of Trustees will act on the nominations at its June 13 meeting.

Marc Brenman

Marc Brenman last month presented on the subject of avoiding institutional and organizational failure at a conference sponsored by the Society of Military Engineers in West Point, N.Y. His “Plan for Reducing Gun Violence in the U.S.” appeared in the January issue of Urban Planning and Economic Development News Magazine. Marc spoke at an intercultural management conference at American University in March on culturally appropriate alternative dispute resolution. An article on the same subject was published in Intercultural Management Quarterly. Another article, “Public Participation, Social Equity, and Technology,” will be published next month in the book Citizen E-Participation in Urban Governance: Crowdsourcing and Collaborative Creativity (Carlos Nunes Silva, ed.).

Lalita Calabria

Lalita Calabria received a grant from the Washington Native Plant Society to conduct a survey of bryophytes and lichens of the south Puget Sound prairies from now through next summer. Lalita received the McHenry Fellowship from the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia to support her work there as a visiting scientist. She is conducting a project on the Marian Ropes Robertson Bryophyte Collection, an important historic collection of Pennsylvania Bryophytes.

Stephanie Coontz

Stephanie Coontz will receive the Work Life Legacy Award from the Families and Work Institute in New York on June 3. She was keynote speaker at the International Sociological Association’s March conference, Demographic and Institutional Change in Global Families. Stephanie is also guest columnist for The New York Times in May and June. Her first of five columns, “Beware Social Nostalgia,” came out Sunday, May 19.

Steve Davis

Steve Davis’s work will be included in Sitting for History: Exploring Self-Identity through Portraiture, opening late July at the Tacoma Art Museum. The show will use portraits to explore ways in which we create public identities and how that has changed across time, media, and cultures. The exhibition includes a cross-section of works from the museum’s permanent collection ranging from the late 18th century through today, and by northwest, national, and international artists.

Diego de Acosta

Diego de Acosta’s article, "The Old English Have-Perfect and Its Congeners,” appeared in the March Journal of English Linguistics (41:33-64). The article is about the development of the present perfect and pluperfect seen in early English texts like Beowulf and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Here’s a link to the abstract.

Hirsh Diamant

Hirsh Diamant and students in his program, Business and Culture along the Silk Roads, were interviewed by the Daoist Daily News while visiting the Temple of Eight Immortals in Xian, China earlier this spring. The photo at left ran with the article.

Carolyn Dobbs & Jeff Antonelis-Lapp

When faculty emerita Carolyn Dobbs was an academic dean in the mid-1990s, she helped establish an internship program for Evergreen students to work and learn at Mount Rainier National Park. Since then the Park Service has supported three to eight paid scientific internships every summer. (Jeff Antonelis-Lapp took over the program in 2011). Carolyn’s love for and Mt Rainier National Park Sign Image commitment to Mount Rainier and our state’s other national parks will now bear even more fruit for students. When Carolyn completed a maximum nine-year term on Washington’s National Park Fund Board of Directors earlier this year, her fellow board members honored her by creating the annual "Carolyn Dobbs Environmental Science Grant" to support science research in Washington national parks. Among other uses of these Environmental Science Grants, Carolyn is particularly interested in having the Fund provide summer scholarships that support Evergreen and other college students working with field scientists in each of Washington's national parks—Olympic, North Cascades, and Mount Rainier. Donors to the Fund can direct their gifts to support the award in Carolyn’s honor.

Erin Ellis

Erin Ellis presented her latest research on the Mekong River—"Temporal variability in the age of carbon exported by the Mekong River, Cambodia: A comparison between lignin phenols and bulk organic matter"—at the annual meeting for the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography in February. The talk was part of a session she co-chaired that examined how carbon transported by rivers can be a signal for climate and land-use change in terrestrial ecosystems.

Susan Fiksdal

Susan Fiksdal has a fall 2013 appointment as University Fellow at Hong Kong Baptist University in the Department of English Language and Literature. She will teach one class and conduct research on classroom discourse.

