Faculty Highlights

Our faculty members participate in conferences around the world, conduct groundbreaking research, and publish books and articles that expand their knowledge and expertise. Here are a few recent highlights.

Theodore Byrne, assistant professor of public administration, participated in the 2011 International Symposium on Ethic Leadership: “Ethical Leadership: Issues,Challenges and Opportunities”  in Chengdu, China, this past October. Byrne presented the topic “Ethical Dilemmas in a California City: Lessons in Leadership, Transparency, and Accountability” during a panel discussion on “Challenges: Building Organizations of Integrity” and presented a critique, “Building Organizations of Integrity.”

On February 23, associate professor of English Randy Cauthen gave a poetry reading along with local poets Barbara Blatt and Richard Bailey for The Third Area, a monthly reading series celebrating new work by local, regional, national, and international poets, both established and emerging, at the Rosamund Felsen Gallery at Bergamot Station Arts Center in Santa Monica. Cauthen read from his upcoming book, “Amphibian,” to be published by Polychrome later this year. Cauthen is also the author of a book of poetry, “The Use of Force” (Tchoupitoulas Press, 1989), and “Black Letters: An Ethnography of a Beginning Legal Writing Course” (New Jersey, Hampton Press, 2010).

Artwork created by professor of art Gilah Hirsch will be shown at the Santa Monica Museum of Art on March 17 as part of SMMoA’s exhibition and art sale, Incognito. Now in its eighth year, Incognito features for purchase original artworks by hundreds of contemporary artists — from well-known to emerging. Earlier in the day, Hirsch will be at the Leo Baeck Temple in Los Angeles for its Yom Limmud (Day of Learning) event to present “Cosmography: The Art of Gilah Yelin Hirsch,” a discussion of the relation between the Hebrew alphabet, patterns in nature, neurology, perception, imagery, and healing.

In early February, professor of biology Thomas Landefeld was part of a group of pre-health advisers invited to Ross University School of Medicine on the Caribbean island of Dominica to tour their facilities and their Miami location. As the pre-health adviser at CSU Dominguez Hills, such visits allow him to better advise CSUDH students as to their future studies in the fields of medicine. Then on Feb. 24, Landefeld was in Atlanta giving a talk, “Preparation for Graduate and Professional School,” to students in the Dr. John H. Hopps, Jr. Research Scholars Program at Morehouse College. The Hopps program is designed to increase the number of Morehouse students entering into PhD, MD/PhD or engineering graduate program. He’ll be off to New Orleans March 8 to give a similar seminar at Dillard University, where former CSUDH President James Lyons is interim president.

Our faculty members participate in conferences around the world, conduct groundbreaking research, and publish books and articles that expand their knowledge and expertise. Here are a few recent highlights.

Kenneth Ganezer, professor of physics, delivered an invited talk at the Department of Energy’s “Fundamental Physics at the Intensity Frontier” workshop in Rockville, Md., Nov. 30-Dec. 2, 2011. He focused on a process in which regular matter, in particular a neutron, spontaneously transforms into its antimatter counterpart, an antineutron, which then annihilates with matter inside an oxygen nucleus. This process is also referred to as neutron oscillations and has been predicted by the leading theories of unification of the fundamental forces and particles on nature, including string theories, in which particles and antiparticles are entangled. The data for this search was taken by the Super-Kamiokande Experiment in Mozumi, Japan, which has been conducted for 16 years by a team of physicists including Ganezer, physics department chair Jim Hill, and William E. Keig of El Camino College, Compton Learning Center. A number of CSU Dominguez Hills students have been involved in the research at Super-Kamiokande, which is continuing to take data.

Vivian Price, coordinator of Labor Studies, presented the documentary, “Harvest of Loneliness (Cosecha Triste),” (co-directed with Gilbert Gonzalez, UC Irvine) at the Festival Internacional del Nuevo Cine Latinamericano, which was held in Havana, Cuba in December. While attending the festival, Price participated in a panel on films portraying Latino lives in the United States. The film, which was aired last fall on PBS stations across the country, examines the United States’s bracero program, which recruited Mexican laborers for temporary work in the U.S. from 1942 to 1964. The documentary won the Cinelatino Audience Choice Award for a documentary at the 2010 Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival.

