ELECTION BIOGRAPHICAL STATEMENTS 2008
Note that not every candidate submitted a bio.
Promotion, Tenure & Membership Committee
Bede Clarke joined the faculty at MU in 1992 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 1998 and then Full Professor in 2004. He was awarded with the Chancellor’s Award for Outstanding Research/Creative Activity in the Humanities and Fine Arts in 2003.
Peter Vallentyne is Florence G. Kline Professor of Philosophy at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He has edited 9 books, published over 70 articles, and is co-editor of Economics and Philosophy. He has held an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship and directed a National Endowments for the Humanities project on ethics across the curriculum. Before joining MU, he taught Virginia Commonwealth University, where he was active in faculty governance. He served for 12 years (1988-2000) as chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies. He also served as President of the local AAUP chapter, on the College Faculty Council, on the University Council, on the Faculty Senate, on the Institutional Effectiveness Committee for Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Self-Study, and as chair of the University Rules and Procedures Revision Committee. He joined MU in 2003, where he has been Director of Graduate Studies for Philosophy since 2005.
Executive Committee
Robert M. Baum is an associate professor in Religious Studies, where he currently teaches courses in African religions, Native American religions and Islam. Prior to coming to Mizzou, he has taught in history and comparative humanities programs, as well as anthropology. His research focuses on the religious and social history of Africa. His first book, Shrines of The Slave Trade: Diola Religion and Society in Precolonial Senegambia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) received an award from the American Academy of Religion, for the best first book in the History of Religions. He is currently writing a book on Diola women prophets in Senegal, Gambia, and Guinea-Bissau. Since coming to Mizzou, Professor Baum has been a project leader for the Ford Foundation Difficult Dialogues Project, and been an active affiliate with the Pew Center for Religion and the Professions, and the Center for the Humanities. He also serves on the Advisory Committee to the Chief Diversity Officer of the University, Coordinator of the vice Provost's African Initiative Group, and has served in a variety of capacities within his department. At a national level, he is co-founder of the African Religion's group of the American Academy of Religion and has served on the Board of Directors of the West African Research Association and the North American Association for the Study of Religion. He is been actively involved in outreach, particularly on Islamic issues, and has directed two summer institutes, funded by the National Endowment For The Humanities and the Ohio Humanities Council, on the comparative study of myth and folklore as a way of enriching multi-cultural education.
Gail S. Ludwig is an associate professor in the Department of Geography. Geospatial and geography education have been central to her professional career. Her research interests focus upon visualization of geographic information and the development of multimedia modules for teaching geography. She served as Chair of the Geography Department from 2003-2007 and now is enjoying her return to the regular faculty ranks!
Dave McDonald. After finishing his graduate work at Washington University in St. Louis, followed by a short stay with the U.S. Navy, McDonald joined the faculty of the University of Missouri in 1963, nearly 45 years ago. His early research interests were in the psychophysiology of normal human sleep, funded by several grants from NIMH and NSF. He continues his interests in sleep research to this day, writing periodic reviews on the topic, and he is presently conducting a project on issues in adolescent sleep. He has published a research and theory text in health psychology, specifically on the psychological effects of aerobic fitness training. He has taught introductory psychology nearly every semester since coming to Columbia, plus additional courses on sleep and sleep disorders, health psychology, and human memory. He has held a number of administrative appointments, including department chair, associate dean of arts and science, and others, plus committee appointments too numerous to list. He currently serves as his department’s associate chair for faculty development.
Peverill Squire. I hold the Hicks and Martha Griffiths Chair in American Political Institutions. I received my Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1986. I am the co-editor of Legislative Studies Quarterly. I have written several books, the most recent being 101 Chambers: Congress, State Legislatures, and the Future of Legislative Studies, and published extensively in the discipline’s leading journals. Until recently I was on the faculty at the University of Iowa where I served on the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences’ Committee on Promotion and Tenure, was elected chair of the Faculty Assembly, and received a Collegiate Teaching Award and a Regents Award for Faculty Excellence.
