ANTHROPOLOGY
Christine Avenarius
Dr. Avenarius is in China from March 9 to July 6, 2006 to collect data for her research project: "China and the Rule of Law: Conceptions of Fairness and Justice in Times of Change." Her host is the China Agricultural University, College of Humanities and Development, Department of Sociology, Professor Zhao Xudong, She will also cooperate with Dr. Qi Xin of The Urban Studies Institute, Beijing Academy of Social Sciences. Dr. Avenarius's research is funded by a two-year NSF grant in addition to an ECU Research Development Grant, and a Harriot College Research Award (Spring 2006). In the middle of July she is scheduled to give a presentation on her research in China at the Institute of Ethnology, University of Cologne, Germany.
John Bort
Dr. Bort is continuing his research on various topics among the Ngöbe (Guaymi) of western Panama, research on rural education in Costa Rica.
Jami Leibowitz
1. Romania: Reproductive Choice: This research explored why Romanian women continue to use abortion as their primary means of reproductive control when more effective, less invasive means of contraception were readily available, known and affordable. The findings of this research indicate that the cultural legacy of communism combined with traditional peasant beliefs about gender and sexuality result in women being re-active rather than pro-active in attempts to control their reproduction.
2. Romania: Dracula Tourism: This research explored how Romanians involved in the tourism industry negotiate between the historical figure and popularized figure in how Dracula and Dracula sites are presented for tourist consumption. Dr. Leibowitz is building upon this research to next explore how the cultural legacy of communism creates barriers to tourism development on the local level.
Dr. Leibowitz is also the lead faculty in the Global Understanding project that brings ECU students together with students from three other countries in a virtual environment of the Global Classroom. For more information see: http://www.ecu.edu/cs-acad/globalinitiatives/index.cfm
Holly Mathews
Dr. Mathews will travel to Oaxaca, Mexico, in February to re-visit her field research site in Santa Ana Tlapacoyan, a Zapotec community. She conducted her dissertation research there on gender and women's roles in the civil and political hierarchy known as the cargo system. She has since researched the ways in which women and men communicate gender messages through folklore in the community. She has just published an article based on this research: "Uncovering Models of Gender from Accounts of Folktales," in Finding Culture in Talk: A Collection of Methods, N. Quinn, ed. pgs.105-156. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. For this visit, she will be presenting a lecture at the Universidad Autonomo Benito Juarez in Oaxaca on "Problems Faced by Oaxacan Women Immigrants in North Carolina." She is also exploring with them some collaborative research on the impacts of immigration for women left behind in rural communities in Oaxaca.
In the realm of teaching, she is collaborating this semester with a female professor in Algeria who will present a lecture to Dr. Mathew's honor's seminar for the ECU Scholars on "Women's Roles in Algeria," and Dr. Mathews will do the same for her colleague through the global classroom. They are hoping to expand their collaboration next semester when Dr. Mathews teaches ANTH 3200 "Women's Roles in Cross-Cultural Perspective."
Finally, Dr. Mathews is collaborating with a Ugandan woman who has started a small NGO in two communities outside of Kampala to help teen mothers, many of whom are infected with HIV. The group is called Hope after Teenage Pregnancy. They attempt to counsel and provide health education and employment training to teen mothers who are shunned by family and community. They also have a preschool for their children. Dr. Mathews is involved in helping them raise funds and collect supplies for their small facility.
Laura Mazow
For the entire month of December 2005 Dr. Mazow was in Jerusalem at the W. F. Albright Institute for Archaeological Research where she is a Miqne Fellow. As a Miqne Fellow, she was assisting in preparing an archaeological report for publication for the Tel Miqne-Ekron Excavation and Publications Project. The report documents the excavations of the Philistine site of Tel Miqne-Ekron during the 1980s and 1990s asa joint project between the W.F. Albright Institute and the Institute of Archaeology, Hebrew University. She is continuing to work on the project throughout the spring from ECU, and will be working in Jerusalem again in June and July.
