Faculty Focus
Frederica Bowcutt last spring celebrated the launch of Vascular Plants of the South Sound Prairies, a field guide 13 years in the making. More than 40 Evergreen students, as well as scientists from Evergreen, Centralia College, and the Center for Natural Lands Management, collaborated on the project. The guide includes illustrations and descriptions of nearly 150 plants found in glacial outwash prairies from Tacoma to Rochester, Wash.
Rebecca Chamberlain completed a certification in Lushootseed, the Salish language of Puget Sound, at the University of Oregon’s Northwest Indian Language Institute last summer. Chamberlain’s essay, “Scälla—Of the Killer Whale: A Song of Hope,” appears in Rights Remembered: A Salish Grandmother Speaks on American Indian History and the Future, by Pauline Hillaire (University of Nebraska, 2016).
Nostalgia just isn’t what it used to be. Ask faculty emerita Stephanie Coontz. Last March, Basic Books published a revised edition of her 1992 book, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, a bestseller that deconstructed the mythology of the “good old days” in American life. In a new introduction and epilogue, Coontz assesses what she got right, what she got wrong, and what she missed entirely in the first edition.
Sarah Eltantawi published “What Does ‘Modernity’ and ‘Postmodernity’ Mean to Northern Nigerians?” in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion.
Dylan Fischer is the new editor-in-chief for Northwest Science, the journal of the Northwestern Scientific Association.
Ruth Hayes’ new animation, Perilous Experiment, screened in Portland, Ore. It was part of the Animation + Printmaking showcase at Flux, the Southern Graphics Council International Conference held at the University of Oregon School of Architecture and Allied Arts. The piece was letterpress printed directly on a triptych of 16mm film leader, with sound by Peter Randlette.
Heather Heying’s creative non-fiction essay, “Jungle Wet,” appeared in the spring issue of the literary magazine EarthLines: The Culture of Nature. The piece explores both the science and lived experience of tropical rain, and was largely written in Yasuní National Park, in the Ecuadoran Amazon.
Nancy Koppelman’s essay, “Blind Spot: Patterns of Meaning and the Metaphor of Mobility,” was published in the winter 2015 issue of Phi Kappa Phi Forum. Koppelman also presented “Tecmessa as Paragon of Aristotle’s Self-limiting Virtues in Sophocles’ Ajax,” at the annual meeting of the Classics Association of the Pacific Northwest.
Miranda Mellis has two new books: Demystifications (Solid Objects) and The Instead (Carville Annex). Her essay, “Autobiology,” appeared in the journal Something on Paper and her new works of speculative fiction can be found in the journal Conjunctions and elsewhere.
Faculty emerita Ratna Roy received a lifetime achievement award last December from Samskritiki, the cultural organization that sponsors the annual Odissi International dance festival in India.
Therese Saliba’s invited essay, “June Jordan’s Songs of Palestine and Lebanon,” appeared in The Feminist Wire in March as part of a tribute to Jordan’s immense contributions to contemporary black, feminist, queer, and anti-imperialist poetics.
Joli Sandoz published “A Game Design Assignment: Learning about Social Class Inequality” in a recent issue of On the Horizon, an international strategic planning journal focused on postsecondary education.
Leonard Schwartz’s new book, The New Babel: Towards a Poetics of the Mid-East Crises (University of Arkansas Press, 2016), evokes and investigates the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, America’s involvement as both perpetrator and victim of events in the Middle East and Afghanistan, and the multiple ways that poetics can respond to political imperatives.
Alison Styring published “Foraging Ecology and Occurrence of 7 Sympatric Babbler Species (Timaliidae) in the Lowland Rainforest of Borneo and Peninsular Malaysia” in Current Zoology in March.
Stokley Towles’ latest project, “Behind the Wheel: Life on the Metro Bus,” is performed on-board an actual Seattle city bus. The one-person show visits the world through the eyes of a King County Metro bus driver and explores the social and physical landscape of the bus.
Bret Weinstein’s article on terrorism, “Let’s Not Get It Wrong This Time: The Terrorists Won After 9/11 Because We Chose to Invade Iraq, Shred Our Constitution,” appeared on Salon.com.
Richard Weiss presented his co-authored paper, “A Reflective Approach to Assessing Student Performance in Cybersecurity Exercises,” at the 2016 meeting of SIGCSE, the national computer science education conference.
