Reconstruction 5.3 (Summer 2005)
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Contributors
Brian Azcona is a doctoral student at the University of Kansas. His research focuses on theories of discourse.
David Burley is a doctoral candidate in Urban Studies at the University of New Orleans and Co-Director of the "Coastal Communities Project" at the Center for Hazards, Assessment, Response and Technology. His research focuses on attachment to place, environmental change, and the social construction of whiteness.
Joanne Darlington is Professor of Sociology at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her research examines communities, risk and disasters primarily in southern Louisiana.
G. Wesley Houp is finishing his dissertation, "Public Labels, Personal Literacies: Literacy Learning, Adult Student Profiles and a Program in Orientation" and teaches writing at the University of Kentucky. His recent publications include articles on teaching and tutoring writing in Teaching English in the Two-Year College and The Writing Lab Newsletter in addition to poems in Black Warrior Review, Limestone, and Chattahoochee Review.
Patrick Howard is a PhD candidate in the Department of Secondary Education at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. His research interests are in exploring the relationship between language and literature and the nurturing of ecological literacy in children, and in hermeneutic phenomenology and human science research methods. Patrick has taught at various levels in the school system in Newfoundland and Labrador where he makes his home by the sea.
Bruce Janz is Associate Professor of Humanities in the Philosophy Department at the University of Central Florida in Orlando Florida. His research is in contemporary continental philosophy, African philosophy, history of Western mysticism, and interdisciplinarity. Currently he is working on a book in African philosophy which raises a more general question for both African thought and the idea of place: What is it to do philosophy in this (or any specific) place? For eight years he was the director of CIRLA, or the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in the Liberal Arts, at Augustana University College in Camrose, Alberta, Canada. His Ph.D. in Philosophy was from the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, Canada.
Pamela Jenkins is Professor of Sociology at the University of New Orleans and Director of the "Coastal Communities Project" at the Center for Hazards, Assessment, Response and Technology. Her research examines connections between communities, place and social change. She has practiced applied sociology in several New Orleans neighborhoods for the past decade.
Joy Kennedy teaches Composition and Creative Writing for Brazosport College in Lake Jackson, Texas, and is also a Ph.D. candidate in the department of English at Indiana University in Pennsylvania. She has worked with members of the Texas Speleological Association for nearly a decade; such experiences are evident in her narratives and critical essays which focus on caving, environmental literature, and eco-criticism. She was recently a recipient of the Writer's League of Texas' Creative Non-Fiction Fellowship.
Marty S. Knepper is Professor and Chair of English at Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa. An Iowa native, she has offered courses in Iowa literature and film, has traveled with her students to film tourist sites in the state, and was on the board of Humanities Iowa. She taught a seminar in American Popular Culture with John Lawrence at Morningside. Together they published "Visions of Iowa in Hollywood Film," Iowa Heritage Illustrated (Winter 1998) and the comprehensive "Iowa Films, 1918-2002," Annals of Iowa (Winter 2003). A former president of the national Popular Culture Association, she has written numerous conference papers and articles on detective fiction, film, and women studies topics.
Michael Kula, fiction writer and playwright, is a graduate of Vanderbilt University and has completed graduate work at the University of Iowa and at Emerson College, where he earned his MFA in Creative Writing in December 1999. In 2000 he was the recipient of an Artist Grant in Fiction Writing from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. He has previously taught writing at Emerson College and Northeastern University, and he is currently teaching writing in the English Department at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. His fiction has most recently appeared in Porcupine (Cedarburg, WI) and his drama has been produced at the VCC Black Box Theater in Orlando.
John Shelton Lawrence of Berkeley, California, is Professor Emeritus, Morningside College, and currently Senior Fellow in Conservation at the Sierra Club in San Francisco. While living in Iowa, he lectured widely in public lecture series on films for Humanities Iowa. His The Myth of the American Superhero (Eerdmans, 2002), co authored with Robert Jewett, received the John Cawelti Award of the American Culture Association for the Best Book of 2002. He has also written with Jewett Captain American and the Crusade Against Evil: The Dilemma of Zealous Nationalism (Eerdmans, 2003). He maintains an author website at <http://www.americansuperhero.com>.
