Campus Notes

Presentations, Conferences, and Lectures

In March, Randy Albelda of the Economics Department and Ph.D. in Public Policy Program delivered the talk "Welfare-to-Work, Farewell to Families?" for Women's History Month at University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire. She also gave the keynote speech at the "Access to Justice" conference organized by the Massachusetts Legal Assistance Corporation.

Elsa Auerbach, professor of English, presented the workshop "The Treasures of Bilingual Families" at the Multiculturalism and Literacy Development Workshop, and was a plenary speaker and workshop presenter at the conference "Popular Education and the Immigrant Workforce: Organizing for Language, Literacy, and Workers' Rights," held at the University of California at Berkeley.

James Bierstaker, assistant professor of accounting and finance, published the article "Auditor Recall and Evaluation of Internal Control Information: Does Task-Specific Knowledge Mitigate Part-List Interference?" in Managerial Auditing Journal.

On March 25 and 26, Steve Bliven and Dan Hellin of the Urban Harbors Institute (UHI) facilitated two public focus groups addressing the issue of "Increasing Involvement in and Awareness of Coastal Zone Management in New Jersey." These meetings are part of UHI's ongoing, comprehensive evaluation of the New Jersey Program.

Ann Blum of the Hispanic Studies Department presented the paper "Delegating Motherhood: Maternal Strategies and Public Welfare, Mexico City, 1920-1930," at the XXIV International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, where she also served as discussant on a panel entitled "Women, Ethnicity, and Mexican Authority: Reproductive and Children's Health in Latin America."

Linda Eisenmann, associate professor in the Department of Leadership in Education, delivered the address at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) annual meeting, held in Chicago in April. The Vice President of AERA, she spoke on "Reclaiming the 'Incidental Students': Higher Education and Women in the 1950s."

Jeffrey Keisler, assistant professor in the Department of Management Science and Information Systems, gave an invited presentation for the Systems Engineering Seminar, held at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point on February 6. His talk was entitled "Value of Information in Portfolio Decision Analysis."

Darren Kew, assistant professor in the Dispute Resolution Program, was an election observer in Nigeria with the National Democratic Institute from April 7 to 21. He recently gave a presentation on the elections for the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) roundtable on Nigeria.

Peter Kiang, professor of education and director of the Asian American Studies Program, delivered an invited keynote address titled "Stories for Children and Families in Asian American Studies" to commemorate Asian Awareness Month at Wesleyan University in April.

On March 28, Esther Kingston-Mann, professor of history and American studies, gave the keynote speech at the Southern Conference for Slavic Studies in Savannah, Georgia. The title of her talk was "The Romance of Privatization."

Mary Jo Marion, associate director of the Gastón Institute, testified before the Boston City Council Education Committee on March 25 on Question 2 implementation in Boston Public Schools.

Art professor Elizabeth Marran presented prints currently on display in her solo exhibition entitled "Blue Rapunzel" at the OHT Gallery in Boston to the Southern Graphics Conference on April 6. The exhibition was highlighted in the April 4 Boston Globe's "Critics' Picks."

On April 5, the Department of Sociology cosponsored an all-day conference on violence with the Center for the Study of Violence at Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. The conference, held at Lipke Auditorium, was attended by over three hundred participants. Siamak Movahedi, professor and chair of the Sociology Department, was one of the many program speakers.

The Computer Sciences Department's Marc Pomplun and Sindhura Sunkara presented at the 17th National Conference on Undergraduate Research in Salt Lake City. The presentation was a part of Sunkara's honors thesis: "Evaluating Human-Computer Interface Usability Based on Pupillary Response."

William Robinson, associate provost and professor of environmental, coastal, and ocean sciences, presented the paper "Marine Biotechnology " The Challenge of Converting Basic Research into Applied Science," which was co-authored with Manickam Sugumaran, associate dean of Graduate Studies and professor of biology, at the Italy-USA Joint Symposium on Marine Biology and Biotechnology.

On April 10, Gary Siperstein, CPCS professor and director of the Center for Social Development and Education, and Jennifer Norins, research assistant and recent graduate of CAS, presented preliminary findings of the Special Olympics Multinational Attitude Study on Mental Retardation at the annual Council for Exceptional Children Conference in Seattle.

Several Asian American Studies Program faculty"Rajini Srikanth, Karen Suyemoto, Zong-Guo Xia, and Peter Kiang"co-presented as panelists at a forum on Asian Pacific American Faculty in Higher Education held at Harvard's Graduate School of Education in April.

Art professor Nancy Stieber spoke on "Interdisciplinarity within a Discipline-Specific Journal" at the international colloquium "Art History and Its Journals," held at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusett, in March.

