CONGRATULATIONS, GRADUATES!

The University of Oklahoma Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences celebrated the achievements of our graduating students at our winter convocation on Dec. 16. We appreciate all of those who attended our event and joined us online to joyfully acknowledge the accomplishments of our students. We also appreciate the time and efforts of our faculty and staff who were dedicated to creating a monumental event. This semester, 25% of our students graduated with distinction, special distinction or a 4.0 GPA. The college congratulates all our 2022 fall graduates on reaching this milestone in their lives. To see more photos from our ceremonies, visit the college Facebook page.

OUTSTANDING SENIOR AWARD RECIPIENTS ANNOUNCED

The University of Oklahoma has chosen 16 students from the 2023 senior class to be named Outstanding Seniors for their exceptional achievements in scholarship, honors, awards, leadership and service. The college is proud to announce that this year we had the rare distinction of having the Overall Outstanding Senior for the university in addition to the Outstanding Senior in our college. The awards are presented each fall by Sooner Parents, and the group was recognized at an awards ceremony during which OU President Joseph Harroz Jr. and representatives from OU colleges presented each recipient their award. Aaron Reid (Claremore) was named the Overall Outstanding Senior and Megan Szymanki (Oklahoma City) was selected as the Outstanding Senior in the Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences. 

Reid is a double major in engineering and letters. Upon coming to OU, he knew he wanted to use his talents in a STEM field, although still not sure what direction he wanted to take, he eventually decided that law school was in his future. After hearing from fellow students about their amazing experiences with the Letters coursework and faculty in the Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences, he knew that the Letters work would better prepare him for the law school path he sought. When asked how he felt about how the Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences has helped prepare him for life after OU, he said, “DFCAS has surrounded me with inspiring and engaging teachers. Second, I have had the amazing opportunity to be in Withrow Leadership Scholars for the past couple of years. WLS prepared me through career development opportunities at our meetings and great international experience with the study abroad experience.”

Reid can’t imagine a better place to have spent the last four years than OU, and his advice for incoming DFCAS students would be to "put some ambition into college and be willing to risk failure, try new things you do not fully understand and envision yourself succeeding when it might be easier to just not try in the first place."

Szymanki is a double major in letters and planned programs: biochemical determinants of health and medicine. After graduation she plans on attending medical school. Looking back at her time in our college, she is grateful for the relationships made with the faculty and staff and being able to take courses with unique learning focuses. Szymanki chose her majors because she has always been drawn to the sciences, accompanied with an enjoyment and appreciation for the humanities. Her two degrees allowed her to take classes that were both beneficial for her future pursuits, as well as addressing her personal interests. 

When asked what her advice would be for incoming students, Szymanki responded, “Ask questions and be curious! There is so much to learn from others in different corners of campus. Also, I highly recommend studying abroad. I studied in Arezzo, Italy, and Oxford, England, this past summer and enjoyed becoming familiar with the cities and growing my cultural competency by providing opportunities to interact with people from unique backgrounds!”

Szymanki was a teaching assistant in the college and enjoyed DFCAS, taking classes related to her future career as well as classes in subjects in which she wanted to learn more. 

Congratulations to both students! 

FACULTY AND DEPARTMENT NEWS

Congratulations to Firat Demir, L.J. Semrod Presidential Professor of Economics, who was named the 21st recipient of the Kinney Sugg Outstanding Professor Award. Demir was honored at a luncheon attended by Sandy Kinney, Mike Sugg and former award winners. The award is presented to model teachers, recognized for dedication, effectiveness and the ability to inspire students to high levels of achievement. Demir specializes in applied analysis of macro and micro development issues in the Global South. His main fields of research are development economics and international economics, focusing on the issues of structural change, long-run development and growth, finance globalization, political economy and development and comparative economic development in the Middle East. He has published one co-authored book, which is considered one of the leading monographs exploring the impacts of trade on developing economies (South-South Trade and Finance in the 21st Century: Rise of the South or a Second Great Divergence). He has taught 20 distinct courses to more than 1,800 students at the graduate and undergraduate levels.

Kalenda Eaton (associate professor, African and African American Studies) has been elected vice president of the Western Literature Association,  a nonprofit, scholarly association that promotes the study of the diverse literature and cultures of the North American West. The WLA was formed in 1965. The WLA’s journal, Western American Literature, in partnership with the University of Nebraska Press, showcases the best work in the field and reaches audiences nationally and internationally. It considers itself “the leading peer-reviewed journal in the literary and cultural study of the North American West, defined broadly to include western Canada and northern Mexico.” Eaton will assume the presidency in 2025. 

