Faculty Friday Spotlight: April 2024
Presentations & Publications
Jennifer L. Hughes, Charles A. Dana Professor of Psychology, recently co-authored and published an invited editorial in the Psi Chi Journal of Psychological Research. The article covers readings developed by Psi Chi, the International Honor Society in Psychology, which can be useful for instructors when selecting content about career exploration and professional development for their courses. These readings could also be useful for faculty to give to undergraduate psychology students when advising them. In this article, three inexpensive and useful Psi Chi eBooks are discussed, which cover career exploration and joining the workforce, graduate school, and business-related careers. In addition, articles from Psi Chi’s magazine, Eye on Psi Chi, are presented. Those articles are grouped into the following categories: career exploration and joining the workforce, graduate school, professional development, and specific areas of psychology. These student-friendly and content-rich articles are free to access for students and faculty.
Professors Jenny Hughes, Bonnie Perdue, Brielle James, and Stephanie Stern also presented talks and posters at the Southeastern Psychological Association conference in Orlando. Ten psychology majors (Trinitii Baggett, Katherine Cox, Chloe Hall, Tiffany Hernandez-Salinas, Alina Kuperminc, Izzy Ley, Jenesis Narcisse, Jessica Pinsker, Leila Reed and J’Lynn Vellon) also presented their research. In addition, Chloe Hall, Trinitii Baggett and Dr. Jenny Hughes’ research was selected as 1 of the 10 best undergraduate posters at the Southeastern Psychological Association conference.
Lauran Whitworth, Assistant Professor & Chair of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Co-Director of the Environmental and Sustainability Studies Minor, gave the keynote for the 2024 Women’s and Gender Studies Symposium at Georgia College and State University on March 26, 2024. The title of Whitworth’s talk was “Loving the Land and Each Other: Environmental Eros & Trans-Species Ethics in Feminist and Queer Ecologies.” Dr. Whitworth also gave a talk at the recent 2024 WGS South conference titled “Against Conservation of the Norm: Regenerative Trans Ecologies in the Interregnum.”
Melissa Fay Greene, Kirk Distinguished Writer-in-Residence, recently engaged in a public conversation at the Carter Center with Pulitzer Prize winning nonfiction author David Finkel about the impact of political divisiveness on individual lives, through the lens of his new book, American Dreamer. Greene has also been commissioned by The Washington Post to submit a series of “postcards” about the run-up to the presidential election in our swing state. Her first (not yet published) was about the influx of in-state and out-of-state transplants into the suburban counties north of Atlanta which flipped them to Biden in 2020 and may do so again. The second series will likely be about experiments in Democratic messaging focused on raising the turnout among eligible African American male voters in Georgia.
Mary Cain, Associate Professor of History, recently delivered two conference papers:” ‘Women’s Work to Guard and Save’: White Female Tract Visitors in the Antebellum Urban North” at the Nineteenth Century Studies Association Annual Meeting and “The Fate of the Yankee Servant: Women, Whiteness and Domestic Management in Antebellum New England” at the Georgia Association of Historians Annual Meeting.
Professor of Economics, Li Qi, organized and chaired the session “Gender Differences: Insights from Empirical and Experimental Studies” at the CES 2024 North America Conference held at Bucknell University (Mar. 29-31). She presented her work on the “Academic profile of economists: Productivity, pay, time use, gender differences, and impacts of COVID-19”, and “How Social Attention Shapes Gendered Trading Choices” with other panelists from UGA, Rutgers, and Texas A&M University.
Associate Professor of Economics Ruth Uwaifo Oyelere was invited on March 16th 2024 to present her recently co-authored published research focused on Housing vulnerability during the pandemic. The seminar series presentation was hosted by the Department of Economics, Howard University.
Cambridge University Press just published Associate Professor of Classics K. Scarlett Kingsley’s book, Herodotus and the Presocratics: Inquiry and Intellectual Culture in the Fifth Century BCE.
Columbia University Press will publish Professor of Psychology’s Barbara Blatchley’s new book titled The Long Road of Sorrow: The Science of Grief. Publication date TBD, but hopefully in 2024!
Professor of Art Nell Ruby’s work is included in Lyndon House’s current exhibition, Rescue: Waste and Redemption. The exhibition is guest curated by Lizzie Zucker Saltz. This group show was curated from a call for submissions in which Saltz selected 22 artists from 90 submissions. Artists included consider the transformation of industrial byproducts into artworks or craft objects thus creating artworks that save materials from the landfill or rescue raw materials from the fate of becoming environmental pollutants.
