Dear OU Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences community,
With the classes underway, we are excited to welcome everyone to the spring 2022 semester.
As you are all well aware, we continue to face ongoing complications and accompanying anxieties of the evolving COVID-19 pandemic. We are now in COVID year three, and the patience, perseverance, dedication and innovation you have all shown in advancing our college goals in the midst of this enduring public health crisis has been remarkable.
Students have made impressive degree progress while navigating changing learning modalities and helping each other succeed; faculty have adapted their teaching strategies and invested great energy and effort to help address student needs; and staff have once more been the vital and creative providers of support who have kept our operations moving forward.
I want to thank you all for your hard work and dedication to preserving our core academic missions of research/scholarship/creative activity and teaching/mentoring/learning. In fact, since the onset of the pandemic nearly 5,000 students have graduated from our college.
I want to wish you all a safe and successful semester. Remember to regularly visit ou.edu/together for details on COVID-19 testing, vaccine updates and information on Norman campus operations. I am grateful for your commitment and thank you for all you do to make our mission possible.
Most Sincerely,
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David Wrobel
Dean, Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences
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The University of Oklahoma proudly honors Black History Month as a time of celebrating accomplishment,
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SAVE THE DATE TO CELEBRATE AT CONVOCATION
This year, the Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences will celebrate the achievements of our graduating students on Saturday, May 14, at the Lloyd Noble Center. We will have two ceremonies, which will begin at 4 p.m. with the Humanities and Natural Sciences Convocation. The Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences Convocation for Professional Programs and Social Sciences will begin at 7:30 p.m. For more information and a list of majors that fall within each group click here.
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FACULTY AND DEPARTMENT NEWS |
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The college congratulates Professor Honorée Fanonne Jeffers on her recent appointment to the Paul and Carol Daube Sutton Chair in English. Over the past year, Jeffers had a number of achievements. Her highly anticipated debut novel The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois was an Oprah's Book Club Selection. Winfrey revealed the news during an appearance she and Jeffers made on CBS This Morning the day the book was released. Jeffers' novel traces centuries of Black history through a family in the American South and its contemporary narrator, young Ailey Paul Garfield. The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, named for the Black scholar and activist, also received advance praise from Angie Thomas, Jacqueline Woodson and Stephanie Powell Watts, among others, and has been listed in the top 10 books of 2021 by The New York Times and the Washington Post. In January of 2022, Love Songs received an NAACP Image Award Nomination for Outstanding Literary Work - Fiction. Her book of poetry, The Age of Phillis, was honored with the 2021 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work – Poetry. The book was also recently selected as a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Jeffers is a poet, novelist, critic and scholar whose work examines the intersection of culture, religion, history and family. Jeffers was born in Kokomo, Indiana, and grew up in Durham, North Carolina, and Atlanta. She holds degrees from Talladega College and the University of Alabama, and she has served on the OU faculty since 2002. Jeffers is the author of six books (five of poetry) and she has championed the stories and achievements of Black women, including Winfrey. A 2021 USA Mellon Fellow, in February Jeffers was named one of the 60 Fellows in the United States Artists’ class of honorees, who receive $50,000 each in unrestricted funds. Other honors during her career include winning the 2018 Harper Lee Award for Literary Distinction for her book The Glory Gets, and in 2020 she was inducted into the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame; both notations recognize lifetime achievement. She also has been awarded fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the Aspen Summer Words Conference, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, MacDowell Colony, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Witter Bynner Foundation through the Library of Congress.
