Diaper duty
Chemist honored
When you think of college students, diapers don’t usually come to mind. But 18 project management students changed that this semester when they organized a diaper drive for a local charity. The students, led by Paul Hirtz, EMgt’95, MS EMgt’97, PhD EMgt’02, interim director of the Student Design and Experiential Learning Center, took on the service-learning project as part of their Introduction to Project Management Course. Their work resulted in the donation of 5,000 diapers to the Phelps County S&T engineering management senior Aaron Young (in Community Partnership’s Young cart) and Jacob Anderson with Paul Hirtz at the Rolla Parents Program.
Yinfa Ma, Curators’ Teaching Professor of chemistry, received the 2008 J. Calvin Giddings Award for Excellence in Education from the American Chemical Society’s division of analytical chemistry. Yinfa Ma The award is designed to reward faculty who enhance the personal and professional development of students in the study of analytical chemistry. Ma studies bioanalysis and environmental analysis of biological compounds, and degradation products of pesticides and herbicides. He has published more than 67 peer-reviewed papers, given more than 169 presentations at national and international conferences, and generated nine patents.
Kroger Store, which helped with the project.
What’s all the flap about flappers? American writers in the 1920s used the flapper as a sign of the times, says Kate Drowne, associate professor of English and technical communication. Now Drowne, who is working on her third book about 1920s culture, will dig deeper into those times through a non-residential fellowship at Harvard University. The fellowship, which is funded through the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African-American and African Studies, will allow Drowne access to the extensive and exclusive Harvard library, where she hopes to dig up rare sources of 1920s literature. According to Drowne, public opinion about the flapper was widely varied during her existence. “She was viewed by some as a perfect role model for the new woman, free of old-fashioned Victorian ideals, and by others as a harbinger of disaster, signaling the destruction of the nation,” Drowne says. “Still Library of Congress, Prints and others thought that the flapper was just going Photographs Division [reproduction through a phase, and would eventually settle into number, e.g., LC-B2-1234] more traditional female roles.” Drowne is the author of Spirits of Defiance: National Prohibition and Jazz Age Literature, 1920-1933 and co-author of American Popular Culture Through History: The 1920s. Drowne will spend several months on her research at Harvard. She intends to complete her new book, The Flapper in American Literature of the Jazz Age, by the fall of 2010.
Good old boys and Southern gentlemen In his new book, White Masculinity in the Recent South, Trent Watts examines the way southern men have been represented in pop culture since World War II, from southern Protestant churches to the music of Lynyrd Skynyrd. The idea grew from Watts’ interest in the 20th century South. Watts, assistant professor of English and technical communication and a native of Mississippi, compiled essays by 13 scholars of history, literature, film and environmental studies for the book, which was published by Louisiana State University Press. He hopes this study will help shape research in the history of gender in the recent South.
MISSOURI S&T MAGAZINE | SPRING 2009 19