- University News Archive - ��Vlog��ý Little Rock

��Vlog��ý Little Rock Remembers Professor Emeritus Paul Yoder

John Hill — Wed, 02 Nov 2022 13:14:11 +0000

��Vlog��ý Little Rock Professor Emeritus passed away Oct. 29 in Little Rock, where he was surrounded by his family. Dr. Yoder retired from the Department of English in 2017 after a quarter century as a professor at ��Vlog��ý Little Rock. “Among the many qualities I cherish about Paul is his passionate generosity, as a scholar, a mentor, a teacher, a friend,” said Dr. Kris McAbee, co-director of the School of Literary and Performing Arts. “He shared ideas openly without pretense or condescension. He adored teaching and was as proud of his university teaching award as his wide-ranging and innovative scholarship. I know many of you share in the sorrow his family, colleagues, and students feel at this loss.” Dr. Yoder earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Louisiana State University and a master’s degree in English from Ohio State University. After earning his Ph.D. in English from Duke University, Yoder accepted a faculty position at ��Vlog��ý Little Rock, where he would stay until he retired in 2017. Dr. Yoder, or “Doc” as he was affectionately known by his students, was well loved by his students for his insightful teaching and mentorship “I earned my M.A. in English and was a high school and college English teacher for 13 years because of him,” said Heather Newsam, director of teacher licensure and placement. “Like all great teachers and mentors, his impact on my life was immeasurable. Because I became a teacher as well, his legacy lives on in my students.” Dr. Edward Anson, a professor of history who worked with Dr. Yoder for his entire career at ��Vlog��ý Little Rock, remembered him as being a productive scholar who applied his research to his teaching and instilled both with his infectious enthusiasm. “He was also a staunch advocate for faculty rights alongside faculty excellence,” Anson said. “We were both senators who mostly agreed on issues although not regarding Thanksgiving and fall break if I remember correctly. I was sorry to see him retire for he brought so much to ��Vlog��ý Little Rock and very sad to hear of his passing.”

Dr. Paul Yoder, center, was one of the winners of the 2009 Faculty Excellence Awards along with Dr. Julianna Flinn and Dr. Hussain Al-Rizzo.

As one of the original members of the Core Council, Dr. Yoder taught his fellow committee members about the value of humanities. “Paul’s devotion and commitment to his family come up repeatedly in conversations among members of the Core Council (university curriculum committee),” said Dr. Belinda Blevins-Knabe, a professor of psychology. “Paul was a master teacher with a strong commitment to teaching and learning. When he described his teaching, the best practices and principles of good teaching and assessment were apparent. The irony was that assessment terms such as ‘learning objectives’ mystified him.” Dr. Yoder had a strong research interest in English Romanticism, including William Blake, John Milton, . Dr. Floyd Martin, professor emeritus of art, remembers co-teaching an interdisciplinary course called “The Sister Arts: British Art and Literature 1750-1850.” “I found it rewarding because I learned so much from Paul both from his lectures and from the planning discussions we had,” Martin said. “Later, when I learned he was doing a whole course on John Milton, I signed up to audit, and that was a wonderful experience for me, since Milton subjects show up so much in British art. Just this spring, Paul helped on a Donaghey Scholars senior project I supervised, on works by Blake, and as usual he brought good insight and suggestions to the student. One of the things I’ll remember about him is his enthusiasm for the subject at hand, his thorough knowledge, and his ability to lead students along a path to more engagement and better understanding.” Dr. Yoder is survived by his wife, Beth Miller, and daughters, Hannah and Laura. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to the Department of English Annual Fund.

