Fall 2007 E-Newsletter
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This is our second e-newsletter, and we hope you enjoy it! Thanks for the feedback you provided about the Spring 2007 edition, and, as always, if you have suggestions of things we should include in the future, don’t hesitate to contact us. The Fall semester is now well under way, and in this edition we’ll take time to look back and congratulate our August 2007 graduates and look forward to some events still to come this fall. I’d like to thank everyone who attended our annual MALS Get Together and Informational Meeting earlier this week. It’s important to foster a sense of community among students and faculty, and we hope to see more of you at these events in the future. Information on other happenings of interest can be found below in the Events section. Don’t forget that the MALS e-newsletter will come out 3 times a year and will include:
What would you like to see? We are especially interested in keeping contact with our alums, and we are doing our best to find you all! Please keep the MALS Program updated with your current physical and email addresses.
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The MALS Advisory Group is a dedicated and energetic group of faculty who help guide the MALS Program, working on everything from admissions to assessment and policy formulation. They bring new ideas and new perspectives to the table, and help us advance interdisciplinary inquiry on campus. Join me in thanking them for all they do for MALS! Thanks to Earnest Cox, Victor Ellsworth, Mark Hartmann, Dan Holland, Laura Smoller, Marjorie Williams-Smith, and Paul Yoder. This edition we would like to turn our “Faculty Spotlilght” to the activities of some of the MALS Advisory Group members (below are the recent activities of the members who were able to respond by our deadline). |
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She is nearing completion of her book manuscript “The Saint and the Chopped-Up Baby: The Cult of Vincent Ferrer and the Religious Life of the Later Middle Ages,” to which end she spent much of the summer reading early Latin lives of the saintly fifteenth century Dominican preacher. This fall, she is teaching graduate courses in “Disease and Society from Antiquity to the Present” and “Apocalypse Now and Then: A History of Apocalyptic Thought and Movements.” |
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Dr. Marjorie Williams-Smith is pleased to announce the following art activities that she will have a part in: UALR Faculty Biennial Exhibition; UALR Gallery I; November 4, 2007 - January 14, 2008 Fifth Annual 5×5 Exhibition (group exhibition); Arts Center of the Ozarks; Springdale, Arkansas; September 28 - November 1, 2007 JUROR for the Central High School Exhibition: Looking Back Looking Ahead: Commemorating 50 Years of Integration; Cox Creative Center - Showcase Arkansas Gallery; Little Rock, Arkansas; September 14 - October 27, 2007 Six Arkansas Printmakers; Christ Episcopal Church; Little Rock, Arkansas; September 14 - November 4, 2007 Solo Exhibition: Silverpoint Drawings; Fort Worth Community Arts Center; Fort Worth, Texas; July 6 - August 18, 2007 57th Annual Art Competition (group exhibition); Fort Smith Art Center; Fort Smith, Arkansas; June 3-30, 2007 |
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Congratulations to the following graduates of the MALS program: |
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Areas of Study: English and Art History Thesis: "The Relationship of Art and Literature: A.S. Byatt, Kate Breakey, and Magic(al) Realism" |
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Angelic Saulsberry Areas of Study: English, Rhetoric, and Journalism Thesis: "Dropping the Soap: Finding and Defining the Soap Opera Genre in Contemporary Television" |
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Chuck Law Areas of Study: Music and Education Final Project: "A Model Curriculum for the Bachelor of Arts Percussioninst" |
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If you’re an alum and would like to send in news or noteworthy events, please contact us (anhunter@ualr.edu). |
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It is always exciting when a student’s hard work is recognized and rewarded. This edition we’d like to share with you a little bit about a current MALS student who received funding to help conduct her thesis research. Ms. Regina Gibson, who is completing an interdisciplinary project using the fields of Gerontology and Health Sciences, agreed to answer some questions about her research. |
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Major: Gerontology; Minor: Health Sciences Expected Graduation: May 2008 Committee Chairs: Professor Mark A Krain (major), School of Social Work; UALR Barbara Hager, MPH (minor) Section Chief; Comprehensive Cancer Control, AR Department of Health 1. What sort of funding did you receive for your research? In the process of preparing to conduct research for my thesis, I was fortunate enough to be pointed in the direction of those who felt my research had enough merit to be funded. 2. What is the focus of your research? My research is entitled “Physician Communication with Older Patients, Particularly Older African American Women, about Sexual Health and Sexual Risk Behaviors for Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS)." My research is designed to examine whether or not physicians (primary care, internal medicine, obstetrics, gynecologists, family and general practice), communicate with their older patients about sexual risk behaviors and HIV/AIDS, and whether or not they test their older patients for these diseases. This topic is of interest to me because the incidence of HIV/AIDS is increasing in this seldom thought to be at high-risk population (age 50 and older). According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in the past few years, new AIDS cases rose faster in middle-aged and older people than in people under age 40 and most of these cases were due to becoming infected after age 50 rather than at an earlier age. The main mode in infection for this age group is through heterosexual sex. Older African American women are disproportionately affected by HIV/AIDS. It is questionable as to what primary care physicians may or may not be doing to educate and assess their older patients for HIV/AIDS. The literature does not support that this is being done on a routine basis, mostly due to age-stereotypes about older persons. In addition to providing information about what physicians in Arkansas are saying or not saying to their older patients about this subject, I anticipate that it will stimulate thought and action for physicians to get sexual histories on their older patients to determine if they practice high-risk sexual behaviors and to test them accordingly. 