2019 COLLEGE OF ARTS, LETTERS AND EDUCATION
DEANS’ CORNER – GREETINGS FROM BRIAN DONAHUE AND PETE PORTER
We are truly fortunate to teach, learn, study and work in a community of artists and researchers who produce insightful, exciting and powerful creative works and scholarly writing. The professional activities of faculty in the College of Arts, Letters and Education bring great benefits to our students, sometimes through students’ direct collaboration on these projects and always through the heightened energy and new perspectives faculty bring to the classroom as a result of their work. These activities are not only important professional accomplishments for faculty but also an essential way in which EWU promotes student success. In this issue of the newsletter, we invite you to read about some of the excellent scholarly and creative achievements of CALE faculty in recent months. These represent just a sample of the outstanding work produced in the college each year in diverse fields ranging from film and music to philosophy and special education, from exercise science and technical writing to literary studies and art. Whether highlighted in these pages or not, we celebrate the many professional successes of CALE faculty.
Brian Donahue, PhD Interim Co-Dean Pete Porter, PhD Interim Co-Dean
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REFLECTION/REFRACTION – SARANAC ART PROJECTS
Reflection/Refraction is a series of new works and collaborations by Lisa Nappa and Chris Tyllia. It investigates the visual qualities of light as it passes through water, clouds, glass, our eyes and imaginations. Reflection and refraction describe how waves—such as light, sound and heat—travel, interact and change our perception. This exhibition not only explores the aesthetics of these phenomena, but also emphasizes the importance of the subtle, quiet and calm reflections that can often lead to a deeper understanding of the world around us. LONGWATER A video collaboration by Lisa Nappa and Chris Tyllia This piece was edited together using several different clips of water captured from various local, distant and imagined locales. It’s an exploration of the meditative seduction of moving water and reflections of light. Light and water are intrinsically linked in our memory, providing slippages and overlaps of time, place and recollection. WATER MEMORY SERIES A series of collages by Lisa Nappa It is often the things that we cannot hold on to that intrigue me: shadows on a wall, slight movement within leaves on a tree, reflecting light on a body of water. These moments of fleeting beauty hold a magic that is elusive and brings forth the ultimate emotion of ephemerality. There is a sadness, or just the practical sense of knowing that this perfect moment cannot last, cannot be contained or kept, and yet this is exactly what I try to do.
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FACULTY ART EXHIBITION
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The Faculty Art Exhibition offers students and community members the opportunity to experience the high quality of artwork currently being produced by art and design faculty at EWU. The exhibition includes recent work by ten faculty, all productive artists working in a diverse array of artistic styles and a wide variety of media. JENNY HYDE: OLD TRICKS, VIDEO STILL, 2018 Old Tricks, video projection and animations, 2018 This work reflects on gathered and held knowledge that is stored in our minds; in particular, the learned experiences that then become practiced actions of maneuvering through life. I wanted to explore aspects of myself that once defined who I was, looking specifically at two skill sets that I no longer utilize or need in my current life. One of these skills is from childhood: the body maneuvering through a barbed wire fence. The second skill, physically painting, once occupied a significant part of my life. I rarely use either of these skills now, yet I still reserve memory space for them. Memories are intrinsically connected to the body, and this work also explores this relationship in different ways. Digital art needs a device or a way for it to be experienced and seen. Data files are just data files without the hardware and software to interpret it into something visual. Memories and bodies are similar. These works also refer to the two ways digital visual imagery is created: raster and vector. The characteristics of raster-based imagery are shown in the painterly projections, while the clean graphic qualities of vector imagery are seen in the animations. JOSHUA HOBSON, AUGMENTED LANDSCAPE (GREENLAND) Photographic Assemblage (Pine, Monofilament, Lead, Inkjet Print) 2018 The series waveforms consist of photographs and photographic assemblages that engage with the complicated relationship between humans and the natural world. These works investigate themes such as resource extraction, landscape augmentation and the role of photography in the domination and control of land. This series takes as its genesis conflicting positions regarding the environment, as exemplified by the “Green Revolution” and the modern environmental movement. The first promotes the idea that humans are capable of innovating our way out of any potential environmental emergency, while the second posits that the earth has certain limits that we cross at our own peril. The source images are appropriated (mined) from various resources such as NASA and USGS. The aerial images, taken via satellite, are essentially author-less and represent the detached relationship with the natural world that has led us to our current state. The two approaches to image-making employed in waveforms—augmented landscapes and performed landscapes—explore the tension between human ingenuity and the limits of natural systems.
