Every year, the General Board of Higher Education and Ministry awards Sam Taylor Fellowships to full-time faculty members at United Methodist–affiliated colleges and universities in Texas. This year, eight Southwestern University faculty members won grants up to $2,000:

• Associate Professor of French Aaron Prevots, “Esther Tellermann: Enigma, Prayer, Identity”
• Associate Professor of Spanish María de los Ángeles Rodriguez Cadena, “Cultural Memory and Historical Fiction: Women of the Past on Television and Film by Four Contemporary Mexican Women Directors”
• Associate Professor of Computer Science Barbara Anthony, “The Social Welfare of Human Behavior in Doodle Polls”
• Associate Professor of Psychology Bryan Neighbors, “Central Texas Treatment Center Aftercare Assessment”
• Associate Professor of German Erika Berroth, “Minimalism and Restraint”
• Professor of Psychology Fay Guarraci, “Poverty: Understanding the Long-Term Effects of Poverty Using an Animal Model”
• Assistant Professor of History Joseph Hower, “The Life and Career of Author–Activist Ralph de Toledano”
• Associate Professor of Communication Studies Valerie Renegar, “Contemporary Modes of Parenting: Disrupting the Representation of Stepmothers in Popular Culture”

Learn more about this prestigious grant here.

Assistant Professor of History Joseph Hower published a short review of Steven Attewell’s People Must Live by Work: Direct Job Creation in America, from FDR to Reagan in the September issue of History: Reviews of New Books.

Visiting Assistant Professor of History Joseph Hower published “Public Sector Unions in the United States” in the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Urban History (ed. Timothy Gilfoyle; Oxford University Press, 2019, pp. 271–285). The essay is a (slightly) modified version of a piece that was originally included in the digital Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History  and was selected for traditional print publication based in part on heavy online traffic.

Visiting Assistant Professor of History Joseph Hower presented a paper titled “The Union of the Future: The Politics of the Presidency in a Public Sector Union, 1958–1964” at the annual meeting of the Labor and Working Class History Association Conference, held May 30–June 1 at Duke University in Durham, NC.

Reconsidering Southern Labor History: Race, Class, and Power (University of Florida Press, 2018) has won the 2019 Best Book Award from the United Association of Labor Education. Visiting Assistant Professor of History Joseph Hower contributed a chapter titled “‘A Threshold Moment’: Public-Sector Organizing and Civil Rights Unionism in the Postwar South.”