Dr. Abe Goldberg has been recognized by the University of South Carolina Office of Research as one of the Featured Scholars for November.

You can read the story here.

Dr. Brigitte Neary will travel to Berlin, Germany to share her knowledge on German women’s experiences of sexual violence and expulsion from East-Central Europe at the Authenticity and Victimhood in Twentieth Century History and Commemorative Culture Conference, which will be held December 11-13.

A professor of sociology at the University of South Carolina Upstate, Neary’s specific research focus has been on women and displacement and women and armed conflict, including their experiences in war zones. She has received both national and international recognition for her work.

The conference aims to explore the experience and construction of victimhood and related narratives in international comparison with the main focus placed on the history of the 1930s to the 1950s and responses to that past in Europe, Asia, and North America. Moreover, the conference seeks to place German and European historical experiences in a broader global context. Hosts include the Institute of Contemporary History, Munich-Berlin, the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto, in cooperation with the Leibniz Research Alliance on Historical Authenticity, and the George Washington University.

For more information, contact Dr. Brigitte Neary at (864) 503-5834.

The University of South Carolina Upstate is pleased to announce that Desireé Rowe, Ph.D., has received a $4,860 grant from the Waterhouse Family Institute of Communication and Society at Villanova University to begin field research on her project, “Performing Gender-Based Activism in Eastern Germany.”

Rowe, an assistant professor in Fine Arts and Communication Studies, plans to use the grant monies to travel to Germany during the summer 2015, where she will begin to examine the reactions of policy changes post-unification and beyond in east Germany. Her goal is to engage local gender-based activist organizations in the Berlin region of east Germany to uncover dominant themes in resistence to policy.

Through her research, Rowe hopes to provide answers to the following research questions:

• What are the dominant narratives of gender that German unification created for feminists in eastern Germany?
• Since unification, how have feminists in eastern Germany responded to the changes in gender-based policy from the GDR (German Democratic Republic) Constitution to the state policy of the Republic of Germany?
• What are feminist gender-based cultural performances of resistance within a localized context in eastern Germany?
• What are the narrative themes of these cultural performances of resistance?

Rowe received her doctorate from Arizona State University in 2009. She serves as the faculty adviser for Lambda Pi Eta, the communication studies honor society. Her research interests include cultural performance, gender and ethnography.

Each year, the Waterhouse Family Insitute provides funds to support research conducted by scholars at Villanova and institutions across the world. The institute through its grant program supports communication-focused research needed to engage the complexities of social change and social justice. This year, the Waterhouse Family Institute accepted 34 percent of the grants submitted for 2014-15.

The University of South Carolina is pleased to announce that Bridget Kirkland will present a paper entitled, “Whaddya Say Jim, Time and Memory in Slices,” during the 2014 Southeastern College Art Conference in Sarasota, Florida, October 8-11, 2014.

Kirkland’s paper will be presented during the themed session, “Reinventing Memory.”

Born in Philadelphia, Penn., Kirkland is a part-time professor of graphic design at USC Upstate and serves as a faculty design mentor for the STUDIO, a student-run design firm housed in the incubator at the George Dean Johnson, Jr. College of Business and Economics.

Kirkland also serves an adjunct professor at Converse College. She is a digital artist at Bridget Kirkland Design and serves as the art director for a college-themed app scheduled for release in summer 2015.

A University of South Carolina Upstate professor has been awarded a research grant by the National Cancer Institute.

Bernard Omolo, Ph.D., assistant chair of the Division of Mathematics and Computer Science, has received a two-year grant totaling $269,336 to develop statistical methodology for colon cancer research being conducted in Spartanburg.

Omolo’s grant is a supplement to a research grant by Dr. Timothy Yeatman, director of the Gibbs Cancer Center and president of the Gibbs Research Institute. Yeatman’s research focuses on individualized colon cancer therapy using hybrid RNA and DNA molecular signature.

“I will be working with Dr. Yeatman to develop statistical models for predicting response to cetuximab in colon cancer patients,” Omolo said.

Omolo said that he will be analyzing data on patients who are undergoing treatment using cetuximab to treat metastatic colorectal cancer. He also will analyze RNA and DNA biomarkers that indicates the risk or progression of the disease, and the susceptibility given treatment.

Omolo said that he and Yeatman had been working on the supplemental grant since February 2013 and were finally accepted to begin work on September 1, 2014. Omolo said that there is still much to learn about the technology that produced the data and the research methodology.

“It will be a very busy two years for me,” Omolo said. “My work will be focused on research and I will be required to submit manuscripts arising from the data analysis and statistical methodology developed. There will be some travel involved as I meet with experts in the field to learn more about the data and the current reporting techniques.”