On April 5, Peter Taylor and Steve Rudnick led a group of 14 UMass Boston faculty and graduate students in presenting the curriculum units developed to address sustainability concerns. These units ranged from developing a funding proposal for promoting community gardens in Dorchester to quantitative reasoning exercises using trends in municipal waste and recycling data.

On April 4, David Terkla, professor of economics, gave a presentation to the Massachusetts Association of Chamber Executives on the Massachusetts Business Roundtable report "Transportation Planning and Development in Massachusetts: Recommended Changes for the New Millennium," which he completed with Public Policy Ph.D. students Phil Granberry and Steve Quimby.

Joan Tonn, associate professor of the College of Management, is the author of the new book Mary P. Follett: Creating Democracy, Transforming Management, which will be published by the Yale University Press on April 25.

Andrés Torres, director of the Gastón Institute, was the discussant for the panel "Are Latinos Redrawing the Color Line?" held at Harvard University's David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies on March 12.

Polly Welsh, assistant director of the ESL Center and director of the Directions for Student Potential Program, and Carlos Maynard, graduate student in Applied Sociology and Applied Linguistics, conducted an ESL Tutor Training Workshop for students at Boston College on April 7.

Paul M. Wright, Boston office editor of the University of Massachusetts Press, recently published "'Perspectives' as American Book History: Developing a Late Twentieth-Century Artifact," in The Book, a newsletter of the American Antiquarian Society.

Publications

The Irish journal Cyphers published a special issue of Vietnamese poetry in May that was edited by the Joiner Center's Nguyen Ba Chung and Kevin Bowen.

Kevin Bowen, director of the Joiner Center, published a collection of new poems and poems selected from previous books, Eight True Maps of the West, with Dedalus Press. He will travel to Dublin in May to celebrate the launch of the book.

A memoir by Alan Helms, professor of English, Young Man from the Provinces, is being republished with a new afterward by University of Minnesota Press.

The joint plenary address that Richard Horsley, distinguished professor of liberal arts and study of religion, delivered to the New England Regional Meeting of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature, "Religion and Other Products of Empire," was published in the March 2003 issue of Journal of the American Academy of Religion.

Darren Kew, assistant professor in the Dispute Resolution Program, contributed a chapter on Nigeria that will be published in the Houghton-Mifflin textbook Issues in Comparative Politics.

College of Community and Public Services adjunct faculty members Sylvia Mignon and William Holmes, with Calvin Larson, professor emeritus of sociology, recently published their book Family Abuse: Consequences, Theories, and Responses.

Shooting the Rat: Outstanding Poems and Stories by High School Writers, co-edited by Mark Pawlak of Academic Support Services and Dick Lourie, formerly of University Communications and Community Relations, has just been published by Hanging Loose Press.

Lloyd Schwartz, Frederick S. Troy Professor of English, just published a chapbook of his poems Lloyd Schwartz: Greatest Hits 1973-2000, with Pudding House Publications.

The first issue of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, under the editorship of Nancy Stieber, professor of art, will appear in June 2003.

The essay "Paul Goodman as Advance-Guard Writer" by Taylor Stoehr, professor of English, appears in the current issue of The Kenyon Review.

David Terkla, professor of economics, co-wrote the article "The Adoption and Diffussion of High-Performance Management: Lessons from Japanese Multinationals in the West," which was published in the March issue of Cambridge Journal of Economics.

Professor John Tobin of the English Department has four textual studies on several Renaissance dramas in the March 2003 issue of Notes and Queries.

Exhibits, Readings, Performances, Shows

Under the auspices of the Department of Corporate, Continuing, and Distance Education, Professor David Patterson of the Music Department presented "Music of the 40's" in story and song at Kit Clark Services in Dorchester, with assistance from vocalist Brigid Battell, a Theatre Arts major.

UMass Boston's Theatre Program, participating in the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival XXXVI (KCACTF), has two actors, Wendy Nystrom and Marta Johnson, and one alternate, Randolph Sainthelmy, nominated to compete in the Irene Ryan Scholarship Competition at the Region I Festival in January 2004. They were selected for their work in Romeo and Juliet under the direction of Professor Laura Schrader.

Appointments and Honors

Peter Kiang, Asian American Studies program director and professor of education, was recently appointed by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights for a two-year term as chair of the commission's Massachusetts State Advisory Committee.

Enrico Marcelli, assistant professor of economics, has been appointed the Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar at Harvard University. He will be working on a study of how neighborhood environment and social networks influence health outcomes among lower-income immigrants and other minorities in the United States.

The Association for Gerontology in Higher Education (AGHE) has selected Sonia Michelson and Marian Spenser, instructors in gerontology, to receive its 2003 Part-Time Faculty Recognition Honor. This honor recognizes part-time and adjunct instructors who make significant contributions to gerontological education.

