Department of
Geography-Anthropology
Summer 2007 Newsletter
A message from the chair:
Though I write this note in June, the department is busier then ever. Two field schools are currently under way – Matthew Bampton has students in kayaks mapping in Casco Bay and Nathan Hamilton has students conducting archaeological work on Malaga Island. In mid-summer, Kreg Ettenger will take a group of students up to Northern Quebec for an ethnographic field school with the Cree community.
We have welcomed two new professional staff members to the department to support the growth in GIS. Michele Tranes is our GIS Laboratory Operations Manager and Dr. Vinton Valentine is in the newly created position of Director of GIS. The department also acquired 304 Bailey Hall, which will be used as a dedicated research laboratory for GIS.
In Spring 2007 we hosted several talks: “Applied Anthropology and the Creative Economy” by Dr. Tracy Michaud Stutzman (Executive Director, The Maine Highlands Guild and Adjunct Professor, USM Geography-Anthropology); "Hearts & Toes: A 2006 Pacific Crest Trail Journey" by Mary Cameron (Geography-Anthropology Alumna '05). Mary hiked the Appalachian Trail and the Pacific Crest Trail as fundraisers. She was awarded the University of Maine System Heart and Soul Award for her volunteer and fundraising work.; “Dangerous Dirt: Paleopathology of Valley Fever” by William R. Harrison, MA JD (Director, USM Office of Research Compliance); “Not Exactly a Day at the Beach: Geoarchaeology, the Little Ice Age, and Sand Catastrophes in 17th Century Scotland” by Dr. Gerald Bigelow (Lecturer, Environmental Studies, Bates College and Adjunct Professor, USM Geography-Anthropology). We also hosted Robin McGinley, Executive Director for the Cree Outfitting and Tourism Association whose visit was arranged by Kreg Ettenger and was related to his teaching and research.
The Geography-Anthropology Student Association has been very active. They organized and hosted their 2nd Annual Knap-In on April 14, 2007 and the crowds were larger than ever and the Portland Press Herald did a nice story with photographs. The GASA also hosted their traditional end-of-the year BBQ at Two Lights State Park on May 5, 2007 and the sun even came out!
The department’s faculty members have all been busy teaching, pursuing their research in their labs and the field, publishing findings, attending professional conferences and securing external funds for research. These efforts often involve students who are actively engaged in our on-going research and often make presentations or publish with us. I invite you to take at look at some of our faculty, student, and alumni accomplishments. Our web page has been redesigned and updated and provides a lot of information (www.usm.maine.edu/gany). There is also an on-line form for alumni to fill out and let us know what they are doing these days. Feel free to call any of us or stop in and say hello – the department is a busy and productive place and we would be happy to share that with you.
Lydia
Student and Alumni News
Students were active in conference presentations, have enjoyed success in awards and scholarships and many have gone onto graduate school.
Scholarship and Awards
The Frank D. Hodges Excellence in Geography Award was awarded to
Mark Zwetsloot for 2007-2008
and Jay Desmond for 2006-2007.
The Frank D. Hodges Excellence in Geography Award was founded by the Major’s Association to honor one of the founding members of our department upon his retirement. If you would like to donate to the Frank D. Hodges Excellence in Geography Award, you may do so by forwarding your contribution to Maggie Tinker in the department office.
NASA/Maine Space Grant Consortium Awards
Mark Zwetsloot
Jasmine Bird
USM Summer Undergraduate
Research Fellows (SURF)
2007: Ann Wittman
2006 Undergraduate Research Award
Northeastern Section of the Geological Society of America
Ingrid Brack
Phyllis Lord Treworgy and Audway
Stuart Treworgy Scholarship
2007-2008: Tara Connolly
2006-2007: Matthew Rowe
Graduate School Admissions:
Jasmine Bird (2007), Tufts University, M.A. Urban and Environmental Policy & Planning.
