College of Letters & Science
IN FOCUS
April 2019, Vol. 9, No.4
Small business, big impact
UWM alumna Kasia Weina is the founder and director of Evergreen Labs. With her team, she’s growing small businesses in Vietnam with an eye on sustainability. (Page 6)
Language and
Contents
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Feature Stories
Linguistics grad teaches police Chinese Prof’s paper features French feminist Alum starts business incubator in Vietnam Math student researches machine learning Grad student studies rise of demagoguery Lands We Share showcases farm history
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Columns Passings In the Media People in Print Alumni Accomplishments Laurels, Accolades, & Grants
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Carsten Brown, an officer with the Houston Police Department, was driving his squad car one evening in 2018 and was flagged down by an elderly Chinese woman on the side of the road. She spoke no English and had been stranded at an intersection by her frustrated cab driver, who couldn’t understand her directions. In halting, broken Mandarin, and with the help of a remote “language line” available to officers who encounter language barriers on the job, Officer Brown pieced together the woman’s story and was able to deliver her safely to her retirement home. Brown is not a native Chinese speaker, but he and his fellow officers are learning how to speak basic Mandarin Chinese to serve the sizeable population of Mandarinspeakers living in Houston. Their first teacher was Li-Ya Mar, a 2016 UWM graduate who earned her PhD in Linguistics.
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“[Officer Brown] told me that the fact that he actually knew some of these simple phrases and words in Mandarin really helped this lady to trust him and allowed him to take her back to her home,” she says as she finishes relating her student’s story. Mar is from Taiwan. She attended college in her native country, but found herself at UWM for graduate school, enticed by the prospect of working with well-known educators in the field of second language acquistion. During her time at UWM, Mar also served as a teaching assistant and a lecturer in Chinese in the Foreign Language and Literature Department.
After graduation, she and her husband traveled to Houston for her husband’s job. Mar reached out to the local universities to offer her services in teaching Chinese – and found some unexpected students. “University of St. Thomas in downtown Houston connected me to the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Houston,” Mar explained. “The Houston Police and the office were trying to establish a language course to help
d Law Enforcement
rad teaches Chinese to Houston Police Department the community and to help the officers communicate better with the community.” Houston is a sprawling city, and it’s home to a large – and growing – number of Chinese speakers. The city’s Chinatown on the west side boasts street signs written primarily in Chinese with English in a smaller font below. The Houston PD recognized they needed to expand their officers’ language skills, including, but not limited to, Chinese. They asked Mar to develop their new Mandarin language course. Though Mar had taught classes at UWM, she always had supporting materials to work with. Now she had to design a 20-week curriculum without so much as a textbook. “So, I reached out to the Houston Police continuing education unit,” she said. “They gave me some documents – protocols about traffic stops, when to draw weapons, and stuff like that. They gave me a lot of freedom to teach whatever I thought was culturally relevant to enhance the communication between the Chinese-speaking communities and police officers.”
Li-Ya Mar smiles with her mentor, now-professor emeritus Fred Eckman, at her graduation from UWM in 2016. Mar used her degree to help build a Mandarin language course for the Houston Police Department. Photo courtesy of Li-Ya Mar.
Then she began to build classes around those interactions. “I covered traffic stops – anything related to traffic. Hostile situations. That includes weapons or drawing guns, or ‘do you have any drugs,’” Mar said. “I taught all the words for weapons very early. I wanted them to know how to say, ‘Drop your gun’ or ‘Do you have a gun.’ I always emphasize that they do not need to know the entire phrase; they just need to know the keywords, such as the verb ‘have’ and then the object, whatever weapon or drug or information, and attach the question particle in Mandarin.”
She’s not looking for perfection. As long as officers have a basic understanding of the verbs and their objects, they can make themselves understood. Other essential phrases include everything from greetings to directions to explaining airport procedures.
The Houston Police Department is grateful for the help. “Policing communities requires a partnership between the police officers on the street and the citizens they are charged with protecting and serving. As in any partnership, communication is paramount,” said Officer Joel Miller of the Houston Police Department. “The Department, therefore, has been privileged in receiving Dr. Li-Ya Mar’s assistance with training our officers to speak the Mandarin language.” The program has been a success, and received coverage from both the Houston Chronicle and Houston Public Media. Officers have been able to use their newfound language skills in several incidents across the city from traffic stops to, yes, delivering elderly women to their homes. Even though classes wrapped up a few months ago and Mar is now located in Dallas, her curriculum will continue to be used to teach the Houston PD new language skills. By Sarah Vickery, College of Letters & Science College of Letters & Science • UW–Milwaukee • 3
Echoes of Imperialism: Louise Michel and t Louise Michel is a striking figure in French history. Though she is most famous for her role in the Paris Commune, an uprising against the French government in 1871, Michel was also an anarchist feminist voice speaking out against imperialism by telling the stories of the oppressed indigenous people, the Kanak, of New Caledonia. This month, UWM professor of History and Women’s & Gender Studies Carolyn Eichner’s article, “Language of Imperialism, Language of Liberation: Louise Michel and the Kanak-French Colonial Encounter,” is forthcoming in Feminist Studies and details how Michel is a revolutionary figure - both in politics and in language. Before we talk about the paper, let’s ask the question on everyone’s mind: Who, exactly, is Louise Michel? She was an impressive and unusual person, and somewhat of a hero in France. There’s a Metro station named after her in Paris and quite a few schools across France. She was trained as a teacher in the provinces and came to Paris in the 1860s, where she became involved in some left-wing political movements. This was the training ground for what came next: France went to war with Prussia, lost, and then there was a revolutionary civil war called the Paris Commune. She was heavily involved in this uprising, and this is the thing she is most known for. She’s by far the most widely-known woman who participated in this revolutionary civil war. The Paris Commune lasted 72 days. It was brutally crushed by the French government, with 25,000 Parisians slaughtered in the streets. Michel was arrested and tried by a military court. She
