In the Spotlight: April 6, 2016

Kudos to these faculty, staff and students

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  • Zsuzsanna Gulacsi, associate professor of art history and Asian studies, has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a residency at the National Humanities Center for the 2016-17 academic year for her sabbatical project “Artistic Culture of Religious Instruction along the Trade Routes of Late Ancient and Medieval Asia.” The fellowship will enable Gulacsi to launch a comparative project on the didactic application of art in both multi-ethnic missionary religions and ethnically based non-missionary religions that co-existed historically in multi-cultural locales along the Silk Routes in Mesopotamia, West Central Asia, Ghandhara, Northwest India, East Central Asia and southern China. In four thematically and geo-culturally defined case studies, Gulacsi’s study will utilize visual, textual and archeological sources to reveal the development and exchanges of artistic forms, techniques of teaching and religious practices designed for doctrinal instruction. This year’s 175 fellows were selected from 3,000 applicants. View the full list of fellows on the Guggenheim website and learn more about Gulacsi’s work here.
  • Donelle Ruwe, professor of English, published a roundtable of essays on teaching long poems by British women writers in Pedagogy, a journal on the teaching of literature, literacy and language arts. The roundtable provides teaching strategies and opportunities to address issues of genre, gender and the potential of pedagogical practice to reconstitute the canon. The articles note the resistance of students to long poems and reveals that professors still have much work to do in establishing lesser-known women writers. Ruwe’s contributions include an introduction to the roundtable as well as a discussion of multimodality in an important 1804 lyric poem by the British Romantic poet Charlotte Smith.
  • Marilya V. Reese, professor of German, has marked the halfway point of her sabbatical with a bilingual publication in WO LYRIK ZUHAUSE IST: Zehra Çirak. The project, Versopolis/E-Merging Creativing is supported by The Creative Europe Programme: European Platforms & The Federal Chancellery of Austria.
  • Seminar students
    University College students explored industrial agricultural farms during a visit to Yuma.

    Kimberley Curtis, University College lecturer, and her first-year “Just Food” seminar students traveled to Yuma to explore industrial agricultural farms. Over four days, students met with border patrol officers, agricultural growers, field workers and community organizers as they continued their research on community-based change and alternatives to the industrial food system.

  • Junior Cecilia Bowsley is the recipient of the 2016 BlueBird Certified Public Accountants Scholarship for Native American Accounting Students. Bowsley is a member of Beta Alpha Psi and works as a tutor and proctor at NAU. She will be the first in her family to graduate from college and plans to pursue a Masters of Accountancy. The BlueBird scholarship was established to assist Native American students who plan to enter the accounting profession.