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Ann West, Ph.D., is one of two OU researchers named Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest multidisciplinary scientific society. West and Priyabrata Mukherjee, Ph.D. (OU Health Stephenson Cancer Center), are among 564 scientists, engineers and innovators spanning 24 scientific disciplines being recognized for their scientifically and socially distinguished achievements. They are the only recipients from Oklahoma this year. “Dr. West and Dr. Mukherjee’s election as Fellows of AAAS is a testament to the significance and impact their research has had in their respective fields,” said Tomás Díaz de la Rubia, vice president for research and partnerships at OU Norman. “With their help, and the help of many other researchers at the University of Oklahoma, we will continue to unlock our greatest potential as one of the nation’s top public research institutions.” West is the Grayce B. Kerr Centennial Chair in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and the director of the National Institutes of Health-funded Center of Biomedical Research Excellence in Structural Biology. She joined the Office of the Vice President for Research and Partnerships as a faculty fellow in 2018 before being named associate vice president in 2019. Focused on microbial signal transduction and adaptive stress responses, West uses molecular biology and X-ray crystallography to determine structures of biomedically important proteins through her work on microbes and pathogenic bacteria. READ MORE
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Donna J. Nelson, Ph.D., 2016 ACS president and professor of organic chemistry, will be 2022 CSSP Board chair-elect of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents. She has held several leadership positions in academia, carried out the Nelson Diversity Surveys and served as science advisor to the AMC television show Breaking Bad. Her research has focused on five primary topics, generally categorized in two areas, Scientific Research and America’s Scientific Readiness. Within Scientific Research, her topics have been on mechanistic patterns in alkene addition reactions and on Single-Walled Carbon Nanotube functionalization and analysis. Under America’s Scientific Readiness, she focuses (1) on science education and impacting science by considering its communities (including classroom innovations and correcting organic chemistry textbook inaccuracies), (2) on ethnic and gender diversity (the Nelson Diversity Surveys) among highly ranked science departments of research universities, and (3) on improving the image and presentation of science and scientists to the public. Nelson has written over 200 research-related publications and has given hundreds of invited presentations to national meetings of professional societies and organizations, universities, and radio and TV programs. She has won many awards and honors, including the Guggenheim Award, Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Edinburgh, ACS Fellow, NSF Special Creativity Extension, National Organization for Women “Woman of Courage” Award, Ford Foundation Fellow, Fulbright Scholarship and NSF ADVANCE Leadership Award. She was named one of the “70 Most Inspirational Women Leaders Impacting the World” by Business.org in 2018 and among “These 12 Texas Women Made History” by UT Austin in 2021. CSSP is a leadership society consisting of presidents, presidents-elect and past-presidents of scientific societies, with combined membership that has historically approached nearly 1 million scientists.
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Sarah T. Hines, assistant professor of Latin American history, has published her first book, Water for All: Community, Property, and Revolution in Modern Bolivia (University of California Press, 2022). Water for All chronicles how Bolivians democratized water access, focusing on the Cochabamba region, known for acute water scarcity and explosive water protests. The book examines conflict and compromises over water from the 1870s to the 2010s, showing how communities of water users increased supply and extended distribution through collective labor and social struggle. Analyzing a wide variety of sources, from agrarian reform case records to oral history interviews, the author investigates how water dispossession that peasant and indigenous communities suffered in the late 19th century and reclaimed water access in the 20th and 21st centuries prompted, shaped and strengthened popular and indigenous social movements. The struggle for democratic control over water culminated in the successful 2000 Water War, a decisive turning point for Bolivian politics. This story offers lessons for contemporary resource management and grassroots movements about how humans can build equitable, democratic and sustainable resource systems in the Andes, Latin America and beyond. Hines’s current book project, tentatively titled “Grassroots Utopias: Dictatorship and Dissent in Cold War Bolivia,” is a social, political and cultural history of oppositional politics in Bolivia under dictatorship (1964–1982). It explores the visions and projects for social transformation and democratic restoration of a wide array of artists, intellectuals and activists who constrained and ultimately overthrew Bolivia’s dictatorships. Hines was originally drawn to Bolivia due to her own participation in social movements in the United States in the early 2000s and her interest in social movements in Latin America that were making major gains at that time. The 2000 Water War in Cochabamba, in which a grassroots movement overturned water privatization, drew her to travel to Bolivia and Cochabamba and ultimately conduct research on the deeper history of social struggle over water access.