Ingrid Brack (2007), University of Reading, M.Sci. Geoarchaeology
Renate Repele (2007) College of Nursing and Health Professionals, USM
Matthew Rowe (2007), Indiana University, Bloomington, Ph.D. Program in Archaeology.
Honor Society News
Phi Beta Kappa
Jasmine Bird
Ingrid Brack
Megan Patterson
Gamma Theta Upsilon: an
International Geographical Honors Society
2006-2008 New Members
Matthew Bickford
Jasmine Bird
Ingrid Brack
Gregory Clifford
Danielle Dadiego
Robert Descoteaux
Mark Zwetsloot
Other news
Matthew Rowe was awarded the Rissho University (Japan) Student Exchange in the summer of 2006 and he also co-authored a paper with Dr. Dinah Carder titled “Cracking the Shell: The Use of Tortoises at Medieval Capalbiaccio, Italy” which is currently under review at Oxbow Press.
Alumni News
Moriah Bedard (2007) has been hired as part-time Latin teacher at
Waynflete School, Portland. Besides all
her wonderful talents as a Geography-Anthropology major, she also graduated
with a minor in Classics (only one course shy of a double major).
Kirsten Boettcher and Rosemary Mosher have their own company named Orbis. The company provides digital mapping services for land use investigations and historical forensics. They produced a composite series of maps tracing Portland, Maine's expansion through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for the “Changing Peninsula” exhibit at the Osher Map Library.
Frank Cangelosi (1995). Due to a business opportunity for his wife, they relocated to the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex four years ago. He recently accepted a new position as GIS Manager for Tarrant County (Fort Worth), Texas. Prior to that, he had been the GIS Manager for a small city within Tarrant County.
Melissa Gates received her M. S. degree in Biomedical Anthropology from
Binghamton University.
Carrie Hight (2003) is currently working at Southern Maine Community College as an Administrative Assistant and recently taught a GIS course at SMCC.
Carey M. Kish (1998). Since graduating, he has been employed with the Greater Portland Council of Governments. He is the manager at GO MAINE, the statewide commuter services program that assists commuters and employers with economical, healthy, and environmentally friendly commuting alternatives by providing carpools and vanpool ridematching and commuter information to employers and commuters around the state in an effort to improve mobility, reduce traffic congestion, improve air quality, reduce energy consumption and save money. He writes: "My education in Geography-Anthropology at USM was critical in securing this job, especially my experience in GIS. In fact, I started here at GPCOG as a USM intern and was eventually hired full-time."
Andrew Land completed his M.S. in GIS at the University of Redlands and moved back to Portland where he works for an environmental consulting firm. He will also be teaching GEO 108 Intro to Arc GIS for the department in the summer and fall of 2007.
Timothy J. Pulsifer (2001) completed his M.A. in anthropology in 2004 at East Carolina University, and is currently working toward a Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology at SUNY Binghamton University. He has taught anthropology at three different colleges, and is currently a Lecturer in the Sociology/Anthropology Department of SUNY College at Cortland.
Christopher A. Wright (2000) worked full-time as a CRM traveling all over the eastern United States after graduation. He is currently enrolled in the Historic Archaeology MA Program at the University of Maine, Orono and will be analyzing faunal material recovered during the excavation of Fort Pentagoet
Let us know what you’re doing! Please submit alumni news at www.usm.maine.edu/gany/Alumni1.htm or by mail to the department.
Faculty Notes
Dr. Matthew Bampton, Associate Professor of Geography, is preparing
for a sabbatical in the 2007 fall semester, during which he plans to work on a
number of projects connected to the teaching and learning of GIS. The
bulk of his research work in the past year has centered on these ideas, and on
developing and submitting the successful NSF proposal "REU Site: Digital
Mapping, Geographic Information System (GIS) Database Construction and
Geospatial Analysis of Regional Strike-slip Shear Zone Deformation".
Working with his collaborator Mark Swanson, of USM's Department of
Geosciences he has been developing a suite of precision mapping techniques
using GPS, Tola Stations, high-resolution photography, and GIS. This is
the third renewal of their National Science Foundation Research Experience for
Undergraduates funding.