Ian Worthington is Frederick A. Middlebush Professor of History. He taught for ten years in the Classics departments at the Universities of New England and of Tasmania in Australia before moving to Missouri in 1998. He has served, or is serving, on the Curators’ Screening, Tenure Probationary Extension, Lectures, Hearnes Center, Ancient Studies, and Center for Studies in Oral Tradition Committees, and on various committees in his department and in national and international professional organizations in his field. He has convened a number of national and international conferences, and founded the biennial Orality and Literacy in Ancient Greece conference series as well as the biennial Fordyce Mitchel Memorial Lecture Series, sponsored by the History department. He has published 13 sole-authored and edited books and over 80 articles on Greek history, epigraphy and oratory, including, most recently, the biographies Alexander the Great: Man and God (London 2004) and Philip II of Macedonia (New Haven, CN 2008) and the Blackwell Companion to Greek Rhetoric (Oxford 2006). He is currently writing a biography of Demosthenes, editing the Blackwell Companion to Ancient Macedonia, and is Editor-in-Chief of Brill's New Jacoby, a new edition, with translations and commentaries, of 856 fragmentary Greek historians involving a team of 112 scholars in 16 countries (published in biannual installments, 2007-2013). He is also filming a course on the ancient Greek world for The Teaching Company in summer 2008. In 2005 he won the Chancellor’s Award for Outstanding Research and Creativity in the Humanities and in 2007 the Student-Athlete Advisory Council Most Inspiring Professor Award.
John Zemke took his doctorate in medieval Spanish literature at the University of California, Davis in 1988. His publications examine medieval Spanish and medieval Hebrew literatures. Since arriving at MU in 1993 he has served on various campus committees and sits now on the A&S Executive Committee.
Campus Committee on Tenure
Rainer Glaser, Ph.D., M.S., Dipl.-Chem., Professor of Chemistry, studied in Tuebingen, Berkeley, and at Yale before beginning his independent academic career at MU in 1989. Dr. Glaser’s activities in research and education are characterized by uncommon breadth and interdisciplinary collaboration. Dr. Glaser has been active to strengthen academic freedom and faculty self-government and to invigorate the academic and social responsibilities of tenured faculty. Dr. Glaser was elected to AAAS Fellow (2005) and Fellow of the Royal Chemical Society (2006).
Ellie Ragland, Professor of English, received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and has taught at several universities, including the University of Paris VIII. A former Middlebush Chair, she is the author of Rabelais and Panurge: A Psychological Approach to Literary Character; Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis; Essays on the Pleasures of Death: From Freud to Lacan; The Logic of Sexuation: From Aristotle to Lacan. Her forthcoming book is entitled Demystifying Language: Uncovering Structure in Lacan. She coedited Lacan and the Subject of Language with Mark Bracher and Lacan: Topologically Speaking with Dragan Milovanovic. She edited Critical Essays on Jacques Lacan. She is the former editor of Newsletter of the Freudian Field and currently edits (Re)-Turn: A Journal of Lacanian Studies. She has published over 100 articles and lectured nationally and internationally in some 200 places.
Marcus Rautman joined the MU department of Art History & Archaeology in 1986, and has served as its director of undergraduate studies, graduate studies, and chair. He teaches courses at all levels, mainly concerning the visual culture of classical antiquity and its reception in the early Middle Ages. His current research focuses on urban life in the east Mediterranean.
Ken Sheldon has been in the Department of Psychological Sciences at MU since 1997, having attained full professorship in 2005. He studies motivation, positive psychology, and subjective well-being. He is interested in learning more about the inner workings of the campus, and feels that the faculty committee on tenure is a good place to learn.
Ian Worthington is Frederick A. Middlebush Professor of History. He taught for ten years in the Classics departments at the Universities of New England and of Tasmania in Australia before moving to Missouri in 1998. He has served, or is serving, on the Curators’ Screening, Tenure Probationary Extension, Lectures, Hearnes Center, Ancient Studies, and Center for Studies in Oral Tradition Committees, and on various committees in his department and in national and international professional organizations in his field. He has convened a number of national and international conferences, and founded the biennial Orality and Literacy in Ancient Greece conference series as well as the biennial Fordyce Mitchel Memorial Lecture Series, sponsored by the History department. He has published 13 sole-authored and edited books and over 80 articles on Greek history, epigraphy and oratory, including, most recently, the biographies Alexander the Great: Man and God (London 2004) and Philip II of Macedonia (New Haven, CN 2008) and the Blackwell Companion to Greek Rhetoric (Oxford 2006). He is currently writing a biography of Demosthenes, editing the Blackwell Companion to Ancient Macedonia, and is Editor-in-Chief of Brill's New Jacoby, a new edition, with translations and commentaries, of 856 fragmentary Greek historians involving a team of 112 scholars in 16 countries (published in biannual installments, 2007-2013). He is also filming a course on the ancient Greek world for The Teaching Company in summer 2008. In 2005 he won the Chancellor’s Award for Outstanding Research and Creativity in the Humanities and in 2007 the Student-Athlete Advisory Council Most Inspiring Professor Award.
