Westmont Magazine Faculty Footnotes
Activities and awards for Westmont’s outstanding professors
Three Westmont professors received the 2014 Teacher of the Year Award: John Blondell(theater arts, right) in the humanities; Kristi Lazar Cantrell (chemistry) in the sciences; and Rick Pointer (history) in the social sciences. Helen Rhee (religious studies) won the Faculty Research Award. Three adjunct professors received the first Adjunct Teaching Awards: Chris Ecklund (kinesiology); Coby Harmon (economics and business); and Daniela Kostruba (modern languages).
Scott Anderson (art) completed illustrations for Seattle Met Magazine, The Dallas Observer, The Wall Street Journal, and The Village Voice. He created the cover art for a young reader’s book from Penguin, “What is the World Series?”
The Santa Barbara Independent honored five professors with 2014 theater awards: John Blondell (theater arts) for directing Westmont’s “Pirates of Penzance” and Lit Moon Theatre’s “Hamlet”; John Douglas (music) for musical direction of “Next to Normal” with Out of the Box Theater Company; Victoria Finlayson (theater arts) for choreography in “The Pirates of Penzance” and her performances in Lit Moon’s “Hamlet” and “Untitled IV” for UCSB’s Launch Pad; Miller James (theater arts) for his direction and costume design of “The Importance of Being Earnest” for Circle Bar B Theatre; and Mitchell Thomas (theater arts) for directing Westmont’s “Electra.” Blondell directed a Lit Moon Theatre production of “The Cherry Orchard” by Anton Chekhov in September and took his Lit Moon production of “Hamlet” to Beijing in October to play at the National Theatre of China’s International Shakespeare Festival.
Katherine Calloway (English), who is serving a one-year appointment, has published “Natural Theology in the Scientific Revolution” (Pickering Studies in the Philosophy of Religion).
Alister Chapman (history) presented a paper, “Race, Religion, and the Politics of the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act,” at a meeting of the Christianity and History Forum at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, in June.
Steve Contakes (chemistry) published an article, “Logical Pitfalls and Commu-nication Gaps: Frequent Lines of Argument that Dead End the Origins Conversation,” in Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith during the summer.
During the summer, Lisa De Boer (art) hosted a conference for the fifth cohort of Lilly Graduate Fellows at Westmont with the theme, Virtuous Learning and Virtuous Teaching. Cheri Larsen Hoeckley (English) facilitated discussions based on George Eliot’s “Middlemarch.”
Deborah Dunn (communication studies) contributed “Bearing Witness: Seeing as a Form of Service” to the spring 2014 issue of Liberal Education published by the Association of American Colleges and Universities.
Charles Farhadian (religious studies) gave a series of four interviews to Compassion Radio in August, “What in the World is God Doing?” He is teaching in Seoul, South Korea, during the fall.
Robert Gundry (scholar-in-residence) delivered a special Provost’s Lecture in October, arguing that the Gospel of Matthew differs significantly from the other Gospels in its portrayal of Peter. Provost Mark Sargent responded. Watch this and other lectures on the college’s YouTube channel, www.youtube.com/ WestmontTV.
A solo exhibit by Nathan Huff (art), “Domesticating Disturbances,” appears at the Sweeney Art Gallery in UC Riverside’s Culver Center for the Arts through the end of the year. He is featured in “ArtWatch 2014: Young Careers—SB to Greater LA” at the Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art through Nov. 22. Chris Rupp (art) also contributed work to the “ArtWatch 2014” exhibit.
Wayne Iba (computer science) presented a poster, “The Power of One: The Surprising Influence of an Individual,” at the Fifth International Workshop on Computational Social Choice in June at Carnegie Mellon University.
Tom Knecht (political science) and Emily Ecklund ’12, one of his former students, published an essay, “Gender Differences at Christian and Secular Colleges,” in the summer edition of Christian Scholar’s Review.