She is presenting a paper entitled, "Producing a Philistine: The Philistine Textile Industry and Its Implications for Reconstructing Philistine Settlement" at a conference on "Cyprus, the Sea Peoples and the Eastern Mediterranean" in Toronto, Canada on March 31. The conference is sponsored by the Canadian Institute for Mediterranean Studies, St. Michael's College and the Department of Near and Middle East Civilizations, the University of Toronto, Pennsylvania State University and the Republic of Cyprus.
Megan Perry
From May-August 2005 Dr. Perry was in Amman, Jordan finishing up publications and doing some research. In June 2005, Dr. Perry and four ECU graduate students surveyed two archaeological sites in Jordan--Petra and Wadi Ramm. From May-July 2006 she will return to Amman to continue the interim publication of her excavations at Petra (from 1994-2002). She is seeking funding to do a small excavation at Wadi Ramm with two more ECU graduate students.
Dr. Perry will be presenting two papers at the Society for American Archaeology meetings in San Juan, Puerto Rico in April, 2006: "'Damnatio ad metal': investigating the origin of Phaeno mining camp prisoners using radiogenic strontium isotope analysis" (with Drew Coleman and Abdel Halim al-Shiyab) and "Pastoralism and Pax Romana: the bioarchaeology of a nomadic community in Provincia Arabia" (with Joshua Fairchild, an ECU graduate student).
Benjamin Saidel
Dr. Saidel has a joint publication projection with Dr. Mordechai Haiman of the Israel Antiquities Authority. Their project is entitled "Life and Death in the Desert: The Excavations at Hameara and Har Saggi in the Western Negev Highlands, Israel." For a summary of this project go to the following website: http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~semitic/wl/digsites/Cisjordan/HamearaHarSagg_03/
Dr. Saidel also serves as a Senior Staff Member, The Tel el-Hesi Regional Survey Project, Negev desert, Israel. The project directors are A. Blakely and J.W. Hardin of Mississippi State University. Fieldwork will commence in June 2006. He is also co-organizer with Dr. Eveline Van der Steen (Visiting Rivers Chair, Department of Anthropology, 2005-2006) of a conference whose tentative title is Archaeological Research in the Ottoman Period . This conference will be held at the W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research, Jerusalem, Israel in July 2006. They are presently seeking a publisher for the proceedings of this meeting.
Eveline van der Steen
Dr. van der Steen is the 2005-2005 Thomas W. Rivers Distinguished Professor of International Studies. She is from the Netherlands where she received her MA at Leiden University and her Ph.D. from Groningen University. She is a Near Eastern archaeologist, with special focus on Jordan and its relations with Palestine/Israel in the Bronze and Iron Ages (3000 BC - 500 BC roughly). She has worked in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Palestine/Israel. Her special research interests are etnoarchaeology and etnohistory, particularly of tribal societies in the 19th century AD Levant, and the history and archaeology of Tribal State formation. At present she is publishing the excavation of Tell Mazar in the Jordan Valley, and writing a book on tribal societies in the Near East as an explanatory model for archaeology in the same region.
BIOLOGY
Robert Christian
Dr. Christian serves as the chair of the expert panel for the development of the Coastal Module of The Global Terrestrial Observing System (C-GTOS). This is a program through the UN with the secretariat in the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). "The primary goal of the Coastal Module of the Global Terrestrial Observing System is to detect, assess and predict global and large-scale regional change associated with land-based, wetland and freshwater ecosystems along coasts." http://www.fao.org/gtos/tems/mod_coa.jsp As part of his activities, he visited the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) headquarters in Paris during the summer of 2005 to develop linkages between different programs within the UN.
In January 2006, he gave a seminar on "Linking Estuarine Nutrient Cycling and Trophic Dynamics" at the University of Ferrara, Italy.
David Knowles
David Knowles has been involved with an ongoing tropical forest restoration project in southern Costa Rica since 1995. The project involves developing and applying reforestation techniques using native tree species and measuring and monitoring ecological change as abandoned pastures regenerate to forest. The research is conducted at a field station operated by Tropical Forestry Initiative, http://www.tropicalforestry.org/ a non-profit organization with the mission to develop realistic restoration techniques, encourage forest restoration in the region and provide educational opportunities to visiting students, faculty and researchers.
