Greetings!

Fall is here, and the College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences already has so many accomplishments to celebrate and so much exciting news to share!

Early this month, Georgia Southern University released a list of its Top 40 Under 40 alumni. Almost half of that list - 17 alumni - were from CLASS. The College would like to congratulate Lindsey Bloom, Capt. Philip Boldt, Saluna Brannen, Jordan Chester, Amy Dietrich, Lea Anne Foster, Shannon Halstead, James Kicklighter, Capt. John Kile, Jason Lawrence, Teresa MacCartney, Kameelah Martin, Bob Mikell, Nick Pearson, Matt Ramsey, Blain Rhodes, and Liz Longshore Stephens on all of their accomplishments. Thank you for being such wonderful representatives of CLASS and Georgia Southern. Another alumnus, Stephen Pomeroy, wrote to the Department of Communication Arts recently to outline how his undergraduate degree in public relations made him a stand-out in his pursuit of a master's degree in the same field at George Washington University. Congratulations, Stephen, on your recent graduation, and thank you for sharing your experiences! We wish these and all of our alumni the very best in all of their endeavors and hope that all of you will continue to keep us informed of your accomplishments through the online alumni survey or by sending us a note at class@georgiasouthern.edu. 

Within the College, communication arts students began the year in the newly renovated Sanford Hall, and University President Dr. Brooks Keel hosted a ribbon-cutting for the repurposed building on August 21. The Department of Communication Arts invites all alumni to a barbeque and open-house at Sanford next month. The College also officially welcomes its newest academic entity - the Center for Social Gerontology - this semester. Learn more about the Center, this month's featured area, below. 

CLASS also wants to congratulate several faculty members:

• Dr. Eric Hall of the Department of History has published his first book, Arthur Ashe: Tennis and Justice in the Civil Rights Era, and wrote a blog post for its publisher, Johns Hopkins Press, about how Ashe's relevance can be seen in events such as the recent turmoil in Ferguson, Missouri.
• Dr. Bradley Sturz of the Department of Psychology was awarded the College's Award of Excellence, which honors outstanding faculty members early in their career.
• Dr. Linda Cionitti of the Department of Music was awarded the College's Ruffin Cup, the highest achievement in teaching, scholarship, and service in CLASS. 

We already have several events planned for September and will continue to have more throughout the Fall. Specifically, I'd like to draw your attention to the return of the College's Great Minds Lecture Series, which features Ceramics Professor Jeff Schmuki and Associate Professor of Art at Auburn University Wendy DesChene's Moth Project on September 15, and the Department of Writing & Linguistic's presentation of renowned comics scholar Scott McCloud on September 10. These, and all of CLASS' events, are sure to enrich your creative minds. 

Warmest regards, 

Sociology & Anthropology

History

Students in Dr. Anna Alexander's History of Modern Latin America course will create an exhibition as the Zach S. Henderson Library entitled "Day of the Dead: Remembering Victims of Atrocities in Latin America." The exhibition runs from October 1 to November 3 and features a student research presentation and reception on October 15.

Dr. Eric Hall wrote a blog post for Johns Hopkins University Press asserting how the historic civil rights battle of Arthur Ashe and his contemporaries is still relevant today, as evident by the recent events in Ferguson, Missouri. Hall's book, Arthur Ashe: Tennis and Justice in the Civil Rights Era, was published this month by Johns Hopkins University Press. 

Alumni and friends reminisced about faculty, including former Department Chair Dr. Clarence MCord, and classes at receptions in the Atlanta area. Current Chair Dr. Pamela Bourland-Davis and Dean Dr. Curtis Ricker provided updates on the Department, including its move to Sanford Hall, and opportunities to recognize McCord's influence on developing the Department.

University President Dr. Brooks Keel hosted a ribbon-cutting for Sanford Hall, the newly renovated home of the Department, on August 21. Communication Arts will hold a barbeque and open-house at Sanford for alumni before the Eagles take on Savannah State on September 6. 

Writing & Linguistics

Professor Tim Giles' "A Dolphin Swims through It: An Argument for the Model as Metaphoric in Aristotle's Scientific Writing" has been accepted by the National Communication Association's annual conference in Chicago on November 20-23. Giles will also participate in a roundtable discussion, "The New Normal: Technical Communication Programs in an Age of Austerity," for the Council on Programs in Scientific and Technical Communication in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on September 25-27.