Janet Ward (Brammer Presidential Professor of History and Faculty Fellow for Strategic Initiatives in the Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences) has been invited to participate in the American Council of Learned Societies’ Leadership Institute for a New Academy, sponsored by the Mellon Foundation. The institute is a year-long pilot initiative designed to galvanize faculty to forge career paths in administration that will strengthen the humanities and drive forward-looking change. The LINA pilot institute, to be held through spring and summer 2023, will feature a series of online and in-person convenings, bringing together over 60 scholars with recent experience as deans or in comparable posts and a demonstrated commitment to enacting or accelerating transformational change in the academy. READ MORE

The college congratulates Kyle Harper, G.T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty and Professor of Classics and Letters, on joining the Santa Fe Institute as a Fractal Faculty member. SFI is a center for the study of complex systems science in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It was launched in the 1980s by theoretical physicists and has grown over the years into a globally renowned research center. READ MORE

Professor Lucas Bessire in the Department of Anthropology, who was named the recipient of the 2022 Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology and the American Anthropological Association for his book, Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains (Princeton University Press). The Victor Turner Prize is an international, juried and highly prestigious award that recognizes books which “contribute in innovative and engaging ways to the genre of ethnography and the field of humanistic anthropology.” 

Late OU professor J. Rufus Fears, known for his captivating Freedom in Rome and Freedom of Greece courses, will be memorialized with a library space that will share his extensive literature collection with the public. A beloved OU professor, Fears joined the classics faculty in 1990. He served as College of Arts and Sciences dean for two years and was named G.T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty. His charisma and profound understanding of history had a positive impact on many students. When he passed in 2012, he left his personal collection of over 7,000 volumes to the department. The department aims to have the library completed by next fall, in time for an event centered on the 11th anniversary of Fears’ death. For more information on how Dr. Fears will be memorialized with a library space that will share his extensive literature collection with the public, click here.

MEET WENDY MALLETTE

Wendy Mallette joined the University of Oklahoma this semester as an assistant professor of religious studies. She earned her Ph.D. in religious studies and a graduate certificate in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies from Yale University after receiving a master of arts in religion degree from Yale Divinity School and a bachelor of arts degree from Valparaiso University. She is currently working on a book manuscript that draws on the archives of lesbian feminist public cultures of the 1960s through 1980s to intervene in conversations around negativity, sin, temporality and affect in queer studies and religious studies. More broadly, her research brings critical theories of gender, sexuality, race, and animality to bear on questions of doctrine and method in religious studies and Christian thought. Her published and forthcoming work can be found in Women’s Studies Quarterly, the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture and Feminist Theology. READ Q AND A WITH WENDY MALLETTE

HOW TO STUDY BIG MOLECULES WITHOUT BREAKING THEM APART

Just like seeing the forest through the trees, studying a whole, intact molecule has incredible scientific benefit but is difficult to do without the very latest technology. Luca Fornelli, an assistant professor of biology in the Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oklahoma, has received a five-year Maximizing Investigators' Research Award, or MIRA, from the National Institutes of Health to increase the efficiency of National Institute of General Medical Sciences funding by providing researchers “with greater stability and flexibility, thereby enhancing scientific productivity and the chances for important breakthroughs.” Fornelli studies proteomics, the science of studying the entire ensemble of proteins inside certain cells or tissues. Proteins are large, complex molecules that play many critical roles in the body. They do most of their work in cells and are required for the structure, function and regulation of the body's tissues and organs. However, Fornelli said, “A protein doesn't exist per se.” Instead, there are many different forms of proteins called proteoforms. READ MORE

Pictured from left: Linda Lieu, Jake Kline, Luca Fornelli, Amal Eltobshi, Alyssa Hargis, Grace Goodwin.

UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA JOINS NATIONAL CONSORTIUM FOR INCLUSIVE LEARNING

The University of Oklahoma will join a consortium of 104 college and universities from across the United States taking part in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Inclusive Excellence 3 Learning Community. The HHMI IE3 initiative aims to support and incentivize teaching and learning practices that increase student success outcomes, particularly in STEM fields. The participating institutions are grouped into Learning Community Clusters, forming cohort groups from a range of small to large, public and private colleges and universities. OU is a part of Cluster 4, focused on the “meaningful evaluation of effective and inclusive teaching, which will inform faculty practices, including promotion and tenure decisions.” The OU project team is led by Keri Kornelson (pictured), Ph.D., professor in the David and Judi Proctor Department of Mathematics, Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences, with OU co investigators Ulli Nollert, Karen Hennes, Lori Snyder, Megan Elwood Madden and Geneva Murray. 

