Dr. Joel Overall, assistant professor in English, recently published an article titled “Kenneth Burke and the Problem of Sonic Identification” in Rhetoric Review. The article explores the fragile nature between sound, meaning and division through a close reading of noted rhetorician Kenneth Burke’s review of a 1934 Nazi-German era symphony, Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler.
Rhetoric Review is a tier one scholarly interdisciplinary journal of rhetoric that publishes in all areas of rhetoric and writing. You can access the article here.
Two entries by Belmont University students and alumni received awards at the recent Public Relations Society of America Nashville Chapter’s 31st annual Parthenon Awards. The event was held at the Parthenon at Centennial Park to recognize the best work produced by area public relations professionals and students in 2016.
Receiving Awards of Merit in the student entries category were Callie Edwards for her “Belmont University Residence Life Research” project and Lindsey Barchent, Haley Hicks Charlton (alumna), Julia Couch (alumna), Haley Hall (alumna) and Jessica Martin (alumna) for the “Success. Value. Advocacy” campaign they conducted for the Students Veterans of America in spring 2016. The two projects were produced in public relations classes taught by Dr. Christie Kleinmann.
Edwards, Couch and Hall attended the annual awards event and assisted in welcoming attendees to the sold-out event. Belmont students Cayli Allen, Jenna Corradeno and Megan Heiner also served as volunteers at the event, assisting in handing out awards.
Dr. Bonnie Riechert, chair of the department of public relations, made the award presentation for the Nashville Chapter’s Hercules Award to Jackie Cavnar, recognizing sustained contributions to the chapter, the profession and the community. Riechert was the recipient of the award last year.
The event was attended by 220 area public relations and communications professionals. DVL Seigenthaler received the Best of Show Award. The PRSA Nashville Chapter is the professional sponsor of Public Relations Student Society of America Chapters at Belmont University, Austin Peay State University, Lipscomb University, Middle Tennessee State University and Western Kentucky University. The Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) is the nation’s largest professional organization serving the communications community.
At the recent Tennessee Cooperative Baptists’ meeting, the 2017 Betty Galloway Award for Advocacy for Women in Ministry was awarded to Belmont Professor of Religion Dr. Judy Skeen and Associate Professor of Religion Dr. Andy Watts. The Betty Galloway Advocacy for Women in Ministry Award was established in May 2000 to recognize individuals, churches or organizations that excel in promoting and advocating for women in places of ministry.
Betty Galloway was the first Southern Baptist female deacon ordained in the State of Tennessee. From 1947 to 1951 Betty and her husband served as missionaries to China and Thailand. Later, both served First Baptist Church in Russellville, KY and First Baptist Church in Oak Ridge, TN.
Belmont’s Jack C. Massey College of Business Administration recently announced the maintenance of its business and specialized accounting accreditation by The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB International). Founded in 1916, AACSB International is the longest serving global accrediting body for business schools that offer bachelors, masters and doctorate degrees in business and accounting.
Dean of the College of Business Administration Dr. Pat Raines said, “Accreditation by AACSB-International is the gold standard by which world-class business schools are measured. AACSB standards are developed by business education thought leaders and provide best-practice guidance for deploying academically qualified faculty, enhancing research productivity and assessing learning outcomes to make sure that our students are truly prepared for their first destination. We are extremely proud of the Massey College of Business faculty, staff and students who dedicated themselves to achieving this symbol of global academic excellence.”
Belmont is part of an elite group of institutions—less than 5 percent of the world’s business schools—to have achieved business accreditation from AACSB International. Even more impressive, only 186 institutions hold the additional accounting accreditation and less than 15 hold both the business and accounting accreditation. To realize accounting accreditation, an institution must first earn or maintain AACSB Business Accreditation, which requires an institution to undergo a meticulous internal review and evaluation process. Then, in addition to developing and implementing a mission-driven plan to satisfy the business accreditation quality standards, accounting accreditation requires the satisfaction of an additional set of standards specific to the discipline and profession of accounting.
“AACSB commends each institution for their exemplary work in holding the highest honor in business school accreditation,” said Robert D. Reid, executive vice president and chief accreditation officer of AACSB International. “During this peer-review process schools must demonstrate alignment with AACSB’s global accreditation standards, as well as how they encourage engagement, innovation, and impact across the communities they serve.”
Belmont University’s Department of Art celebrated senior achievement and graduation with its annual exhibition of senior studio art and art education majors. The exhibit culminated with a reception and art crawl that included the presentation of senior design portfolios in the Leu Center for the Visual Arts Gallery and Lobby on Thursday, May 4.