When Melissa Pilgrim’s undergraduate students suit up for research, they don’t reach for white lab coats and safety glasses. Instead, they don waders, battery-powered headlamps and lots of bug spray before heading into damp woodlands after dusk.

Welcome to USC Upstate’s chapter of the North American Amphibian Monitoring Program — a citizen-scientist project that’s both demanding and rewarding.

Read more about what Pilgrim is doing in the “classroom.”

Dr. Lisa Johnson and Dr. Robert McRuer announce that the first of two special issues of the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies is now available.

JLCDS 8.2 and 8.3, edited by Johnson and McRuer, are both on the topic of Cripistemologies.

The volume includes essays by Mel Chen, Anna Mollow, and Aly Patsavas and “Comments from the Field” by Margaret Fink and Cassandra Hartblay.

Following the introduction, a virtual roundtable brings into conversation such renowned scholars of disability studies, critical race theory, and gender studies as Lennard Davis, David Serlin, Emma Kivisild, Jennifer Christine Nash, J. Jack Halberstam, Margaret Price, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Jasbir Puar, Susan Schweik, Jennifer James, Lisa Duggan, and Carrie Sandahl.

Johnson has been developing a specialization in this field over the past five years, and as director of the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies, she has integrated disability studies into the WGS minor curriculum. She serves on the editorial board of Disability Studies Quarterly and received an Access Leadership award from Disability Services in 2012 for offering several courses on this topic at USC Upstate.

JLCDS can be accessed through our library databases.

A unique partnership between non-profit groups and botanists aims to rid the Mary Black Foundation Rail Trail of non-native, invasive plant species.

The Trees Coalition, formerly known as the Kudzu Coalition, Partners for Active Living and the Mary Black Foundation teamed with local botanists Drs. Gillian Newberry and Ben Montgomery to catalog specific plants, shrubs and vines on the Rail Trail.

Read more in the Herald-Journal.

The USC Upstate Committee for Faculty Excellence has selected Dr. Colleen O’Brien, associate professor of English, as the 2014 winner of the Bank of America Annual Award for Faculty Scholarly and/or Creative Pursuits.

O’Brien has made substantial interdisciplinary and international contributions to the fields of American literature, history, American studies, and African American Studies. In the past three years alone, O’Brien has published one book, two book chapters, and four scholarly articles in some of the most competitive journals in American studies and American literature. She has also been awarded a Fulbright Research Chair in North American Studies at the University of Western Ontario, a National Endowment for the Humanities summer institute grant, and a fellowship in the Mellon Foundation American Literatures Initiative — all since 2011.

O’Brien’s book, Race, Romance, and Rebellion: Literatures of the Americas in the Nineteenth-Century (University of Virginia Press, 2013), has already received international recognition from the British Association for American Studies.

As Ronald G. Walters, professor of history at Johns Hopkins University, noted, O’Brien’s work uncovers under-examined materials from across a range of fields — philosophy, history, literature, journalism, politics, and letters—and brings these materials to bear to answer major questions about links between various reform movements in the 19th century.

“Part of my excitement about this line of analysis is that it helps reconsider a criticism some of us have made about white abolitionists — that they were unable to articulate clearly what a free, racially egalitarian society might look like,” Walters added. “Dr. O’Brien suggests that many African Americans and people of First Nations were able to do so, thanks in part to the circulation of people and ideas from the U.S., Haiti, Canada and elsewhere.”

Through this research, O’Brien is changing understandings of the nineteenth century by breaking down the barriers of race, gender, nation, and region and tracing the cross-boundary networks that shaped the foundations of the nineteenth century throughout the Americas.

Her second book, Metaphors of Heart’s Blood and Home, already in progress, explores the nineteenth-century concept of freedom rooted in land-ownership and agricultural self-sufficiency that spread throughout North and South America and emerged from African and Native American rhetoric about land and liberty.

Dr. Celena Kusch, associate professor of American Literature in the department of Languages, Literature, and Composition, has been named co-chair of the H.D. International Society, a society dedicated to the study of the writer H.D. (Hilda Doolittle).

Kusch’s co-chair is Dr. Rebecca Walsh, assistant professor of English at North Carolina State University.

H.D. was one of the pioneers in literature in the first half of the 20th century and she played an important role in bringing issues of gender to the forefront of the global literary, film, and artistic communities of the time.

The H.D. International Society works to assist scholars, students, artists, and the general public in sharing resources and information, establishing collaborations, and supporting the production of scholarly and creative responses to H.D. and members of her circle.

The H.D. International Society recently launched a new website.