Sherry H. Penney, former chancellor and now professor of leadership in the College of Management, will receive the 2003 Abigail Adams award from the Mass Women's Political Caucus at the awards ceremony on June 16 at the Fairmont Copley. The award is given annually to "women who have made a significant contribution to the realization of equal political, economic, and social rights for women."

The College of Management's recipients of the Dean's Awards for Distinguished Research for 2003 are: Mary Lou Roberts, professor of marketing, who has been honored for her work and publication of her book Internet Marketing: Integrating Online and Offline Strategies; and Moshin Habib, assistant professor of management, and Leon Zurawicki, professor of marketing, who have been honored jointly for their work on a paper on corruption in international business.

Candice Rowe, part-timer in the English Department, has been awarded an Honorable Mention in the Sheila Smith Short Story Prize by the National League of American Pen Women. She has also been named a finalist in the Writers @ Work Competition.

Castellano B. Turner has been appointed interim director of the William Monroe Trotter Institute for the Study of Black Culture.

Grants and Research

Lovalerie King, assistant professor of English, has been awarded a summer stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and a place in the NEH-sponsored institute on the history of the African American civil rights movement, 1866-1965, in July and August at the W. E. B. Dubois Institute at Harvard University.

Mary Oleskiewicz, assistant professor of music, has been awarded a $5,000 Healey Endowment Grant to produce the first edition and CD recording of the six long-lost quartets for flute, violin, viola, and basso continuo by Johann Joachim Quantz.

James Willis, assistant professor of sociology, submitted a co-authored final research report, "Compstat and Organizational Change in a Small Police Department," to the Police Foundation as part of an NIJ-funded project on the place of Compstat in American policing.

The Asian American Studies Program was awarded $2,000 by the Asian American Unity Fund to support production of a resource booklet to commemorate and connect the 100th anniversaries of Korean immigration to the U.S., the historic 1903 immigration raid against Boston Chinatown, and the contemporary deportation of Cambodian Americans.

The Center for Social Policy's Connection, Service and Partnership through Technology (CSPTech) Project has been awarded a $25,000 challenge grant from the Boston Foundation's New Economy Initiative. The grant will help CSPTech to continue to develop a web-based querying tool that will allow use access to CSPTech data on homelessness among other related projects.

The Mauricio Gastón Institute received a $21,000 grant from the Christopher Reynolds Foundation for an exchange between Cuban and Boston community development practitioners. The institute also received $5,000 from the National Council of La Raza to conduct focus groups with Massachusetts voters on bilingual education.

The Annie E. Casey Foundation has awarded New England Resource Center for Higher Education (NERCHE) a $42,000 grant to identify best practices among colleges and universities for addressing the needs of campus staff who come from the neighborhoods surrounding the campus.

Dissertations

Amy Rebecca Gay, assistant director of the Graduate Programs in Dispute Resolution at CPCS, received her Ph.D. in social sciences from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, having successfully defended her dissertation, "Neither Judge Nor Jury: Norms and the Role of the Volunteer Community Mediator," in March.

James McIntyre, candidate for a Ph.D. in Public Policy, presented his dissertation research, "An Analysis of the State Public Education Aid Funding Mechanism Established by the Massachusetts Education Reform Act," on April 26.

Chivimbiso Tawayena Kapungu, candidate for a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, presented his dissertation research, "Making Connections: Political Efficacy and Psychosocial Adaptation of African International Students in the United States. An Ecological Approach," on April 28.

Correction

The title of a new CD by Mary Oleskiewicz is the "Johann Joachim Quartz Flute Sonatas." The Reporter erroneously referred to it as "Joseph Joachim" in the Campus Notes section of the April issue.

Miscellaneous

Ann Torke, assistant professor in the Art Department, is currently the Teen Media Artist in Residence at the Daniel Marr Boys and Girls Club for Arts on the Point's Community Outreach Program.
On April 9, the Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy presented the 17th Women's Research Forum, featuring Professor Aminah Fernandes Pilgrim of Africana Studies and Co-Director of the Cape Verdean Language and Culture Institute.

WUMB's Barbara Neely, host of Commonwealth Journal, and staffers completed a two-part special on grandmothers, which is the first program that WUMB is distributing for national syndication. So far, nearly 30 stations across the country are airing the special.

In the News

Research by scientists at the Environmental, Coastal, and Ocean Sciences (ECOS) Department on the geochemical fingerprint of terrorism in New York Harbor was the focus of an article in the LA Times on April 6. Sarah Oktay, ECOS researcher, was quoted in the article.

Richard Horsley, distinguished professor of liberal arts and the study of religion, served as the lead historian for a PBS documentary, "Peter and Paul and the Christian Revolution. The Rock and River/The Empire and the Kingdom," which aired on WGBH-TV 2 on April 9.

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