Tremper Longman III (Robert Gundry professor of biblical studies) edited “The Baker Compact Bible Dictionary.” He wrote the forward for “Reconsidering the Relationship between Biblical and Syste-matic Theology in the New Testament” (Mohr Siebeck, 2014), a festschrift honoring Robert Gundry (scholar-in-residence).
In July, Chandra Mallampalli (history) presented a paper, “The Debate over Dalit Christian Reservations in India,” at the European Conference on South Asian Studies in Zurich, Switzerland. He also delivered a lecture in August at the Jindal Global Law School in New Delhi, “When Liberal Empire Meets Wahhabi Conspiracy in Colonial India, 1835-1840.”
Christine Milner (kinesiology), Andrea Gurney (psychology) and Jane Wilson (education) collaborated on a presentation, “The Science of Gratitude: Physical, Psychological, Spiritual and Pedagogical Benefits of Practicing Gratitude,” for the Christian Society for Kinesiology and Leisure Studies national meeting at Messiah College in Pennsylvania in June.
John Moore (kinesiology) served as a court coach for the 2014 USA Basketball Men’s U18 National Team training camp in June at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colo.
Mark Nelson (philosophy) presented a paper, “What the Utilitarian Cannot Think,” in May at a conference at the University of Notre Dame and again in July to the British Society for Ethical Theory in Cambridge. He also delivered a paper, “Moral Psychology and Non-cognitivism: Hume Against the Humeans,” at the annual meeting of the International Hume Society in Portland, Ore.
Tito Paredes (anthropology) wrote an article, “New Emerging Forms of Holistic Mission in Latin America,” for the International Review of Mission of the World Council of Churches. During August, he hosted a group of 14 doctoral students from Brazil, Argentina, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Peru and Hispanic USA as they worked for two weeks on courses related to Latin American theology.
Helen Rhee (religious studies, above) participated in a workshop on Religion and Medicine, Health, Healing, Disease, and Disability in Late Antiquity at the annual meeting of the North American Patristic Society in May. She also served as a guest preacher at the New Harvest Ministry in Seoul in June.
Steve Rogers (psychology) and recent graduates Katie Mukai ’14, Eric Zuidema ’14, Brittany Allen ’14 and Elise Albert ’14 made six presentations at the American Psychological Association Annual Convention in Washington, D.C. Their projects included examining the relationship between sleep and neuro-psychological functioning, the impact of a history of depression on the cognitive performance of older adults, and the degree of similarity or difference in the cognitive functioning of married couples.
Carmel Saad (psychology) chaired a symposium at the American Psychological Association convention in Washington, D.C., in August. She also gave a presentation, “Bicultural Identity Conflict and Implicit Identification.”
Ed Song (philosophy) presented a paper, “Liberal Democracy and the Value of Autonomy,” at the Workshop in Christian Political Thought at Wheaton College in July.
In August, Felicia Song (sociology) presented a paper at the meeting of the American Sociological Association in San Francisco. Speaking at the roundtable on Consumers and Consumption, she discussed “Online Shopping as a Labor of Love: Motherhood and the Social Construction of Baby Registries.”
Mitchell Thomas (theater arts) performed the Pulitzer-nominated, one-man play “Thom Pain (based on nothing),” at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in June. In September he opened a double bill with Lit Moon Theatre Company, playing Lopahkin in Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” and Polonius/Laertes/ Gravedigger in “Hamlet” in Beijing in October.
Randy VanderMey (English) read two of his poems at the Western Region Conference on Christianity and Literature at Westmont in May that have been accepted for publication in forthcoming issues of Books and Culture. In August, he participated in a week-long poetry workshop, part of the annual Glen West Workshop in Santa Fe, N.M.
In July, Tom Walters (kinesiology) served as the moderator for a continuing education webinar, “Pain: Where Does Biomechanics Fit?”
Jane Wilson (education) co-wrote an article with Paige Harris ’14, “How Practicing Gratitude Influences the Teaching-Learning Experience of Pre-Service Teachers,” published in CCNews: California Council on Teacher Education.