Enrique Reyes
Dr. Reyes has been invited to make a presentation on wetlands and global changes in climate and sea level at the SWS -- Catchments to Coast International Conference in Cairns, Australia during July 2006. The title of his presentation is, "Large spatial watershed models: readily management tools for long-term planning."
CHEMISTRY
Lee Bartolotti
Dr. Bartolotti has an on going collaboration with Dr A.D. Kulkarni in the Department of Chemistry and Dr R.K. Pathak in the Department of Physics at the University of Pune, Pune, India. This collaboration has lead to one paper in 2005, " Structures, Energetics and Vibrational spectra of H 2 O 2 ...(H 2 O) n , n=1-6 Clusters: Ab Initio Quantum Chemical Investigations, " A.D. Kulkarni, R.K. Pathak and L.J. Bartolotti, J. Phys. Chem., 109 , 4583-4590 (2005).
He also has an on-going collaboration with Dr. P.W. Ayers in the Department of Chemistry, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. This collaboration has lead to two papers in 2005: " An example where orbital relaxation is an important contribution to the Fukui function ," L.J. Bartolotti and P.W. Ayers, J. Phys. Chem. 109 ,1146-1151 (2005) and "Perturbative Perspectives on the Chemical Reaction Prediction Problem ," P.W. Ayers, J.S.M. Anderson, and L.J. Bartolotti, Int. J. of Quantum Chemistry 101 , 520-534 (2005)
He co-authored a paper with Dr. A. Nagy who is in the Department of Theoretical Physics, University of Debrecen, and Atomic and Molecular Physics Research Group of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Debrecen, Hungary. The paper is " Generalized density functional theory for degenerate states," A. Nagy, S. Liu and L. Bartolotti, J. Chem. Phys. 122 , 134107-1,134107-5 (2005).
Paul Gemperline
Dr. Gemperline made a presentation,"Model-based analysis of batch processes using calibration-free in-situ spectroscopy and calorimetry," at a workshop organized by the CRC 540, that took place on April 27th and 28th 2006 in Aachen, Germany. He also gave an invited lecture at an international conference on chemometrics and analytical chemistry : CAC 2006 -- The 10th International Conference on Chemometrics in Analytical Chemistry, 10-14 September 2006, Campinas, Brazil.
ECONOMICS
Okmyung Bin
Dr. Bin continues as a member of KAEA (Korea-America Economic Association).
John Bishop
Dr. Bishop presented a paper, "Statistical Inference for Inter-distributional Lorenz Curves," with L. Zeager and V. Chow, at the first annual conference of Economic Inequality Society, in Palma, Majorca, Spain, July 2005. He also presented a paper, "Rising Income Inequality and the Redistributive Effects of Taxes and Transfers in the United States, 1981-2001," with J. Formby, H. Kim and N. Podder at the Tax Reform and Public Finance Conference, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, December 2005.
Richard Ericson
Dr. Ericson chaired the International Advisory Board (IAB) of the Economic Education and Research Consortium (EERC-Russia) International Advisory Board (IAB) which meet in Kiev, Ukraine, July 7-11, 2005, and refereed three projects in its Research Workshop. He is also the representative of EERC-Russia on the Board of Directors and in the Executive Committee of EERC, Inc. that met in Kiev, October 13-16, 2005. He chaired the EERC-Russia IAB meeting and refereed two projects at its workshop in Moscow, Russia. He will travel to Kiev again in July 2006 for another workshop and IAB meeting.
Jamie Kruse
Dr. Kruse maintains collaborative research ties with Ozlem Ozdemir at Yeditepe University, Istanbul, Turkey, and Renate Schubert at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, Switzerland. She has been on the Board of Editors of the Global Review of Business and Economic Research since 2003. She has also refereed for a number to non-US journals this year, and is a member of the Economic Science Association, which is an international organization of experimental researchers.
