Greetings!

Spring has sprung! Across campus flowers are in bloom, the days are getting warmer, and everything is covered with a misting of yellow pollen. Soon, we will see new life all around us - new blooms, new birds, butterflies. Spring is a time of rebirth, a time of change. 

Like the world around us, CLASS is constantly undergoing changes. We are currently interviewing and making offers to fill several open positions, including those for department chairs and an associate dean. Be on the lookout this fall for our Welcome to CLASS publication that will announce all of our new hires! Additionally, we are looking at new models of academic advisement and recently hired several new advisors so that each of the more than 4,300 CLASS majors can have a consistent professional advisor dedicated to his/her major throughout his/her time at Georgia Southern. The CLASS Advisement Center has moved to a new location to accommodate this growth and continues to make advancements for our students. 

April is full of events, many of which represent change or commemorate the past: The Georgia Southern Symphony and Southern Chorale will perform the monumental "Elijah" on April 6 at Statesboro First Baptist Church, and Dr. Shannon Jeffreys, director of choral activities, will provide a Great Minds lecture on April 4 to explain the historical significance of the piece. The importance of African, Jewish, and Irish influence on American music will be examined when Dr. Michael Moloney speaks on April 1 and 2, and our own ArtsFest celebrates 33 years on April 5. One of America's best known contemporary poets Dr. Marilyn Nelson, whose work is inspired by U.S. and her own history, will present a reading on April 2; the Department of History will commemorate the outbreak of World War I on April 9 with a half-day conference; and the Theatre & Performance program will bring Shakespeare's medieval tragedy Hamlet to the modern era on April 2-9. Budding poets are invited to explore their own history or whatever inspires them by participating with the Department of Writing & Linguistics in National Poetry Writing Month, and the Department of Foreign Languages is presenting an International Poetry Night on April 10. These events are only a few of those offered by CLASS in April - it might be historical how many there are!

Though we strive to be a college that constantly evolves to provide the best experiences and education for our students, a constant in CLASS is the dedication of our faculty to their students and to teaching, research, and service, as is evident by the news below and in the recently released CLASS Connect magazine. Check out the publication online and let us know if you would like to receive a print version.

What has changed since you were in CLASS? Please drop us a line at class@georgiasouthern.edu or fill out the online alumni survey to update us on your life events (honors, awards, promotions, and successes). 

Warmest regards, 

Center for Irish Research & Teaching

Music

The Piano Area held its Spring recital on March 13. The concert centered on the music of Franz Schubert and featured performances by Daniel Steadley, Xi Wang, Michael Ursrey, Jordan Knapp, Nick Blake, Yan Kou, and Quinn Moss, all students of Dr. David Murray

The Palm Trio, George Weremchuk, soprano saxophone; Carolyn J. Bryan, tenor saxophone; and Ricardo Flores, percussion, performed the world premier of Katherine Ann Murdock's Follow at the North American Saxophone Alliance biennial conference at the University of Illinois on March 22. The work was commissioned by and dedicated to the Palm Trio.

Members of the Southern Pride Marching Band represented Georgia Southern in the St. Patrick's Day parade in Savannah.

Art

Assistant Professor Sarah Bielski's "Yawn" and "Blacktop/Greentop" are featured in the Landscape at the Edge: Contemporary Views exhibition at the Hera Gallery in Wakefield, R.I.

Assistant Professor Santanu Majumdar's paper "Design Education for Millennial Generation" has been accepted by the 2014 University System of Georgia's Teaching and Learning Conference, April 17 and 18 in Athens, Ga.

Writing & Linguistics

Undergraduates Cady Ennis, Amanda Malone, and Sarah Fonesca won the 2014 Roy F. Powell Awards for Creative Writing. Each student received $100 and a framed certificate and will be recognized at the University's Honors Day on April 2. The winning works will also be published in Miscellany, the campus Arts magazine.

Christina Olson was interviewed by Quiddity. Her poem "Urban Legends" was accepted by Sundog Lit, and her nonfiction piece "Poverty Year" was accepted by Quarterly West.