JEFFERS W. CHERTOK MEMORIAL ENDOWED PROFESSORSHIP ANNOUNCEMENT
Kevin Decker, PhD, of the philosophy program has been awarded the Jeffers W. Chertok Memorial Endowed Professorship, hosted in the College of Social Sciences. This prestigious distinction recognizes Decker’s scholarly accomplishments in the fields of philosophy and social science, in which he has published articles on such subjects as social justice, political science and material culture. It is also a tribute to Decker’s excellence in the area of teaching and public speaking. In his new capacity, Decker will have the privilege to invite high-profile guest speakers to EWU, present talks on social science topics and organize a study abroad program to Europe that is focused on the origins of social science.
Students and faculty in the College of Arts, Letters and Education owe much of their success to donors like YOU who financially support the activities and academic scholarship you read about in this newsletter. THANK YOU!
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FACULTY SPOTLIGHT – GRANT SMITH & HENRY-YORK “HANK” STEINER – 50 YEARS OF SERVICE TO EWU Grant Smith, PhD, is an international expert in onomastics, a branch of linguistics that focuses on the meaning and origin of names. In his 50 years here at EWU, Smith has served as an honors professor and parliamentarian in the Faculty Senate, has been a leader in the English Department and has become well known for his management of the Corporate Cup teams for Bloomsday. He takes pride in having attracted three previous Fulbright scholars to our campus and in having served as research adviser to two PhD candidates from overseas. Over the past year, Smith has illustrated his theoretical work with analyses of specific texts by Shakespeare, including “Epithets, Hyperbole, and Irony in the Names of Much Ado About Nothing,” prepared for Investigations of Onomastics, a conference in May in Riga, Latvia, where Smith was an invited speaker among 94 presenters and was interviewed on Latvian national television. This paper is set to be published in 2019. During Thanksgiving, Smith was a guest lecturer at the University of Basilicata in Potenza, Italy. He delivered four lectures on language pragmatics, theater history and Shakespeare. The trip was very exciting for him and his wife, Lilia, as they toured Matera and Vesuvius, relished Lucanian cuisine and encountered Smith’s face plastered on posters. In January Smith will present a paper, “Naming as Art in Shakespeare’s Tempest”, at the Linguistic Society of America. He will also be a featured speaker at the fifth International Conference on Names and Naming in September and has agreed to contribute an article, “Multiculturalism in Shakespeare’s Names,” for a book edited by Oliviu Felecan, and another on theory for a volume edited by Martyna Gibka and Richard Coates. Henry-York Steiner, PhD, is retiring after 61 years of university teaching, 50 of which were here at EWU. An alumnus of Grinnell College (BA), Yale University (MA) and the University of Oregon (PhD), he joined our faculty in 1968. As dean of Undergraduate Studies (1968-79), he helped create and nurture the programs now known as American Indian Studies, Africana Studies, Chicano Education, University Honors and Environmental Science. As a deeply respected and popular professor, he has taught graduate and undergraduate courses in interests ranging from Eastern religion, JRR Tolkien and honors, to classical poetics and rhetoric, among many others. Hank Steiner is known to students, administrators, faculty and many people in supporting roles over the decades for his intellect, compassion and integrity. He has been a model and mentor to generations of students and faculty. One of his colleagues recently quipped, “When I grow up, I want to be Hank Steiner.” Unfortunately, there is only one original. Fortunately, we have had the joy of learning with and from him. In addition, Steiner is a life-long fan of square dancing and the symphony, and he has long served and mentored in the ski patrol at the 49 Degrees North ski complex. His wife, Lori, is a recipient of an EWU Alumni Award. It is safe to state that Henry-York Steiner’s contributions to our community and to so many individuals are greater than mere words can express. Thank you, Hank. Written by Dana Elder
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GIVING JOY DAY