Miller Earns Double Bachelor’s Degrees at ��Vlog��ý Little Rock

John Hill — Wed, 11 May 2022 13:19:21 +0000

Student journalist Remington Miller has made her mark at ��Vlog��ý Little Rock, and now she is taking her next step in her career as a journalist. Miller is graduating May 14 with bachelor’s degrees in English and mass communication with an emphasis in journalism as well as a minor in race and ethnicity. “I am equal parts terrified and excited about graduating,” Miller said. “I came straight from high school to college, and I also know through ��Vlog��ý Little Rock I’ve had so many opportunities and internships and great professors that I will be able to go out into the world and be successful no matter what I do.” While Miller always planned to major in mass communication, her decision to pursue a second major in English was the first of many unexpected surprises from ��Vlog��ý Little Rock. “I had taken a test and received a score that indicated an aptitude for English,” Miller said. “Professor Kris McAbee emailed me before I started college to see if I was interested in the English program. She helped me pick out classes, find scholarships, and decide if English would work with mass communication. The support I got before I even got to campus is what convinced me that ��Vlog��ý Little Rock was a great idea.” Miller thanked Dr. Tim Edwards and Sonny Rhodes, mass communication professors, as well as English professors Dr. Kris McAbee and Dr. Laura Barrio-Vilar for serving as inspirational professors during her time at ��Vlog��ý Little Rock. “They were phenomenal influences and inspired me to keep learning,” Miller said. “They are highlights of this university and helped to make or break my experience as a student.” Miller has worked at , ��Vlog��ý Little Rock’s student newspaper, for years, serving as a reporter and entertainment editor. This semester, Miller received a third-place award for review writing from the Arkansas College Media Association. Last year, Miller was selected for the Arkansas Newspaper Foundation’s (ANF) summer internship program and interned at the Daily Record over the summer. The ANF supports Arkansas newspapers by sponsoring college students to intern at newspapers over the summer to gain real-world journalism experience. Her time at the Daily Record was followed with an internship at ��Vlog��ý Little Rock Public Radio during the fall 2021 semester. Miller now works as a part-time reporter at K��Vlog��ýR. In addition to her journalism activities, Miller was also a member of the Chancellor’s Leadership Corps, the William G. Cooper Jr. Honors Program in English, and a peer mentor for the Office of Student Retention Initiatives. As a Little Rock native, Miller is passionate about providing better information to the community where she grew up. After graduation, she aspires to be an investigative reporter in the Little Rock area. “My advice is to get involved at your university,” Miller said. “That doesn’t just mean join a club and don’t show up. It makes a difference to go and make connections. Take advantage of the resources we have. We have a great food pantry, career closet, and counseling services. These resources are there for you and will go to waste if you don’t use them.”

��Vlog��ý Little Rock to Host Virtual Lecture with New York Times Best-Selling Author Madeline Miller

John Hill — Mon, 27 Sep 2021 13:21:56 +0000

The University of Arkansas at Little Rock will host a virtual lecture with New York Times best-selling author Madeline Miller on Oct. 7. Presented by the ��Vlog��ý Little Rock Cooper Lecture Series, Miller will give her lecture, “Homer’s Women: Secret Stories of Women in the Iliad and the Odyssey,” at 6 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 7. The event is free and open to the public. Visit this website to register. In this talk, Miller will explore several of the women of Homer in their journey through literary history. From Briseis, the enslaved war prize of the Iliad, to the powerful nymph-goddesses Calypso, Thetis, and Circe, to Clytemnestra, the shadow that haunts the Odyssey, and more. Miller will draw on her background as both Classicist and storyteller to imagine how these women’s lives might continue to grow and change. In addition to the lecture, Miller will meet with students in the Cooper Honors Seminar this semester, who are studying “The Odyssey” as well as her novel “Circe.” The class focuses on how contemporary writers and audiences re-imagine classical stories. Miller’s first novel, “The Song of Achilles,” was awarded the 2012 Orange Prize for Fiction and was a New York Times bestseller. Her second novel, “Circe,” was an instant #1 New York Times bestseller. Her novels have been translated into more than 25 languages, and her essays have appeared in the Guardian, Wall Street Journal, Lapham’s Quarterly and on NPR. Before she was a novelist, Miller earned a bachelor’s degree and Master of Arts in Classics from Brown University. She taught and tutored Latin, Greek, and Shakespeare to high school students for more than 15 years. She has also studied at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, and in the Dramaturgy department at Yale School of Drama, where she focused on the adaptation of classical texts to modern forms.

Crutcher, Hayn named co-editors of national journal on young adult literature

Ajani Oyindamola — Mon, 22 Oct 2018 13:59:07 +0000

Two University of Arkansas at Little Rock professors have been selected as co-editors of a national journal.�� Dr. Judith Hayn, professor of teacher education, and Dr. Paul Crutcher, assistant professor of English, are the new co-editors of SIGNAL Journal, a peer-reviewed journal associated with the International Literacy Association’s Special Interest Group-Network on Adolescent Literature (SIGNAL). The journal publishes articles, essays, and reviews about varying aspects of young adult literature. �� Crutcher and Hayn recently published the first edition of the journal under their editorship. The Spring/Summer 2018 issue featured an article about literature and literary practices in transmedia pop culture authored by Crutcher and Dr. Autumn Dodge of Lynchburg University. Hayn wrote the journal’s introduction as well as three young adult book reviews. Ashley Collie-Heather, an adjunct professor in the Department of English, designed the issue. Hayn joined ��Vlog��ý Little Rock in 2006 as an assistant professor. She also serves on VOYA Magazine’s Nonfiction Honors Committee. is a library journal dedicated to young adult literature and reading. In 2017, Hayn was awarded an AERA (American Educational Research Association, Division K) award for her book chapter, “Teaching, Affirming and Recognizing Trans and Gender Creative Youth D,” and was also featured in the HuffPost article, Crutcher joined ��Vlog��ý Little Rock in 2013. He is currently writing a book chapter, “Xenophobic pandas, pop culture, and how empathy can change education.” Last year, Crutcher received a $15,900 grant from the Freeman Foundation to teach the Consortium for Teaching about Asia program to Arkansas teachers, a multi-year initiative to encourage and facilitate teaching and learning about East Asia in elementary and secondary schools nationwide.