Faculty members who participated in the Georgia Southern Writing Project, including Lisa Costello, LeighAnn Williams, Christina Olson, Ben Drevlow, and project codirectors Kathy Albertson and June Joyner, will visit participants in their middle-school classrooms each month during the academic year to continue to help the teachers develop conversations and best practices for incorporating writing as a formative assessment tool. 

Laura Valeri's "Stealing from the Past" and "Tell Me Your Earliest Memory and I'll Tell You Who You Are" appear in Fiction Writer's Review. 

Jessica Nastal-Dema presented "In Search of Writing Assessments That Work" at the Council of Writing Program Administrators' national conference in Normal, Illinois.

Dr. Lisa Costello helmed a workshop at the National Holocaust Memorial Museum's Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies on teaching the Holocaust digitally on June 16-19. The workshop was led by Dr. Leah Wolfson and Dr. Emil Kerenji of the USHMM. 

Christina Olson's poetry appears in Heavy Feather Review, Commons Magazine, and North Chicago Review. Her "To the Stars through Difficulties" was reprinted on Verse Daily. 

Jared Yates Sexton's book-length collections "The Hook and the Haymaker" and "I Am the Oil of the Engine of the World" were accepted for publication by Split Lip Press. Sexton also had stories accepted by Sundog Lit and the RPM: Fiction with Torque anthology. 

Art

Last Fall, graphic design students worked with the Georgia Southern Museum to design The Mad Scientist's Laboratory. The exhibition will be on display until Jun. 25, 2015.

MFA Candidate Claudia Furlow's work was exhibited in the Virginia Festival Juried Fine Arts Show and received the Award of Excellence, the top prize for the show. 

Graphic design student Brittni Favorite designed the promotional items for Georgia Southern's Theatre & Performance program's 2014-2015 season. 

Foundations Professor Sarah Bielski's "First and Ten; Do It Again" has been accepted to the 2014 Arts Guild of New Jersey's NEXUS International Juried Exhibition in Rahway, New Jersey. 

Literature & Philosophy

Caren Town's book Unsuitable Books: Young Adult Fiction and Censorship has been published by McFarland Press. 

Mary Villeponteaux's book The Queen's Mercy: Gender and Judgement in Representations of Elizabeth I was published by Palgrave Macmillan. 

Beth Butterfield presented "Religious Values, Atheism, and the Project" at the Diverse Lineages of Existentialism Conference in St. Louis, and her chapter "The Devil Made Me Do It" was published in The Devil and Philosophy: The Nature of His Game, published by Open Court. 

William Eaton coordinated the Educating the Irish Genius conference in Kilkenny, Ireland. The philosophical symposium on the history of Irish thought was developed by the Department, the Center for Irish Research and Teaching, and Kilkenny College and featured leading experts on George Berkeley, Jonathan Swift, John Toland, and Katherine Jones.

Maria Adamos has been selected to the editorial board of the Athens Journal of Philosophy, whose first issue will be published in January. Adamos presented "The Unity of Emotion: An Unlikely Aristotelian Solution" at the Aristotle graduate seminar at the Aristotle University in Thessaloniki, Greece, in June. 

Music

Senior choral music education majors Nick Flott (left) and Chelsea Green (right) were selected as interns for the 62nd North Carolina Summer Institute of Choral Arts at Woodrow Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina. Through the program, six interns observed and assisted in rehearsals of middle- and high-school choirs, participated in workshops, attended master classes, and planned for and taught lessons to students preparing for the North Carolina Honors Choir. Dr. Mary Goetze (center), Professor Emerita at Indiana University and founding director of the Children's Choir and International Vocal Ensemble, served as the program's mentor teacher.

Dr. Tom Pearsall's book Keyboard Fundamentals Illustrated: Pentachords, Chords, Cadences and Scales/Arpeggios was published by Kona Press. Pearsall presented "Group Piano: Making it New with Practical Teaching Tips" at the National Group Piano and Piano Pedagogy Forum Conference in Cincinnati on August 1 and was appointed to the American Music Teacher journal's editorial committee for the 2015-2017 biennium. 