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Andrew Porwancher’s book, The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton, was published by Princeton University Press in August 2021. Porwancher is a Wick Cary Associate Professor in the OU Department of Classics and Letters. This is his third book, which has been described as “provocative and intriguing" by Pulitzer Prize-winner Annette Gordon-Reed of Harvard University. In The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton, Porwancher debunks a string of myths about the origins of this founding father to arrive at a startling conclusion: Hamilton, in all likelihood, was born and raised Jewish. For more than two centuries, his youth in the Caribbean has remained shrouded in mystery. With a detective’s persistence and a historian’s rigor, Porwancher upends that assumption and revolutionizes our understanding of an American icon. This radical reassessment of Hamilton’s religious upbringing gives us a fresh perspective on both his adult years and the country he helped forge. Although he didn’t identify as a Jewish in America, Hamilton cultivated a relationship with the Jewish community that made him unique among the founders. By setting Hamilton in the context of his Jewish world for the first time, this fascinating book challenges us to rethink the life and legend of America’s most enigmatic founder. Porwancher's interviews and commentary about the book has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and Bloomberg. The book is the winner of the Journal of the American Revolution Book of the Year Award. Porwancher's fourth book, The Prophet of Harvard Law – which he coauthored with three young alumni of the OU Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences – will appear later this year with the University Press of Kansas. He is now at work on his fifth book, Theodore Roosevelt and the Jews, with Princeton University Press.
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The Anne and Henry Zarrow School of Social Work has entered into an exciting partnership with the Norman Police Department this semester. Capt. Eric Lehenbauer contacted the department seeking to be a field practicum site for an MSW student interested filling the role of victim advocate for the NPD. Lehenbauer, site preceptor, has welcomed Bonni Goodwin (OU field instructor) and Morgan Albright (MSW student) into the department to begin her concentration practicum as a victim advocate. “I cannot begin to express my excitement about being able to learn from some of the finest police officers and detectives in Norman," said Albright. “This partnership has opened the opportunity to work within an interdisciplinary team of police officers, detectives and the general public, as well as various other criminal justice roles. Through my experience working with the NPD, I am able to use my social work education and knowledge to not only support the survivors of crimes, but to also support the officers. In addition to that, I am able to gain valuable insight to viewing advocacy, resource and community work through a criminal justice lens, alongside the social work lens.” Victim advocacy assists victims of crime as well as law enforcement investigating those crimes. Advocates are responsible for assessing and identifying the needs of victims during a difficult time in their life and connecting those victims to resources to support and meet their needs. An advocate is also responsible for providing awareness of and access to certain rights available to victims of crime. Victim advocates also provide support for officers during the length of the investigation by serving as a liaison between law enforcement and the community. Through developing a trusting working relationship with law enforcement, advocates are able to assist in achieving the goals of criminal justice while sharing valuable perspectives and awareness of the impact of trauma on victims. Through this new partnership with the NPD, OU School of Social Work students are afforded the opportunity to experience and participate in the power of collaboration between criminal justice and social work. |
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WESTERN JEWISH STUDIES ASSOCIATION CONFERENCE TO BE HELD IN NORMAN
The OU Schusterman Center for Judaic and Israel Studies received $5,000 grants each from Oklahoma Humanities and from the Jewish OKC Foundation in support of their hosting the 26th annual Western Jewish Studies Association Conference (blended) in Norman from March 27-28. The WJSA is a nonprofit organization founded in 1995 to organize a Jewish Studies conference every spring at alternating sites in the western United States and Canada. The conference serves as a forum for Jewish studies scholars in this region to present their research, discuss pedagogical issues, network with colleagues in their disciplines, and share information about the funding and organization of Jewish studies programs. Although it is planning for a predominantly in-person conference, the WJSA will feature virtual panels. Visit here for more information about this event.
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ALTERNATIVE TEXTBOOK GRANT RETURNS
The University Libraries’ Alternative Textbook Grant will return this spring and, as in previous years, the Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences will provide matching funding for Arts and Sciences instructors. The grant program incentivizes instructors with grants of up to $2,500 to adopt, modify or create open educational resources in place of using costly course materials. Previous Arts and Sciences grantees include Milos Savic (mathematics), Heather Ketchum (biology), Lex Holmes (economics), Shane Brady (social work), Julie Ward (MLLL), Robert Cichewicz (chemistry and biochemistry), Anne Hyde (history), Charles Finocchiaro (political science) and Marielle Hoefnagels (microbiology/plant biology), to name just a few.
