DHP Newsletter

Greetings,

As the Winter semester comes to a close, we reflect back on a year of unprecedented challenges and major changes. After twelve months of teaching and learning in Zoom and Blendflex, I think we are all looking forward to the prospect of returning to classroom and being fully back on campus. As such, we welcome President Hanbury’s recent announcement that NSU intends to resume full in-person classroom learning for the Fall 2021 semester.

While adapting to Covid has naturally remained a major focus of our activities this semester, there are still a great many milestones, accomplishments and in initiatives in the Department of Humanities and Politics from the last few months that we would like to share with you in this newsletter. From the initiatives of the Center for the Humanities and the Council for Dialogue and Democracy to the activities of student organizations like Phi Alpha Delta, Alpha Mu Gamma, Pi Sigma Alpha, the Graduate Leadership Council, Model UN (NIRA) and Mock Trial, its been another semester packed full of notable stories. 

As always, we are immensely proud of the many accomplishments of our wonderful faculty, students, and alumni, some of which we will highlight in this edition of the newsletter. Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have stories you want to share.

Best wishes,

David Kilroy, Chair

dkilroy@nova.edu

It is with great sadness that DHP shares the news of the passing of NSU Distinguished Professor Dr. Stuart Horn. Stuart just retired this year after 48 years at NSU, during which time he served as a professor of humanities and in various administrative positions. Stuart was an historian with a PhD from City University of New York. During his time at NSU he developed and taught courses in history, legal studies, humanities, and interdisciplinary studies at both the graduate and undergraduate level. He served as Director of Graduate Division of the former Institute for the Humanities and the Arts and Director of the former Liberal Arts Department.  

In recent years he resided in Edmonds, Washington with his wife Sandra and he continued to teach popular online courses at NSU such as Asian Thought and Death and Dying. Stuart was a practicing Buddhist and spent much of his adult life exploring a deeper understanding of the faith. He served as an instructor at the Nitartha Institute for Higher Buddhist Studies in Seattle, Washington.  On behalf of the whole NSU community we extend our deepest sympathy to his family.

This has been an unprecedented year on so many levels, not least of which because the Department of Humanities and Politics is bidding farewell to four long serving faculty members. In addition to Professor Dixon, who we featured in the Fall 2020 newsletter, Professors Gershman, Mulvey, and Waites are all bringing their time here to end in Winter 2021. Over the course of their combined 107 years of teaching and service at Nova Southeastern University, each of these faculty have made an indelible impression on the lives of countless students and helped to shape and guide the paths of a numerous NSU alumni. They will all be greatly missed.

Since coming to NSU 20 years ago, Dr. Gary Gershman has been hugely instrumental in shaping the curricular and co-curricular identity of what is today the Department of Humanities and Politics. Dr. Gershman helped to grow both the history and legal studies majors at NSU, playing a key role in curriculum design and teaching extensively in both programs. He also was instrumental in the creation of the political science and international studies majors, teaching in both of those programs also. Dr. Gershman was heavily involved in building first the Honors Program and now the Honors College, and he has long been a champion of travel study at NSU. His Genocide in the Twentieth Century and Beyond travel study course to Poland, Hungary, Serbia, and Bosnia has achieved legendary status among students and alumni, for many of whom it was an eye opening and transformative experience. 

Dr. Gershman has served as mentor to hundreds of pre-law students over the years, guiding them through LSAT and Applying to Law School workshops. In recent years he served as coach of the Mock Trial team, leading an NSU team to the Opening Round Championship for the first time ever in 2019. Dr. Gershman has worked with numerous other student groups and organizations, and organized countless guest speakers, panels, and workshops to promote intellectual and cultural engagement across campus. On top of his extensive commitment to teaching and service, Dr. Gershman has remained an active scholar in the areas of civil liberties, genocide studies, and sports history, publishing and presenting at professional conferences regularly throughout the years. Happy hour just won’t be the same without him!

Dr. Ben Mulvey joined Nova University back in 1988, and during his 33 years at NSU he has been instrumental in creating numerous programs from the pioneering online master’s program in Liberal Arts to the undergraduate Philosophy major. Over the years Dr. Mulvey has taught courses in the School of Business, College of Education, College of Health Sciences, and in various iterations of arts and sciences colleges through the shifting landscape of undergraduate education at NSU from the Farquhar Center for Undergraduate Studies to the Halmos College of Arts and Sciences. He has taught a wide range of courses in ethics and philosophy across various disciplines and fields, such as liberal arts and national security affairs at the graduate level and philosophy, legal studies, political science, international studies, communications, and biology at the undergraduate level.