College of Arts, Letters, and Sciences awards four Summer Research Fellowship Grants

Ajani Oyindamola — Wed, 18 Jul 2018 13:13:54 +0000

The University of Arkansas at Little Rock College of Arts, Letters, and Sciences awarded $10,480 in Summer Research Fellowship Grants to four professors who are spending their summer breaks performing unique research.�� The grant winners include Michael Warrick, professor of sculpture from the Department of Art and Design; Shanzhi Wang, assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry; Heather Hummel, assistant professor in the Department of English; and Zachary Hagins, professor in the Department of World Languages. Warrick received $2,480 to enlarge his traditional clay portraits of contemporary architects of peace in his project, “Portraits of Peace.” Utilizing contemporary 3D scanning and scaling technology, he plans to produce monumentally scaled portraits reflecting the benefits of meditation and spiritual centeredness. Additional long-term prospects for the project include a touring exhibition and a lecture series titled “Portraits of Peace in Clay and Bronze.” In his project, “Enzymatic studies of BbI06 from Lyme disease causing Borrelia��burgdorferi,” Wang has received $4,000 to fund an early step of a larger research project that has a long-term goal to eliminate Borrelia burgdorferi, bacteria that causes Lyme Disease, by inhibiting all three isoforms of methylthioadenosine nucleosidases of Borrelia burgdorferi (pfs, bgp and BbI06). Hummel has received $1,650 for a research trip that follows the U.S. Civil Rights Trail. She will visit historic sites and museums on her week-long, 1,300-mile loop through Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi. The information gathered along the way will be used to write a collection of poems that reconsiders the historic civil rights narratives against the urgency of social justice issues today. The final grant recipient, Hagins, received $2,350 to travel to Arles and Paris, France, to gather primary sources to finish drafting two chapters of his book manuscript. “Visualizing Diversity in the Republic: Contemporary Photography and the French Urban Periphery” explores how engaged photography can show how underprivileged social actors in France negotiate political, social, and cultural obstacles in their everyday lives. After completing the research, Hagins will be able to submit the manuscript for publication. In the upper right photo,��Michael Warrick stands by his sculpture, “Straight Lines on a Round World,” in front of the Statehouse Convention Center in downtown Little Rock, which commemorates the 200th anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase Survey.

Visiting Writers Series kicks off with award-winning authors Jan. 23

Jenny Lambert — Mon, 22 Jan 2018 15:51:54 +0000

Join award-winning environmental writers Sean Prentiss and Joe Wilkins for a special literary reading and discussion during their visit to the University of Arkansas at Little Rock on Friday, Jan. 26. The event will take place at 2 p.m. in Donaghey Student Center Room 205G and is sponsored by the ��Vlog��ý Little Rock English Department’s Visiting Writers Series and the William G. Coopers Honors Program. Prentiss, a Vermont resident and associate professor of English at Norwich University, has received several awards for his novel “Finding Abbey: A Search for Edward Abbey and His Hidden Desert Grave,” including the 2015 National Outdoor Book Award for History/Biography, the Utah Book Award for Nonfiction, and the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for Biography. He is also the co-author of an environmental writing textbook and editor of the Bloomsbury Publishing Writer Series Guide. Wilkins lives in western Oregon with his family and serves as the director of the creative writing program at Linfield College. His latest full-length collection, “When We Were Birds,” was recently named the winner of the 2017 Stafford/Hall Prize in Poetry from the Oregon Book Awards. His memoir, “The Mountain and the Fathers” also received several awards and honorary recognition. Wilkins has also written books of poetry and has published a variety of literary work in notable publications, such as The Southern Review, Ecotone, and Slate. This event is free and open to the public. For more information, contact Heather Hummel, assistant professor in the Department of English, at hkhummel@ualr.edu.

