End of Year Professional Notes 2018
12/31/2018
A round-up of awards, presentations, papers and the other professional achievements of SLU faculty, staff and students.
STUDENTS
White Coat Ceremony
The Physician Assistant Program held its White Coat Ceremony of its 2019 Class on Friday, Dec. 7, in the Allied Health Professions Building. The ceremony marks the end of the didactic phase of the program as its students prepare to start a year of clinical rotations in January.
Grants, Fellowships and Scholarships
The Department of History, the Department of American Studies, and the African American Studies Program have awarded four grants to SLU graduate students as part of the newly-established Elsesser Urban History Research Grant. The Elsesser Urban History Research Grant provides financial support for SLU students researching urban history and is generously funded by Saint Louis University alumnus Brian Elsesser, Ph.D. (A&S Grad 2009). The 2019 contest is organized around the theme, “Studying City People and Their Spaces.” The recipients of the inaugural grants are Victoria Cannon, Elizabeth Eikmann, Idolina Hernandez and Kimberly Webb.
This year’s Research Grants support a broad range of research on topics ranging from tourism, to photography, to disease quarantines, to ethnic enclaves.
- Cannon, doctoral student in American Studies, will use the award to fund pre-dissertation research into American tourism in Mexico at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
- Elizabeth Eikmann, a doctoral student in American Studies, will enhance her research into the use of photography in the construction of ideas about race and place in Saint Louis for her dissertation chapter “Seeing St. Louis: The Urban, the Visual, and the Color-Line.”
- The Research Grant will fund history doctoral student Idolina Hernandez’s study of the 1790s yellow fever epidemics in Charleston and Philadelphia, outbreaks that prompted the creation of “disease maps” and containment policies to stop contagious diseases arriving via ship and that targeted refugee and migrant populations.
- Kimberly Webb, the undergraduate Elsesser Grant winner, has been awarded funds for her History Honors thesis, “Keeping Italian in St. Louis, 1900-1980.” Webb’s research examines the long term vibrancy of the Hill neighborhood in south St. Louis.
The Elsesser Urban History Research Grants highlight the outstanding scholarship carried out by Saint Louis University graduate and undergraduate students. The awards were made possible by the continued sponsorship of student research by Elsesser, who funded the March 2018 symposium, “Urban Encounters: Urban Boundaries.” The symposium focused on race and citizenship in St. Louis and the greater metropolitan area.
An event showcasing the inaugural Elsesser Urban History Research Grants awardees’ research will take place in the April 2019.
Experiential Learning
Geology and environmental science students in mineralogy class (EAS-2200) traveled to Bonne Terre, Missouri, to its lead mine on Saturday, Nov. 10. Bonne Terre is known for its different kinds of minerals, and its role in Missouri state mining history due to the high concentrations of the state mineral, galena, that are found in the area.
Theater, dance and music students from SLU-Madrid showcased their work and talent in an end-of-semester performance series. Psychology students from SLU-Madrid also presented work at their end-of-term capstone project fair.
FACULTY AND STAFF
Awards and Fellowships
Katie Devany, program director for organizational studies in the School for Professional Studies, received the school’s Teacher of the Year Award earlier this year.
Zdenko Mandušić, Ph.D., of the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, was chosen by the Student Government Association as one of the recipients of this year’s Faculty Excellence Awards.
Appointments
Peter Bernhardt, Ph.D., of the Department of Biology and director of the Bernhardt-Meier Lab, has been named an adjunct professor at the School of Molecular and Life Sciences at Curtin University in western Australia.
Jonathan Smith, Ph.D., vice president for diversity and community engagement, has joined the board of St. Louis Public Radio.
Publications
Emily Lutenski, Ph.D., associate professor of American Studies, published an essay, “Leaving the West for the Left: Louise Thompson Patterson, the New Negro Movement, and Black Women’s Activism,” in Left in the West: Literature, Culture, and Progressive Politics in the American West, edited by Gioia Woods (Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 2018).
Karla Scott, Ph.D., of the African American Studies Program, published an article, “Check Yo’ Stuff: A Black feminist rant to ‘‘allies’’ seeking ‘‘dialogue’” in precarious times,” in International Review of Qualitative Research, Vol. 11, No. 2, Summer 2018.
Simone Bregni, Ph.D., of the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, published the invited article “Assassin’s Creed Taught Me Italian: Video Games and the Quest for Foreign Language Acquisition” in Profession, the Journal of the Modern Language Association.
