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Faculty Notes
 By official Congressional decree, 2003 has been designated the "Year of the Blues." In that spirit,
Jerry Zolten, associate professor of communication arts and sciences at Penn State Altoona, produced a one-hour radio blues special, "Chimpin' the Blues," with cartoonist Robert Crumb (of the Academy Award nominated films,
Crumb, Ghost World, and the recently released American Splendor). The show is an off-beat, off-the-cuff, one-hour excursion into the blues, pre-blues, gospel, and jazz of the 1920s and '30s, seasoned with plenty of anecdotes and trivia.
The show debuted in Oklahoma on September 15 and aired in Central Pennsylvania on Saturday, September 20 on WPSU-FM. The show was also broadcast in Australia, Belgium and public radio stations around the country.
"Chimpin' the Blues" with Crumb and Zolten includes 13 rare tracks accompanied by pertinent background information. It covers a dimension of the blues that will simply not be heard in any other media tribute in this, the official "Year of the Blues."
 Zolten is an academic, record producer, and author. He teaches courses in communication arts and sciences, american studies, and integrative arts at Penn State Altoona. In the early 1980s, he spearheaded the return to commercial recording and touring of Grammy-winning a cappella gospel quartet, the Fairfield Four. Zolten produced the group's only live CD, Wreckin' the House (Dead Reckoning/Compendia) and a solo CD, Beautiful Starts (Lost Highway) by Fairfield Four bass singer, Isaac Dickie Freeman. Author of numerous roots music liner notes and profiles of blues artists, Zolten's latest work is the book,
Great God A' Mighty! The Dixie Hummingbirds / Celebrating the Rise of Soul Gospel Music (Oxford Univer-sity Press). Zolten, himself a rabid collector of rare 78-rpms, first connected with Crumb in the early 1980s with the receipt of a letter from the cartoonist offering to trade his artwork for records. Finding kinship in their shared obsession, the two have remained friends ever since. For more information about the radio broadcast, go to http://wpsu.org/crumb/stations.html
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Dinty W. Moore, professor of English and integrative arts, taught a five-week graduate workshop in Writing Creative Nonfiction this past July and August in Madrid, Spain. The course was part of the University of New Orleans' Madrid Summer Seminars. In addition, Moore did a public reading,
"Son of Mr. Green Jeans: An Essay on Fatherhood, Alphabetically Arranged," at the
Colegio Mayor Chaminade in Madrid's University District. |
Sylvester Osagie, assistant professor of labor studies and industrial relations, won a Fulbright-Hays 2003 Summer Abroad Grant and will be spending part of his summer in Ghana. These grants provide US educators with intense study/travel opportunity to improve their knowledge of their respective host countries. While in Ghana, Dr. Osagie will gather information on how informal institutions mediate the effects of globalization.
Mary Lou Nemanic, communications program coordinator, and communications faculty member
Doug Nemanic spent six days shooting a documentary on the 100th anniversary celebration of the northern Minnesota Iron Range town of Aurora. They captured more than 5 hours of video and more than 300 still photographs, documenting events from dedications to pie eating contests. Doug photographed the town portrait from a cherry picker above Main Street, where the crowd filled the street for 2 1/2 blocks.
Besides their documentary work, Mary Lou did additional research for her book, One Day for Democracy on the history of the Fourth of July nationally and on the Iron Range of Minnesota and the relationship of Independence Day to mass culture.
In April Mary Lou presented a paper, entitled The Realities of Reality-Based Television, on the effects of reality-based television on documentary at the national Popular Culture/American Culture Associations joint conference in New Orleans.
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Mary Lou Nemanic |
Merel J. Cox (Jack), part-time instructor in geography, was a guest speaker at the tenth anniversary of the Pittsburgh Herpetological Society in Monroeville. His presentation was entitled
"A Poor Man's Guide to Snakes and Other Interesting Things in Thailand." The meeting was attended by approximately 200 herpetologists from Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio.
| A farewell party was held this past summer to honor Major Dwayne Hynes, assistant professor of military science and ROTC program coordinator. Major Hynes had been at Penn State Altoona for three years; he will now be working in the Pentagon in Washington, DC. assisting a two-star General in evaluating the readiness of field artillery.
Captain Rob Cruz will now serve in Hynes' place. Rob comes to Penn State Altoona from Ft. Bragg, NC, where he was an Airborne Military Police company commander. |
Captain Rob Cruz |
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Rebecca Strzelec, assistant professor of visual arts, is be showing wearable objects in "Tech Art" from November 7 to December 12 at The Olin Fine Art Center at Washington and Jefferson College. Rebecca participated in two exhibitions this summer; her work was shown at the Chautauqua Center for the Visual Arts "46th Annual National Juried Exhibition of American Art" in Chautauqua, New York and the internationally juried art gallery of SIGGRAPH 2003 in San Diego.