The 2018 EWU Giving Joy Day was another success! This year we surpassed our goal of $275,000 and finished the day off with $1,801,721 in pledges, cash, and in-kind gifts! Some notable donations included a gift of $10,000 from EWU President Mary Cullinan to match the first $10,000 donated by the university community, $25,000 from Numerica Credit Union to support its scholarship fund and two significant gifts that will benefit EWU’s jazz program and provide equipment support for computer science students. Numerica also presented two students with $2,500 scholarships for the 2019-20 academic year! As our way of giving back on Giving Tuesday, the CALE office set up a giving station, where anyone was welcome to come into the office, say hello, grab a yummy treat and make a donation if they wished. We set up computers for online donations and collected cash and check donations as well as payroll deduction forms. We always enjoy watching our whiteboard fill up with paper hearts, each with the name of someone who stopped by to donate in our office. We can’t wait for next year! START SOMETHING BIG GRANTS $2,500, John Marshall, Music $1,500, Terrance MacMullan, Philosophy $2,500, Cynthia Nasman, Music $2,100, Suzie Henning and Carissa Gran, Education $945, John Gerber and Garth Babcock, Physical Education, Health and Recreation $2,000, Michael Waldrop, Music $3,000, Ann Van Wig, Education $2450, Tracey McHenry, English $1,301, Natalie Kusz, English
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FACULTY NOTABLE ACHIEVEMENT AND AWARDS DREW AYERS, FILM Drew Ayers has published a book, Spectacular Posthumanism: The Digital Vernacular of Visual Effects, that examines the ways in which VFX imagery fantasizes about digital disembodiment while simultaneously reasserting the importance of the lived body. The text analyzes a wide range of case studies, including the films of David Cronenberg and Stanley Kubrick, image technologies such as performance capture and crowd simulation, Games of Thrones, Terminator: Genisys, Planet Earth, and 300. JANE ELLSWORTH, MUSIC Jane Ellsworth will perform at the conference of the International Clarinet Association next July in Knoxville, Tennessee. She and her husband William Conable, a cellist, were invited to give a performance of Wilhelm Berger’s Trio, Op. 94, for clarinet, cello and piano.
CATHERINE GIRARD, ART Catherine Girard was recently invited, alongside professors at Harvard University and the University of Chicago, to be one of five speakers on the roundtable The Future of Studying Eighteenth-Century Art during the 25th anniversary conference of Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture (HECAA) at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. She was also invited to present papers on her new research project about eighteenth-century indigenous women artists at EWU Women’s and Gender Studies and at the College Art Association annual conference in New York.
CALE JODY GRAVES, MUSIC Jody Graves was again named by the Steinway Company in New York—through the Steinway Gallery of Spokane—as a 2018 Top Music Teacher, after a nomination and review process to recognize pianists who are outstanding in the field across the US. Graves also attended the Festival Internacional de Música de Cámara with “The Brahamas” at the Universidad del Norte in Baranquilla, Columbia. The group consisted of Ethan Seid, violin; James Marshall, viola; Tim Gales, cello; and Cristian Garcia, piano. Graves gave a master class, performed and presented a lecture to university students and talked with university officials about more student/faculty exchanges between Universidad del Norte and EWU. JOSHUA HOBSON, ART Joshua Hobson, lecturer in photography, was invited to give an artist talk and participate in a discussion panel on the topic “Photographic Resolution: A Technical Yes, A Conceptual No” at the annual Middle America College Arts Association (MACAA) conference in Lincoln, Nebraska. The title of his talk was “Iconoclastic Photography: Revealing Materiality Through Destruction.” JONATHAN JOHNSON, ENGLISH Jonathan Johnson has published a book of poems, May Is an Island. If the dead are a sea and the living an island, these poems speak from the shore. Their steady company consoles and reminds us that the wages of mortal awareness and sorrow endured can be attention and generosity. From mournful solitude and wanderings as far as Paris, Greece and Spain, Johnson returns again and again to his familiar Scottish coasts,
highlands and relations; to fatherhood and romantic love; to sensory wonder and the reverence of moments; and now and then to outright grace.
CALE PAUL LINDHOLDT, ENGLISH Paul Lindholdt has published a book of poetry, Making Landfall. The phrase “making landfall,” as used today, describes a direct hit by a tropical storm. In colonialera writings about the American continents, though, the phrase had a different meaning: it signified a shipboard landing after weeks or months at sea. In Making Landfall the phrase performs a third duty: to show how creatures, people and land fell, once Europeans occupied the continent. In short, the colonial project resembled a storm. The book consists of 45 personae poems set on early American frontiers.