Dylan Fischer

Dylan Fischer co-wrote two recent publications: An article, “Genetic components to below ground carbon fluxes in a riparian forest ecosystem: A common garden approach,” in New Phytologist (195[3]:631-639; here is the abstract), and a book chapter, “From genes to ecosystems: Emerging concepts bridging ecological and evolutionary dynamics,” in Cambridge University Press’s Ecological Reviews series title, The Ecology of Plant Secondary Metabolites: From Genes to Global Processes (G.R. Iason, M. Dicke, and S.E. Hartley, eds.; 2012).

Leslie Flemmer

Leslie Flemmer was an invited panelist at the San Diego Regional Network of the National Association for Multicultural Education Conference at San Diego State University in March. The conference (Cultural Relevance in Schools: Why, How, and What?) provided an opportunity for educators to discuss their research and practices specific to social justice education and critical and culturally-relevant pedagogy.

Kevin Francis

Kevin Francis gave a talk last month on the visualization of geological time in science textbooks called “Time’s Accordion: Picturing the Anthropocene in Earth History.” The talk was part of Practicing Science, Engaging Publics: A Conference in Honor of Historian Sally Gregory Kohlsted, in Minneapolis.

Larry Geri

Larry Geri was selected as a Fulbright scholar for one semester of teaching and research at Universidad Andres Bello in Santiago, Chile beginning in August 2013. He will teach a course on comparative energy policy and sustainability and perform research on public participation in the Chilean electricity sector.

Ariel Goldberger

Ariel Goldberger was an invited panelist at the Playwriting Puppets and Dramaturgy Symposium at the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry at the University of Connecticut. The symposium gathered puppeteers, playwrights, and dramaturgs to explore different ways puppets and play texts connect in performance.

Trevor Griffey

Trevor Griffey has accepted a position as lecturer at the University of Washington – Bothell for 2013-14. Meantime, he is collecting oral histories of longtime Evergreen faculty.

Zoltán Grossman

Zoltán Grossman was a conference organizer for an NSF-funded international Indigenous workshop, WIS2DOM: Weaving Indigenous and Sustainability Sciences: Diversifying our Methods, held Feb. 13-16 at the Longhouse. At the annual conference of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) in Los Angeles, Zoltán reported on the publication of Asserting Native Resilience: Pacific Rim Indigenous Nations Face the Climate Crisis, and presented on "The Resilience Doctrine: Disaster Cooperativism in the Climate Crisis" and "The Global War on Tribes: Extending the 'Frontier' Overseas." He presented his dissertation work, "Unlikely Alliances: Treaty Conflicts and Environmental Cooperation between Native American and Rural White Communities," at the Native Science: Dimensions and Dialogues conference at Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif. He also published "Shipping: The Achilles Heel of the Fossil Fuel Monster" in Works in Progress and the South Sound Green Pages and has been researching the connection of the ports of Olympia and Grays Harbor to hydraulic fracturing (fracking) for oil in North Dakota.

Grace Huerta

Grace Huerta’s article, “Challenging the Latina/o Achievement Gaps—Let’s Begin By Making School Relevant to Their Community, Their Culture and Their Lives,” appeared March 18 in the online journal Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social (Women Active in Letters and Social Change).

Mark Hurst

Mark Hurst’s workshop and symposium were selected for the International Positive Psychology Congress in Los Angeles in June. The workshop, "Positive Re-Entry," is based on Mark’s eight years of research and programs in prisons.

Ben Kamen

Ben Kamen published an iPad musical instrument application, Chordion, recently featured on the Apple App Store. A positive review of the app appears on iMore.