Dr. Dinah Crader, Associate Professor of Anthropology, is currently working on Iron Age faunal remains from the site of Aissa Dugjé, northern Cameroon, in collaboration with Scott MacEachern of Bowdoin College. The assemblage includes some of the earliest evidence for domestic horse/pony in central-west Africa. Students in ANT 410- Zooarchaeology (Spring 2007) were involved in research projects on three of the equid skeletons from the site, and presented the results of their work at "Thinking Matters 2007", USM’s annual student research conference.
She also continued her research on the faunal assemblage from the medieval site of Capalbiaccio, Italy, specifically focusing on the tortoise remains, in collaboration with recent USM graduate Matthew Rowe (2006). This work formed the basis of a paper she presented at the meetings of the International Council of Archaeozoology in Mexico City in August 2006. A manuscript focused on this research, titled “Cracking the Shell: The Use of Tortoises at Medieval Capalbiaccio, Italy”, co-authored with Matthew Rowe, is currently under review at Oxbow Press. She plans to continue her work on this fauna, including an examination of the pre-Roman assemblage.
Her most recent publications include: "Cod, Clams and Deer: The Food Remains from Indiantown Island”, published in Archaeology of Eastern North America (2006), and co-authored with Arthur Spiess, Kris Sobolik, Stevie Hale-Benoit, John Mosher and Deborah Wilson. She also has a book chapter in press titled “Technology and Classification of the Grinding Equipment” to appear in Adrar Bous: Archaeology of a Granitic Ring Complex in Niger”, edited by Diane Gifford-Gonzalez, to be published by Tervuren Press.
In 2006 she was an invited speaker at Grand Rounds for Obstetrics and Gynecology at Maine Medical Center in Portland where she gave a talk on “Female Reproductive Biology from an Anthropologist’s Perspective.”
Besides teaching in the department, for the past two years she has also been a faculty member in the Honors Program at USM where she teaches HON 103-“Religious and Scientific Perspectives on Human Origins and the Human Species”. In 2006, students in that course gave oral presentations of their research at USM’s “Thinking Matters” conference.
In 2006 she was awarded the “Excellence in Teaching” award in Social Sciences from the Faculty Senate.
Dr. Matthew Edney, Associate Professor of Geography and American and
New England Studies and Osher Map Library Faculty Scholar, has been on leave in
2005-2007, directing the History of Cartography Project at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison. He will return to USM in Fall 08 on a reduced-time
appointment, which will permit him to continue directing the project and its
award-winning, multi-volume History of Cartography series published by
the University of Chicago Press; he continues as coeditor of volume 4, Cartography
in the European Enlightenment. Even so, he looks forward to getting back to
Maine and to teaching again.
He has been professionally very busy, with many presentations in North America
and Europe (Budapest, Oxford, Barcelona, Amsterdam!). Among his recent
publications are "The Origins and Development of J. B. Harley’s
Cartographic Theories," Cartographica 40, nos. 1 & 2 (2005):
Monograph 54; “Mapping Parts of the World,” in Maps: Finding Our Place in
History, ed. James R. Akerman and Robert W. Karrow (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press for the Field Museum of Natural History and the Newberry Library,
2007); and “Recent Trends in the History of
Cartography: A Selective, Annotated Bibliography to the English-Language
Literature,” ver. 2.1, Coordinates: Online Journal of the Map and Geography
Round Table American Library Association, ser. B, no. 6 (April 2007). «http://purl.oclc.org/coordinates/b6.pdf»
or
«http://purl.oclc.org/coordinates/b6.htm».
Dr. Kreg Ettenger, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, continues
to develop his collaborative research project on tourism with the Eeyou (Cree)
communities of Northern Quebec. In 2006 he held a summer field course on
"Cree Tourism in Northern Quebec," with seven GYA students visiting
five Cree communities. In July of 2007 he will again visit the region, this
time by RV, taking along four GYA students and one Colby anthropology student.