attempted to take the blame for everything as a martyr. The French authorities didn’t shoot her because if they had, she would have been a martyr. Instead, they sent her to a prison colony in New Caledonia, an archipelago in the South Pacific, over ten thousand miles from France. What does your new paper tell readers about Michel? This article looks at the way that Louise Michel used indigenous Kanak oral tales as a way of altering Louise Michel Europeans’ deeply negative view of the Kanak, but also to advance her own political agenda. In the time Michel was imprisoned in New Caledonia, she became interested in the Kanak people. With the cooperation of Daoumi, an indigenous man who spoke French, she translated and transcribed Kanak oral tales and published them, initially in a newspaper in New Caledonia and then in books published in France. She hoped to present the Kanak to the French public as a people with culture and civilization, as opposed to the dominant racist idea that they were amongst the very lowest of the people in France’s colonies. It was also a way of advancing Michel’s anarchist-feminist politics. She wanted to show how the French had something to learn from indigenous people. What was the prevailing French attitude toward the Kanak at the time? The French had developed a racialized ‘hierarchy of civilization,’ with white Europeans at the top – French at the very top, of course. Then came Arabs, North Africans, Polynesians and southeast Asians in the next level. If you think about skin color, this is what it’s based on. The lowest level was sub-Saharan Africans, so black Africans, and Melanesians (people in the south Pacific with dark skin like the Kanak). France’s argument was that by bringing imperialism to “less evolved” people like the Kanak, the French would help elevate them and bring them up the civilizational ladder more quickly than they would rise on their own. And what was the reality? The Kanak were living happily (before French traders came to New Caledonia). It’s an abundant place. They practiced agriculture and fishing, but they did not have A rendering of two Kanak men in New Caledonia, circa 1880.
the Kanak tales any kind of large quadrupeds at all. The French brought horses and cattle and it devastated the Kanak agriculture. The French wanted to appropriate the lands and use the Kanak as labor, so they imposed a different social structure on them. First of all, they assumed that the Kanak land was owned communally, and that was not the case. They also assumed that chiefs had all power, and that was not the case. But the French would only deal with the chiefs. Then ultimately, the French created a reservation system and moved the Kanak off their lands onto reservations, and then seized Kanak lands and desecrated holy places. How did Louise Michel become interested in Kanak culture and the Kanak themselves? Michel was held with other French political prisoners in a “prison without walls” on the main New Caledonian island. It was a small peninsula, cut off from the rest of the island. But they had some interactions with the Kanak. Michel was one of the only French prisoners to take an interest in the indigenous people. The Kanak had 28 different languages, so they had developed a creole that they communicated with. They used it for trade amongst themselves and with international traders. Michel saw this as much more sophisticated than Europeans or the western world, because she considered language to be a huge barrier between peoples. That was a common thought in the later 19th century, when constructed languages like Esperanto were being developed. There was a belief that if you could surmount (differences in language), that people could connect and communicate and have international peace. Michel saw the Kanak’s common language and said, wait a minute, this is natural. It evolved upwards. This shows greater civilization than the French. The Kanak also had an oral culture that they passed down from generation to generation. It united people, passed along their history and served as a reflection of the way they saw themselves in relation to the world. They had a different cosmology from Europeans. They didn’t see people as fully separate from each other or fully separate from the natural world, which fit right in with Michel’s conception of universal anarchism. The French didn’t think that the Kanak had a culture. The Europeans considered the Kanak savages, closer to animals than civilized people. In contrast, Michel saw the beauty of Kanak stories and culture. In the translation, transcription, and publication of the tales, she wanted to have the Europeans re-see the Kanak in this new light.
History and women’s and gender studies professor Carolyn Eichner’s new article details how French anarchist-feminist Louise Michel translated and transcribed the oral tales of the Kanak of New Caledonia.
Was she successful? She was, at least somewhat. She was cited by anthropologists who saw her work as ground-breaking. She influenced some anthropologists and ethnographers at the time to recognize the Kanak as having a culture and a history. Today, many Kanak recognize her as the first person to translate and transcribe their oral tales in a respectful way. This happened a long time ago and halfway around the world. Why is it important to study today? Louise Michel’s story is part of the history of imperialism, anthropology, ethnography, and feminism, and the way that Americans and Europeans have viewed and judged indigenous peoples. It’s the story of how we have shaped, re-shaped, destroyed and attempted to take over their lives and their world. It’s also part of the history of how indigenous and some European people have opposed such oppressions. Michel was one of the very first of the era’s French antiimperialists. When the Kanak had an anti-imperialist uprising during her time in New Caledonia, Michel was the only French prisoner to fully support their revolt. She opposed imperialism for political reasons and because she valued the indigenous people and their culture. By Sarah Vickery, College of Letters & Science College of Letters & Science • UW–Milwaukee • 5
Small business, big impact
UWM grad’s company builds “Evergreen”
Kasia Weina and her partner had just moved to Hong Kong and founded their own start-up when a friend approached with an irresistible offer: He would finance any start-up business they created, as long as they based their operations in his hometown of Da Nang, Vietnam. So, they packed up their apartment in Hong Kong, settled their cat in for a long flight, and moved to Vietnam to found Evergreen Labs, a start-up that acts as an impact venture-building organization. “We really enjoy being entrepreneurs, and we wanted to do something meaningful with our backgrounds and our career paths,” Weina said. “With Evergreen Labs, we want to prove that you can do good and also make money.” Running a project development firm wasn’t exactly what Weina set out to do when she entered UWM to major in biology. She was more interested in marine biology and traveling – she completed a study abroad in Taiwan and one in Australia before graduating in 2010. Her next destination was England, where she earned her Master of Pharmacy at University College London, and then Germany for her doctoral education. After completing their graduate degrees, Weina and her partner, Jan Zellmann, each wanted a change of scenery. The pair moved to Hong Kong with every intention of getting a job, Weina said. Instead, they founded their first start-up, a company that produced journals and logbooks made from recycled mining waste. Then came the offer to start a business in Vietnam.