Participating seniors included Sevoey Anderson, Regan Anne, Danielle Armbruster, Jessi Baumgartner, Sadie Birchfield, Dustin Conway, Kiana Enriquez, Celeste Foust, Absurd Ty Higgins, Madison Kent, Adrienne Li, Grace E Lewis, Lindsey McCartin, Ashley McCormick, Mary Louise Meadors, Ryan Minnigan, Grace Netter, Lauren Newman, Sara Schandelmayer, Gramm Sedano, Jacob Spalding and Chandler Thompson.
This year’s gallery includes a variety of art forms, mediums and styles as students have the opportunity to select the pieces they will showcase. Lauren Newman, a senior studying studio art with an emphasis in photography, is passionate about lifestyle and fashion photography, though her extensive portfolio has expanded to include many industries. Her exhibit, titled “Nirvana,” highlights diners around Nashville and questions how we view the concept of Nirvana, a transcendent state where suffering, desire and a sense of self is removed. Taking its inspiration from Charles Bukowski’s poem, “Nirvana,” Newman visited Nashville’s most familiar diners and photographed individual booths.
One of Newman’s “Nirvana” pictures
“I challenge the viewer to see them with fresh eyes,” Newman said. “Most of these diners have been around for decades and reflect an aesthetic popular to their time. Most, if not all, of these locations have not been updated, but they have instead chosen to retain an original aesthetic. The intention of this work is to evoke a sense of not only nirvana, but also comfort and familiarity that can be found with any diner, no matter where you are.”
Madison Kent, an art education student, chose to explore the intersection of faith, art and human emotion in her pieces. Born from a place of tension — faith and anxiety, the flesh and the spirit and peace and affliction — Kent’s exhibit seeks to understand how anxiety and spirituality can coexist, using color and texture to mimic the complexity of life’s stories. Taking inspiration from her own story, Kent said she “uses paint to evoke empathy and give voice to intangible emotions. While emotionally charged, these paints are also rooted in meditations surrounding biblical passages, hymns or phrases that have provided hope in the midst of my personal struggle with anxiety and panic attacks.”
Kent’s piece entitled “Stone to Flesh”
Embarking on her own journey to seek hope when despair was easier, Kent said her art followed suit. Though she didn’t intend for hope to become some a prevalent theme as she planned to focus on the tension between mental illness and spirituality, her own lessons of choosing hope came through in her creations. “As I learned that hope could exist within the tension, it started to seep into the work,” Kent said. “The colors softened and my marks became gentler.”
Seeing her pieces as an opportunity to impact her viewers, Kent encourages the tension between these very different ideals. “Humans so often run from this tension, even though sometimes it is where we should pitch our tents and dwell for awhile, rather than choosing a side,” she said. “The tension makes us uncomfortable. It shakes us and forces us to decide what we believe is true and where we place our faith. I have found hope in this tension…Like these paintings, life is layered, colorful and abstract. In the face of anxiety, insecurities or whatever storms may come, we must seek out the words, beliefs and people that give us strength to confront the tension in our hearts and to choose hope in the midst of woe.”
Dr. Steve Murphree, biology professor and director of the Middle Tennessee Science & Engineering Fair, recently received a grant for the Middle Tennessee Science and Engineering Fair (MTSEF) from the Nashville Predators Foundation. These funds will help pay for MTSEF awards, mailings to area schools to encourage student research and projects and affiliation fees with the Society for Science and the Public for MTSEF Grand Prize winners to go to the International Science and Engineering Fair.
MTSEF is the premiere STEM competition for middle and high school students in Nashville-Davidson County and its surrounding counties (Williamson, Rutherford, Wilson, Sumner, Robertson, Cheatham, Dickson, Houston, Humphreys, Montgomery, Stewart, Hickman, Lewis, Maury, Perry, Wayne, Trousdale, Bedford, Giles, Lawrence, Lincoln, Marshall and Moore). The Middle Tennessee Science and Engineering Fair Foundation is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization which was formed in 2015 to secure financial support for MTSEF. Belmont has hosted the MTSEF since 2016 and
Belmont University hosted a regional conference on Shakespeare and the digital humanities on April 20 and launched its new website, “Shakespeare in Nashville Performance Archive.” The website showcases video clips, interviews and photos of local Shakespeare performances. The conference and website were made possible by a grant from the Folger Shakespeare Library in conjunction with the National Endowment for the Humanities. Drs. Marcia McDonald, Jayme Yeo and Joel Overall wrote the grant and organized the conference, and the website was created in classes taught by McDonald and Overall.