Mukti Khanna

Mukti Khanna co-presented an experiential workshop, “Person Centered Expressive Arts: Creating Community Medicine,” at the International Expressive Arts Therapy Conference in Berkeley, Calif. in March. She also mentored a presentation by Evergreen students and alumni at the conference, “Transdiscplinary Education: Creating Community Harmony for Seven Generations” that linked student work in expressive arts to Howard Gardner’s book, Five Minds for the Future. Presenters included Stephanie Jamieson (“The Neurobiology of Expressive Arts”), Aleilah Lawson (“Generational Healing”), MoLee Omeh (“Weaving Worlds: Finding Home”), and Yuko Igarashi (“Creating Health: Surviving Radiation”—vimeo.com has video of part of Yuko’s presentation). Mukti’s students were the only undergraduate presenters at the conference.

Rob Knapp

Rob Knapp spent January, February and March as a visiting scholar at the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory of the University of California – Berkeley. Rob is part of the organizing committee for the Third Triennial Conference on Physics and Sustainable Energy. The conference will take place March 8-9, 2014 on the Berkeley campus and will acquaint physical scientists, especially college and university faculty and students, with the technical details of promising techniques for efficient and renewable energy.

Nancy Koppelman

Nancy Koppelman presented a paper, "Reading to Write: Attuning First-Year Students to Reading in College," at the 25th International Conference on the First Year Experience in Vancouver, B.C. last November. She gave the D'var Torah on Human Rights Shabbat at Temple Beth Hatfiloh in December. The talk was called "Human Rights and the Tragedies of History"—also the title of her upper-division fall/winter program. A copy is available on Nancy’s web site. Her review of Michael Barnett’s Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism appeared in History: Reviews of New Books (41:2). Another review, of Madhavi Sunder’s From Goods to a Good Life: Intellectual Property and Social Justice, is forthcoming in Academe. Her article about the Academic Statement Initiative, "Think about Your Thinking: Reclaiming a Foundation of Liberal Education at The Evergreen State College," will appear in the spring issue of the AAC&U journal Liberal Education.

Tina Kuckkahn-Miller, Les Purce & Michael Zimmerman

Native Programs planning unit coordinator Tina Kuckkahn-Miller, President Les Purce, and Provost Michael Zimmerman met this month with Michael Kaiser, president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, to discuss the next steps of program planning for the Longhouse. The Longhouse is part of a cohort of Ford Foundation grantees who have been receiving training in arts management and leadership at the Kennedy Center.

Naima Lowe

Naima Lowe’s piece, "thirty-nine (39) Questions for WHITE PEOPLE," is part of the exhibition Under My Skin: Artists Explore Race in the 21st Century, at Seattle’s Wing Luke Museum now through November 17.

Carrie M. Margolin

Carrie M. Margolin just returned from the 93rd annual convention of the Western Psychological Association. She took 22 students with her, all first-time attendees.

Jean MacGregor & Rob Cole

Jean MacGregor and Rob Cole returned from a month in the Lake Baikal region of Russia. Sponsored by the Great Baikal Trail organization (the creation of MES graduate and Muskie Scholar Ariadna Reida), Jean has been working with outreach staff at parks and protected areas as well as eco-tourism leaders to introduce “environmental interpretation” as a professional practice in the region.

Helena Meyer-Knapp

Helena Meyer-Knapp‘s article, “Improving International Relations at the Grass Roots: Japanese Student Attitudes to Japanese – Korean Relations,” appears in the spring 2013 issue of Japan Social Innovation Journal. The piece, co-written with her colleague Yoko Matsuda, resulted from a Hyogo Overseas Research Network (HORN) fellowship that afforded Helena a month of field work in Kobe last fall.

Paul McCreary

Paul McCreary recently updated an article he wrote several years ago for The Mathematica Journal. In the process he learned how to move the images into interactive animations that are viewable on computable document format (CDF) freeware. A link to the freeware and the animations are on Paul’s web site.

Bill Ransom

The Daily World in Aberdeen profiled Bill Ransom in its May 12 issue: “’What if?’ Sci-fi and poetry natural to Grayland writer.”