Dr. John Thompson presented his audio-visual composition "Stream Stone Surface" at the Toronto International Electroacoustic Symposium. The work has been shown at Wesleyan University as part of the Society for Electroacoustic Music in the United States' national conference, the Bradley Observatory Planetarium at Agnes Scott College, and Jacksonville University for the Lotusounds concert series and was accepted for presentation at the International Computer Music Conference in Greece. In September, Thompson will travel with music technology graduate students to Florida, where he is working with former student Michael Olson to coordinate Root Signals, an electronic music festival, in conjunction with Jacksonville University. Thompson spent the summer updating the music technology studios at Georgia Southern, which are now among the best in the Southeast. 

Dr. Linda Cionitti was awarded the Ruffin Cup by the College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences.

Criminal Justice & Criminology

MASS graduate students Shanna Felix and Joseph Bacot worked with Drs. Bryan Miller and Laura Agnich and colleagues Dr. John Stogner and Amber Sanders of University of North Carolina - Charlotte to have their article "Marketing a Panic: Media Coverage of Novel Psychoactive Drugs and Its Relationship with Legal Changes" accepted by the American Journal of Criminal Justice. 

Dr. Chad Posick and colleague Gregory Zimmerman of Northeastern University found in their recent study appearing in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence that in urban schools, the effect of victimization was dampened by other social factors while victimization's effect was greater in suburban/rural schools. In a separate article appearing in the Journal of Adolescent Health, these authors found that youth who associate with more delinquent peers are more likely to hurt others while depression differentiates those who direct harm inward. 

Dr. Laurie Gould coauthored with Matthew Pate of the University at Albany the chapter "Prison Privatization: The Political Economy of Race" in the book Color Behind Bars: Racism in the U.S. Prison System, published by ABC-CLIO. 

Political Science 

Undergraduate political science major James Farmer worked with Dr. Jamie Scalera on "Are There Cracks in the Democratic Peace?," which was published by the Interdisciplinary Journal of Undergraduate Research.  

Dr. Jamie Scalera will present "Euroskeptic Voting in European and National Elections: A Coalition Theory of European Voting," which she coauthored with Robert Pahre of the University of Illinois and Elizabeth Radziszewski of Lehigh University, at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in Washington, D.C. Scalera taught introduction to political science and introduction to the European Union courses in Paris this summer as part of the European Council's USG Program.

Dr. Robert Pirro presented "Aesthetic Legacies and Dashed Political Hopes" at a workshop organized by the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies at the Free University in Berlin. Pirro also presented "The Politics of Tragedy: Ein Konzept für die Politikwissenschaft" at a conference on Formen des Politischen hosted by the Department of Theology at Humboldt University in Berlin. He participated in a four-week NEH Summer Institute "Mortality: Facing Death in Ancient Greece" in Athens, Greece, in July.

Psychology

Doctoral students Kayla LeLeux-LaBarge and Arthur Hatton's poster, "Psychological Distress in Sexual Minorities: Examining the Roles of Self-Concealment and Psychology of Inflexibility," was accepted to the 2015 National Multicultural Conference and Summit. 

Dr. Bradley Sturz received the College's Award of Excellence.

Dr. Nicholas Holtzman had three articles accepted for publication: "Exploring Political Ideologies of Senators with Semantic Analysis Tools: Further Validation of CASS," coauthored with S. Kwong and K.L. Baird, in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology; "The Roots of Narcissus: Old and New Models of the Evolution of Narcissim," coauthored with M.B. Donnellan, in Evolutionary Perspectives on Social Psychology; and "Fast and Slow Sexual Strategies Are Not Opposites: Implications for Personality and Psychopathology," coauthored with A.L. Senne, in Psychological Inquiry. 

Center for Religious Studies

The Center welcomes two full-time lecturers for the 2014-2015 academic year: Juli Gittinger expects to receive her Ph.D. from McGill University this Fall and wrote her dissertation on practices of Hinduism in cyberspace. She is teaching courses on Asian religions. Dianel Pioske received his Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary and wrote his dissertation on the relation between history and memory in studies of the Hebrew Bible. He is teaching courses in biblical studies. 

The Center will present its third Undergraduate Research Symposium, with the theme "Religion and Media," in October.