UWM biological sciences alumna Kasia Weina (center back) stands with her team in front of their newly-opened retail shop in Da Nang, Vietnam. The store sells locally-sourced, sustainably-grown produce. Photo courtesy of Kasia Weina.
The country is a promising market. Vietnam has a young population with an emerging middle class that can afford – and demands – highquality products. The economy is still developing, which means that Evergreen Labs can build environmentally and sociallyconscious business models right into the architecture of their start-ups.
And there are many start-ups they’re bringing along. “We looked at core areas that needed a lot of support. We’re working now in mainly three sectors: Agriculture, waste management, and sustainable tourism,” Weina said. “We try to tackle these big issues, but these issues occur throughout southeast Asia.” One of the major problems Weina has identified is food security – “Anything from people dumping chemicals on the farm fields to injecting shrimp with silicon. We didn’t feel safe eating the food,” she said. And, she added, those farmers that did commit to healthy farming practices still saw their crops sold to middlemen before they
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” and inclusive business solutions in Vietnam hit the market mixed with the “dirty” produce. They were being paid the same amount, though they worked much harder to grow their food. So, Evergreen Labs founded HealthyFarm, a start-up that works with local farmers to bring naturallyproduced, high-quality fruits and vegetables directly to consumers. HealthyFarm purchases “clean” produce from farmers at a better price than they would usually get from their old supply chains, and then sells the food through online and retail channels. In three years, the business has grown so much that HealthyFarm now supplies food to several of the five-star resorts in Da Nang. With a guaranteed buyer, the farmers are making more money as well.
Mr. Loi waves on his farm in Da Nang, Vietnam. Mr. Loi and other local farmers like him supply the Healthy Farm
start-up conceived by Evergreen Labs. Photo courtesy of Kasia Weina. “Before, farmers would make on average $35 a month. Now, we can safely say we doubled that amount by expanding our crop selection and our buyers,” Weina said. “Now, we’re working with over 250 farmers, many in central Vietnam but also throughout the country. We’re working in nine provinces at the moment, and planning to grow our network as we get more and more buyers.”
And that’s just one business nurtured by Evergreen Labs. Another project, called ReForm, creates commodity products from low-grade plastics like plastic bags and styrofoam. It removes typically non-recycled plastics from the environment while empowering local waste workers. The business recently created and installed a full set of back-of-the-house lockers in a boutique hotel in Ho Chi Minh City. In each start-up, Evergreen Labs hires a team of dedicated workers. As the business grows and takes on a life of its own, Weina begins to transfer ownership to the team. “We just incentivized our co-founder in an agriculture project through shares,” Weina added. “So now she’s a shareholder in the company that she built with Evergreen Labs.” And Evergreen Labs has grown beyond Vietnam. The group has projects going in places like Myanmar and Indonesia, and Weina says she’s focusing on growing those projects while continuing to support the start-ups in Vietnam. “It’s definitely more challenging to really incorporate our social or environmental impact into what we do,” she said, “but we believe if it’s done in the right way and with the right approach, we can be more impactful longterm.” By Sarah Vickery, College of Letters & Science
College of Letters & Science • UW–Milwaukee • 7
Math student’s machine learning research makes a splash Nathan Kohls just wanted to pay his rent without having to work at the campus IT desk. When he heard that students could receive funding from the Office of Undergraduate Research for helping faculty members conduct their research, he jumped at the chance. Now, his work has the potential to change the way scientists study water quality. “One of my math professors emailed me and said, hey, you do computer science stuff too, right? Want to get in on this project?” Kohls said. “And so here I am in biological pattern recognition.” Kohls, who is majoring in both mathematical sciences and computer science, works under mathematical sciences professor Peter Hinow. Together, they’re developing a tool to help biological sciences professor Rudy Strickler wade through the data collected in the course of his research. Strickler is working with high-speed video observations of animals and algae patches during predator-prey interactions in the water. Patterns in the water can be disrupted quickly as these organisms and the water itself move around. The Mathematical sciences and computer science major Nathan Kohls is using machine learning to videos generate thousands of frames during fast changes help researchers study water quality. Photo by Sarah Vickery. of distribution patterns. The black-and-white video would take countless hours to analyze, so Kohls was tasked with teaching a computer algorithm to recognize the patterns found in the video so it can identify the exact frame where changes take place. The algorithm sorts the images into two categories: Unexcited, where the image is static and no activity is happening, and excited, where the image grows dynamic and “jumps” and “wiggles,” as Kohls describes it. “I break the video down into individual frames and then I train this program to sort those images into what it should be,” Kohls explained. “At first, it’s super-ineffective. The algorithm doesn’t know anything.” So he has to teach it. He feeds the computer program image after image. The machine guesses which category the picture should be grouped in – unexcited or excited. It does so by looking for specific nuances in each frame, like the amount of pixels of a certain color or the presence of curving lines. As the machine learns which images it categorized correctly and incorrectly, it begins to learn the hallmarks of an unexcited or excited image. “It’s basically like spraying a cat with a water bottle. No. Bad algorithm. Shift whatever is happening inside of you around so that this picture is grouped with the ‘boring’ pictures,” Kohls said with a laugh. “And then you do that over and over and over again with a ton of different images. And at the end, it starts getting good classifications.” Of course, the algorithm can’t really “see” the images, and it can be hard to discern what parameters the program is working with. If it’s using too few or too narrow criterion, that could mean it will mis-categorize images in the future. It’s slow, detailed work, but Kohls said that the algorithm he’s helped to develop has the potential to help other researchers in the future. “The idea is that we can get a procedure going so that people can adapt this algorithm and transfer our idea over to other experiments easily,” he said. “With this, you would still need training data on the new data sets, but it’s going to be a lot easier for other people to use this to speed up their research.” Kohls says he’s just about finished teaching the algorithm how to categorize the images. The next step is to transfer the program to a computer in Strickler’s lab so that it can analyze video in real time. Kohls is also planning to present his work at the Office of Undergraduate Research Symposium later this month. By Sarah Vickery, College of Letters & Science 8 • IN FOCUS • April, 2019