Again the subject will be tourism development, with a focus on Cree traditional
summer gatherings. They will also be doing mapping and GPS-photography of
community tourism facilities for use on the website of the Cree Outfitting and
Tourism Association.
His other major initiative has been the development of a digital ethnography
program at USM. In Spring of 2007 he taught ANT 260 - Public Interpretation in
Anthropology, with a focus on using digital media. Students produced digital
audio, video and photo/text projects exploring regional culture and places,
from general stores and a boatbuilding shop to the Patriot's Day Nor'Easter. He
plans to continue his work in this area in the coming years, and to develop
relationships with other media-based programs on campus and with outside
organizations like the Salt Institute of Documentary Studies.
Kreg is also working to develop online courses through the Center for Technology-Enhanced Learning (CTEL) at USM. In the summer of 2007 he taught the first online sections of ANT 101J - Anthropology:The Cultural View. He plans to develop more online content in the future to help meet the needs of working and off-campus students.
GYA students Jeni Poland, Jasmine Bird, Tammy
Batchelder and Tara Yandian follow Cree guide Anna Bosum as she gives them a
walking tour of a northern peat bog, explaining plants used for medicinal
purposes.
Dr. Firooza Pavri, Assistant Professor of Geography, has research examining patterns of human-environment interaction currently ongoing at three sites, including western India, the American Great Plains, and coastal New England. Her work on tropical forest cover change in a section of India’s Western Ghats led to a couple of recent publications including a forthcoming book chapter entitled “Re-mapping land use: remote sensing, institutional approaches and landscape boundaries” (2007) in Nature’s Edge: Boundary Explorations in Ecological Theory and Practice by SUNY Press and an article on “Vulnerability and forest resource scarcity in India’s Western Ghats” (2005) in the Paper of the Applied Geography Conferences.
Research focused on wetland ecosystems in the Great Plains region and coauthored with Dr. James Aber resulted in an additional article on “Changes in water and wetland vegetation in Cheyenne Bottoms, Kansas, 2002-2005” in the Transactions of the Academy of Sciences, Kansas (2006). Since moving to New England, Firooza has been interested in initiating a research project within the region and was able to do so last summer with Dr. Valentine (USM – GIS Director). They received a grant from the Massachusetts Agency for Coastal Zone Management to use airborne imagery to document wetland marshes and habitat health at the NSF designated Long-term Ecological Research site at Plum Island Estuary in northern Massachusetts. She has enjoyed working with student research assistants on a variety of research projects and has had two students receive NASA/Maine Space Grant scholarships.
Firooza was invited to speak at the International Institute of Public Policy hosted by Spelman College, Atlanta on Geographic Information Systems and Satellite Imaging Technologies in 2006. She looks forward to an active year of scholarship and teaching ahead and learning more about gardening this summer.
Dr. Lydia Savage, Associate Professor of Geography, continues her research gender, work and the US labor movement. She is also still active on the Women’s Studies Council and the Labor Studies minor and will continue as department chair until the summer of 2009 when she is anticipating a long awaited sabbatical.
She co-authored an article with Rob Krueger (2007) titled “Boston’s Urban Politics: Mediating Neo-liberalism and Redefining Sustainability” in a special issue of International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (31(1): 215–23) called “City-regions, political participation and geographies of social reproduction” edited by Andrew Joan and Kevin Ward and her article “Justice for Janitors: Scales of Organizing and Representing Workers” appeared in a special issue of Antipode (38(3): 648-667) co-edited by Luis LM Aguiar and Andrew Herod. The article was also reprinted as a chapter in a book titled The Dirty Work of Neoliberalism: Cleaners in the Global Economy (Blackwell, 2007).
She also published “Changing Work, Changing People: A Conversation with Union Organizers at Harvard University and the University of Massachusetts Memorial Medical Center.” In Dorothy Sue Cobble (ed.) The Sex of Class: Women and America’s New Labor Movements. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (2007, pp. 181-216) and several book reviews.