Janet Dales' nonfiction piece "Der Vogelfänger bin ich ja" was published in Gravel: A Literary Journal.

Peggy Lindsay presented "Emerging Identities: Cultural Independence in the Northern Irish Novel" at the British Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies Conference in Savannah.

Professor Laura Valeri was invited to teach at the Author's Workshop at the Amelia Island Writers' Festival. Valeri also won the Mermaids Who Create residency.

Professor Jared Yates Sexton's "Punch-For-Punch" was accepted by PANK and "The Death of Second Person" was accepted by The Newer York. He recently read in Seattle for Atticus Books, Midwestern Gothic, and Dock Street Press and in Atlanta for Sundog Lit. His "Behold, I Come as a Thief" was selected as one of six stories for this year's Best of the Net anthology. Sexton and Dr. Les Loncharich presented at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in Indianapolis.

Dr. Kathy Albertson presented research about transfer students taking upper-level writing courses at the Research Network Forum on March 19 in Indianapolis.

Communication Arts

Student Ashley Mattison was profiled by Connect Statesboro.

Jim Osterman will speak at the Department's annual banquet on April 10. Osterman is the editor in chief of Transaction World magazine, a monthly trade publication of the payments industry. He has been a freelance writer, writing for newspapers, magazines, TV, radio, public relations firms, advertising agencies, corporations, and stand-up comedians. As a Georgia Southern student, Osterman was sports editor of The George-Anne, a DJ for WVGS, and appeared in five productions with Masquers. During his campus visit, Osterman will visit classes and be interviewed by students.

Sociology & Anthropology

The Department is creating Student Spotlight videos to highlight its outstanding students.

The Department, along with the Justice Studies Club, NAACP, ALAS, Sociological Society, and the University's Multicultural Student Center and Campus Life Enrichment Committee, presented Travis A. Williams on March 25. Williams spoke on the documentary Gideon's Army and deficiencies in the U.S. criminal justice system.

Dr. April Schueths was invited to write a guest post for crImmigration, a blog by César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández that was named among the best blogs of 2012 by the American Bar Association Journal. 

Dr. Heidi Altman presented "Translating Culture: Linguistic Anthropology in Indian Country" in a session entitled Lessons Learned from Indian Country at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Chicago. Altman also organized the session.

Professor Nathan Palmer will present three invited lectures on Teaching and Learning in the Liberal Arts at Pennsylvania State University. Palmer is dedicated to helping sociology educators and students by sharing his experiences and creating free open-classroom resources such as SociologySource.org, SociologyInFocus.com, and SociologySounds.com. He serves on the American Sociological Association Special Task Force on Social Media and will lead multiple social media training sessions at an ASA preconference workshop in the fall.

Foreign Languages

Professor Jorge Suazo was profiled by Connect Statesboro.

Psychology

Undergraduate students To'Meisha Edwards and Alyssa Hutcheson examined the potential for research gender to affect perceived ethics of an experiment. Their paper, "Decisions of Ethics Favor Female Researchers," is under review with The Psi Chi Journal of Psychological Research.

Graduate student Sean Fowler was awarded the APA Division 39 Graduate Scholar Award. Sean's "Burnout and Depression in Academia: A Look at the Discourse of the University" was published in Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication.

Graduate student Christine Vitiello won the 2014 Women's and Gender Studies Research & Project Award for her research on implicit biases toward working mothers.

Graduate student Jennifer Chau has been accepted into the Social Ph.D. program at Claremont University.

Faculty members Drs. Bradley Struz and Ty Boyer, along with graduate student Joshua Edwards, published "Asymmetrical Interference Effects between Two-Dimensional Geometric Shapes and their Corresponding Shape Words" in PLoS ONE.

Dr. Janie Wilson's "Ethical Relationships with Students" was published in Psychology Teacher Network, and An Easy Guide to Research Presentations, written with colleague Dr. Beth Schwartz (Randolph Macon College), was published by Sage Publications.