Remembering Veterans

Students, faculty and staff who have served in the military gathered at the flagpole Nov. 11 to commemorate Veterans Day. Southwestern now has 21 veterans enrolled and was recently included in the 2014 Guide to Military-Friendly Schools. Shown here raising the flag are Army veteran Travis Fuller, who plans to enroll in Southwestern in the spring, and Shannon Johnson, another Army veteran who is graduating in December. (Photo by Maritza Robles)

Top News

STUDENTS IN  PROCESS AND PROJECT MANAGEMENT CLASS HELP LOCAL NONPROFITS IMPROVE THEIR OPERATIONS

To meet its goal of being a no-kill animal shelter, Texas Humane Heroes needs to get as many animals adopted as possible.

With a limited number of staff and volunteers, this means the Leander-based nonprofit organization has to process its adoptions as efficiently as possible.

To see if any improvements could be made to its adoption process, Executive Director Ron Marullo recently turned to students in Alan Crudden’s Process and Project Management class for help. As part of the class, all the students have to complete both a process management consultancy and a project management consultancy.

Business majors Hope Brown and Nick Moore, who are both self-described animal lovers, took on the challenge of helping Texas Humane Heroes. The two specifically looked at the organization’s dog adoption process.

“We wanted to help them streamline the adoption process from the time clients arrive to when they leave with a dog,” Brown said.

Read more here.

THEATRE PROJECT CONNECTS STUDENTS WITH WOMEN FROM EARLIER GENERATIONS

Is feminism different today than it was 50 years ago?

Students in the Feminism and Performance class taught by Kathleen Juhl, professor of theatre, are finding out this semester in a unique way: by working on a theatre project with women who are old enough to be their mothers or grandmothers.

Juhl came up with the idea for the intergenerational theater project after talking with Sarah Brackmann, director of civic engagement. Brackmann had attended a meeting of the Georgetown Branch of the American Association of University Women (AAUW) and thought they might be willing to partner with Juhl on the project.

The group agreed, and all the students in the class were paired with an AAUW “pen pal.” The students and pen pals worked together to write scenes on topics related to feminism, such as abortion, rape and gender equality in the workplace.

The scenes will be combined into a play that will be performed on Wednesday, Nov. 20, at 4:30 p.m. in the Lynda Ballroom.

Read more here.

Events

CHORALE TO PERFORM NOV. 23

The SU Chorale will perform on Saturday, Nov. 23, at 7 p.m. in the Alma Thomas Theater. The program will include the Holocaust Cantata by Donald McCullough and Benjamin Britten’s setting of W. H. Auden’s Hymn to St. Cecilia.

The Holocaust Cantata, which incorporates bothsongs and readings, will feature pianist Pam Rossman and cellist Hai Zheng-Olefsky. Readers will include President Edward Burger and faculty members James Kilfoyle, Shannon Marriotti, David Olson, Robert Bednar, Michael Saenger, Eric Selbin and Rebecca Sheller, Kathleen Juhl, professor of theatre, is serving as coach for the readers.

The concert is free and open to the public. Additional information is available here.

JAZZ BAND TO GIVE CONCERT DEC. 3

The Southwestern University Jazz Band will give a concert on Tuesday, Dec. 3, 2013 at 7 p.m. in the Alma Thomas Theater. The concert will be conducted by David Guidi and will include Two Finger Punch and Force of Nature by John Mills, Jazz Goes to Siwash by Bill Holman, Summer Samba by Mark Taylor, The Easy Winners by Scott Joplin, Maiden Voyage by Herbie Hancock, When Sunny Gets Blue by Jack Segal and Marvin Fischer, and The Queen Bee by Sammy Nestico.

The concert is free and open to the public.

Media Coverage

Numerous media outlets covered the Nov. 11 campus lockdown that was prompted by a nearby crime scene. Watch the KVUE story here. Watch the FOX7 story here. Watch the KXAN story here. Watch the KEYE stories here and here. Police Chief Deb Brown, Student Congress President Nathan Tuttle and senior Ashley Johnson were interviewed for the YNN story that can be found here.

Notables

Shana Bernstein, associate professor of history, participated as an invited reviewer at the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Collections and References Resources Grant Program in Washington, D.C.

Romi Burks, professor of biology, and Therese Shelton, associate professor of mathematics, had an article titled “Count Your Eggs Before They Invade: Identifying and Quantifying Egg Clutches of Two Invasive Apple Snail Species (Pomacea)” published in the online journal PLOS ONE. Former students Allyson Plantz and Colin Kyle were co-authors on the paper. Read the article here.

Dave Guidi, part-time assistant professor of music, has been commissioned to compose two original works for the George Mason University Jazz Saxophone Ensemble. The ensemble will premiere the pieces at the Virginia Music Educator’s Conference in late November. A second premier will be in January at the Jazz Educator’s National Conference in Dallas.

Patrick Hajovsky, assistant professor of art history, gave a lecture on “Moteuczoma’s Fame in Three Dimensions: Sign, Speech and Portrait in Tenochtitlan” at UT-Austin Nov. 13. Hajovsky is giving the same lecture at Southwestern Nov. 18 at noon in the Merzbach Room. Read more here. Hajovsky is the author of an upcoming book tentatively titled Moteuczoma, On the Lips of Others: Sculpture, Ritual and Fame in Tenochtitlan that will be published by UT Press.

Eric Selbin, professor of political science and University Scholar, reviewed Hal Brands’ book, Latin America’s Cold War, for the Bulletin of Latin American Research. Read the review here.

Anwar Sounny-Slitine, instructor of environmental studies and GIS lab manager, co-authored an article titled “A new longitudinal approach to assess hydrologic connectivity: Embanked floodplain inundation along the lower Mississippi River” that was published in a recent issue of the journal Hydrological Processes. The article looked at hydrologic connectivity in the lower Mississippi floodplain. Sounny-Slitine and his colleagues utilized GIS and LiDAR to create hydrological models which estimated the longitudinal channel bank profile, enabling a detailed examination of embanked floodplain hydrologic connectivity. The results of the investigation shed new light on the topic of hydrologic connectivity for an important embanked fluvial system that has previously received little attention concerning its physical floodplain processes. Read more here.

Valerie Thatcher, adjunct instructor in the Communication Studies Department, successfully defended her doctoral dissertation Oct. 25 and was awarded a Ph.D. from The University of Texas at Austin in communication studies. The title of her dissertation is The Atypical Environmentalist: The Rhetoric of Environmentalist Identity and Citizenship in the Texas Coal Plant Opposition Movement.”