Doug Schuler

Doug Schuler’s article, “Creating the World Citizen Parliament: Seven Challenges for Interaction Designers,” is the cover story of the May-June issue of Interactions, the journal of the Association of Computing Machinery. Doug serves on the program committees of several upcoming conferences: ePart 2013 in Koblenz, Germany; Reflecting Connectedness Participatory Design Conference in Windhoek, Namibia; and Nexus, Confluence, and Difference: Community Archives meets Community Informatics in Prato, Italy. Doug’s paper on “Civic Intelligence and CSCW [Computer Supported Cooperative Work]” is included in ICT Critical Infrastructures and Society, the proceedings of a conference on human choice and computers held in the Netherlands last year.

Leonard Schwartz

Leonard Schwartz recently spoke at Duke University on poetics and read from his new book, IF. You can listen to an online interview with Leonard about the book on Radio Free Albion. In April he also read from the book at The St. Marks Poetry Project and Vassar College, and spoke on a panel on New Poetry from Spain at the Instituto Cervantes in New York. A section from his prose poem "The Sleep Talkers" recently appeared in a festschrift for French writer Jacqueline Risset: I pensieri dell'istante: Scritti per Jacqueline Risset. Leonard’s ebook, The Production of Subjectivity: Conversations with Michael Hardt, was published in March by The Conversant.

Ellen Shortt Sanchez & Savvina Chowdhury

Ellen Shortt Sanchez and Savvina Chowdhury gave a presentation, “Gateways for Incarcerated Youth and Popular Education,” at the Western Region Service Learning Conference in Portland, Ore. last month.

Suzanne Simons

Suzanne Simons’ article on U.S. women journalists of Muslim and/or Middle East descent was recently published in the Encyclopedia of Women in Islamic Cultures. She explored the evolution of women journalists and journalism from the immigrant press of the 19th and early 20th centuries, through the era of assimilation, to 21st century identity-based journalism. The article also examined discourses within the Muslim and Middle Eastern diaspora in the U.S. and their effects on content and coverage, implications for domestic and foreign policy, and the impact of technology, including the advent of the 24/7 news cycle and new media.

Rob Smurr

Rob Smurr presented a paper, “Nationalizing Nature: The History and Preservation of Estonia’s Glacial Erratic Boulders,” at a March conference in Tallinn, Estonia. The international conference, From Instants to Eons: Time in Environment and Environmental History, was organized by the Centre for Environmental History at Tallinn University.

Gail Tremblay

Gail Tremblay has pieces in several current exhibits, including: On the Trails of the Iroquois at the Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany in Bonn through August 4; Changing Hands: Art without Reservations 3 at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario through June 2; Together Again: Lillian Pitt, Gail Tremblay, Rick Bartow, and Joe Feddersen at the C.N. Gorman Museum at the University of California – Davis through June 21; and Reframing Images, Conceptualizing Indigenous Forms at the Froelick Gallery in Portland, Ore. through June 1. An article about Gail’s work, “Reweaving History” by Suzanne Beal, appeared in the April-May issue of American Craft Magazine. Finally, the Arkansas Art Center purchased Gail’s 35mm film basket, "And Then There’s the Business of Fancy Dancing...” (at right), made with footage from the trailer of Sherman Alexie's film, The Business of Fancy Dancing. The basket will be on exhibit in June.

Erik Thuesen

Erik Thuesen has joined the Editorial Board of the journal PLOS ONE. The Public Library of Science launched PLOS ONE as a completely open access journal that publishes research in all areas of science and medicine.

Michael Vavrus

Michael Vavrus was keynote speaker for the Washington State Attorney General's recognition of Black History Month. His talk, "The Continuing Criminalization of African Americans & What Can Be Done," presented historical and contemporary data on the racist roots of the U.S. justice system along with possible solutions to reverse practices that disproportionately single out African Americans.