Since 2014, the Alternative Textbook Grant has given OU instructors the ability to use texts that meet their course learning goals and objectives, rather than adjusting their learning goals/objectives to fit the limitations of a text. The grant has also saved OU students over $4 million in course materials costs. Information on how to apply will be available early in the spring 2022 semester; please email scholarlycommunication@ou.edu if you have questions or want more information.
PUBLISH OPEN ACCESS IN OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS JOURNALS
Effective January 2022 - December 2024, OU scholars are able to publish open access articles in eligible Oxford University Press journals at no additional charge. This is made possible by a University Libraries’ transformative “Read and Publish” agreement, which shifts library spending from subscription-based reading toward open access publishing. The Oxford agreement is one of several open access publishing discounts negotiated for OU authors by the University Libraries.
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STAFF SPOTLIGHT: MEET NATALIE DICKSON
Since July 2019, Natalie Dickson has served the OU Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences as an academic advisor. In her role, she is the primary advisor for nearly 350 students in African and African American studies, biology, community and public health, and sociology/criminology.
Dickson is a first-generation college student and an OU DFCAS graduate with a bachelor’s degree in anthropology and African and African American studies. She continued her education at UCLA, where she completed a dual degree program and earned a master’s degree in African studies and a master’s degree in public health in community health sciences. She was involved in public health projects in both Kenya and Tanzania, promoting HIV support services and research. In addition to her advising position, she is currently pursuing a doctorate in sociology. Her present research interests include stratification and inequality, higher education and mixed methods research.
Dickson’s interests in anthropology, African studies and public health have given her many different career path options, but she would like to stay in education. She hopes to use her doctoral degree to continue working closely with undergraduate students, perhaps through teaching or faculty advising. Her dream is to be the director of a transfer student center at a university, and to shape programming and support services for this often-overlooked student population.
Because of her training in community health, Dickson better serves her students by using a systems, evaluation and programming approach. She compares the conversations she has with students about their academic and personal health with talking to diverse communities about health and wellbeing. She uses her knowledge of health behavioral theories and decision making in supporting her students in their academic decision making.
When she’s not working, she is streaming UFC fights with her husband on Saturday nights and hosting watch parties with friends. She loves it because it is different from her day-to-day life and she is fascinated by the mixed martial arts. She also loves to cook healthy meals that help her keep up with balancing work, school and everything in between. Her favorite meal to prepare right now is sweet potato bison chili. When she’s on campus, she loves to take walks near the library and go around the North Oval, where the best view of Evans Hall is.
As a student and staff member in many different capacities, her advice to new staff members is to not be shy! She advises staff to introduce themselves to other staff, and to get to know them and their positions. It’s great to have friendships across campus so that you can connect students to people and resources, she says.
Dickson’s favorite thing about working at OU is the endless opportunities the university provides. She’s grateful she works for a university that offers and encourages extracurricular participation across the board. For her, the flexibility of working toward her Ph.D. part time with the staff tuition waiver and being involved in professional development programs is rewarding.
“Natalie Dickson is a prime example of the great work our academic advisors within the Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences are conducting on a daily basis,” said Ryan Peters, director of Academic Services. “Natalie embodies a true passion for both the mission of higher education and advocacy for students, and her work reflects a high attention to detail combined with an innate ability to develop rapport with others. Simply said, Natalie has a positive impact on everyone she works with, including both students and coworkers, and we are fortunate to have her as part of the team.”
