About Our People
The following faculty members were granted tenure at the university’s recent board of trustees meeting: Lori DeKruyf (Graduate Counseling), Bob Hamilton (Engineering), Kendra Weddle Irons (Religious Studies), Rhett Luedtke (Performing Arts), Lisa McMinn (Sociology), and Gary Spivey (Engineering).
The board also approved promotions. Promoted from assistant to associate professor were Corey Beals (Religious Studies), Melanie Hulbert (Sociology), Sue O’Donnell (Psychology), and Mary Peterson (Graduate Psychology). Also, Judy Keeney (Education) was promoted from instructor to assistant professor.
Joel Perez (Student Life) presented a workshop, “Hard Lessons to Learn: Dealing with Racial Incidents on a Christian Campus,†at the SCORR (Student Congress on Racial Reconciliation) conference held at Biola University in La Mirada, Calif., in February.
Kathy Heininge’s (Writing/Literature) book Buffoonery in Irish Drama: Staging 20th Century Post-Colonial Stereotypes is now available from Peter Lang Publishing. Generations of Irish playwrights have tried to assert the reputation of the stage Irish figure as other than comic, but each effort was in its turn assailed as buffoonery. Using post-colonial and performative theory, Heininge’s book demonstrates the ways the Irish struggled to create a sense of identity in a colonial structure and explores the distortion and appropriation of that new identity that elicit further calls to eradicate negative stereotypes. Demonstrating the pervasiveness of the reclamation efforts, Buffoonery in Irish Drama covers a wide range of well-known and obscure plays to show the trajectory of 20th century drama that brings us into a globalized 21st-century Ireland.
Ed Higgins’ (Writing/Literature) poem “We two†was published in the March 2009 issue of Earthshine, an online poetry journal. In addition, the current online issue of Tattoo Highway features his poem “Polyphemous Remembers the Taste of Greeks.†Ed recently attended the annual Conference on College Composition and Communication in San Francisco, participating in an all-day “Writing Teachers Writing” workshop in which he read some of his own creative nonfiction and poetry.