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Roselyn Constantino, associate professor of Spanish and women's studies, was an invited senior scholar at the Third Annual Seminar
and Festival of Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics in New York
City this past July, where she presented "Body, Memory, and Terror." She also
served as a keynote speaker at the International Congress of Ibero-American
Women on State Escenario/Annual Ibero-American International Theatre Festival in
Cadiz, Spain in October.
Instructor in theatre arts, Carlos Ruiz's theatre/puppet work,
Sadomasofixions, debuted at the Third Annual Seminar and Festival of the
Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics in New York City this past
July. Directed by Roselyn Costantino, Ruiz created the script, the set, and the
puppets. Ruiz and Costantino were the puppeteers, four professional actors -
Penn State graduates - provided voices, and Penn State Altoona student Ryan
McFarland designed the sound.
Ian Marshall, professor of English, who as the incoming President of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) recently organized and hosted the association's fifth biennial, international conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In addition to hosting the five day event, Ian gave a reading from his recent book,
Peak Experiences. Other Penn State Altoona faculty who participated in the conference include Joanna Goodman, Carolyn Mahan, and Sandy Petrulionis.
Kevin Moist, assistant professor of communications, gave a talk entitled "The Art of the Music Poster of the 60's and 70's" at the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art in Altoona in conjunction with a museum exhibit with the same subject matter.
L. Edward Day, assistant professor of criminal justice, and Tracy Reilly, student supervisor at Eiche Library and a May graduate of the criminal justice program, presented their paper, "An Instructor's Guide to the International Criminal Court," at the annual meeting of the Northeast Association on Criminal Justice Sciences. L. Edward Day's paper,
"Teaching the Ultimate Crime: Genocide and International Crime in the Criminal Justice Curriculum," coauthored with Margaret Vandiver and W. Richard Janikowski of the University of Memphis, appeared in the most recent issue of the Journal of Criminal Justice Education.
Margaret Moses was recently honored by the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association and the Pennsylvania Women's Press Association with a third place award for page design in the Altoona Mirror.
Valerie Stratton, associate professor of psychology, has been appointed to the permanent position of Head, Division of Education, Human Development, and Social Sciences, effective July 1.
Yaw Agawu-Kakraba, associate professor of Spanish, gave a public lecture on contemporary Spanish culture and fiction at Clarion University. His talk concluded this year's Clarion University Foundation Lecture Series on culture and literature sponsored by the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures. His essay, "José Angel Maña's Literature of Insurgency:
Historias del Kronen" was recently published in Revista Hispánica Moderna.
Agawu-Kakraba also gave a lecture on September 25 at the XIth Congress of International Federation for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Osaka in Japan. The lecture was entitled "The Human Element in the Later Works of Nicolás Guillén."
Bob Trumpbour, assistant professor of communications, worked as production assistant for the CBS radio broadcast of the Steelers\Browns game at Heinz Field on October 5, 2003. He is scheduled to work as field coordinator for a CBS Radio Monday night game in Cleveland later this year.
Valerie Stratton, associate professor of psychology, and Annette Zalanowski, associate professor of music, presented their paper, "Anticipated Pleasure and Music Choice Based on Memory VS Samples" at the international meeting of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition, UNLV, Las Vegas; "Predicting Enjoyment of Music from Memory and Samples" at the American Music Therapy Association's national meeting in Minneapolis.
Mary De Jong, associate professor of English and women's studies, participated in the conference of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers in Fort Worth, Texas. She presented "Antebellum Female Seminaries and Boarding Schools: Dangerous Environments for the Female 'Constitution.'"
Jennifer Streb, part-time instructor in art history, was selected to participate in the Graduate Student Summer Residency Program at Penn State's Institute for the Arts and Humanities which allowed her to continue work on her dissertation titled "Minna Citron: A Feminist Critique of an Artist's Satirical Realism in the 1930s." Other awards received this past summer which had aided in the continued success of the project include The Francis E. Hyslop Memorial Fellowship and the Art History Donors Travel Grant.
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Sandy Petrulionis, associate professor of English, was recently awarded a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to work on her book,
"Murder to the State": The Abolitionist Movement in Henry D. Thoreau's Concord. She has also been appointed as the Executive Secretary of the international Thoreau Society.
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Brian Black, associate professor of history, is a member of an eight-member faculty team under the direction of Sharon Moran of Temple University that was awarded a three-year, $100,000 grant by the Pennsylvania Department of the Environment. Their project, titled "The Environmental Law and Policy Project," will generate environmental educational materials to be used by K-12 educators throughout the Commonwealth.
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