PETE PORTER, FILM Pete Porter took professional leave during the 2017-18 academic year, serving as visiting scholar in media studies at the University of Amsterdam. During his leave, Porter developed research on representations of non-human animals in the media, focusing on how media representations can challenge human moral blindness toward other creatures. This work will culminate in the manuscript Moving Animals: Engaging Nonhumans in Screen Stories. During his leave, Porter published three articles in Society & Animals and gave the invited talks “Moving Animals: Engaging Nonhumans in Screen Stories” at the University of Groningen in Groningen, Netherlands, “From It Happened One Night to Get Out: Screen Stories and Moral Codes” at the University of Klagenfurt, in Klagenfurt, Austria, two
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talks at the Center for Animal Ethics at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain: “Teaching Animal Movies” and “Animals on Display: the case of Blackfish.” Porter also gave several presentations in international contexts: at (Un)Common Worlds at Turku University in Finland, European Network for Cinema and Media Studies, and at Dissecting Violence: Structures, Imaginaries, Resistance at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. A highlight of his professional leave was at Minding Animals 4 in Mexico City, where his talk, “Against Anthropocentrism: Menippean Animals” won the award for best conference presentation. Minding Animals is the premiere international conference in animal studies. Porter also continued to contribute film reviews to the Animals and Society Institute.
REINALDO GIL ZAMBRANO, ART Reinaldo Zambrano presented at the University of Montana as a visiting artist, working with the printmaking students to install a mural of relief prints in their fine arts building.
JUSTIN YOUNG, ENGLISH Justin Young has been selected as the first faculty fellow to the provost. In his role as faculty fellow, Young will be collaborating with university leaders on campus-wide initiatives and projects, working with key constituencies, serving on university committees and taking on special projects and assignments under the mentorship of the provost.
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SHAPING GERMANY CAMPUS WEEK
CALE SERVICE ANNIVERSARIES
As part of Wunderbar Together, the federal government of Germany’s initiative celebrating GermanAmerican friendship, EWU hosted a German campus week in early November, with events and activities exploring the theme “Integrating Immigrants.” The Wunderbar Together campaign runs through the end of 2019 and focuses on the deeprooted ties between the two nations. The campus week was sponsored by the German Embassy in Washington, D.C., and the College of Arts, Letters and Education at EWU. Senior Lecturer Jody StewartStrobelt, who coordinates the German program in the Modern Languages and Literatures Department, applied for the funding and organized the week to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the EWU-University of Passau exchange program. Events included a week-long exhibit in the JFK library depicting lives of immigrants in Germany since WWII, a talk on populism in Germany by Professor Dr. Karsten Fitz of the University of Passau, a reception for alumni of the exchange program, several film screenings, a talk by German embassy representative Claudia Schneider and a panel discussion on immigration in Germany. EWU philosophy professor Kevin Decker moderated the panel discussion, which featured short presentations by panelists Karsten Fitz and Claudia Schneider along with EWU professors Ann Le Bar and Kristin Edquist. Both the panel and the library exhibit included an original video created by StewartStrobelt and her students during their month-long, faculty-led study abroad experience in Passau this past summer. It featured interviews with several refugees and immigrants living in Passau. The German Club and the School of Global Learning hosted kaffee klatsches throughout the week in the School of Global Learning lounge in Hargreaves for students to drop in and get to know what the German program at EWU has to offer. The campus week was wunderbar indeed!
40 YEARS
Penny Rose 35 YEARS
Dana Elder 20 YEARS
Garth Babcock Jose Garcia-Sanchez Gregory Spatz 15 YEARS
Teena Carnegie Jody Graves Florian Preisig Christina Valeo 10 YEARS
Christopher Kirby Carri Kreider Jamie Neely Jeffrey Sanders Christopher Tyllia 5 YEARS
Stephanie Boughter Christi Brewer Kristina Guilfoyle Jenny Hyde Felicia Jensen Jenny Kellogg Carlos Munoz Miguel Novella Chase Ogden Tesha Panther Jodi Patterson Jacob Rehm Elizabeth Rognes
College of Arts, Letters and Education 343 Patterson Cheney, WA 99004
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