Faculty Council
André Ariew is an associate professor of Philosophy with a specialty in philosophy of science in general and theories of evolution in particular. He joined MU in 2006. Prior to 2006 he was an assistant then associate professor at the University of Rhode Island where he served on the Faculty Council for an eventful three years. He's held visiting scholar positions at University of Wisconsin, Cambridge University, and for seven years he was an Associate at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard.
Charles Borduin, professor of Psychological Sciences, has been a member of the MU faculty since 1982. He is a recipient of the Kemper Teaching Fellowship, and his research on violent juvenile offenders is funded by NIMH. He has served on the Honors Council, Research Council, Graduate Faculty Senate, Campus IRB, Faculty Council, and Promotion, Tenure, and Membership Committee.
Richard Callahan is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies. He has been at MU since 2000, first in a visiting position before becoming a regular tenure-track faculty member. His research and teaching focus on religion in American history and the cultural study of religion. He is the author of Work and Faith in the Kentucky Coal Fields: Subject to Dust and editor of New Territory, New Perspectives: The Religious Impact of the Louisiana Purchase. He has served on the Chancellor's Lecture Committee, the Chancellor's Status of Women Committee, numerous departmental search committees, and will be serving on the MU Campus Writing Board. He has received the Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching with Technology Award at MU and has been awarded grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Missouri Humanities Council, the Pew Program in Religion and American History (Yale University), the Young Scholars in American Religion Program (IUPUI and the Lilly Endowment), and other sources. He is active in his discipline, serving regionally as Chair of the Religion and American Culture Section of the Midwest American Academy of Religion, and nationally as Co-Chair of the Religion and Popular Culture Group of the American Academy of Religion. He regularly serves on thesis and dissertation committees in History, Sociology, and English (Folklore), and teaches courses that are cross-listed with other departments; this interdisciplinary contact helps to give him a broad sense of faculty concerns in the college.
April Langley is an Associate Professor of English. She has been at the University of Missouri-Columbia since 2001. Her areas of specialization are 18th and 19th-century African American and Afro-British American literature, autobiography and Black Feminist/Womanist theory. She has published several articles, presented at numerous national and international conferences and her first book The Black Aesthetic Unbound: Theorizing the Dilemma of Eighteenth-Century African American Literature was recently published (2008) by Ohio State University Press. She received her Ph.D. from University of Notre Dame in 2001. Her research and scholarship has garnered several awards including University of Missouri Research Council, Board, International Travel, Summer Research, and Center for Arts and Humanities grants and fellowship as well as American Association of University Women Dissertation Award, and a postdoctoral fellowship in African and Afro-American Studies Washington University in St. Louis. She is a 2008 Gold Chalk Award winner for graduate advising, and a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Among her interest in working with students, and colleagues in African Diaspora Studies Concentration in her department, Langley also enjoys being an affiliate faculty member of Black Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies, and has been a McNair Liaison and member of University Library Committee for since 2004.
Shawn Ni is Professor of Economics and Adjunct Professor of Statistics at University of Missouri-Columbia. He conducts research on a wide range of problems in macroeconomics, econometrics, and government finance, and has published numerous articles in leading journals in these areas. Professor Ni has taught introductory, intermediate, and advanced economics courses and has been a devoted adviser for graduate students. He has served in various committees in the economics department and the college of arts and science.
Michael Taksar received his Ph. D. in Mathematics from Cornell University in 1979. After graduation he worked at Stanford University, Florida State University, State University of New York at Stony Brook. He joined the faculty of the University of Missouri in 2002. He is currently a Professor at the Department of Mathematics, where he is in charge of the Program in Mathematical Finance and Actuarial Science. He served as a member of math department Executive Committee in 2006. Currently he is a member of the Faculty council where he served in Academic Affairs and Fiscal Committees.