Danny Mayer is a PhD student in the English department at the University of Kentucky with interests in critical human geography, American Studies, and literary nonfiction.
Anthony M. Orum teaches courses in politics, urban history, immigration and social theory at the Department of Sociology, University of Illinois at Chicago. He received his doctoral degree in Sociology from the University of Chicago, and has taught at Emory University, the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and the University of Texas at Austin. He has written about sociological methods, the politics of black and white Americans as well as political protest in the United States. Among his most recent books are City-Building in America (Westview Press, 1995); Introduction to Political Sociology (Prentice-Hall, 2001); and, with Xianming Chen, The World of Cities (Blackwell, 2003). He is currently learning Spanish and studying the enclaves of new foreign-born immigrants who have moved to Chicago. He plans to use his perspective on the importance of places to illuminate and to deepen our understanding of the lives of new immigrants.
Melissa Purdue is a PhD candidate at the University of Kentucky where she is working on her dissertation on "New Woman" authors at the fin de siècle. Her work has been published, or is forthcoming, in Revista Atenea, Genre and Women Behaving Badly: Female Transgression in 18th and 19th Century Literature (eds. Harriet Devine Jump & Margaret Forsyth). She is also a founding editor of Ninteenth-Century Gender Studies <www.ncgsjournal.com>--a new online, peer-reviewed journal.
Lynda H. Schneekloth is a Professor at the School of Architecture and Planning, SUNY/Buffalo. She has been teaching and researching at architecture schools since 1976 and holds a MS in Landscape Architecture and BA in English from the University of Wisconsin. Schneekloth's scholarly research is focused on the idea of placemaking, that is, how people transform the world, including natural processes and built form. Schneekloth is founding member and president of The Friends of the Buffalo Niagara Rivers, a place based organization whose mission since 1989 has been the preservation and restoration of the natural and cultural heritage of the regional rivers. Recently funded projects include the 20 year Restoration and Management Plan for the Buffalo Olmsted Parks Conservancy with Shibley; a public conversation on the historic Buffalo Grain Elevators; the research and publication on the history of hydropower at Niagara Falls, and the development of a bi-national heritage strategy for the Niagara Region. Schneekloth is author of Placemaking: The Art and Practice of Building Communities with R. Shibley; Ordering Spaces: Types in Architecture and Design with K. Franck, Changing Places: ReMaking Institutional Buildings with M. Feuerstein and B. Campagna, and forthcoming Rediscovering the Concrete Atlantis and with Yots, The Story of Power at Niagara Falls.
Robert G. Shibley is a Professor of Architecture and Planning at the University at Buffalo. He was Chair of the Department of Architecture from 1982 until 1990 when he founded The Urban Design Project (UDP), a center for the study and practice of urban design he continues to direct. He has authored eight books, including Urban Excellence, with Philip Langdon and Polly Welch, Commitment to Place: Urban Excellence and Community, and the encyclopedic McGraw Hill compendium on the state of the art in urban design with Don Watson and Alan Plattus (Time Savers Standards for Urban Design). Professor Shibley was awarded the James Haecker Award for Distinguished Leadership in the Advancement of Architectural Research from the Architectural Research Centers Consortium, a national organization of University based research centers. In 2004 the APA recognized work led by Shibley when they gave the Queen City Hub: Regional Action Plan for Downtown Buffalo top national honors for outstanding planning. Prior to his appointment to UB, Professor Shibley was director of the US Department of Energy's Passive and Hybrid Solar Commercial Buildings Program (1980-82) and practiced architecture as a client representative for the Office of the Chief of Engineers, US Army Corps of Engineers (1970-80). He holds a B.S. in Psychology and B. Arch. from the University of Oregon, as well as a Master of Architecture in Urban Design from the Catholic University of America. He is a licensed architect and certified planner.
Marilyn Yaquinto is the author of Pump 'Em Full of Lead: A Look at Gangsters on Film (New York: Twayne/Macmillan, 1998); and "Tough Love: Mamas, Molls, and Mob Wives," in Action Chicks: New Images of Tough Women in Popular Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)