Franklin Strier professor emeritus of law, had his article, “The Roberts Court and the Separation of Church and State” published in the January issue of Dissent Magazine. The article, which has also been referenced on the Website, www.democraticunderground.com , discusses what Strier calls “a delicate, dual obligation upon government, under which Congress can neither empower religion nor restrict it.”  The author of the books, “The Adversary System” and “Reconstructing Justice,” Strier examines a number of cases that were affected by the “Establishment Clause” and the “Free Exercise Clause” of the First Amendment, and their interpretations by what he calls “an agenda-driven Supreme Court.”

Clare Weber, chair of sociology, and Kara Z. Dellacioppa, associate professor of sociology, co-edited “Cultural Politics and Resistance in the 21st Century: Community-Based Social Movements and Global Change in the Americas” which was released by Sage Publications last December. In addition, the co-editors each contributed a chapterDellacioppa authored the chapter on “Local Communities and Global Resistance: Social Change and Autonomy Struggles in the Americas” and Weber wrote “Struggles for Social Movement Autonomy in a Global Port City and another: Global movements? Local Movements?”

According to Dellacioppa, there have been monumental political and social shifts in Latin America in the last decade that have had reverberations in the United States, particularly immigrant community-based organizations.

“Newly developed social movements in Latin America have created new discourses and political practices and envisioning ‘new ways of living politics,’” says Dellacioppa. “These movements tend to be grassroots and articulate a notion of “autonomy” from the state but at the same time they seek to redistribute resources of the state from the rich to the poor.  Some of the most powerful movements have been the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil, the Zapatista movement in Mexico and the indigenous rights movement in Bolivia and Ecuador as well as the unemployed movement in Argentina. One outcome of these new movements has been the rejection of U.S. hegemony in the region through the election of left-leaning leaders such as Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia or more moderate leaders like Cristina Kirchner of Argentina. One thing common to all of these leaders is that no matter what their individual politics are, they all reject the notion that the U.S. should dictate the economic policies of Latin America.”

Our faculty members participate in conferences around the world, conduct groundbreaking research, and publish books and articles that expand their knowledge and expertise. Here are a few recent highlights.

Kirstin Ellsworth, a lecturer in the humanities program, served as co-editor of Women Inventing the 50s, a special December issue of Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. The issue included contributing articles that explored the wide range of women’s creative/scholarly input during the 1950s.

Bryan Feuer, a lecturer in the humanities program, had his article, “Being Mycenaean: A View From the Periphery,” published in the October issue of the American Journal of Archaeology. An expert on the Aegean Bronze Age, he has written extensively on  archaeology and the ancient world, including his books, “The Northern Mycenaean Border in Thessaly” and “Mycenaean Civilization.”

Munashe Furusa, acting associate dean of the College of Arts and Humanities and associate professor of Africana studies, contributed the chapter “Memory and the Mapping of a Nation in Crisis: Chenjerai Hove’s ‘Bones’ and the Narration of the Zimbabwean Nation,” to the recently published “Memory and the Narrative Imagination in the African and Diaspora Experience” (ed. Tom Spencer-Walters; 2011, Troy, Mich., Bedford Publisher, Inc.). In it, Furusa examines Chenjerai Hove’s 1988 novel, “Bones,” and its narration of the Zimbabwean nation underscoring a complex analysis of intersecting themes of race, class, and gender. Hove is one of the major writers in Zimbabwe and Africa who have engaged critical issues of oppression, dictatorship, and human rights violations caused by corrupt, undemocratic, and ineffective governments, both in the colonial and post-independence periods in Africa.

Associate professor of music Jonathon Grasse has had his latest album, “Chamber Music,” released by Centaur Records in November. Richard Kravchak, professor of music, is a guest artist on the album, which was made possible by a CSU Dominguez Hills Research, Scholarship, Creative Activities Award Program (RSCAAP) grant. In addition, Grasse’s ensemble, Surrealestate also released a new recording titled “Aporias” that will be available online on the Acoustic Levitation label. He is incorporating his fieldwork on the regional urban and rural music of Minas Gerais, Brazil into a forthcoming book.