Marnie Lawler McDonough worked in corporate communications and marketing before enrolling in graduate school to study the rhetoric of organizational leadership. (UWM Photo/Elora Hennessey)
The growing pervasiveness of demagogic rhetoric Before arriving at UWM, Marnie Lawler McDonough enjoyed a career as a corporate communications and marketing executive in New York. That led to her research interest as a communication doctoral candidate – the rhetoric of organizational leadership, especially speech that’s manipulative, deceptive or violates norms. While taking a seminar on the rhetoric of debates in 2016, she noticed that the word “demagogue” was experiencing a resurgence in popular media. Although she typically stays away from politics, her interest was piqued, and she began looking at the rhetoric of demagoguery. “It hadn’t been written about in the scholarship for a while,” says Lawler McDonough, whose doctoral advisor is Kathryn Olson, a professor of communication. Lawler McDonough examined transcripts of the three presidential debates held that year and determined that rhetoric fitting the historical definition of demagogues was used consistently, but with contemporary nuances. It works like this. Leaders posture as common people. They choose words to trigger waves of powerful emotion, manipulating this emotion for personal benefit and threatening or breaking established principles of
governance. Modern platforms like social media then help deliver this to a wider audience. Lawler McDonough says the demagogic approach isn’t limited to politics and is being used in other areas of society. “It has applications in the rhetoric of anyone in power,” she says. “For example, how leaders communicate with their employees or how famous people have responded to accusations of sexual harassment.” Broad swaths of the American public have accepted this deviation from typical leadership rhetoric. She believes it’s important to understand why, and says that those studying political rhetoric and demagoguery should chart new courses in examining such developments. That includes exploring the role social media plays in amplifying normbusting speech. “Rhetorical scholars should work to gain a better recognition and understanding of demagogic rhetoric,” Lawler McDonough says, “especially because it’s becoming even more pervasive as its usage evolves in the 21st century.” By Dan Simmons, University Relations College of Letters & Science • UW–Milwaukee • 9
The Lands We Share
Exhibit finds ties that connect cultures in th
James Levy is no stranger to discussions about race — he teaches several classes about race and ethnicity at UW-Whitewater as an associate professor history. But he’s found that many of his students are uncomfortable with contributing to class discussions surrounding those topics. A fellow faculty member at UW-Whitewater mentioned that most students at the university are somehow connected to farms, either having grown up on one or having parents who did. That, Levy thought, could be a way in. “The more I thought about race and learned more about farming in the state, the more I thought this could be an interesting way to get students to talk about race from the side door,” said Levy. With the help of four other public historians in the UW System, he created the Wisconsin Farms Oral History Project, where students became researchers and interviewers to learn more about farming history. The oral history project started six years ago, and The Lands We Share exhibit is the culmination of that work. “If you put together race, farming and state history, that’s our project,” Levy said. The exhibit has been touring Wisconsin since October. After finishing a placement at the Wisconsin Black Historical Society, the exhibit moved to the Golda Meir Library at UWM in March. The exhibit is traveling to the cities of the four UW System
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universities involved (UW-Whitewater, UW-Oshkosh, UWMilwaukee and UW-Madison). Levy contacted other public historians throughout the UW System to see if they wanted to get involved. Jasmine Alinder, associate professor of history and associate dean of the College of Letters & Science at UWM, said yes, as did Steven Kercher, the chair of the history program at UW-Oshkosh, and Troy Reeves, the head of the oral history program at UW-Madison. “James was instrumental at reaching out across the system,” Alinder said. “To his credit, that’s an unusual thing to do. There are not many cross-campus projects. At UWM, we were also fortunate to get support from the Office of Undergraduate Research.” Together the four public historians have used the program at their respective campuses through boot camps, undergraduate researchers and teaching classes. There were summer boot camps at UW-Oshkosh, UWMilwaukee, UW-Madison and UW-Whitewater, where the mostly undergraduate students learned the best ways to interview people. “They were like training sessions for them to understand and learn how to use oral history,” Alinder said. The students found there was a long history of farming in Wisconsin that has included many races and ethnicities, from the Oneida Nation to German and Hmong immigrants. Local food, local farms, local connections While the museum display teaches about farming history, there is another important part of the exhibit: farmto-table conversation dinners. “Many exhibitions serve as ends in themselves – destinations to be
he farms we tend visited,” Levy said. “We look at our exhibition as a means to an end regarding community engagement. That is, the exhibit is designed to set up and frame the community conversations.” The dinners were an unconventional exhibit experience that helps build a sense of community through locally grown food and dialogue. “The meals have been fantastic,” Levy said. “After dinner is wrapping up, we do a short presentation so people in one region can see how they are connected to the other featured regions in the project.” Five farm sites are featured in the exhibit: two from Jefferson County, one from Milwaukee and two from northeastern Wisconsin. In the small town of Seymour near Green Bay is the Oneida Nation farm, which spans more than 5,000 acres. It and two smaller farms on the Oneida reservation are included in the exhibit. The smallest of those three, run by the Ohe-laku group, grows white corn using traditional farming methods. In Allenville, near Oshkosh, is the Allen Family Farm which has been passed down from generation to generation for over 100 years. In Jefferson County are the Dettmann Dairy Farms and the Vang C&C Farm, which is the first certified organic Hmong farm in Wisconsin.