Michael Urban has been at MU since 1998. He is Associate Professor in Geography where he teaches a number of undergraduate and graduate courses in physical geography, geomorphology and geographical philosophy. His research explores the role humans play in shaping the world around them, both the social drivers and the bio-physical environmental impacts resulting from this interaction. Recent projects have focused on environmental perception and fluvial geomorphology, documenting historic modifications of stream systems throughout the agricultural Midwest and East Asia, and the role of physical and biotic restoration in environmental management strategies. Recent research funding has been through the EPA and Missouri State Department of Conservation. Urban spent 2006-2007 as a Fulbright Fellow in the Peoples' Republic of China. He has previously served on the MU Academic Integrity Assessment and A&S Status of Women Committees.
Ian Worthington is Frederick A. Middlebush Professor of History. He taught for ten years in the Classics departments at the Universities of New England and of Tasmania in Australia before moving to Missouri in 1998. He has served, or is serving, on the Curators’ Screening, Tenure Probationary Extension, Lectures, Hearnes Center, Ancient Studies, and Center for Studies in Oral Tradition Committees, and on various committees in his department and in national and international professional organizations in his field. He has convened a number of national and international conferences, and founded the biennial Orality and Literacy in Ancient Greece conference series as well as the biennial Fordyce Mitchel Memorial Lecture Series, sponsored by the History department. He has published 13 sole-authored and edited books and over 80 articles on Greek history, epigraphy and oratory, including, most recently, the biographies Alexander the Great: Man and God (London 2004) and Philip II of Macedonia (New Haven, CN 2008) and the Blackwell Companion to Greek Rhetoric (Oxford 2006). He is currently writing a biography of Demosthenes, editing the Blackwell Companion to Ancient Macedonia, and is Editor-in-Chief of Brill's New Jacoby, a new edition, with translations and commentaries, of 856 fragmentary Greek historians involving a team of 112 scholars in 16 countries (published in biannual installments, 2007-2013). He is also filming a course on the ancient Greek world for The Teaching Company in summer 2008. In 2005 he won the Chancellor’s Award for Outstanding Research and Creativity in the Humanities and in 2007 the Student-Athlete Advisory Council Most Inspiring Professor Award.
Honors Council
M. Heather Carver is an associate professor of Theatre. Carver received the 2004 Chancellor's Award for MU Women for her work as Artistic Director and co-founder of the Troubling Violence Performance Project. She is also the creator and Artistic Director of MU's Life and Literature Performance Workshop and Series. Carver's research and teaching center on the field of Performance Studies and Performative Writing. She is co-editor of Voices Made Flesh: Performing Women's Autobiography, University of Wisconsin Press, 2003, co-editor of Healthy Primates and Other Plays from the New Play Development Workshop, Vanderbilt, 2004, and her articles appear in Text and Performance Quarterly and the Journal of American Folklore. She is Vice-Chair of the Performance Division of the National Communication Association. Carver's adaptation of Lynn Miller's novel, The Fool's Journey, premiered at MU in November, 2004 and was selected as a national finalist for the David Mark Cohen Playwriting award. In October, 2006, Carver premiered her autobiographical play, Booby Prize: A Comedy about Breast Cancer at the Ellis Fischel 11th annual oncology conference. Since then, Booby Prize has been performed on campus and across the country. Her latest book, Troubling Violence: A Performance Project, appears later this year with the University of Mississippi Press.
Sara Rachel Chant is a second-year assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Missouri-Columbia. She specializes in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind and action. Sara teaches honors introductory courses in ethics and introduction to philosophy as well as advanced graduate courses in metaphysics. Moreover, she owns a great Great Dane named "Alexander."
Rabia Gregory is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies. She joined the department in 2007. Her current research focuses on medieval women's religious literature from Germany and the Low Countries, particularly prescriptive literature for women's religious communities and female-authored or co-authored devotional and mystical texts. She teaches an Honors Section of the History of Christianity sequence in the Religious Studies department each semester, and also contributed preliminary feedback on the 2008 syllabus for the Medieval/Renaissance portion of the Honors Humanities Sequence. Based on many positive experiences with the Honors College this year, she is interested in serving on the Honors Council.
Deborah Huelsbergen is an Associate Professor of Art who has been at MU since 1997. She teaches graphic design to all levels of students from freshmen to grad students.
Deborah is also the Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Art department and coordinates advising for 270+ students. She is on numerous committees at the department, college and university level including the Committee on Undergraduate Education and the Curriculum, Instruction and Advising Committee for A&S where she is currently chair. She has received awards for advising and teaching including the Kemper Award, the Excellence in Advising Award, a Blue Chalk Advising Award and the Woodhouse Award for exceptional achievement.