Pamela Krochalk, professor and chair of the division of health sciences, co-authored an article that was published in Intergenerational Family Support for Chinese Older Adults a special issue of the International Journal of Social Welfare published in October. In “Widowhood, family support, and self-related health among older adults in China” Krochalk and co-authors Yawen Li, Iris Chi and Ling Xu look at the role family support and length of widowhood plays in the health of older widowed adults.

Jerry Moore, professor of anthropology, has been named as a visiting fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study at Durham University in the United Kingdom. Located at one of the United Kingdom’s top three research universities, the Institute of Advanced Study is an inter-disciplinary center for scholarly research and intellectual exchange, bringing together scholars from across the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences. Moore will be in residence at Durham University during the Spring 2013 semester and will work on “Constructing Time in South American Prehistory.”

Jung-Sun Park, professor of Asian Pacific studies, presented her paper, “South Korea’s ‘Multiple Citizenship’” at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, which was held in Montreal, Nov 16-20. She recently became a board member of the Association for the Studies of Koreans Abroad and the International Association of Comparative Korean Studies.

Our faculty members participate in conferences around the world, conduct groundbreaking research, and publish books and articles that expand their knowledge and expertise. Here are a few recent highlights.

Nancy Erbe, professor of negotiation, conflict resolution and peace building (NCRP) served on a panel of experts at the annual conference of the Association for Conflict Resolution (ACR) in San Diego in October. Along with colleagues from Fresno State and Wayne State, and CSU Dominguez Hills NCRP lecturer Greg Dern, she discussed “Beyond ‘The Fourth R’- Generating a Library of Best Practice in Conflict Resolution Education.” Erbe focused on her expertise on culturally sensitive curriculum and preventing and addressing violence in schools. NCRP alumna Jody Jones also presented at this conference.

Erbe has published articles on mediation’s impact on reducing violent behavior and the role of compassionate mentoring in ACR’s education newsletter, The Fourth R. Her new book, “Negotiation Alchemy: Global Skills Inspiring and Transforming Diverging Worlds” was published in August by Institute of Governmental Studies Press at the University of California-Berkeley. She recently co-presented “Addressing Critical Issues in Teaching:  Social Justice Pedagogy Across Disciplines” at the annual meeting of the Council of Social Work Education in Atlanta, Oct. 27-30. Erbe and her colleagues Candida Madrigal and Jocelyn Hermoso from San Francisco State and Joe Grimes from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo were supported in their presentation as a CSU-wide faculty research team with funding from the CSU Office of the Chancellor.

Emeritus professor of history Donald Hata served as a panelist at a community-wide symposium on “Cast in Bronze: Terminology and Memory of the Japanese American WWII Incarceration Experience,” held on Oct. 22 at the Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Northern California in San Francisco. His talk recalled the struggle to recognize the former concentration camps at Manzanar and Tule Lake, California in the 1970s, and highlights the need to replace the wartime euphemism of Japanese American “internment” with more accurate terms to describe the unconstitutional imprisonment of American citizens.

Hata will speak at a workshop on Nikkei and WWII for teachers of kindergarten through high school in Palo Alto and introduce the fourth edition of his book, “Japanese Americans and World War II: Mass Removal, Imprisonment, and Redress” (with Nadine Ishitani Hata) on November 17;  the event is hosted by the Inter-University Center for Japanese Studies at Stanford University. He will also give a talk on Nov. 29 on the exhibition, “Building Evidence: Japanese Americans in Southern California During Mid-Century. 40 Years of Collecting,” which is currently on view in the Archives and Special Collections of the University Library at CSU Dominguez Hills.

Professor of art Gilah Yelin Hirsch is featured in an exhibition, “Jüdische Frauen in der Bildenden Kunst” (Jewish Women in the Visual Arts), which is currently on view at Inselgalerie in Berlin. Her solo exhibition continues in its third year, at Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion, Los Angeles. Her recent publications include “Artist as Shaman – Conjuring Healing: Imagery, Bio-theology, Health & Right Action,” which was translated into Chinese for “Collections of Foreign Studies on Shamanism,” published by Dalian Nationalities University in Liaoning, China; and “Biotheology, Imagery, & Healing,” which appeared in the Journal of Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine.

