Honors Associate Professor Kristine LaLonde was named a finalist for the Nashville Business Journal‘s  2013 Women of Influence Awards in the inspiration and mentor category. LaLonde coordinates and teaches the courses for the Honors leadership studies program, Project LEAD.  Project LEAD works with students to help them become more effective and engaged citizens through study, discussion, and community-based projects.

Award winners will be named March 1 during an awards luncheon at Loews Vanderbilt Hotel.

Dr. Ronnie Littlejohn, chairman of philosophy and director of Asian Studies, will give two public talks in the Philosophy and Religious Studies Distinguished Lecture Series at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Wash. on Feb. 25 and 26.  The two talks examine the records of the numinal experiences of the masters of the dao contained in Daoist classical and canonical texts.  Littlejohn explores the connections between the experiences and the physical locations in which they occurred: underground chambers, caves, and grottoes. In addition to linking these activities to seminal texts such as the Daodejing and Zhuangzi, he argues that this connection continues throughout later Daoist lineage histories. He also explores comparisons between Daoist and similar experiences recorded of Biblical and ancient Greek figures.

English Assistant Professor Gary McDowell has two essays forthcoming in SLAB and The Bellingham Review. Both essays are excerpts from a memoir-in-progress. He also has poems that will be published in literary journals Salt Hill, Bateau, Linebreak, and The Georgetown Review. McDowell will read and discuss the poems from his forthcoming book, Weeping at a Stranger’s Funeral (Dream Horse Press, 2014), Feb. 23 at The Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900 in a talk titled, “Household Fire and Other Poems.”

English Instructor Charmion Gustke ‘s article “Luck and Success Are Very Different Things”: Lessons from the Bank Vault” will appear in the forthcoming scholarly issue of The Willa Cather Newsletter and Review, feathering essays to celebrate Knopf’s publication of The Letters of Willa Cather

Research and Instruction Librarian Claire Walker co-presented a session at the Conference on Higher Education Pedagogy held at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va. Feb. 6-8. This conference focused on higher education teaching excellence and the scholarship of teaching and learning. Walker helped lead the session titled “Authentic Teaching: Lessons from Instruction Librarians,” which discussed best practices and strategies for development as an authentic teacher.