Summer Undergraduate Research Program

Fifteen Evergreen students received 2013 Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP) awards. The students will receive stipends to work on 13 faculty-led research projects. The following projects and students were selected for this first year of the program:

Faculty Leaders	Projects	Student Researchers
Kristina Ackley Zoltán Grossman Laura Grabhorn	Indigenous Placemaking	Jesse Drescher Lydia Juarez
Clyde Barlow	Measuring Oxygen Distributions	Geoffrey Bok
Abir Biswas	Biogeochemical cycling in Pacific Northwest ecosystems	Mariah Smith
Gerardo Chin-Leo	Research on Phytoplankton Ecology in South Puget Sound	James Robertson
Dylan Fischer	Plant Community & Ecosystem Ecology Research in Western Washington Ecosystems	Levi Travis
Karen Gaul	Anthropology, Sustainability Studies	Ben Stahnke
Jennifer Gerend Ralph Murphy	A Survey of Municipal Planning Practices in Washington State	Shira Moch
Paul McCreary	Interactive Computer Graphics for K-12 Education	Jacqueline Harper
Lydia McKinstry	Organic Chemistry	Dylan Kohl
Miranda Mellis	The Encyclopedia Project	Katie Aymar
Mike Paros	Bovine Mastitis Bacteriophage Lab	Morgan Mager
Trevor Speller	Maps and Illustrations in Early British Novels	Sovay Hansen Sarah Leibovitz
Alison Styring	Summer Research in Field Ornithology	Stephanie Lewis

Kutter Fund

Two faculty-student teams received 2013 awards from the Kutter Fund for Microbiology research at Evergreen.

Clarissa Dirks (faculty PI) and undergraduate researchers Seth Taylor, Pranav Hippargi and David Ginocchi—$5,000 for the project “Distribution and Biodiversity of Tardigrada (Water Bears) In Xeric Environments.”
Mike Paros (faculty PI) and undergraduate researchers Joni Anderson, Jillian Porter and Morgan Mager—$3,250 for the project “Assessing the Potential of a Bacteriophage Cocktail Against Host and Foreign clinical E. coli Isolates in TSB and Raw Milk as a Treatment for Coliform Mastitis.”

External Grants

Evergreen received the following external grants since the February 2013 issue of the Faculty Update.

Principal Investigator(s)	Projects	Funders	Awards
Elizabeth Drake	WSIPP Juvenile Decline of Jurisdiction Study	DSHS Office of Juvenile Justice	$75,282
Tina Kuckkahn-Miller	NACF Regional Collaboration Pilot Program	Native Arts & Culture Foundation	$40,000
Carri LeRoy	Pocket Gopher Plant Propagation	JBLM	$36,000
Barbara Smith	Enduring Legacies Native Cases Initiative	Squaxin Island Tribe	$2,500

Faculty Foundation Grant

Thirteen faculty members received Faculty Foundation Grant awards for 2013:

Abir Biswas for the project “Mercury Assessment in Pacific Northwest (Evergreen) Forest, Stream, and Intertidal Ecosystems”
Jennifer Calkins for the project “Phylogenomic Analysis of Odontophoridae”
Erin Ellis for the project “Assessing the Age of Plant-derived Carbon Exported by the Queets River: A Glimpse into the Carbon Cycling Dynamics of Temperate Rainforests”
Miranda Mellis for the project “Encyclopedia Vol. 3, L-P: Editorial Work and Research”
Greg Mullins for the project “The Banality of Good: Rights, Moralism, and the Growth of Amnesty International USA”
James Neitzel for the project “A Method to Evaluate the Ability of Antioxidants to Prevent Oxidative Damage to Essential Fatty Acids”
Shaw Osha for the project “The Insistence of Painting”
Benjamin Simon for the project “Yersinia ruckeri as a Vaccine Delivery Vehicle to Immunize Rainbow Trout”
Trevor Speller for the project “Cartography in Gulliver's Travels”
Richard Weiss and Arun Chandra for the project “Integrating Music, Robotics and Cybernetics”
Elizabeth Williamson for the project “Shakespeare's Political Martyrs”
Julia Zay partial support for the project “‘Buildings To Be Held in Your Hand’: Small Architecture of the Pacific Northwest Alternative Photographic Processes and Large Format Photography”

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