Faculty Accomplishments

Meredith A. B. Ellis, Ph.D., assistant professor of anthropology, recently had her first single-authored monograph published. The Children of Spring Street: The Bioarchaeology of Childhood in a 19th Century Abolitionist Congregation (https://www.springer.com/us/book/9783319926865) looks at the skeletal remains as well as the historical records of the some 70 children buried at the Spring Street Presbyterian Church in lower Manhattan between 1820 and 1850. Using that information, it reconstructs and tells the stories of what it was like to be a child growing up in New York City in the first half of the 19th century. This is Ellis’ second book to be published this year. Her first book was Nineteenth Century Childhoods in Interdisciplinary and International Perspectives,” an edited volume that she wrote with Jane Eva Baxter of DePaul University. Ellis’ research focuses on human skeletal remains from archaeological sites. Specifically, she looks at how people lived in the past, and what their bodies can tell us about their daily lives and about life in a family and a community.

Josephine Beoku-Betts, Ph.D., will serve as a Fulbright Scholar for the 2018-2019 academic year at the Institute for Gender Studies and Documentation (INGRADOC) at the University of Sierra Leone. During her term as a Fulbright Scholar, she will provide expertise in strategic planning for program and curriculum development in a new Gender Studies undergraduate degree program. She will also teach courses in the M.Phil. and M.A. degree programs in Gender Studies. In addition to teaching and program development, Dr. Beoku-Betts will continue her research on “Women’s Political Activism in Post-War Sierra Leone”. Specifically, she will study the Fifty-Fifty Group, a local women’s NGO that advocates for women’s increased involvement in political leadership, increased awareness about women’s citizenship rights, and provision of support for women running for elected office. Her work examines how this NGO leverages political transformations in the state, for example, the newly elected government of the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) 2018, to demand legislation and policies which promote gender equality and women’s rights. She will consider whether changing political opportunities to restructure gender relations in a deeply embedded patriarchal culture will lead organizations such as Fifty-Fifty to refocus their goals and analytical frameworks using feminist standpoints that are openly assertive in their engagement with the state.

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