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Daniel Becker, an assistant professor of biology, has been leading a proactive modeling study over the last year and a half to identify bat species that are likely to carry betacoronaviruses, including but not limited to, SARS-like viruses. The study, “Optimizing predictive models to prioritize viral discovery in zoonotic reservoirs,” which was published by Lancet Microbe, was guided by Becker; Greg Albery, a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University’s Bansal Lab; and Colin J. Carlson, an assistant research professor at Georgetown’s Center for Global Health Science and Security. Becker and colleagues’ study is part of the broader efforts of an international research team called the Verena Consortium (viralemergence.org), which works to predict which viruses could infect humans, which animals host them and where they could emerge. Albery and Carlson were co-founders of the consortium in 2020, with Becker as a founding member. READ MORE
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Jizhong Zhou, director of the Institute for Environmental Genomics and a George Lynn Cross Research Professor in the Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences, is leading a research team at IEG, in collaboration with Mary Firestone from the University of California at Berkeley, to demonstrate the effectiveness of a new conceptual framework for disentangling direct and indirect relationships in association networks. Despite the fundamental role networks play in how scientists understand the dynamics and properties of complex systems, reconstructing networks from large-scale experimental data is a challenge. In systems biology and microbial ecology – the study of microbes in the environment and their interactions with each other – the challenges of reconstructing these networks can be compounded by difficulty unraveling direct and indirect interactions, or the ability of one element in a system to impact another, either with or without direct interaction. READ MORE
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$310,000 – U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE, CONGRESSIONALLY DIRECTED MEDICAL RESEARCH PROGS
UNIVERSAL AGENT TO IMPROVE WOUND HEALING
New approaches are needed to promote the healing of diabetic wounds and pressure ulcers. The immune system has considerable specificity and can discriminate between individual species of microbes. In this regard, pathogens are “seen” as dangerous to the host and elicit an inflammatory response capable of destroying the microbes. This immune discrimination is achieved through the recognition of microbe-specific molecules, known as Pathogen-Associated Molecular Pattern (PAMP) molecules. But cell death creates Damage-Associated Molecular Pattern (DAMP) molecules. PAMPs and DAMPs impede wound healing by lengthening the inflammatory phase of healing, contributing to the persistence of diabetic chronic wounds and pressure ulcers. Preventing PAMPs and DAMPs from triggering the release of inflammatory cytokines will improve wound healing. However, successful drugs are elusive because PAMPs originate from many different species of Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria. This project will test a universal broad-spectrum agent against PAMPs and DAMPs.
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The Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences congratulates all students named to the fall 2021 honor roll, a distinction given to those who achieve the highest academic standards. A total of 8,900 students were named to the fall 2021 honor roll. Of these students, 3,576 were named to the President’s Honor Roll for earning an “A” grade in all their courses. The honor roll recognizes undergraduate students in the academic programs based at OU’s Norman campus and at the OU Health Sciences Center. For students in Norman campus programs, the fall honor roll also includes grades that may have been earned during the winter intersession, which count toward students’ overall grade-point averages for the preceding semester. A searchable honor roll list for fall 2021 is available for download online. Students who are on both the President’s Honor Roll and the Dean’s Honor Roll are denoted by an asterisk.
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Feb. 14
Deadline to enter new course changes not associated with program modifications, certificates or minors into Courseleaf.
Feb. 15
Sabbatical leave reports for spring 2021 and fall 2021 (two-semester sabbatical) or fall 2021 only are due to the Dean’s office.
Feb. 22
Chairs and Directors meeting 9 a.m.
Feb. 23
CASFAM Staff meeting, 9 a.m.
March 1
Deadline to submit Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences Outstanding Staff Award nominations to Darla Madden.
March 11
The Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences is pleased to announce a new funding initiative. We are inviting application for Collaborative Research Faculty Fellowships to incentivize research and creative activity in alignment with the University-wide strategic research framework established by the Office of the Vice President for Research and Partnerships based on the fifth pillar of OU’s Lead On strategic plan. We invite teams comprised of faculty from different departments in the college to propose transdisciplinary research projects that can help advance knowledge to address societal challenges, elevate OU's national reputation, and align its seed funding support with federal funding goals and priorities.
The Collaborative Research Faculty Fellowship program will award up to $50,000 per research team over a maximum of two years. For more information, please visit our website.
We are also pleased to continue our efforts to support excellence in research and creative activity through Junior Faculty Summer Fellowships, Senior Faculty Summer Fellowships and support for Data Scholarship Initiatives. Updated information on those programs can be found here. Applications for the programs outlined above should be submitted through the online portals.
March 15
Deadline for academic units to submit staff performance evaluations to Darla Madden.
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If you have information or announcements for News & Updates, please submit to the College communication office.
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