Lydia gave two talks at Vassar College in April of 2007 on her research and was also an invited speaker for the plenary session: “Women Transforming American Labor: Retrospect and Prospect” (with Dorothy Sue Cobble, Janice Fine, Irasema Garza, and Katie Quan) for “Sisters on the Frontline: Organizing Women, Building Power.” A conference presented by Cornell University’s Institute for Women and Work, The Cornell Labor Program and The Joseph S. Murphy Center for Labor, Community, and Policy Studies, City University of New York. New York City. March 31-April 1, 2007.
Dr. Judy Tizon, Associate Professor of Anthropology, is still serving as the Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education and working on the revision of general education at USM. She gave a conference presentation with Dr. Susan McWilliams titled "Transforming the Familiar: an Ethnographic Approach to General Education Reform" at the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) for Academic Renewal conference in March of 2007.
Under Judy’s leadership, USM faculty and staff have spent several years designing a new general education that will eventually replace the current required core curriculum over the next several years. Leaders in curriculum design are describing the new general education as a model for other universities. If you are interested in seeing the proposed changes, go to http://www.usm.maine.edu/gened/.
As part of the implementation of the new general education, USM has begun offering EYE (entry-year experience) courses to first year students. Judy will be teaching one of the new first year interdisciplinary seminars in the fall of 2007. The course is EYE 109: Race Matters and will be co-taught with Drs. Susan McWilliams (a sociologist) and Adam Tuchinsky (a historian).
She is also going become a grandma for the first time in the fall. Congratulations!
Dr. Joseph Wood, Professor of Geography and Provost, will serve as USM's
interim president for the 2007-2008 academic year. In his life as a geographer, he was elected to and served on the
2007 AAG Nominations Committee
He was guest editor for a special issue of The Geographical Review (96:2006) on Wilbur Zelinsky and authored the introduction titled “A Tribute to Wilbur Zelinsky and recently contributed a book chapter “Making America at Eden Center” to From Urban Enclave to Ethnic Suburb: New Asian Communities in Pacific Rim Countries. pp. 23-40. Edited by Wei Li. University of Hawai’i Press, 2006.
Joe also published book reviews of Donald W. Meinig’s The Shaping of
America: Geographical Perspectives on 500 Years of History. Vol. 4. Global America, 1915-2000.
(Yale, 2004) in Geographical Review, 96, 2006:318-320 and Diane Shaw’s City
Building on the Eastern Frontier. Sorting the Nineteenth-Century City. (Johns
Hopkins, 2004) in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians,
65 2006:146-7.
Joe gave the keynote address at the Teaching Maine History Conference at UMaine
in October 2006 and he presented a paper, "Sanctuary in the American
Landscape," at the American Council of Learned Societies/Association of
American Geographers Conference on Geography and the Humanities at the
University of Virginia in June 2007.
In his spare time (?), he co-taught GYA 399: Discipline Matters with Kreg
Ettenger in the spring of 2007.
Alumni and Friends - You Can Help
Remember that you can make a tax-deductible contribution to the Department through the USM Annual Fund. You can even designate that your donation be targeted for a specific purpose (e.g. student scholarships; field trip support; professional meeting attendance for students; equipment; map purchases, etc.). If you already make a contribution to the USM annual fund, please think about designating your donation. If you do not currently contribute to the Annual Fund, perhaps you might consider doing so in the future. We appreciate the help we get from alumni and friends.
The Geography-Anthropology Newsletter is distributed to alumni, friends, faculty, students and staff. Send requests, changes of address and other communications to:
Geography-Anthropology Newsletter
Lydia Savage, Editor
Department of Geography-Anthropology
University of Southern Maine
Gorham, Maine 04038
Phone: (207) 780-5570
FAX: (207) 780-5167
Website: www.usm.maine.edu/gany
Editor: Lydia Savage.