Marty Townsend directed MU's nationally award winning Campus Writing Program (CWP) for fifteen years. She is now an associate professor fully in the Department of English, teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in composition and continuing her research on writing-across-the-curriculum and writing program administration. She is eager to resume campus-wide committee work (missing since CWP) via the Honors College. She previously served a term on the A&S Executive Council.
Dennis Trout has been Associate Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Missouri since 2000. He has previously served on the Honors Council and frequently teaches Honors courses. He is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Early Christian Studies as well as a Book Review Editor for the Journal of Late Antiquity (both published by Johns Hopkins University Press). His research is primarily concerned with the transformation of classical culture in late antiquity and he is currently preparing for publication a translation, with introduction and commentary, of the epigraphic poetry of Damasus, bishop of Rome from 366 to 384.
CUE
Mark Carroll joined the Department of History in 1998. Promoted with tenure to the rank of associate professor in 2004, his research and teaching interests focus on culture and law in the early American republic and in the borderlands of the antebellum South. He is author of Homesteads Ungovernable: Families, Sex, Race, and the Law in Frontier Texas, 1823-1860, editor of an anthology exploring the history and law of Upper Louisiana and Missouri, and is currently working on a monograph dealing with society and governance in the early trans-Mississippi West, research supported in part by MU Research Board and UMC Research Council grants and a Supreme Court of Missouri Historical Society Seiler Fellowship. His undergraduate courses are regularly integrated with the Campus Writing Program, and he has worked with the MU School of Law and been a member of the UMC Peace Studies Faculty Board and the Peace Studies Curriculum Review Committee to advance interdisciplinary undergraduate course offerings relevant to globalization and issues of cooperation and conflict resolution. He also serves on an advisory committee of the Missouri State Archives to facilitate the preservation, digitization, and study of historical judicial records.
Keith Eggener has been at the University of Missouri since 1999. Associate Professor of Architectural History and American Art, he is the author of Luis Barragán's Gardens of El Pedregal and of several articles and book chapters on Mexican and U.S. art, architecture, urbanism, and design. He is currently completing a book on American cemeteries for the U.S. Library of Congress. Eggener was editor of the book American Architectural History: A Contemporary Reader and is Associate Editor of the 59-volume Buildings of the United States series published by the Society of Architectural Historians and the University of Virginia Press. Along with serving on various department committees, he has also been a member of several college and university committees, including CIA, Campus Planning, and Campus Art and Artifacts.
Peter Mueser joined the University of Missouri-Columbia in 1985 as an assistant professor in the Department of Economics. Since then, he has served in a variety of roles within his department, including director of graduate studies, recruitment committee chair and member, seminar series coordinator, and chair of several ad hoc disciplinary committees. At the University level, he has served on the Graduate Faculty Senate and on several grievance committees as member and chair, and on the MU Research Council, in addition to several advisory committees. He has published more than 30 articles and book chapters. He is currently PI on three external grants and has served as PI or co-PI on more than a dozen grants. He holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago.
Dr. Myoung Lee is a Teaching Assistant Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies, Department of Economics, and Co-Director of MU’s Tourism Economics Research Initiative. She has been serving on MU’s Arts and Sciences Curriculum, Instruction, and Advising Committee for the last four years, and she teaches classes with anywhere from 30 to 500 students. She received her Ph.D. in 2003 from MU’s Department of Economics. Her research interests include post-secondary educational policy and its labor market impacts, health policy and tourism economics.
Dennis Miller. I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences, and my primary undergraduate teaching assignment has been an introductory course in drugs and behavior. I’ve tried to help students understand the scientific basics of pharmacology so that they are able to ask appropriate questions to their physician about therapeutic medications and make informed decisions about which substances they use recreationally. My graduate courses have focused on helping clinical psychologists understand the basics of drug action for the medications their clients might be using. In the laboratory, my research focus is the biological basis of psychological disorders, such as drug addiction, Alzheimer disease and schizophrenia. Undergraduate and graduate students investigate how changes in neural functioning alter behavior in animal models of human psychopathologies. Our collaborative research has recently determined that lobelia inflata, a flowering plant found in Missouri, could be a therapy to help individual addicted to heroin.