Philip Rothman
Dr. Rothman was the program chair for the 13th annual conference of the Society for Nonlinear Dynamics & Econometrics at City University, London, March 31-April 1, 2005. Further details about the conference and the Society can be found at: http://www-snde.rutgers.edu/SNDE/society/snde.html
Nicholas Rupp
Dr. Rupp presented a paper, "Retracting a Gift: How Does Employee Effort Respond to Wage Reductions," at Wissenchaftszentrum (Social Science Research Center) of Berlin in November 2005.
ENGLISH
Michael Aceto
Dr. Aceto is currently analyzing his fieldwork data from St. Eustatius and Dominica.
Julie Fay
In May 2005, Julie Fay attended a book signing at English Bookshop stand at bookfair, Comédie du Livre: Montpellier. In August she attended an international poetry conference in Lodeve, France, where she met Rouquette scholars (http://www.voixdelamediterranee.com/html/intro_flash.html). During the summer she continued her research and work on Compostella fiction/poetry manuscript and on translations of Max Rouquette. She also judged applications for the French Fulbright committee.
During Fall 2005, Ms. Fay attended an homage/tribute to Max Rouquette in Lodeve. She gave guest lectures on 19th-century American author Edith Wharton at Université de Toulouse, Le Mirail. She was guest poet/speaker for Dr. Danielle Edouard's American Civilization class: read poetry from her books and spoke about an Eastern Carolina flood book project: Watching TV Off the Back of a Firetruck: Voices from the Floyd Flood in Eastern North Carolina (Crossroads Press, Summer 2005), a collection of community-based poems, essays, and interviews written by victims of Hurricane Floyd. She spoke with faculty at Toulouse about the possibility of having a satellite conference between a class there and an ECU class. Her article, "For Lack of a Fax: Co-Authoring Disaster in North Carolina and the Gulf Coast," was accepted for Mapping American Space publication of Université de Toulouse. She was a featured writer on a national French education site: continued development of "Canal U" "V.O." web program featuring interview with Fay, some ofher work in English and in French; see www.canal-u.fr. She also attended a doctoral thesis defense on J.D. Salinger at theUniversité de Toulouse.
Next summer (2006), Ms. Fay is an invited reader and participant at 29th Anglo-French Poetry Festival June 21-25, 2006, translation workshops, bilingual public readings, in conjunction with Marche de la poesie, Place St. Sulpice, Paris. She will also attend the Mediterranean poetry conference in Lodeve; http://www.voixdelamediterranee.com.
Thomas Herron
Dr. Herron gave a conference lecture in late February 2006 in Cork, Ireland, relating to his research on the early modern English poet Edmund Spenser, who was a plantation settler and poet while in Ireland, ca. 1580-1599. The paper also considered the colonial poetry of Sir Walter Raleigh. The conference was co-organized by the Irish Historical Settlement Society and Irish Post-Medieval Archaeology Group.
Dr. Herron also gave lectures on similar subject matter at the International Spenser Society meeting in Toronto, Canada, in May 2006, as well as at the British-Irish Spenser Seminar in Cambridge, England in September, 2006.
C. W. Sullivan III
Dr. Sullivan read, "Kenneth Morris: The Milestone in Welsh Celtic Fantasy Fiction" at the Milestones in Celtic Studies Conference, Aberystwyth, Wales, July 2005. Dr. Sullivan argued that Morris was, in his 1914 The Fates of the Princes of Dyfed and 1930 Book of the Three Dragons , the first to use materials from the medieval Welsh prose piece known as the Mabinogi as ingredients in fantasy novels. Dr. Sullivan has been researching medieval Welsh Celtic myths and legends at the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth since 1982 and is a Harriot College Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences.
David Wilson-Okamura
Dr. Wilson-Okamura will present a paper, "Lyric Styles in the Faerie Queene," in a session on Spenser's Civilization at the International Spencer Society conference in Toronto, Canada, in May 2006. The conference is sponsored by the Department of English of the University of Toronto.
FOREIGN LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES
Joanna Bradley
During July and August, Dr. Bradley was in Honduras as an interpreter for a Humanitarian Aid group for North Carolina. They worked in a small mountain village where she laid block and rebuilt structures destroyed by recent (and not so recent) hurricanes.