Welcome New Tenure-Track Hires!
A warm welcome to the following new tenure track hires:
Spanish- Ana Maria Pozo
Public Health- Atticus Wolfe
Biology- Sarah Mitchell
Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies: Julia Gutierrez
Physics- Natalia Arellano
Grants Awarded and More Submitted
Tina Pippin, Wallace M. Alston Professor of Bible and Religion, received a $30,000 Large Project grant from the Wabash Center for Teaching Theology and Religious Studies for “Teaching Social Justice and Civic Engagement” for a two-year project: ““Ecopedagogy, Religion, and Place-Based Civic Engagement.” Our community partner is Trellis Horticultural Therapy Alliance and they will be leading wellness horticulture workshops on campus, as well as working with us (and in particular REL/WGSS/ESS 210: Religion and Ecology) on participating with their organic farming program with the Metro State Transitional Center for women felons. In addition, there will be ecopedagogy workshops by leading scholars available to faculty, staff and students during each of four semesters. Stay tuned for more details!
The division of academic affairs is very fortunate to have generous donors that have committed funds for faculty professional development. These internal funds are a wonderful way to fund small professional development and curricular projects or to provide initial momentum for long-term projects that can be connected with external funding. The allocation of these funds is overseen by the Dean of the College with recommendations generated by the faculty Professional Development Committee (Toby Emert, chair) and the Holder Fund Committee.
The Holder fund was established by alumna and former chair of the Board of Trustees, Beth Holder `82, and was created “to promote innovative forms of faculty development and renewal that simultaneously enable Agnes Scott College to retain outstanding teacher-scholars and enhance the scholarship and teaching of faculty who receive support from it.” Income from this endowed fund will support “various forms of faculty innovation that require travel, research assistance, reassigned time from teaching, specialized equipment, and access to archival and other scholarly materials.
There are a variety of funds which support professional development internal grant awards and we gratefully recognize them:
Catherine Sims Faculty Enrichment Fund
Alma Buchanan Collaborative Research Fund
Humanities Faculty Fund
Dorothy Travis Joyner Faculty Innovation Fund
Sara Burke Addison Fund
Sterly Lebey Wilder Collaborative Research Fund
The faculty who were awarded Holder and PDC grants are:
Nell Ruby
Erica Harris
Katherine Smith and Nell Ruby
Erin Bradley and Amy Patterson
Hodari-Sakiki Hubbard-James
Lock Rogers
Alan Grostephan
Alexandra Yep
Carmen Carrion
Mike Schlig
Qiao Solomon
Toby Emert, Tracey Laird, Bridget Roosa, Nell Ruby, and Katherine Smith
Roshan Iqbal
Waqas Kwaja
Bobby Meyer-Lee
Tina Pippin
Jennifer Hurst-Kennedy
Philip Ojo
Shu-Chin Wu
Shoshana Katzman
Bridget Roosa
Li Qi
Shu-Chin Wu
Julia Knowlton
Charlotte Artese
Nicole Stamant
Robert Meyer-Lee
Toby Emert
Roshan Iqbal
Mi-Sun Kim
We celebrate the awarding of grants, but also acknowledge the labor that goes into submitting them in the first place! We’re wishing the following faculty luck in receiving the following:
Alan Koch, Srebrenka Robic, Jenny Hughes, Stacey Dutton, Molly Embree, and Lora-Beth Allen submitted a NSF S-STEM Track2 grant titled, “S-STEM-STEMPOWER: STEM Partnerships Offering Women Education & Resources,” for $1.98M that will provide programming scholarships to STEM students, if awarded.
Jennifer Kovacs submitted an NSF-Major Research Instrumentation grant, entitled, “Field vehicle for biology and sustainability studies at Agnes Scott College”.
Jim Wiseman submitted a grant to the Simmons Foundation entitled, “Dynamical systems”.
Bella Tobin submitted an NSF grant entitled, “Understanding post-critically finite bicritical rational maps”.
Jing Paul submitted a NSA Georgia STARTALK grant.
Mary Chase Mize submitted a Health Resources and Services Administration grant entitled, “WISE (Wellness and Interdisciplinary Support for Elders) at Agnes Scott College”.
Jennifer Fulling-Smith submitted a Spencer Foundation grant, entitled, “Decolonizing Intersectional Counseling Education”.
Jennifer Larimore submitted an NSF grant, entitled, “AGAP-1 dependent Endosomal Trafficking in dendritic structural development in the SHANK3B deficient mouse”.