3. How did you go about getting the funding? At the outset I was hoping for a miracle. Dr. Krain and I had about exhausted sources for funding at the University. I had written a couple of letters to foundations but before I heard anything from them, my minor chair, Barbara Hager, suggested that I talk to Gary Horton, Section Chief of HIV/STD/Hepatitis C at the Arkansas Department of Health (ADH). She thought that the department may be interested in any data that the research provides. Apparently, physicians in Arkansas have not been queried before about their communication with older patients regarding sexual risk behaviors and HIV/AIDS. You might say that this research will be innovative for Arkansas. After a brief meeting, where I was prepared to request some assistance with funding, Mr. Horton and his staff offered to totally fund the research and reduce the funding by allowing me to do the copying and mail out at the HIV/STD Hepatitis C office. The return postage and questionnaire mail backs will also be going to this office. 4. How do you plan on using the funding? The HIV/STD/Hepatitis C Division at ADH is providing most of the funding support in in-kind. The funding left will support hiring a graduate student to transcribe responses received in an Excel file format for data analysis. 5. What advice do you have to give to MALS students who are just beginning the program? My advice is for new students to look at the disciplines they chose and begin from day one to think about a thesis statement encompassing the two. Gear your thesis statement to what you are interested in as you are going to be spending a lot of time with it. Do not become discouraged or anxious if you decide (after much research and deliberation) to change your thesis - that is okay. I think I must have changed my focus several times before it hit met that I was really interested in my current thesis topic. The more I read about older people, the more perspective I gained about the gaps in healthcare that were not being addressed. Lack of information about the consequences for high-risk sexual behaviors is not only an individual problem; it is also a community problem, but older people were not included in HIV/AIDS education and prevention messages. There are many possibilities out there, explore them. Being in an interdisciplinary degree program can be very exciting - you have two areas from which your thesis may emerge and you get to tie them together into something truly unique. |
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We accepted 5 students who began in Summer or Fall 2007 (for a total of 9 students admitted in 2007). Welcome to the new students—Gretchen England, Denies Gaskins, Crystal Hampton-West, Valerie Johnston, and Robin Sternweis. Do you have a friend, colleague or family member who is seeking a unique educational experience? If you know anyone who may be interested in MALS, please have them contact Dr. Hunter for information about the program. She is also available to give presentations about MALS at professional or club meetings. Help us spread the work about MALS! The deadline for consideration for admission in Spring 2008 is October 15, 2007. All application materials should be submitted to the Graduate School office. Contact the MALS office if you have questions about the admissions process. |
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RECENT AND UPCOMING EVENTS |
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Dear MALS alums, students, faculty & friends,
Dr. Laura Smoller, Professor of History, has just published “Astrology and the Sibyls: John of Legnano’s De adventu Christi and the Natural Theology of the Later Middle Ages,” Science in Context 20:3 (2007): 423-50. The article is in a special issue of the journal entitled “Believing Nature, Knowing God,” which represents work carried out by members of the “Natural Theology” section of the research group, “Knowledge and Belief,” sponsored by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, 2003-05. 
Dr. Mark Hartmann is Associate Professor of Anthropology. He continues to teach courses in Physical Anthropology including a graduate course in Forensic Anthropology and courses in Anthropological Theory (also at the graduate level) and archaeology and Egyptology. He has been working on the excavation of an historic cemetery in Missouri and studying Egyptian hieroglyphics in preparation for fieldwork in Egypt in the summer of 2008. Here is a link to his website: 
Dr. Paul Yoder has been keeping busy finishing his book, Blake’s Jerusalem and the Rhetoric of Discontinuity for Edwin Mellen Press. He is currently teaching a graduate course on “Four Literary Icons: Frankenstein, Sherlock Holmes, Dracula and Tarzan,” and will be teaching a new course in the Spring on “How to Read Poetry” for the William G. Cooper, Jr. Honors Program in English. Also in the Spring, Dr. Yoder will sit in as Acting Director of the Donaghey Scholars Program while Dr. Earl Ramsey is on Off-Campus Duty Assignment. You can check out some of Doc Yoder’s bird photographs at his “Yard Birds” page at 
Katie Butler
Regina V. Gibson, RN, BS, CHES, CCRP, Graduate Student, MALS Program