|
Back Issues of Literati
David Chapman named Dean
of Howard College of Arts & Sciences
David Chapman succeeded English
grad Roderick Davis ('62) as Dean of Howard College of Arts
and Sciences, beginning August 2001. Davis retired as dean
but returns to teaching full-time as professor of English.
Chapman, who was associate dean and is a
professor of communication, joined Samford's English faculty
in 1990 and has been responsible for developing the undergraduate
writing program at the University, including Writing Across
the Curriculum and directing the Communication Arts curriculum
for freshmen. He has a B.A. from the University of Oklahoma,
M.A. from the University of Tulsa, and a Ph.D. from Texas
Christian University.
Chapman is proud of the core curriculum
developed five years ago in the college and wants to continue
the strong competency standards of the interdisciplinary program.
He cited the results from a national survey on student engagement,
ranking Samford high, particularly among freshmen in class
participation and in leading discussion.
"These rankings have a lot to do with
the core, and with English," he said. "The English
Department has had an integral role in the core curriculum."
Chapman believes the core mirrors the development
of English studies over the last generation. "Although
we still preserve the canonical works in English, the movement
to cultural and historical studies has been exciting,"
he said. "English doesn't have the kind of elitist attitude
it was once accused of having. I see the interchange of literature,
history, philosophy, psychology, and other fields as very
positive. Literary studies are still at the heart of the intellectual
enterprise."
Chapman finds an inspiring role model in
John Howard, the 18th century British prison reformer for
whom the college was named. "He was not necessarily a
philanthropist, but his work made a significant contribution
to society, and to Christianity."
Chapman expects the English Department to
continue its contributions to the college. "The department
has been outstanding in cultivating its majors."
Rosemary Fisk named associate dean
On October 1, 2001,
Associate Professor of English Rosemary Fisk was named Associate
Dean of Academic Affairs for the Howard College of Arts and
Sciences. George Keller, an associate professor of Biology,
was named Associate Dean for Student Affairs for the college.
Fisk is a former Samford English major ('77)
who earned her Master's degree at Duke and her doctorate at
Rice University in American literature, writing her dissertation
on "The Profession of Authorship: Hawthorne and His Publisher,
James T. Fields."
She has been active in service to the department
and to the college. She is advisor of Sigma Tau Delta, the
English honorary society and has been co-coordinator for the
Cultural Perspectives curriculum, the first-year, interdisciplinary
core curriculum. She is also on the executive board of the
Nathaniel Hawthorne Society.
In her new administrative role, she will
be in charge of the core curriculum and general education
courses with a broader involvement in faculty development.
"We still have a relatively new curriculum
(in its fifth year) and we are still assessing it, but the
courses have proved to reach their primary objective, which
was to give a foundation to the students of a learning experience
that raised the level of academic discourse."
Immediately, Fisk will be working on accreditation
with the American Academy of Liberal Education, the only organization
that accredits schools of arts and sciences nationally, making
the process faculty-driven rather than the normal one-size-fits-all
accreditation process.
"When I made the case for considering
the AALE, I hoped our faculty would get enough recognition
so that we become sought-after in assessing other programs,"
she said. "This can only make our program better."
Hillary Olsen: Texan with a French
Connection
That's right, she's
from Texas, from Plano, where the flat prairie stretches west
toward El Paso and where her father works for Wells-Fargo
no less (the financial institution). But nearly all points
of the compass meet in Hillary Olsen, a senior English and
French major who has taken her Samford education around the
world.
For starters, there's the francophile who
spent one summer in Grenoble and last summer at the Lycée
Française Charles de Gaulle, a French-speaking high
school located a few blocks from the Samford London Study
Centre. As part of an internship, Olsen worked each day in
the library, learning and speaking French.
She is apt to be reading Marguerite Duras'
L'Amant (The Lover) while she works out on the treadmill at
the local gym, where her choice of books draws curious glances:
studying vocabulary for the GRE, browsing through The New
Yorker, pondering Judith Butler's "Body Matters."
Then there's the Russian angle. Her senior thesis in French
examines Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1875-77), a book she chose
partly "because there's so much French in it."