Locally, Dr. Bradley participated in relocation projects for Spanish speakers who arrive in Greenville from other countries. She and project colleagues help the new arrivals enroll children in school, find employment and medical care. They have also begun English as a Second Language classes and organize and disperse donated clothing. In December 2005, she directed an Angel Tree Christmas project that matched 55 low income Hispanic children with Greenville families who provided each child with a complete outfit, a pair of shoes and a toy. Most of the children are in the Belvoir Elementary School.
Juan Daneri
Dr. Daneri organized the panel, "Transculturation processes and alternative ethnographic discourses in colonial Mexico: The works of Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl," XXVI International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, San Juan, Puerto Rico (March 2006). He will also present the paper, "Cultural and critical continuities on Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl's work." He will present the paper, "Cultura cortesana europea e historiografía amerindia: Diego Muñoz Camargo y la historia colonial de Tlaxcala" [European courtier culture and Amerindian historiography: Diego Muñoz Camargo and the colonial history of Tlaxcala] at the 52nd International Congress of Americanists, Seville, Spain (July 2006).
Paul Fallon
Dr. Fallon will be making a presentation, “Between new knowledges and old habits: negotiating (a border literary) community online en la línea,” at the Tenth Annual Symposium on Contemporary Narrative: Latin American Cyberliterature and Cyberculture at the University of Leeds (UK) at the end of March 2006. He also participated in a workshop discussion: “Cyberliterature and Cyberculture.”
Charles Fantazzi
Dr. Fantazzi chaired two sessions at the annual meeting of the Renaissance of America at the University of Cambridge (UK) in March 2005. He has been invited to a congress at Christ Church, Oxford, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the edition of Erasmus' correspondence, September, 2006. His paper will be on the correspondence between Erasmus and Vives. He has also been invited to give a paper on Sannazaro at a congress at the University of Louvain, September, 2006. He is editing a Companion to Vives, a volume of some 500 pages, for E.J. Brill Publishers, Leiden, The Netherlands, to be published in 2007. Dr. Fantazzi is a member of the editorial board, editor and translator, The Collected Works of Erasmus, University of Toronto Press. He also worked at the Library of the University of Louvain and the Bibliothèque royale de Belgique in Brussels at Christmas time, 2005-6.
Frank Romer
In November 2005, Dr. Romer served as study leader for an educational tour of Phoenician, Greek, and Roman monuments in Tunisia and Libya for the Archaeological Institute of America. As a member of the Comparative Ideas of Empire and Geography group based in Paris, he works on the Roman geographer and paradoxographer Solinus.
Michael Schinasi
Dr. Schinasi presented a paper in September 2005 in Buenos Aires at the conference "El Quijote en Buenos Aires" (a commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the publication of Don Quijote ). His book has just appeared: Ventura de la Vega, Poemas , ed. intro. notes Michael Schinasi. Salamanca: Grupo de Estudios del Siglo XVIII -- Universidad de Salamanca, 2006.
Peter Standish
During 2005 Dr. Standish conducted research in Mexico for his forthcoming book, A Companion to Mexican Studies (late 2006) to be published by Tamesis Books (an imprint that has a strong list in Hispanic Studies and is associated with the University of London). It is part of a series of research companions.
Jill Twark
Dr. Twark received a J. William Fulbright German Studies Seminar grant to attend the seminar "Aktuelle Tendenzen in der Deutschen Gegenwartsliteratur" [Recent Trends in Contemporary German Literature] in Berlin, Leipzig and Hamburg, Germany from June 8-25, 2005.
Jennifer Valko
Dr. Valko was awarded a Research & Creative Activity Grant for Summer 2006 to work on "Marketing, Journalism, and Nation Building: The Role of the Argentinisches Tageblatt in the Argentine Immigration Industry (1874-1908)." She will be doing archival research in Buenos Aires to examine the narrative construction of Argentine Patagonia between 1890-1935 by Germanic immigrants and Argentine urban intellectuals. Her summer research focuses on the narratives of Swiss journalists Johann and Moritz Alemann (father and son) recruited by Argentine officials to immigrate there, establish a newspaper, and attract potential entrepreneurs and colonists.