Children tend the Metcalfe Park Legacy Garden, part of the Lands We Share exhibit. (Shoua Yang photo)
Milwaukee’s agricultural roots Milwaukee is known for its urban agriculture roots. The Metcalfe Park Legacy Garden is an urban garden in one of the poorer neighborhoods of Milwaukee where fresh food is a scarce commodity. Hongyan Yang, one of the student researchers of the exhibit, always thought of farmers markets as a middleclass amenity. But the Walker’s Square Farmers Market is something different. It’s full of working class people in search of fresh fruit and vegetables at reasonable prices. “The farmers market has very diverse customers. They sometimes have Malaysian, Indian, Chinese and Hmong,” Yang said. “White people are not the majority.” Yang started researching the Walker’s Square Farmers Market in the fall of 2017. She is a doctoral student at UWM in the Buildings, Landscapes and Cultures program through the School of Architecture and Urban Planning. “The theme of the project is about the connection between food, agriculture and race or ethnicity, which aligned with my research interests,” Yang said. Yang is one of four student researchers at UWM, including Margarita Garcia-Rojas, Jamison Ellis, and Shavaughn Lawson, in charge of the Milwaukee section of the exhibit, with Alinder supervising. The Walker’s Square Farmers Market is featured in the online presentation of the Lands We Share exhibit, albeit not in the physical exhibit traveling the state. By Claire Hackett, University Relations College of Letters & Science • UW–Milwaukee • 11
Passings Nathan Miller, UWM professor emeritus of history, passed away in January at the age of 101. Nathan earned a Master’s degree in 1947 and a PhD in 1960, both from Columbia University. He joined the UWM faculty in 1960, where he served in the History Department until 1987. Nathan was awarded a Bronze Star for his service in the U.S. Army Intelligence between 1941 and 1945. Nathan is survived by his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Funeral services were held on Jan. 7. A full obituary is available at https://bit.ly/2CHLc3d.
Lawrence “Larry” Grogan, a long-time senior lecturer in the Mathematical Sciences department, passed away unexpectedly in late February after teaching a full day of classes. Larry was a UWM alum, where he earned his Master’s in Mathematics in 1972. He joined the UWM staff as a part-time lecturer in 1975 and was hired on full-time in 2005. He was also a full-time employee of Weber Systems, a software company, until his retirement. Larry was well-liked by his students and touched many lives.
In the Media and Around the Community Krista Lisdahl (Psychology) commented on the link between marijuana and psychosis in an NPR segment discussing a new study that links the risk of psychotic episodes and cannabis use. https://n.pr/2FmT8Zj
This year’s Gerber Baby is the first winner of Hmong descent, and Chia Vang (History) told TMJ4 that the Hmong community is thrilled. https://bit.ly/2IQfgz3 A handful of John Isbell’s (Geosciences) students are traveling around the southern hemisphere searching for glacial remnants that could shed light on ancient climate change, according to Phys.org. https://bit.ly/2TdFq3E
After it was announced that Milwaukee would host the 2020 Democratic National Convention, the Washington Post called on Aims McGuinness (History) and John Gurda (’78, MA Geography) to explain the city’s socialist past. https://wapo.st/2u3PaOT
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Thanks to new technology, astronomers have been able to pinpoint the origin location of particles called neutrinos, which travel through space unaffected by any matter or forces it meets. Patrick Brady (Physics) explained some of the finer points of deep-space research in an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://bit.ly/2Hf1Nyq In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published a list of places around Milwaukee where aspiring dancers can learn to Irish dance – including from teacher Chelsea Holloway (’16, BA Psychology), who owns Bellator Academy of Irish Dance in Germantown, Wisconsin. https://bit.ly/2TItEOm The 53206 is Milwaukee’s most depressed zipcode, according to a new report by UWM’s Center for Economic Development. Marc Levine (emeritus History) went on WUWM to explain why. (https://bit.ly/2TojjI4) The Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service also provided analysis of the report. (https://bit.ly/2H2bj8X) Finally, Levine was mentioned in The Cap Times in an article outlining the saga of the proposed Foxconn plant in Racine. https://bit.ly/2ET04xk Urban Milwaukee announced an upcoming Milwaukee Film event curated by Tami Williams (Film Studies) that celebrates “Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers,” which will take place in April. https://bit.ly/2NNdPAi Erin Winkler (African and African Diaspora Studies) recommended talking to kids honestly about systemic racial bias in a Patch.com article. https://bit.ly/2CcrLPS
People in Print Katherine A. Niessen, Mengyang Xu, Deepu K. George, Michael C. Chen, Adrian R. Ferre-D’Amare, Edward H. Snell, Vivian Cody, James Pace, Marius Schmidt (Physics), and Andrea G. Larkelz. 2019. Protein and RNA Dynamical Fingerprinting. Nature Communications. Online. https://go.nature.com/2Uod9E8 Weidong Li, Qingniao Zhou, Yong Gao, Yonghua Jiang, Yuanjie Hunag, Zengnan Mo, Yiming Zou (Mathematical Sciences), and Yanling Hu. 2019. eQTL analysis from colocalization of 2739 GWAS loci detects associated genes across 14 human cancers. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 426: 240-246. https://bit.ly/2VetHOS
A new study lead by Erin Kaheny (Political Science) explores whether gender, age, and race of state supreme court judges influences who is asked to write majority opinions, EurekaAlert.org reported. https://bit.ly/2Y6BFfk
Seyedali Banisadr, Adebola Oyefusi, and Jian Chen (all Chemistry and Biochemistry). 2019. A Versatile Strategy for Transparent Stimuli-Responsive Interference Coloration. ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, 11(7): 7415-7422. https://bit.ly/2JvOoVI Anne Pycha (Linguistics). 2019. Mind Your “Fs” and “Vs”: Agriculture May Have Shaped Both Human Jaws and Language. Scientific American. Online. https://bit.ly/2TTjIla Michael J. Mikos (Foreign Language and Literature) (translator). 2018. Trifles, Songs, and Saint John’s Eve Song. By Jan Kochanowski. Lublin, Poland: KUL Publishing House. https://bit.ly/2XCfn4U John S. Heywood (Economics), Lu Xu, and Guangliang Ye. 2019. How does a Public Innovator License a Foreign Rival? Australian Economic Papers, 58(1): 78-95. https://bit.ly/2TowEA0
Ron Voight (’78, BA Geography) is one of a trio of long-serving members in the Ozaukee County Register of Deeds Office who were profiled by the Ozaukee Press.