In June, Hirsch was also invited to deliver a presentation on her work, titled “The Mystery of the White Spheres” at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. Her talk examined the confluence of her work in science and art. Hirsch also delivered a keynote address on, “Artist as Shaman” at the biennial conference of the International Society for Shamanic Research, which took place Oct. 5-9 in Warsaw, Poland at the State Ethnographic Museum. Her work will be featured in the upcoming “The World in Their Eyes,” an exhibition of faculty artists at CSU Dominguez Hills, opening on Nov. 9.

Professor of biology Thomas Landefeld served as keynote speaker at the 2011 STEM Kick-Off Event at Fayetteville State University in September. He was invited by the university’s Minority Biomedical Research Support (MBRS) program to speak on “Preparing for Graduate School.” He was also a panelist at the 3rd Annual John H. Hopps Research Scholars Program (HOPPS) Training Symposium and Recruitment Fair held at Morehouse College in September. The HOPPS program is funded by the Department of Defense and is named the renowned physicist and former Morehouse provost.

Landefeld was also a panelist in a session on “Demystifying the Admissions Process” at UCLA in September, when he spoke on the importance of a well-written personal statement. The session was part of the annual conference of the National Association of Medical Minority Educators.

Ericka Verba, associate professor of history, had her article, “Sewing Resistance” published in the anthology, “Mapping Latin America: A Cartographic Reader” (ed. Jordana Dym, Karl Offen). Verba’s article focuses on arpilleras, testimonial tapestries that were originally created by Chilean women during the Pinochet regime of the 1970s.

Our faculty members participate in conferences around the world, conduct groundbreaking research, and publish books and articles that expand their knowledge and expertise. Here are a few recent highlights.

 

Carrie Blackaller, professor and chair of special education, and Shirley Lal, emeritus faculty, Teacher Education, presented “A Mentoring Support Process: School and University Collaboration” at the 12th Biennial Conference of the International Association of Special Education in Windhoek, Nambia.

Kirti Celly, professor of management and marketing, co-wrote an article, “50th Anniversary Commemoration at a Major Public University: Benefits of an Integrated Branding and Communications Approach to Event Planning,” that was published in the International Journal of NonProfit and Voluntary Sector Marketing. In the article, she and co-author Brenda Knepper, director of University Communications and Public Affairs, describe the campaign to publicize the 50th anniversary of CSU Dominguez Hills.

Celly also led a session on “Managing disruptive student behavior” with colleagues from CSU Northridge at the 2011 Marketing Educators Association Spring Conference. Her article, “Promoting promotions: Does showcasing free gifts backfire?,” co-authored with Dr. Priya Raghubir of NYU, appeared in the January 2011 issue of the Journal of Business Research.

Nancy Cheever, associate professor and chair of communications, presented her research, “Emotional and Attitudinal Responses to Viewing Mixed Martial Arts,” at the 2011 convention of the American Psychological Association in Washington D.C. in August. She co-wrote “Teaching the iGeneration,” which was published in Educational Leadership; and “An Empirical Examination of the Educational Impact of Text Message-Induced Task Switching in the Classroom” with Larry Rosen, professor of psychology; L. Mark Carrier, associate professor of psychology; and Alex Lim (Class of ’10, B.S., psychology), which was published in Psychologia Educativa (The Spanish Journal of Educational Psychology). She is also co-author of “iDisorder: Understanding Our Dependency on Technology and Overcoming Our Addiction,” with Rosen and Carrier; the book will be published next March by Palgrave Macmillan.

Matthew Jones, associate professor of mathematics, was recognized by the Whittier City School District (WCSD) in August for his contributions to a six-year project between CSU Dominguez Hills and WCSD. With a $2,621,801 grant from the California Math-Science Partnership, Jones and his colleagues provided professional development for 80 of the district’s elementary and junior high school math teachers.

Matt Mutchler, associate professor of sociology and acting director of the Urban Community Research Center, was co-author on  “Sex Drugs, Peer Connections and HIV:  Use and Risk among African American, Latino and Multiracial Young Men Who Have Sex with Men (YMSM) in Los Angeles and New York,” which was published in the Journal of Gay and Lesbian Social Services and “The Effect of Partner Sex:  Nondisclosure of HIV Status to Male and Female Partners among Men who Have Sex with Men and Women (MSMW),” in which appeared in the August 2011 issue of AIDS and Behavior.