��Vlog��ý Little Rock professor organizes feminist panels on the early modern period

Ajani Oyindamola — Thu, 21 Dec 2017 14:32:08 +0000

A University of Arkansas at Little Rock professor is making it her mission to revive interest in research of the early modern period for a national women’s studies conference.�� Kris McAbee, associate professor of English, organized two panels for the conference held Nov. 16-19 in Baltimore. As a member of the conference’s Early Modern Women Interest Group, McAbee said that interesting has been waning in the group. To get the group back on track, McAbee and fellow members organized two panels they hoped would tempt feminist researchers back to the area. The early modern period runs from around 1,500 to 1,800 A.D. “It’s been latent the last few years, so I spoke with some colleagues about trying to bring some life back to that group,” she said. “The way we started was to put together two interdisciplinary panels. Our panels were well placed to look at, how in the early modern period, a period so historically removed from our own, we still have examples of women resisting oppression.” The first panel, “Early Modern Nasty Women: Shrews, Whores, and the Legacy of Resistance,” featured research on women living in authoritarian regimes in the 17th century who participated in acts of resistance against oppression. The second panel, “Transgressive Sexualities in Early Modern Capitalist, Carceral, and Colonizing States,” featured research exploring how colonialism and capitalism were used to subjugate women. The panel covered early modern period examples of anorexia, cross dressing, imprisonment, and witch hunts. McAbee, who is already organizing panels for next year’s conference, also aims to publish these papers as articles in a special edition of an academic journal.

Faculty members create research collective to highlight feminist research

Ajani Oyindamola — Wed, 22 Nov 2017 14:05:52 +0000

Faculty members at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock have started a group to explore feminist research and collaboration opportunities around campus.�� The Feminist Research Collective is open to all faculty members interested in intersectional feminist research, advocacy, and pedagogy at ��Vlog��ý Little Rock. Kris McAbee, associate professor of English and one of the group’s founders, said faculty members have talked about starting such a group for years. She was inspired by a similar group her friends started at the University of Texas at Dallas. “They found really productive engagement with each other,” McAbee said. “One rhetorical scholar and one artist have collaborated on projects and now have a joint installation at a museum in Dallas. It’s a relationship they wouldn’t have formed had they not come together through this group.” This semester, the group has held two meetings exploring research on masculinity and child sexual abuse in abolitionist narratives by Dr. Laura Barrio Villar, associate professor of English, and the work on anti-racism, love, and politics by Dr. Jana McAuliffe, assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and Interdisciplinary Studies. “It’s been so heartwarming and encouraging to meet and work with colleagues who have interests that I didn’t know were so similar to mine,” McAbee said. “I think it can be easy to get isolated in your department. This is a way for us to collaborate across departments and fields and share our research with each other. It’s nice to have a group to keep us committed to keeping up our scholarship.” For more information, contact Kris McAbee, kxmcabee@ualr.edu, or Catherine Crisp, clcrisp@ualr.edu.

University Writing Center to hold bake sale for veterans

Ajani Oyindamola — Thu, 16 Nov 2017 22:12:31 +0000

The University Writing Center at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock will hold a bake sale to raise money for veterans on Monday, Nov. 20.�� The bake sale will be held from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. in the Donaghey Student Center. All proceeds will go to volunteer services at veterans hospitals in the Little Rock area and will be used to purchase necessity items for local veterans in need. The University Writing Center, located in Student Union B Room 116, was developed to help clients with their writing at any stage of the writing process. It is located in the Student Union B Room 116. For more information, call 501-569-8343.

��Vlog��ý Little Rock professor receives $50,000 for public radio program

Ajani Oyindamola — Wed, 15 Nov 2017 14:16:59 +0000

A University of Arkansas at Little Rock professor has received a $50,000 commitment to create a partnership to continue a K��Vlog��ýR public radio show dedicated to humanities and literary arts in the South.�� The Arkansas Humanities Council signed a memorandum of understanding to award J. Bradley Minnick, associate professor in the Department of English, $10,000 a year for the next five years to continue the.�� “We want to highlight the intellectual work of the South, specifically the Arkansas and Mid-South region to share our rich tradition, history, and cultural production in our community,” Minnick said. Minnick is the executive producer and host of “Arts & Letters,” which airs at 7 p.m. on the second and fourth Fridays of the month on K��Vlog��ýR to an audience of 8,000 to 12,000 listeners and is available for download as a podcast on artsandlettersradio.org, NPR, NPR One, Player FM, and iTunes. Now in its fourth season, “Arts & Letters” has aired more than 30 episodes. Episodes cover a wide range of arts and humanities topics from the to the search for in downtown Little Rock to the . The program also highlights the musical talents of central Arkansas and regional artists, who share their music. Minnick completes special four-minute episodes “Arts & Letters Shorts,” which highlight contributing musicians. In the upcoming season, viewers can look forward to an episode on spirit possession in the Arkansas Delta region as well a program about ��

- University News Archive - ����Vlog��ý Little Rock

����Vlog��ý Little Rock Remembers Professor Emeritus Paul Yoder

Miller Earns Double Bachelor’s Degrees at ����Vlog��ý Little Rock

����Vlog��ý Little Rock to Host Virtual Lecture with New York Times Best-Selling Author Madeline Miller