Ready to Dedicate


The new Jim Mallon Baseball Field House will be officially dedicated on Friday, Aug. 30, at 3 p.m. The field house, which is located on the north side of the Robertson Center, will serve as a locker room for the baseball team and is named after former Southwestern baseball coach Jim Mallon. 

Top News

FOUR HONORED FOR EXEMPLARY SERVICE TO SOUTHWESTERN

Four Southwestern University employees were honored this month for exemplary service to the university.

The four received the Joe S. Mundy Exemplary Service Award, which was created in 2002 as a memorial to the leadership of former alumnus and Trustee Joe Mundy. This year’s award winners were Alison Kafer, associate professor of feminist studies; Dirk Early, professor of economics; Lou Ann Moore, senior executive secretary in University Relations; and former registrar David Stones.

At the 2013 commencement ceremony in May, President emeritus Jake B. Schrum also presented the Mundy Award to Ella Sedwick, who works for Southwestern’s food service provider, Sodexo. Students frequently mention Sedwick as one of the things they like most about Southwestern.

Read more here.

SOUTHWESTERN WELCOMES FOUR NEW FACULTY MEMBERS

In addition to a new president, Southwestern is welcoming four new faculty members this fall.

Two of the new faculty members will be teaching in the Department of Economics and Business. They are Katherine Grooms, assistant professor of economics, and Patrick Van Horn, assistant professor of economics. Michael Gesinski is joining the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry as an assistant professor of chemistry and Jessica Hower is joining the History Department as an assistant professor of history.

Read more here.

Events

BURGER UNIVERSITY OFFERING ‘BURGERS WITH BURGER’ SEPT. 3

Thinkwell, the company that has produced President Edward B. Burger’s videos to help students learn math, is sponsoring a “Burgers with Burger” event on Tuesday, Sept. 3, at Burger University restaurant on the Georgetown Square. The first 150 members of the Southwestern community who show up beginning at 4 p.m. will receive a free “Campus Classic” burger if they show their ID at the register.

President Burger is scheduled to be at the event at 5 p.m.

FILM FESTIVAL BEGINS SEPT. 5

Southwestern is hosting a film festival this fall that will feature five films from Spain and the Americas. The films will be shown in Olin 105 from 7-10 p.m. on Thursday nights beginning Sept. 5. The film to be shown Sept. 5 is a 2012 film from Spain titled “Wilaya,” which is the story of a girl who is born to a Sahrawi family in a Saharan refugee camp in Algeria and later sent to live with foster parents in Spain. After the film is shown, there will be an interview with director Pedro Pérez Rosado via Skype.

Read more here.

TICKETS ON SALE FOR 2013-2014 THEATRE SEASON

Tickets are now on sale for Southwestern’s 2013-2014 theatre season. The season begins Sept. 25-29 with performances of the Emmy-nominated play, “The Laramie Project.” Other​​ shows that will be performed in the coming year include the Moliere comedy “Tartuffe,” the musical “Gypsy,” and the play “Bent,” which deals with events that happened in Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

Season ticket packages are available starting at $40. For more information, or to purchase tickets, go here.

VIOLINIST, PIANIST TO GIVE GUEST RECITAL SEPT. 10

Violinist Alexandre Da Costa and pianist Wonny Song will give a guest recital on Tuesday, Sept. 10, at 7 p.m. in the Alma Thomas Theater. The program will consist of Johannes Brahms’ Violin Sonata No. 1, No. 2, and No. 3.

The event is free and open to the public. Read more here.

Media Coverage

Over the summer, Josh Long, assistant professor of environmental studies, was quoted in a BBC News Magazine story about why half of the 10 fastest-growing cities in the United States are in Texas and in a story published by The Verge about how New Orleans wants to become the next San Francisco. Read the BBC story here. Read The Verge story here.

The Williamson County Sun ran a story about Daniel Orozco, Southwestern’s new director of Career Services.

The Williamson County Sun ran a story about the faculty and staff members who received the 2013 Mundy Awards.

The Williamson County Sun ran a story about how Southwestern is licensing merchandise to be sold at local retailers.

Notables

Ben Pierce, professor of biology and holder of the Lillian Nelson Pratt Chair, published an article in Herpetological Conservation and Biology with Alex Hall, a 2011 graduate who is now a Ph.D. student at The University of Texas at Arlington. Their article was titled “Call latency as a measure of calling intensity in anuran auditory surveys.”  

Eileen Cleere, professor of English, has signed a contract with Ohio State University Press for her book The Sanitary Arts: Aesthetic Culture and the Victorian Cleanliness Campaigns. The book addresses the impact of Victorian sanitation reform in the 1840s on the fine and decorative arts in England over the long 19th century.

Abby Dings, associate professor of Spanish, presented two talks at the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese conference in San Antonio in July. In “A tool for oral proficiency evaluation for teachers,” a joint presentation with colleagues from The University of Texas and Purdue University, she presented a project piloting a series of Open Badges for the Spanish Corpus Proficiency Level Training website. “The undergraduate Spanish major curriculum: Perceptions and reality,” co-presented with Tammy Jandrey Hertel of Lynchburg College, focused on the results of a nationwide survey of Spanish faculty members.

Alisa Gaunder, professor of political science, had a chapter titled “The DPJ and Women: The Limited Impact of the 2009 Alternation of Power on Policy and Governance” published in Japan Under the DPJ: The Politics of Transition and Governance, which was edited by Kenji E. Kushida and Phillip Y. Lipscy and recently published by the Brookings Institution Press.

Carlos DeOro, assistant professor of Spanish, presented a paper titled “Ciudadanía y conflicto: Representaciones del Caribe colombiano y sus culturas en Los viajes del viento” at the XI Seminario Internacional de Estudios del Caribe, which was held at the Universidad de Cartagena in Colombia July 29-Aug. 2. He also presented a paper titled “El vuelco del cangrejo: neocolonialismo, etnicidad y conflicto” at the Latin American Studies Association’s 2013 conference, which was held in Washington, D.C., May 29-June 1.

Laura Glass, information services assistant in the A. Frank Smith, Jr. Library Center, had an article published in a recent edition of the International Journal of Diversity in Education. The article is titled “Fear of Finding the Needle in the Haystack: Library Anxiety in Marginalized Populations.”

Josh Long, assistant professor of environmental studies, was an author on two articles that were recently published. One article was titled “Toward Sustainable Educational Travel” and was published in the Journal of Sustainable Tourism. The other article was titled “Toward an applied methodology for price comparison studies of farmers’ markets and competing retailers at the local scale” and was published in the Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development. The second article was based on research conducted by students in the 2012 Senior Environmental Studies Capstone course. Long also gave an invited lecture at an AP Human Geography Seminar that was held at UT-Austin. His lecture was titled “Teaching AP Human Geography: Using the City as Text.”

Eric Selbin, professor of political science and University Scholar, will serve on American Council of Learned Societies Review Board for their 2014 ACLS Fellowship Program. In addition, his book Revolution, Rebellion, Resistance: The Power of Story has been published in Arabic as ثورة تمرد المقاومة: قوة قصة by Egypt’s National Center for Translation.