She will present a paper titled, "Immigration and Advertising in the Early Twentieth Century. Swiss Immigrants Market the Argentine Patagonia" at the Latin American Studies Association Congress (LASA) in San Juan, Puerto Rico in March 2006. In July of 2006 she is scheduled to present "Soñar con el futuro. La representación de la Patagonia Argentina en Roberto J. Payró y Theodor Alemann" [Dreaming the Future. The Representation of Argentine Patagonia in Roberto J. Payró and Theodor Alemann] at the 52nd International Congress of Americanists in Seville, Spain.
GEOGRAPHY
Jeff Popke
In the summer of 2005, Dr. Popke spent three weeks in Michoacán, Mexico, studying the processes fueling out-migration from rural communities there. He is planning a similar research trip for the summer of 2006 (length and destination to be determined). Students under his direction are studying transnational migration from Mexico and social and economic change in Argentina.
Rebecca Torres and Jeff Popke
Drs. Torres and Popke conducted fieldwork in Mexico during summer 2005 on a project titled, "From Tierra Caliente to Rural North Carolina: Mexican Transnational Migration and Settlement in the U.S. South."
GEOLOGY
Reide Corbett
Dr. Corbett is a member of the International Association for the Physical Sciences of the Oceans Commission on Groundwater-Seawater Interactions.
Steve Culver
Dr. Culver has a research project that was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council in the UK on reconstruction of Jurassic environmental change in the the Kimmeridgian strata of the UK using benthic foraminiferal assemblages as paleoenvironmental indicators. The Kimmeridge Clay is an important petroleum source rock in the North Sea. One of his former post-doctoral students at the Natural History Museum, London, is working up the data. He is also currently working with coauthors from the University of Houston on a paper on the late Precambrian plate tectonic evolution of the West African craton. This work incorporates samples that he collected on a couple of National Geographic-funded expeditions that he led to Senegal, Mali, Sierra Leone and Liberia 10 to 15 years ago. Dr. Culver is a Fellow of the Geological Society of London, a Chartered Geologist with the Geological Society of London and an Honorary Professor at University College, London.
Catherine Rigsby
Dr. Rigsby has conducted paleoclimate research in the central Andes region of Bolivia and Peru, as well as in the Tibetan highlands. The following is a list of her recent international projects:
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an NSF-funded project in the Bolivian Altiplano on Quaternary paleoclimatology and fluvial and lacustrine sedimentology of the Rio Desaguadero Basin . This recently completed (1995-2003) project was an effort to establish links between terrestrial climate change records (ice cores and lake sediment records), fluvial and lacustrine sedimentology, and human land-use (there is an ECU Edge Magazine article about this research). The work included both surface and subsurface investigations and was facilitated by an agreement with PELT (a bi-national, Bolivian/Peruvian, agency concerned with Lake Titicaca and its watershed). Her US collaborator was J. Platt Bradbury of the U.S. Geological Survey in Denver.
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a pilot project on the island of Grenada to study of the nature and cause of long-term climatic variations from the sediment record of island lakes (http://www.ecu.edu/geology/RIGSBY/Rigsby Research Pages/WIPP/Wipp.html). Collaborators on this project included, Sherilyn Fritz, a diatomist from the University of Nebraska, Paul Baker, a geochemist from Duke, and Svante Bjorck, a Quaternary geoscientist from the University of Lund
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a currently NSF-funded multidisciplinary study of the Holocene fluvial and climate history as related to cultural history in the Cirum-Titicaca region (this is the same link as above, it leads to info about both projects). This project is also being done under the auspices of PELT. Her U.S. collaborators are Mark Aldenderfer, an archeologist from UC Santa Barbara and Paul Baker, a geochemist from Duke)
- 2 projects in the Lake Qinghai basin of northeastern Tibet:
- a lake drilling project at Lake Qinghai has recently been funded by the International Continental Drilling Program (ICDP). The coring will begin in May or 2005 with the aim of producing high-resolution paleoclimate and paleotectonic changes on the Tibetan Plateau. The lead PI in the coring project is Professor An Zhisheng of the Institute of Earth Environment and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IEE, CAS), Xi'an, China. The project will involve researchers and students from 9 countries.