Associate Professors of English Kimberly Wieser and Bill Endres, along with Comanche Nation citizens First Year Composition Assistant Teaching Professor Rance Weryackwe and doctoral student in English Allison Steinmeyer, have received $45,407.00 for their project “Continuing Comanche Culture: Culture as Making, Craft as Shared Story” from a Library of Congress–Of the People: Widening the Path: Community Collections Grant. This project will digitally curate artistic creations by citizens of the Comanche Nation of Oklahoma, the Nʉmʉnʉʉ People. While aesthetics is the hallmark of art, craft is its learned organizing principles; craft is the structure and system behind the artistic product, learned by the artisan in a culturally specific context. Maintaining a broad focus when defining artistic creations, from men’s ties to ledger art to beadwork, the team of Comanche and allied academics will conduct interviews with participants to provide deeper context about the Comanche cultural circumstances of the art and its meaning to the artists themselves, exploring how different aspects and materials of an artwork celebrate, appropriate and transcend different power dynamics, identities, communities and culture. Conversations will explore the learning and application of craft and its transformative power in the hands of each participant, aiding in uniting the curated works while demonstrating internal diversity. The interviews will provide insight into how craft encourages a piece of art to come into existence, grounded in an artwork’s material reality and how its materials participate to tell a human story in the final artistic creation. The team will capture high-resolution images, reflectance transformation imaging to capture surface details and the play of light, and 3-D images when applicable to a product. While the Library of Congress will archive the raw materials, the team will produce two computer kiosks to house the interviews with the images of the objects. One of these will be donated to the Native Nations Center at OU and the other to the Comanche Nation Museum. The team is thrilled not only to have been awarded the first Library of Congress grant for OU, but to also have gained the support of the Comanche Nation and Native Nations Center as additional stakeholders for this project.

Recent studies have found that over 93% of adults between 50 and 80 experience ageism, which can have negative health effects; people who have an upbeat take on getting older actually live longer. Julie Ober Allen, Ph.D., Department of Health and Exercise Science, recently discussed her research on how ageism affects the health of older adults on CBS Sunday Morning.

A multimethod archaeological study of a spider monkey sacrificed at Teotihuacán, located approximately 25 miles from Mexico City, provides the earliest evidence of primate captivity and translocation in the Americas over 1,500 years ago. Researchers at the University of Oklahoma’s Laboratories of Molecular Anthropology and Microbiome Research led the genetic analysis of the spider monkey’s skeleton. The OU team includes study co-authors Courtney Hofman, Ph.D., President’s Associates Presidential Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences, with graduate student Robin Singleton and laboratory technician Karissa Hughes. READ MORE

Courtney Hofman, professor of anthropology at the University of Oklahoma, and LMAMR lab technician Karissa Hughes. Photo by Robin Singleton.

Meet Noor Kahbi, an Arab-American student from Tulsa who was the college banner carrier during our winter convocation ceremony. Kahbi majored in public affairs and non-profit administration. Kahbi came to OU in 2019 with a desire to serve and with hopes of meeting and working with a diverse group of students. Her experiences as a second-generation immigrant drive her to promote inclusivity and create new knowledge. Noor sees her time at OU as a great stepping stone for the rest of her life.

The Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences Data Scholarship Program is proud to announce its first graduates! Two undergraduate students successfully earned minors in applied statistics and data analytics. Callista Fuhrmann majored in mathematics and minored in applied statistics. Tryston Ingram’s major was in psychology with a minor in data analytics. Tryston has already been applying his skills by interning with the Chickasaw Nation's Division of Commerce as a data science intern since late June. Tryston will be continuing at OU in the Online Master of Data Science and Analytics program. Congratulations! We wish them both continued success.

The Data Scholarship Program was launched in fall 2020 under the guidance of Interim Director June Abbas and core faculty members Carrie Schroeder, Chongle Pan and Jonathan McFadden after development by faculty across the college.

The 20th annual Math Day was held in the OU FORUM building on Nov. 10. This is a day-long major outreach event for high school students from all over Oklahoma and north Texas who come to visit the OU campus for an intense day full of mathematical challenges and competitions. Students competed in written tests, participated in the Sooner Math Bowl – an exciting real-time team competition – and enjoyed an entertaining lecture on the Mathematics and Art of the Rubik Cube delivered by professor David Plaxco from Clayton State University (who held a postdoctoral position in the OU Math Department in 2015-17). This year, more than 446 students accompanied by 49 teachers and chaperones attended the event, some coming from as far as Arlington,Texas. The event was organized by professor Greg Muller and made possible by dozens of volunteers from the math department, including graduate students, postdocs, staff and faculty.

Jan. 16

Deadline to submit new undergraduate minors and changes to existing minors (using State Regent forms) to the Dean’s office

Jan. 24 

Chairs and Directors meeting, 10 a.m. 

Jan. 25

CASFAM Staff meeting, 9 a.m. 

Jan. 27 

Sabbatical leave applications for fall 2023 and spring 2024 (two-semester sabbatical) or fall 2023 only are due to the Dean’s office.

Jan. 27

Deadline for academic units to submit to the Dean’s office recommendations for reappointment or non-reappointment to a second year for tenure-track and ranked-renewable term faculty.