Dr. Mulvey has also served in a number of administrative roles during his time at NSU, including as Director of the Division of Humanities and Assistant Dean of the Farquhar College of Arts and Sciences. Most recently Dr. Mulvey was instrumental in the creation of the Halmos College Center for the Humanities. Throughout his time at NSU Dr. Mulvey has remained an active scholar in the areas of applied ethics and political theory, and he has played a prominent role as an ethicist in numerous professional bodies such as the Broward General Medical Center, the Florida Department of Corrections Bioethics Committee, the Hospice Care of Southeast Broward Bioethics Committee, and the Florida Bioethics Network. Many of us will look with envy as Dr. Mulvey begins new chapter in retirement in the UNESCO World Heritage city of Porto in Portugal.

Since joining the Liberal Arts College at what was then Nova University 34 years ago, Kate Waites has witnessed profound changes at NSU, and she has been intimately involved along the way in developing and restructuring numerous majors, minors, and graduate programs. Originally hired to teach writing and communications, Dr. Waites helped pioneer the creation of graduate programs in Liberal Arts and Writing as well as the English major and Gender Studies and Film Studies minors. She has championed a host of student and campus initiatives during her career such as the creation and growth of Radio X and the establishment of Women’s Resource Center at NSU. She helped bring a chapter of the American Association of University Women (AAUW) to NSU and she was recognized for her contribution to promoting feminism and women’s history month with the Susan B. Anthony Award by the Broward Women’s History Coalition.

In 2006-2007 Dr. Waites was nominated for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching U.S. Professors of the Year, and she has been named professor of the year at NSU three times, in 1990-91, 2006-07, and most recently in 2019-20. Throughout her career Dr. Waites has remained a productive scholar, presenting at numerous professional regional and national conferences and publishing numerous journal articles and book chapters in the areas of memoir, film studies, and gender studies. Congratulations to Dr. Waites on being awarded the rank of Professor Emeritus on retirement.

This past April, under the direction of center director Dr. Aileen Farrar, NSU’s Center for the Humanities hosted its 3rd Annual Crossroads Humanities Student Conference. The Crossroads Conference is a friendly venue for undergraduate and graduate students of NSU and beyond to further their research in the humanities and to professionalize. Preparations for the conference included a series of pre-conference events, including a Digital Humanities Workshop, led by Sarah Stanley, the Digital Humanities Librarian of Florida State University; a Style Us “Conference Conventions & Etiquette Workshop,” part of the Department of Humanities and Politics Style Us: Writing and Professionalization Series; and a “Humanities to a Career in Tech” talk with Iris Nevins and Jasmine Haugabrook of the email marketing company, Mailchimp. Each event served as additional opportunities to connect students with the academic and professional applications of the humanities in our increasingly digital cultures.

This year’s conference theme, “Networks,” invited participants to explore diverse and interdisciplinary issues of networks and networking, from the social, political, and cultural to the technological, environmental, and biological. Over 150 members joined panels and events during this one-day virtual conference, including presenters and attendees from Greece, Indonesia, India, the UK, and all over the US, including Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, Ohio, and Michigan. Undergraduate and graduate presenters represented a distinguished range of disciplinary studies from medicine and law to English, History, Political Science, Philosophy, Sociology, and more. The Center for Humanities was especially pleased to welcome peers from the “Making Diversity Meaningful in the Humanities: MDC-FIU Pathway Partnership.” Adding to the day, two special guest speakers—Jessica Harvey, Project Manager of the Guy Harvey Ocean Foundation, and Nina Schick, a political commentator and broadcaster who specializes in disinformation and technology and the author of Deepfakes: The Coming Infocalypse —delighted audiences with expansive perspectives on the growing need for humanities scholarship and skills in areas of conservation and politics, especially in an age of rapid technological advancement. Nina Schick’s talk, titled “Deepfakes and the Age of Synthetic Media,” was sponsored by the Department of Humanities and Politics’ Stolzenberg Doan International Studies Lecture Series. 

