Faculty Accomplishments

Michael Zager received his fourth Fulbright Specialist Grant. For this grant, Zager will be designing a commercial music program for the Ho Chi Minh City Conservatory of Music in Vietnam this summer. He will be based in Thailand. The album that was produced as a result of Zager’s past Fulbright grants for study in Thailand was recently release. The album is titled “The Jazz King: A Long Journey” and was produced for The Royal Family of Thailand in memory of their King, who was a serious jazz composer and musician. The King passed away in October 2016.

Kelly J. Shannon, Ph.D., recently published the book “U.S. Foreign Policy and Muslim Women’s Human Rights,” which explores the integration of Americans’ concerns about women’s human rights into U.S. policy toward Islamic countries since 1979. The book was published by University of Pennsylvania Press and more information can be found here https://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15750.html

Don Adams, Ph.D., is partially through his Fulbright year in Indian, where he has been the keynote speaker at three conferences.

Meredith Ellis, Ph.D., recently had her first book published. “Nineteenth Century Childhoods in Interdisciplinary and International Perspectives” is an edited volume that she wrote with Jane Eva Baxter of DePaul University through Oxbow Books. More information can be found here https://www.oxbowbooks.com/oxbow/nineteenth-century-childhoods-in-interdisciplinary-and-international-perspectives.html

Phillip Hough, Ph.D. was awarded a 2018-2019 Fellowship for $50,000 from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). He will use the fellowship to complete the writing of his book on this research project. Professor Hough’s project, Global Markets, Local Labor: Development, Production and Crisis in Rural Colombia, engages contemporary scholarly debates about labor rights, repression, and development in the global economy through a comparative and world historical analysis of local labor regime dynamics in three economic sub-regions of rural Colombia: coffee, bananas, and cocaine. The research for this project is rooted in over a decade of research that includes various rounds of qualitative fieldwork in Colombia, quantitative data analysis of social protests, political violence, and local labor regime dynamics, and secondary data analysis of global market trends. Professor Hough finds that the development opportunities offered by the world market have shrunk over time as US world hegemony unraveled, leaving Colombia’s local labor regimes squeezed between periods of intense labor repression and social crisis.

Carol Prusa, MFA, Professor of Painting/Drawing, spent the summer preparing a solo show at the Sarasota Art Center, which opened in September. She also traveled to Nebraska for the total eclipse. As a result of this trip, she is beginning a project based on seeing the totality of the eclipse and reading about American women astronomers.

Ilaria Serra, Languages and Linguistics, recently had her article “Italian American Femininities” published in the Routledge History of the Italian Americans. The article is a review of Italian American memoirs by women and it is structured in an original way, as a walk among the rooms of their homes.

Mallory Fenn and Sara Ayers-Rigsby, FAU’s representatives for the Florida Public Archaeology Network, were recently interviewed for an article in Atlantic Magazine on sea level rise

Rebecca LeMoine, Political Science, will give a talk In November at Boston University for the Ancient Philosophy Workshop. The talk is titled, “Cultural Diversity in Plato’s Cave?” She was invited by David Roochnik, Professor of Philosophy, and Maria Stata, Professor of Classical Greek Studies. Dr. Roochnik has published several top books and articles on Plato and Aristotle, and is very well-known in his field. Dr. LeMoine also recently published an article in the leading journal The American Political Science Review. Published in the August 2017 issue, the article is titled, “Foreigners as Liberators: Education and Cultural Diversity in Plato’s Menexenus.”

Gerald Sim, School of Communication and Multimedia Studies, has been selected to participate in the Television Academy Foundation’s 2017 Faculty Seminar Program. Members of the Television Academy selected just 25 professors from colleges and universities nationwide for the annual program. The faculty fellows will gain the latest information on the television and content development industries from top entertainment professionals during a weeklong Southern California seminar Nov. 6-10, 2017. The seminar will include panel discussions with broadcast and cable networks’ programming and scheduling executives, legal experts and cutting-edge content creators. Private studio tours and trips to top Hollywood production facilities to meet with producers, observe production, and get first-hand updates on the latest in television technologies are also part of the program. First launched in 1987, the Foundation’s annual seminar offers faculty a comprehensive program designed to enhance knowledge and in turn enrich learning environments.