- a project to study the Quaternary geology and geomorphology in the Qinghai basin watershed (funding proposal to be submitted to NSF-Earth Sciences in January 2005). This project will be in collaboration with An Zhisheng (IEE, CAS) and Steve Porter (University of Washington) and will involve both Chinese and U.S. graduate students.
- She has participated in several international conferences in connection with these projects, most recently a geomorphology research conference in Zaragosa Spain.
J. P. Walsh
Dr. Walsh is currently conducting research in Papua New Guinea, New Zealand, and Puerto Rico.
- Evolution of the subaqueous delta clinoform seaward of the Fly River. The objective of this project is to interpret the record of fluvial sediments on the continental shelf seaward of a large river. A detailed web site on the project can be found at www.scripps.ucsd.edu/png. This research is based upon observations made by my doctoral research. It is funded by the Margins Source to Sink program of the National Science Foundation and is being conducted in collaboration with Neal Driscoll (Scripps Institution of Oceanography), John Milliman (Virginia Institute of Marine Science), Rudy Slingerland (Penn State University), John Crockett (University of Washington), Chuck Nittrouer (UW), Andrea Ogston (UW) and many others.
- Sediment dynamics on the actively deforming Waipaoa continental margin. This project, also part of the Margins Source to Sink program, is designed to investigate the modern transport of terrestrial sediment to and within the continental slope seaward of the Waipaoa River, New Zealand. A research cruise for this project is scheduled for February 2005 aboard R/V Kilo Moana. This research is being conducted in collaboration with Clark Alexander (Skidaway), Alan Orpin (Canada Geological Survey), Lionel Carter (National Institute for Water and Atmosphere Research, New Zealand), Steve Kuehl (Virginia Institute of Marine Science) and Lincoln Pratson (Duke University).
- Terrestrial sediment flux onto coral reefs of southwestern Puerto Rico. This research is aimed at quantifying the flux of terrestrial (land-derived) sediment to the coral reef areas of La Parguera, Puerto Rico. The research is being conducted in collaboration with Amos Winter (University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez), Richard Appeldorn (UPRM), Francisco Pagan (UPRM) and others. It is part of the NOAA Coral Reef Ecosystem Studies - Caribbean program.
HISTORY
David Dennard and Kenneth Wilburn
Dr. Dennard and Dr. Kenneth Wilburn are organizing an ECU summer study abroad program to Ghana for June 2006: http://core.ecu.edu/hist/wilburnk/StudyAbroad/
Jonathan Reid
Dr. Reid delivered an invited paper, "Evangelical Networks in France (1520-1555): Proto-churches?" at the international conference, "The French and Italian Reformations: Contacts, Contrasts, and Comparisons," Rome, October 2005. The organizers were Profs. Philip Benedict, formerly of Brown University, now Director of the Institut d'Histoire de la Réformation , Geneva, Switzerland; Alain Tallon, Université de Paris-Sorbonne, Paris IV; and Silvana Seidel-Menchi, Università di Pisa. The Conference was underwritten by the École française de Rome, Florence Gould foundation, American Academy in Rome, Università degli studi di Pisa, Université de Paris-Sorbonne, Paris IV, and l'Accademia Naztionale dei Lincei.
Chad Ross
Dr. Ross will be presenting a paper, "Food for Thought: Diet, Health, Morality and the Reform of Life," as part of a panel on health, the body and the nation in the early twentieth century at the European Social Sciences History Conference in Amsterdam in March 2006.
Anoush Terjanian
Dr. Terjanian is a member of the international editorial team producing the first modern critical edition of the ten-volume, best-selling history of comparative empires--the Histoire politique et philosophique ducommerce et des établissements des Européens dans les deux Indes(1770,1774, 1780). The edition will be published by the Voltaire Foundation at Oxford University. She was invited to give a paper at the International Colloquium, “Raynal and his Networks,” to be held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, on 15-16 December 2006. Dr.Terjanian was also elected to the Board of Trustees of the Institut Français de Washington, now based at UNC-Chapel Hill.