Even though populations of flying insects have been declining in recent years, Peter Dunn (Biological Sciences) told Mashable.com that unfortunately, cockroaches are probably here to stay.
https://bit.ly/2JdIyb5
https://bit.ly/2F5y6OV
Spring has finally arrived, but Mark Schwartz’s (Geography) phenological tools helped predict the start of the season months ago. He explained how on WUWM Radio. https://bit.ly/2ObgNik Jeffrey Sommers (International Studies and African and African Diaspora Studies) made a case for raising the minimum wage in The Cap Times. https://bit.ly/2Y78yby
As a sentencing consultant, Lisa (Rode) Andres (’89, BA Communication) conducts background research on criminal defendants prior to sentencing so that judges have complete information about the case. Andres was profiled in the Wisconsin State Journal. https://bit.ly/2TKh4yB
How can companies build a community around the data they collect? Pat Pitre (’06, BA Communication) of IBM went on The Intelligent Business Show podcast to explain.
David Allen (Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies) presented an update on his research entitled, “From Public Welfare to Governmental Interest: The Time, Place and Manner Test and American Expressive Freedom,” at the UW-Stout Center for the Study of Institutions and Innovation Civil Liberties Symposium in March. https://bit.ly/2udtLCS
Picking a winning March Madness bracket is all about game theory, Brendan Burns Healy (Mathematical Sciences) revealed on CBS 58 News. https://bit.ly/2OejQGG
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Rachel Buff (History) was a guest on WORT 89.9 FM Radio in March to speak about sanctuary and deportation in the United States.
College of Letters & Science • UW–Milwaukee • 13
Upcoming Events April 3
Imagining the Moon: A History of Lunar Visualizations. 7 p.m. AGS Library. Marcy Bidney, UWM Libraries. Event includes a special exhibit of lunar maps, globes, atlases, and photos. Part of the UWM Planetarium’s 50th Anniversary of the Apollo Moon Landing series. https://bit.ly/2UcIE42
April 5
Bending the Archive: Zines, Preservation, & the Digital Humanities. 4 p.m. Curtin 175. Panelists include Jenna Freedman (Barnard Library), Milo Miller (UWM), and Lane Hall (UWM). https://bit.ly/2JIAXBJ
April 5 - April 26
Science Bag: Whispers from the Universe - Waves, Holes, and Stars. 7 p.m. Physics 137. UWM Physics professor Patrick Brady presents. Shows run Fridays at 7 p.m. through April 26 and at 2 p.m. on Sunday, April 14. Free and open to the public. www.uwm.edu/science-bag
April 5 - May 3
Planetarium Show: Arabian Nights. 7 p.m. Manfred Olson Planetarium. Learn about Arabian culture from food to architecture, and its many contributions to astronomy. Tickets are $5. Shows run Friday evenings through May 3. Family-friendly and open to the public. www.uwm.edu/planetarium
April 9
A Sacred Space is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism. 3:30 p.m. Greene Hall. Author Victoria Smolkin presents her work on Soviet atheism.
April 10
Women’s & Gender Studies Brown Bag: Litigating Liberation. Noon. Curtin 535B. Marcus Filippello, UWM. https://bit.ly/2Wu4fWh
An Evening with Dan Kaufman. 6 p.m. 4th Floor Library Conference Center. Author Dan Kaufman presents, “The Fall of Wisconsin: The Legacy of Divide-and-Conquer Politics and the Aftermath of the 2018 Elections.” Sponsored by the Center for 21st Century Studies. https://bit.ly/2FDfHJv
April 11
Geosciences Colloquium: Why is Nevada in Hot Water? Tectonic Controls on Geothermal Activity and Strategies for Harnessing Geothermal Energy in the Great Basin Region. 4 p.m. Lapham N101. James Faulds, University of Nevada, Reno.
14 • IN FOCUS • April, 2019
April 12
LGBT+ Studies Visiting Scholar Lecture: God Bless Sex. 1 p.m. Union 191. This lecture explores religious views of sexuality in various faiths. Neuroscience Seminar: Effects of physical activity and fitness on hippocampal memory systems. 2 p.m. Lapham N101. Michelle Voss, University of Iowa. Geography Colloquium: Multi-trophic phenological change among birds, insects and plants. 3 p.m. AGS Library. Jana Viel, UWM.
April 14
Science Bag: Whispers from the Universe - Waves, Holes, and Stars. 2 p.m. Physics 137. UWM Physics professor Patrick Brady presents. Free and open to the public. www.uwm.edu/science-bag
April 16
Marden Lecture in Mathematics: The Many Facets of Chaos. 3:30 p.m. Lubar N140. James A. Yorke, University of Maryland. Free and open to the public.
April 17
James A. Yorke
Unblocking Attachment Sites for Living in the Plantationocene. 3:30 p.m. Curtin 175. Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing (University of California-Santa Cruz) in conversation exploring the arts of living on a damaged planet. Sponsored by the Center for 21st Century Studies. https://bit.ly/2usD4iH
Planetarium Presentation: Unblinded by the Light. 6:30 p.m. Physics 137. Janis Eells explains how space resarch opened our eyes on Earth. Part of the UWM Planetarium’s 50th Anniversary of the Apollo Moon Landing series. https://bit.ly/2UcIE42
April 18
The Maamtrasna Murders: Why Language Mattered in Nineteenth-Century Ireland. 7 p.m. Fourth Floor Library Conference Center. Margaret Kelleher, University College Dublin, discusses the wrongful conviction of an Irishspeaking man in a grisly murder.
