FACULTY NEWS

On May 25, six department faculty joined in the first-ever "Brains of Bakersfield" quiz night here at CSUB—an event organized in part by our own Cliona Murphy to help raise money for both CSUB soccer and a juvenile diabetes camp. "Cliona's Klingon's" and Dr. Vivian's "Gray Matter Envy" squared off against twenty other teams in a fun evening of trivia and strategy. We're looking forward to a repeat of this event next year.

Dr. Mark Baker will take paternity leave in the fall, after the birth of his son, expected in late July.  Congratulations to him, Mary, and big sister, Lily! He also plans to stay in Bakersfield this summer revising his book manuscript.

Revising an article will be job one this summer for Dr. Douglas Dodd.  He'll be reworking "The Bureau of Reclamation, the National Park Service, and the Origins of the National Recreation Area Concept at Lake Mead" for the Southern California Quarterly.

An article written by Dr. Jeanne Harrie during her sabbatical last year has been accepted for publication: "The Guises, the Body of Christ, and the Body Politic," The Sixteenth Century Journal XXXVII/1 (2006):  51-65.  Over the summer she plans to develop History 210, which she'll teach in the fall. She hopes, too, to work on her project on the Paris conference of 1566, a public debate about Protestant/Catholic doctrinal differences, especially regarding the Eucharist, that was intended to bring a recent noble convert (staged by her Catholic father) to Calvinism back into the Catholic fold.  For a change of pace, she looks forward to reading and getting outdoors to work in her garden.

Prof. Jim Meriwether is teaching summer school and is traveling at the end of June to the annual conference of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) in Lawrence, KS. His paper—"Rethinking the 1960 Presidential Campaign: Africa and the Airlift"—examines the role of Africa during the intensely close presidential race between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, arguing that an "airlift" of African students played a little recognized but critical role in the outcome of the campaign.  After the conference, he will travel to the Harry Truman Presidential Library in Independence, MO, to research in the Truman Archives.

Travel will dominate Prof. Cliona Murphy's summer.  Along with some vacationing (Mexico, Ireland, Paris, and Brussels), she'll be staying in an apartment at the University of Cork to do some research.  She also plans to improve her Spanish this summer.  She has recently had an article accepted for publication—"‘Great Gas’ and ‘Irish Bull’: Humour and the Fight for Irish Women’s Suffrage"—which will be published in a book for the centenary of the foundation of the Irish Women's Franchise League in 2008: The Irish Suffrage Movement: the Road to Enfranchisement and Beyond. She also reviewed a manuscript on contemporary changes in Irish society.

Prof. Connie Orliski spent finals week in Lincoln, Nebraska, helping grade the AP world history exams.  While teaching summer school, she'll be revising two articles: “The Health of the Body Politic: Jiating Weisheng in Early Republican Shanghai," for Environment and Planning D: Society and Space; and "The Famous as Told by the Infamous: Emily Hahn Narrates the Soong Sisters," for a volume of conference articles titled Gender, Culture, and Power: Chinese and Western Women Interact in Late Imperial and Modern China.  In late June she'll be the discussant on a panel ("Feminist Constructions of Gender and Legality in East Asia and the Western Pacific") at the World History Association’s 15th Annual Conference at CSULB. A trip to the Baltic and a biking trip should round out her summer.

While on sabbatical this winter and spring terms, Dr. Alicia Rodriquez has been working mainly on her article on the Ku Klux Klan in Kern County in the 1920s, about which she'll give a talk in the fall as part of a lecture series in the Walter Stiern Library.

It's off to eastern Austria for Prof. Miriam Raub Vivian, who will spend July participating in the ongoing excavation of the Roman town of Carnuntum, located about twenty-five miles east of Vienna, just south of the Danube River.  She hopes to gain some valuable archaeological experience, which should enhance the 2-unit CSUB course (CSUB 103 or 303) she is scheduled to teach in the fall (and which may be taken as an enrichment course by any students): The Dirt on Western Civilization: Archaeological Milestones in Understanding Ancient Mesopotamians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Christians, and Vikings.