Yet her coursework at Samford has drawn
her to favorite ethnic authors such as Sandra Sisneros or
Maxine Hong Kinston. Her senior thesis in English examines
the crossing of gender barriers in Kinston's The Woman Warrior
and Chinamen.
A writer herself, Olsen is inspired by Native
American author Leslie Marmon Silko, but also by her mother,
who grew up in Hawaii and who taught third grade in New Jersey.
Olsen's story "Pele and Starboy," for instance,
uses her mother's stories to imagine herself as the goddess
Pele falling in love with the mortal Starboy.
In some ways, Olsen's being at Samford at
all is surprising. She was headed to UT-Austin out of high
school and fought the idea of coming to Birmingham before
she arrived for a campus visit. Once here, "I just got
the feeling that this was the place for me," she says.
Initially undecided and considering Journalism,
she followed her love of literature to English, where she
has enjoyed Shakespeare, Sisneros, Silko, and in her free
time, Si Su, her teacher at meditation classes in Hoover,
who instructs his students by asking, "What did you learn
about yourself from yourself?" The discipline of "bringing
yourself to what you are doing" made her a better student,
Olsen says: "It has cut down on stress and helped me
in class. Now I don't wait passively to learn everything from
the teacher."
She wants to take a year or so to reflect
on that question, believing she may pursue grad school down
the road. In the meantime, her destination is more likely
to be domestic rather than international, more likely the
Navajo Indian Reservation than Nice. She is looking hard at
the Teach for America program, which supports bright, young
teachers out of college in 17 sites across the country where
teachers are in great demand.
| Rod Davis returns
to his teacher's roots |
|
After eleven years of administration
(not all of it was administrivia), Roderick Davis, '58, has
joined Samford's English faculty full-time, trading offices
with his former associate David Chapman, who succeeds Davis
as dean of the Howard College of Arts & Sciences.
In a tribute dinner last April, speakers
credited Davis with leading an academic renaissance in the
college: hiring high-quality faculty members, renovating the
University core curriculum, adding new departments, and culminating
his tenure with the dedication of the new ScienCenter this
fall.
Davis has now back to his first love, literature,
teaching the western classics in the Cultural Perspectives
and British literature, particularly twentieth century British
literature. Davis is a Joseph Conrad scholar.
At Howard College in the late fifties, Davis's
class was the last on the old Roebuck campus. An English major,
he remembers the mentoring of Samuel Mitchell, of the late
Lizette Van Gelder Mitchell, and of Dean Burns.
He left for the northeast, completing degrees
at Boston University (M.A. in English), Yale (Master's of
Divinity), and Columbia (Ph.D. in English), staying in New
York City for 23 years as professor and administrator at John
Jay College. He returned to Samford in 1990 as Dean of the
Howard College of Arts & Sciences.
| Scarlotte Deupree returns to
real world after Miss Alabama |
|
Senior English major Scarlotte
Deupree of Sylacauga was crowned Miss Alabama 2002 in June
and then finished as First Runner-up in the Miss America contest
in September 2002, but now the challenges really begin.
She has joined the staff of Initiative 7 as Program
Director. Initiative 7, the brainchild of Alabama's Seventh
District Congressman Artur Davis, is a public interest project
to enhance the development of the Southeast Blackbelt region.
Her new position also gives her a new forum from
which to promote literacy, which was her platform as Miss
Alabama. Even as a high school student, to help her community
of Sylacauga, she began volunteering in literacy programs.
She later started a program that identifies people to serve
as one-on-one tutors.
Her family moved to Birmingham several years ago,
and she became active in the Literacy Council of Central Alabama,
where she still serves. In 2001, she and the council sponsored
Alabama's first Women in Literacy Summit, held at Samford.
She said that she first became interested in literacy
when she learned that 25 percent of Alabamians read below
the fifth-grade level. "That's about 500,000 people,
and that is a very scary thing to me," she said, adding
that many of those cannot read at all.
An honors student, she interned in the office
of Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions in January 2001 and has also
interned on the editorial desk of Southern Living magazine.
|