April 19
Geography Colloquium: Socio-spatial disparities in dementia mortality in the United States. 3 p.m. AGS Library. Wei Xu, UWM.
April 23
Jere D. McGaffey Annual Lecture: “Europe’s Destruction of Arab Democracy in 1920: A Century of Consequences.” 3 p.m. Union Fireside Lounge. Elizabeth F. Thompson, American University. Free and open to the public. https://uwm.edu/history/
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April 25
Geosciences Colloquium: A new approach to documenting Phanerozoic Trends in Marine Functional Diversity. 4 p.m. Lapham N101. Philip Novack-Gottshal, Benedictine University.
April 25
Friends of Art History Lecture: Grace Lavery. 5 p.m. Mitchell 191. Grace Lavery, University of CaliforniaBerkeley, discusses her new book. A book sale and signing will follow the talk.
April 26
Geography Colloquium: A conceptual modeling framework for hydrologic ecosystem services. 3 p.m. AGS Library. Feng Pan, UWM.
April 26 - April 28
Italian Film Festival USA. Union Cinema. Enjoy eight Italian-language films from comedies to documentaries to thrillers. Films include “Quanto Basta (As Needed),” “Resina (Resin),” “Balentes (The Brave Ones),” “Il Presento Sofia (Let Me Introduce You to Sofia),” “Una Storia Senza Nome (The Stolen Caravaggio),” “Manuel,” “La Ragazza Nella Nebbia (The Girl in the Fog),” and a series of short films. For a list of descriptions and showtimes, visit www.italianfilmfests.org/milwaukee.html
Activist Winona LaDuke delivers the Dean’s Distinguished Lecture in the Humanities Join the College of Letters & Science at the annual Dean’s Distinguished Lecture in the Humanities on April 11 at 6 p.m. in Merrill Hall 131. Sustainability activist Winona LaDuke presents, “The Next Energy Economy: Grassroots Strategies to Mitigate Global Climate Change and How We Move Ahead.” The talk focuses on how local projects on indigenous lands are helping establish the next energy economy. From solar to wind to localized food production, the White Earth reservation is moving ahead in creating a more sustainable future.
April 30
Winona LaDuke is an internationally renowned activist working on issues of sustainable development renewable energy and food systems. She lives and works on the White Earth reservation in northern Minnesota, and is a two time vice presidential candidate with Ralph Nader for the Green Party.
https://bit.ly/2WqUrwb
WHEN: Thursday, April 11 Reception begins at 6 p.m. Lecture begins at 6:30 p.m.
Podcasting the Past: An Evening with Ben Franklin’s World. 6 p.m. Fourth Floor Library Conference Center. Liz Covart, host of the podcast “Ben Franklin’s World,” converses with Mitch Teich of WUWM Radio about podcasting and history. Free and open to the public. Diaspora Songs: Yiddish Meets Ladino, with Sarah Aroeste & Anthony Russell. 7 p.m. Ovation Jewish Home, 1414 N. Prospect Ave., Milwaukee. Vocalists Sarah Aroeste and Anthony Russell explore common themes and approaches in Ladino and Yiddish music.
WHERE: Merrill Hall, Room 131 COST: Free! MORE INFORMATION: https://bit.ly/2SSlfaC
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College of Letters & Science • UW–Milwaukee • 15
Alumni Accomplishments Meg Metcalf (’12, BA Women’s and Gender Studies; ’15, MA Women’s and Gender Studies/Master of Library and Information Science) was featured in a Los Angeles Blade article discussing the Library of Congress’ LGBTQ+ Studies Web Archive. Metcalf, the Library’s Women’s Gender, & LGBTQ+ Collection Specialist, is in charge of curating the archive. https://bit.ly/2tYuDeR Megan (McCallum) Konkol (’10, MA Language, Literature, and Translation) was elected to the American Translator Associations’ board of directors. The ATA is the nation’s largest organization of professional translators and interpreters. Konkol has been involved in ATA’s School Outreach Program since 2010 and has served as the program’s coordinator since 2011. In this role, she leads a team of fellow volunteers in promoting school visits Meghan (McCallum) Konkol to speak about the professions of translation and interpreting in classrooms around the world. Louisa Boardman (’87, BA English) was named the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s sports editor, the third in the paper’s history. Boardman previously served as deputy sports editor. Boardman’s career in Milwaukee newspapers has stretched over 34 years. https://bit.ly/2Hy5Fej
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (’69, BS History) received the Dr. John Hope Franklin award on March 11 at the annual meeting of the American Council on Education. Her distinguished career was profiled on DiverseEducation.com. https://bit.ly/2W2BzDH
Michael Bugalski (’13, BA Economics and Political Science) was named the new president of the Moberly Area Economic Development Corporation in Moberly, Missouri. He has served as the interim president since Jan. 1, and was previously the organization’s vice president. https://bit.ly/2CrVl3R Debra Sybell (’90, BA Political Science) has been appointed the Executive Director of the Division of Policy Development at the Wisconsin Department of Safety and Professional Services. She will act as a policy analyst, operational liaison, and facilitator of various boards and councils related to the agency. https://bit.ly/2W1ZwuK Ashley Dineen (’15, PhD Geosciences) and her colleagues are being lauded for their new research that provide a glimpse into the lives and evolution of the “Great Dying” extinction survivors. The “Great Dying” was a mass extinction event 252 million years ago. Her and her colleagues’ research was published in Biology Letters. https://bit.ly/2TQCTvV
Kumara Jayasuriya (’93, PhD Mathematical Sciences) was named the 10th president of Southwest Minnesota State University. He takes over July 1. Jayasuriya is currently the provost and vice president of academic affairs at West Virginia State University. https://bit.ly/2TZTOME
Claudia Paetsch (’92, MA Communication) was named Kumara Jayasurlya Marquette University’s new vice president for human resources. She begins work on April 22. She spent the previous decade as a member of the HR leadership team at Northwestern Mutual, most recently as the senior director, human resources business partner. https://bit.ly/2UPjtor