In commemoration of National Poetry month, Aurora Luque and Elsy Cardona, Ph.D., of the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, were the featured author and translator, respectively, in the Spring issue of Ezra Journal of Literary Translation. Several of Cardona's translations from her volume appeared in Issue 13, Spring 2018 of Mount Hope Magazine.
Gregory Divers, Ph.D., of the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, published an essay entitled “‘legt los, leute, haut rein’: US-American Jazz in German Poetry since 1945” in Jazz in Word: European (Non-) Fiction, edited by Kirsten Krick-Aigner and Marc-Oliver Schuster (Königshausen & Neumann, 2018.) This essay is based on a presentation made at the Jazz in Word Conference held at the Amerika Haus in Vienna, Austria, in May 2014. Divers also published translations from German of three poems, along with commentary on the translations, in Transference, Vol. 5, Fall 2017: “Weh denen…” by Jakob van Hoddis; “älteres paar” and “mystery and crime” by Yaak Karsunke.
An article by the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures’ Cassandra Hamrick, Ph.D., of the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, "Être un autre: au-delà de la théorie dans la critique d'art de Gautier" ("Becoming the Other: Beyond Theory in Gautier's Art Criticism") has appeared in a collective volume of essays entitled Gautier et la religion de l'art (Gautier and the Religion of Art), published by Classiques Garnier. An earlier version of essay was given at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris on the occasion of the bicentennial of the birth of the French writer Théophile Gautier.
In February, Claudia Karagoz, Ph.D., of the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, published a “Review of Italy’s Other Women. Gender and Prostitution in Italian Cinema, 1940-1965, Danielle Hipkins (2016),” in the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies (JICMS), Vol. 6:2, 2018.
Jean-Louis Pautrot, Ph.D., of the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, published a book chapter on French film: “Roads, Rivers, Canals: Spaces of Freedom from Epstein to Vigo.” In Met, Philippe & Derek Schilling, eds., Screening the Paris suburbs before the banlieue film (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2018). Pautrot’s review of Pascal Quignard's novel Les larmes (Paris: Grasset, 2016) appeared in The French Review 91.2 (December 2017).
Constance Wagner, J.D., of the School of Law, published two articles, “Evolving Norms of Corporate Social Responsibility: Lessons Learned from the European Union Directive on Non-Financial Reporting, 19 Tennessee Journal of Business Law 619 (2018); and Change from Within: Using Task Forces and Best Practices to Achieve Gender Equity for University Faculty, 47 Journal of Law and Education 295 (2018).
Brian M. Gross, Ph.D., program director for the Department of Communication at SLU-Madrid, published a chapter in Explorations of Identity and Communication (2018, Editor: Carmen Popescu). Goss’ chapter in the volume extends on his specialization in mass media and analyzed the discourse on former U.S. President James Earl “Jimmy” Carter in news magazines in the first decade of the twenty-first century.
Keon Gilbert, Ph.D., of the Department of Behavioral Science and Health Education, published work about fatal police engagements in neighborhoods of color in Social Science & Medicine. Gilbert also published "Adaptation, Implementation, and Evaluation of a Public Health Research Methods Training for Youth" in Health Equity.
Workshops, Presentations and Lectures
Simone Bregni, Ph.D., of the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, has delivered a series of workshops, seminars, and presentations at university campuses across Europe. In February, he delivered the workshop "(E-)Life is (not) Strange: Using Video Games in Foreign/Second Language Acquisition" to an audience of professors, instructors and master’s students in Spanish and English-as-a-Second-Language at the New York University Campus in Madrid, Spain. In the same month, Bregni delivered a presentation entitled “Assassin’s Creed Taught Me a Foreign Language: Video Games in Second/Foreign Language and Culture Acquisition” to students and faculty at the SLU-Madrid campus. In March, he delivered two game-based learning sessions to an audience of instructors and students in Italian at the Spring Hill College Campus in Bologna, Italy, as well as a three-hour seminar on Video Games in Foreign/Second Language Acquisition to an audience of approximately 70 first-year students in Modern Languages in Elisa Corino’s Didattica delle Lingue Moderne course at Università degli Studi di Torino, Italy, his alma mater.
Community Engagement
The Division of Student Development held two auctions of kitchen and restaurant equipment, furniture and small wares this year. The first auction, held in the spring, generated over $17,000 in revenue. At its second auction, which took place in October, Student Development raised almost $6,000. All in all, the division brought in $23,000 in new revenue. The auctions were organized by Angelo Smith, financial coordinator in student development business administration and auxiliary services, and Ismael S. Lopez Barrera, facilities supervisor in Facilities Management.