Honored for Exemplary Service

Dana Hendrix was one of four Southwestern University employees who received the 2012 Joe S. Mundy Award for Exemplary Service. President Jake B. Schrum presented the awards as part of his annual State of the University Address Aug. 23. Hendrix is head of collection development and acquisitions at the A. Frank Smith Jr. Library Center. Read more below.

Top News

SOUTHWESTERN INCLUDED IN NEW EDITION OF COLLEGES THAT CHANGE LIVES

 Southwestern University is one of the colleges included in an updated edition of the influential book Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Schools That Will Change the Way You Think About Colleges.

Southwestern was included in the original edition of Colleges That Change Lives, which was published in 1996. The original book was written by Loren Pope, former education editor of The New York Times and longtime education consultant.  

Pope wanted to help high school students find colleges that help them develop a lifelong love of learning and provide the foundation for a successful and fulfilling life beyond college. In many cases, these turned out to be colleges that weren’t necessarily very well known.

Read more here.

FOUR HONORED FOR EXEMPLARY SERVICE TO SOUTHWESTERN

Two current and two former Southwestern employees were recently honored for exemplary service to the university.

The four received the Joe S. Mundy Exemplary Service Award, which was created in 2002 as a memorial to the leadership of former alumnus and Trustee Joe Mundy. The award honors faculty and staff members who have demonstrated exemplary service to Southwestern.

This year’s award winners were John Chapman, professor emeritus of mathematics; Dana Hendrix, head of collection development and acquisitions at the A. Frank Smith Jr. Library Center; Mike Leese, former dean of students; and Scott Sandoval, senior associate director of admissions.

Read more here.

SOUTHWESTERN GRADUATE EARNS A SPOT ON THE U.S. PARALYMPIC TEAM

A Southwestern University graduate is among the athletes who will be representing the United States in the 2012 Paralympic Games, which will be held in London Aug. 29-Sept. 9.

Steve Baldwin will be among 112 wheelchair tennis competitors from around the world vying for medals in the Paralympics. The competition will take place at Eton Manor, a 10,500-seat venue in London’s Olympic Park that was built specifically for wheelchair tennis.

Baldwin, who friends describe as a natural athlete, was a soccer player in high school before he was injured in a car accident. He took tennis as a PE credit at Southwestern and then continued playing the game with classmates.

“I always thought it was impressive how good he was with such little training,” said his former roommate, Michael Cravey. “I was a serviceable player and he could regularly beat me.”

Read more here.

Events

SPANISH FILM FESTIVAL STARTS SEPT. 6

The Spanish Department, along with the student groups Sigma Delta Pi (the Spanish honor society) and Latinos Unidos, are hosting a film festival Sept. 6-Oct. 4 that will feature five films from Spanish-speaking countries. The festival begins Sept. 6 with a screening of  “El niño pez” (“The Fish Child”), a 2011 film from Argentina.

All films will be shown in Olin 105 at 8 p.m.

Read more here.

Media Coverage

The Austin Business Journal, the Austin American-Statesman, Community Impact newspaper and the Williamson County Sun covered the announcement of President Schrum’s retirement. Read the ABJ story here. Read the Statesman story here. Read the Community Impact story here.

The Williamson County Sun ran photos of the Aug. 18 event held at the Williamson County Courthouse to welcome new parents.

Notables

Barbara Anthony, assistant professor of computer science, presented a paper at the 6th Annual International Conference on Combinatorial Optimization and Applications held in Banff, Canada, in August. The paper, titled “Online Bottleneck Matching,” was co-authored with Christine Chung, assistant professor of computer science at Connecticut College, and published in Springer’s Lecture Notes in Computer Science series.

Shana Bernstein, associate professor of history, gave several invited lectures over the summer. In May, she gave a lecture titled “Nazis, Red-Baiting, and Civil Rights: Jewish Americans as Interracial Activists in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles” at Stanford University’s Research Institute for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity. In June, she gave a lecture titled “Immigration: The ‘Second Wave’ Re-imagined” at the Texas Humanities Institute’s summer teacher program at the University of Houston. In August, she was a participant on a roundtable titled “Race and Politics in Postwar California” at the Pacific Coast Branch American Historical Association conference in San Diego. Bernstein has been named a 2012-2013 Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians (OAH). Read more here.

Identity Papers: Contemporary Narratives of American Jewishness by Helene Meyers, professor of English and McManis University Chair, has recently been released in paperback and also has been “highly recommended” by Choice. 

Kate Nelson, a studio technician in the Sarofim School of Fine Arts, has had a piece accepted for the DeLuce Clay National, a juried exhibition that will be on display Oct. 1-Nov. 2 at Northwest Missouri State University.

Ben Pierce, professor of biology and holder of the Lillian Nelson Pratt Chair, published an article in the Southwestern Naturalist along with former students Tiffany Biagas, Alex Hall and Alexis Ritzer.  The article is titled “Time of day does not affect detection in visual encounter surveys of a spring-dwelling salamander, Eurycea naufragia.” Pierce was recently awarded a third year of funding from the Williamson County Research Foundation for his research on the Georgetown salamander.

President Jake B. Schrum has been named to the Steering Committee for the American College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment. Read more here. President Schrum also has been elected a trustee of Agnes Scott College in Atlanta.

Eric Selbin, professor of political science and University Scholar, was a visiting professor at the Tallinn Postgraduate Summer School in Social and Cultural Studies, where he co-taught a graduate course titled “Revisiting the Revolution: Past, Present, Perspectives” with Christopher Finlay, Ernesto Laclau, Todd May, Dalia Mostofa and Chantel Mouffe. He also gave a public talk titled “‘The Revolution’ (Such As It Is) Has Been and Will Be Televised, Texted, Youtubed, Facebooked, and Tweeted: Does it Matter? ID-even-K. Is It New? Maybe. Is It Different? Sure. Shiny Too” and presented one of the featured papers at the Eighth Estonian Institute of Humanities Symposium in Social and Cultural Theory titled “Reclaiming and Reanimating Our Stories of Resistance, Rebellion, and Revolution: Eleven Theses in Search of an Audience.”

Mary Hale Visser, professor of art and holder of the Herman Brown Chair, presented a paper on “Cybersculpture: materials, processes and the history of sculpture in the digital age” at the European Forum on Rapid Prototyping and Manufacturing symposium held in Paris in June.