Celebrate 50 years of Black Studies at UWM! The UWM Department of African and African Diaspora Studies marks the 50th anniversary of its founding with a keynote address delivered by UWM alumna Evelyn Higginbotham. Higginbotham, who attended campus as student activists were advocating for a Black Studies program, is the former chair of African and African American Studies at Harvard and the university’s current chair of History. Following the talk, Higginbotham will join a conversation with Dan Burrell (a student activist and first director of the Center for Afro-American Culture (retired from Milwaukee Area Technical College)), Clayborn Benson (a UWM alum and director of the Wisconsin Black Historical Society), and Charmane Perry (a graduate of the department’s PhD program) to discuss the turbulent days of the program’s establishment and how Black Studies programs continue to press for transformation of campuses and communities. Join us in the UWM Union Wisconsin Room at 7 p.m. on April 25! This event is free and open to the public. 16 • IN FOCUS • April, 2019
Laurels, Accolades, and Grants Graduate student Marie de la Paz (Translation and Interpreting Studies) was awarded a Title VIII Fellowship to attend the 2019 eight-week summer intensive Russian program run by the Critical Languages Institute (CLI) of Arizona State University’s Melikian Center. Title VIII funding is internationally competitive and typical applicants have already demonstrated significant academic achievement. Applicants for the CLI came from all over the US and abroad; typical applicants have already demonstrated significant academic achievement. De la Paz was ranked in the top third of applicants. Celeste Campos-Castillo (Sociology) and Linnea Laestadius from the UWM Zilber School of Public Health were awarded a $120 thousand grant to study how Latinx adolescents manage the privacy of their peers on social media. They will be working with the United Community Center to recruit Latinx adolescents for the research project. Peter Dunn (Biological Sciences) and Linda Whittingham (emeritus Biological Sciences) received the 2019 Elliott Coues Achievement Award from the American Ornithological Society in February. This is one of the highest awards in ornithology, recognizing outstanding and innovative contributions to the study of birds. The award has been presented to 47 ornithologists from around the world since 1972, and it includes a Nobel prize winner, Fellows of the Royal Society and the AAAS. The award is named in honor of Elliott Coues, a pioneering ornithologist and founding member of the society in 1883. The Coues Achievement Award consists of a medal and an Celeste Campos-Castillo honorarium that will be presented to Whittingham and Dunn in June at the annual meeting of the AOS in Anchorage, Alaska. https://bit.ly/2IPXV9K Graduate student Nancy Retana (Public Administration) is the recipient of a $1,000 Susan B. Anthony Award. The scholarship, granted by the Susan B. Anthony – Women of Influence Awards Committee recognized Retana for her hard work in and for the Kenosha, Wisconsin, community. Retana is the grants specialist/development coordinator for Kenosha County Division of Parks. https://bit.ly/2VEfjQj Trudy Turner (Anthopology) was named the new editor of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology by the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. Her term began April 1. The journal has been named among the top 10 most influential journals of the century in the fields of biology and medicine by the Special Libraries Association. https://bit.ly/2SKHTNK Diane Reddy (Psychology) has been named a Fellow of the Midwestern Psychological Association (MPA). Fellow status is the highest honor MPA can bestow upon its members. Rachel Buff (History) and Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece (English and Film Studies) were awarded UW-System Fellowships at the Institute for Research in the Humanities for the 2019-20 academic year. UWM Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies students won big this year, garnering 39 awards Trudy Turner in four major state-wide journalism contests that included broadcast and print mediums. The student journalists also garnered more Milwaukee Press Club awards than any other Wisconsin university. For a complete list of awards, including individual student honorees, visit the Media Milwaukee website. https://bit.ly/2UAMh3J Student James Van Eerden (Geosciences) and his partner, Matt Kemper (Lubar School of Business) won $10,000 on “Project Pitch It”, a show where budding entrepreneurs can pitch their business to successful Milwaukee-area moguls. Their company, Light Fruit Co. LLC, is a dehydrated melon producer. https://bit.ly/2FnSmeZ Leslie Harris and Erin Sahlstein Parcell (both Communication) have been awarded the Federation Prize from the Central States Communication Association and an Advancing the Discipline Grant from the National Communication Association for The Gun Violence Project: Narratives of Violence in Milwaukee. Shane Wesener (Biological Sciences) was one of four winners from UWM in the “Smart Cities-Smart Futures” competition, sponsored by Foxconn. The contest encouraged entrants to develop innovative ideas that advance connected communities. Wesener, who won in the “internet of things” category, was among 30 entries that advanced to the third and final round of the competition. Round Two winners received $1,500 and will have a shot at a $5,000 prize in the third round. The winner will be announced this spring. https://bit.ly/2V1gitU College of Letters & Science • UW–Milwaukee • 17
On March 11, Gladys Mitchell-Walthour (African and African Diaspora Studies) gave a congressional briefing in Washington, D.C. She represented the AfroBrazilian committee of the United States Network to Defend Democracy in Brazil. The briefing was held with Alex Main from the Center for Economic and Policy Research and Dr. Sharelle Barber of Drexel University who produced a documentary on Marielle Franco, an Afro-Brazilian lesbian woman activist and politician who was assasinted nearly a year ago. Mitchell-Walthour spoke about the current conditions of Afro-Brazilians and how progress in these communities are under threat under the current government.