On Wednesday, April 19, first-year students enrolled in Dr. Bonnie Smith Whitehouse’s “Writers Who Walk” and Holly Huddleston’s “Health and Fitness Concepts” courses traveled to Radnor Lake State Park with their guided journals in hand to experience how exercise and nature foster creative writing. The group walked the three-mile-long trail together while making stops along the way to sit in the solitude of nature and write their thoughts.
This is just one example of an opportunity made possible through Belmont’s interdisciplinary Learning Community Courses (LCC) requirement found in the University’s general education program, better known on campus as the BELL Core. LCCs, which link together two courses from different areas of study that share a common issue or goal, support the idea that integrating lessons between classes is a critical part of the learning process. The primary purpose of the LCC is to build on the understanding of “ways of knowing,” developed in Belmont’s First-Year Seminar (FYS) program. The experience of “crossing borders,” which is central to the FYS, is a regular practice in an LCC as students cross the borders between two disciplines by completing common assignments, readings and projects.
For the faculty members, the LCC structure allows more class time for expanding lessons beyond the traditional classroom. For Smith Whitehouse, an English professor, taking walks in nature helps to inspire students’ creativity and encourages them to break down the structured way they often view writing. “I think writers spend way too much time in front of screens. That’s not historically how writers have composed, and we need to remember that,” she said. “Creation is a great place to create! I love getting to show my students that through the learning community and through getting their bodies and their minds engaged.”
Additionally, exercising the mind while also taking care of the body prepares students to develop a lifelong commitment to wellness in the physical, mental and spiritual sense. Instead of just focusing her lessons on exercise, Huddleston, who teaches in the Sport Science department, is able to show students the true impact exercise can have on all aspects of their lives, beyond just physical health.
Throughout the semester, Huddleston and Smith Whitehouse’s students have researched the relationship between the mind and body, learned about labyrinths and pilgrimages and have made interactive walking guides for various locations around Nashville, including Beaman Park and Bells Bend.
“About six and a half years ago, I approached Holly,” Smith Whitehouse said. “I had a kernel of an idea that [this class] could work as an LCC because I had been thinking for a long time about the peripatetic tradition in philosophy and literature. ‘Peripatetic’ means ‘given to walking about,’ and it describes philosophers and teachers like Plato whose ‘classrooms’ were not rooms with four walls and a row of desks, but the perimeters of the city. They literally walked about and taught about what they saw and how the world in which they moved connected to real-world philosophical problems. That appealed to me, and I wanted to experiment with it. And Belmont is the kind of place where someone like me can get a kernel of an idea and bring it to life! I’m so grateful for that.”
For more information on Belmont’s LCCs and their purpose, click here.
A panel of faculty-authors recently hosted a discussion for fellow faculty, staff and students on their article, “The Cultural Leadership Cohort Group Initiative: Empowered Community-Building for Faculty of Color,” published in The Journal of Interdisciplinary Education. The authors included Drs. Cheryl Slay Carr, Hope Campbell, Edgar Diaz-Cruz, Michelle Guinn, Leela Kodali, Hyangsook Lee and Bernard Turner.
During the event, the team discussed their experience in collaborative writing across the disciplines and their findings on the value of the Faculty of Color Cohort Group Model. They offered recommendations for university hiring practices and for faculty members interested in leading efforts to improve and grow inclusive campuses.
Dr. Matthew Heard, Biology, was asked to be a member of the Board of Editors for the journal Southeastern Naturalist (SENA). Per their website, The Southeastern Naturalist (Print ISSN #1528-7092 and Online ISSN # 1938-5412) is a peer-reviewed journal that publishes original articles focused on natural history research related to all aspects of the biology and ecology of terrestrial, freshwater and marine organisms and the environments of the southeastern portion of North America.
Dr. Joel Overall, assistant professor in English, recently published an article titled “Kenneth Burke and the Problem of Sonic Identification” in Rhetoric Review. The article explores the fragile nature between sound, meaning and division through a close reading of noted rhetorician Kenneth Burke’s review of a 1934 Nazi-German era symphony, Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler. 
Two entries by Belmont University students and alumni received awards at the recent Public Relations Society of America Nashville Chapter’s 31st annual Parthenon Awards. The event was held at the Parthenon at Centennial Park to recognize the best work produced by area public relations professionals and students in 2016.
Dr. Steve Murphree, biology professor and director of the Middle Tennessee Science & Engineering Fair, recently received a grant for the 
Dr. Matthew Heard, Biology, was asked to be a member of the Board of Editors for the journal 