Angela Thompson
Dr. Thompson will present a paper entitled, "Poltergeist: Frederick Catherwood in the Old World and New" at the European Social Science History Conference in Amsterdam, Netherlands, in March 2006. She also spent a month in Egypt in May and June 2006 and participated in the Dakhla Oasis Project Conference in Cairo in June.
John Tucker
Dr. Tucker led a group of eight ECU undergraduates and a cued-speech specialist on the 2005 Kyoto Study Tour in May of 2005. The study tour featured field studies of ancient Shinto shrines, Buddhist temples, samurai castles, and the old imperial palace in Kyoto. Students also attended a kabuki performance, a baseball game, lunch and a private lecture by the Head Abbot of the Tofukuji Temple, Fukushima Roshi, and two major Shinto festivals, the Aoi Matsuri and the Mifune Matsuri. Tucker is currently organizing the 2006 ECU Kyoto Study Tour for May. He plans to lead a group of ten ECU undergrads on a study tour of Japanese history and culture in and around Kyoto, the ancient imperial capital of Japan.
Tucker received a $5,000.00 grant from the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership to fund a workshop for Greenville-Pitt County middle and high school social science teachers. The workshop is called, "Discovering Japanese History and Culture through Anime : A Multidisciplinary Examination of Miyazaki Hayao's Princess Mononoke." This workshop will take place on Saturday, February 25, 2006, on the ECU campus. Tucker has applied for another Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership grant to fund a second workshop for Greenville-Pitt County middle and high school social science teachers, "Representations of the Feminine in Japanese Literary and Popular Culture." This grant is pending.
The week of December 11-16, 2005, Tucker served in Washington, D. C. as a field reader for the U. S. Department of Education's International Education Programs, reviewing applications for the Fulbright-Hays Group Projects Abroad Grants for 2006-2007. Tucker served on the East Asian panel.
The week of January 8-13, 2006 Tucker served in Washington, D.C. as a field reader for the U. S. Department of Education's Title VI National Resource Center/Foreign Language Area Studies Grants program. Tucker chaired the East Asian review panel which included eight other faculty field readers and Senior Program Officer, Cheryl Gibbs.
Tucker's book, Ogyu Sorai's Philosophical Masterpieces: The Bendo and Benmei, will be published in March of 2006 by the University of Hawaii Press. The book is part of a series, "Asian Interactions and Comparisons," sponsored by the Association for Asian Studies and the University of Hawaii Press.
Tucker will participate in an international conference in Chicago, March 4-6, 2006 for publication of a Sourcebook in Japanese Philosophy . The conference and the publication are sponsored by the Nanzan Institute in Japan. The Sourcebook is planned for publication in 2007 by the University of Hawaii Press.
INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
Sylvie Debevec Henning
Dr. Henning will present a paper, "Writing the World: Samuel Beckett's Novelistic Investigations," at the Congrès international de la Société française d'études irlandaises, Université de Franche-Comté, Besançon, France in late March.
MATHEMATICS
Chal Benson
Dr. Benson attended the Harmonic Analysis and Related Problems conference in Zakopane, Poland, in January 2006. His talk was entitled, "A geometric model for the space of bounded spherical functions on a two step nilpotent Lie group."
Alexandra Shlapentokh
Dr. Schlapentokh will attend a workshop at the Field Arithmetic Meeting sponsored by the German Mathematical Society in Oberwolfach, Germany, in February 2006. The German Mathematical Society has a research institute which primarily serves as a base for various conferences and workshops. These conferences are by invitation only. Field Arithmetic Meeting is one of the meetings sponsored by the institute. Field Arithmetic is a relatively new field lying on the boundary of more traditional fields: Algebra, Model Theory (a field in Logic) and Algebraic Geometry. For more information please visit the website of the German Math Society at http://www.mfo.de, and the information site for workshops: http://www.mfo.de/cgi-bin/path?programme
PHILOSOPHY
Derek Maher<