At the end of the day, conference members gathered for the closing ceremonies. Three lucky winners of the Virtual Mural Raffle were awarded special Crossroads Conference grab bags. The pictures posted by Rachel Northrop from the University of Miami, Kate Poppenhagen from the University of Colorado Denver, and Greter Camacho Melian from Nova Southeastern University along with conference pictures posted by many other participants throughout the day can be viewed in the conference gallery:  https://nsudhp.wixsite.com/crossroadsconference/gallery 

The Crossroads Conference is also proud to announce the winners of the 2021 Digital Humanities Contest:

· 1st Place – “A Different Image, Another Sound: Resistant Rhetoric and Black Identity” by Nhadya Lawes (U of Miami)

· 2nd place – “A Meta-Analytic Review: The Implications of Virtual Reality with Immersion on Secondary Language Acquisition” by Dylan Darling and Greter Camacho Melian (NSU)

· 3rd Place – “Griot to DJ: Remixing and Blending Globalizing Culture” by Sarah Djos-Raph (U of Louisiana at Lafayette)

Each project represents exemplary studies of impactful issues in digital humanities and will be posted to the Humanities Center website over the summer:  https://hcas.nova.edu/humanities/ 

The next Call-For-Papers for the Crossroads Humanities Student Conference (2022) will be released in Fall 2021. Ask to be added to our listserv for more updates by emailing humanities@nova.edu or follow us on Instagram @nsu_humanities.

Angel Vasquez, a history major, presented a paper titled "A Statistical Comparison of Democratic Liberties, Socioeconomic Development, and Effectiveness of COVID-19 Pandemic Response in Countries around the World” at the Pi Sigma Alpha National Student Research Conference in March. Angel also presented his research at the NSU Humanities Center Annual Crossroads Humanities Student Conference in April. Angel notes that “participating in the Phi Sigma Alpha virtual conference allowed me to present my research to a scholarly audience and to experience academia firsthand. This experience has informed me about other career options and piqued my interest in other fields within the social sciences…I am deeply thankful for the professors of the Department of History and Political Science for their enthusiastic support and guidance.” Dr. Ransford Edwards served as mentor for Angel’s project.

Emma Heineman, an International Studies & Political Science double major and a Spanish minor, presented a paper titled “Women in States Legislatures: The Effect of Female Representation of State Abortion Restrictions” at the Pi Sigma Alpha National Student Research Conference held virtually in March. Emma notes that “the conference not only gave me the opportunity to showcase my work but also provided me with the chance to network with other students, faculty, and researchers from across the country.” Emma also presented her work at the Florida Political Science Association Annual Meeting, the NSU Undergraduate Student Symposium, and the NSU Humanities Center Annual Crossroads Humanities Student Conference. She adds “before this year, research wasn’t something I ever saw myself pursuing, but the experiences I have had conducting and presenting my own research have sparked a passion that I hope to continue in the future. It has allowed me to expand on the incredible opportunities I have had at NSU and has truly been one of the highlights of my undergraduate experience.” Dr. Ransford Edwards served as mentor for Emma’s project. 

Andrea Riano, a Legal Studies and Political Science double major, presented a research paper titled “The relationship between mining, forced displacement, and territorial and economic conflicts in Colombia” at the Florida Political Science Association Annual Meeting held virtually in March. According to Andrea, “having the opportunity to work on a research project and share it with my mentors and peers, not only helped me to develop my writing and public speaking skills; but also showed me that with dedication and the right system of support even the hardest tasks become possible.” Dr. Edwards served as a mentor for Andrea’s project.

Janay Joseph, a history major, won first prize at the NSU 2021 Undergraduate Student Symposium in the film category for her documentary film  She Had A Dream: Eula Johnson’s Fight to Desegregate Broward County . 

Janay’s work grew out of an internship at History Fort Lauderdale (formerly the Fort Lauderdale Historical Society). According to Janay, the internship “allowed me to not only learn about my community's past, but how it relates to the present as well. While working on this documentary project with my supervisor, Tara Chadwick, we uncovered an aspect of Civil Rights history that has not been brought to light since the 1960s. It was a pleasure to embark on this journey to learn about the historic neighborhood of Sistrunk, which is not too far from where I have lived my entire life."

Alpha Alpha Zeta:

Alpha Alpha Zeta is NSU’s chapter of Alpha Mu Gamma. The chapter was chartered in April 2020, but due to Covid-19 its chartering and first induction ceremony were postponed until November 18, 2020. Thirteen students were inducted on that day in Spanish and American Sign Language. Currently, Emma Heineman (Political Science/International Studies double major, Spanish minor) serves as Chapter President and Catherine Weber (Biology Major, and Pre-Health, Psychology & Spanish minors) serves as Secretary. Dr. Yvette Fuentes serves as the faculty advisor. Although the organization is new on campus and despite Covid-19 restrictions, NSU’s Alpha Alpha Zeta chapter of Alpha Mu Gamma has been active since its inception. On October 19, 2020, the chapter hosted “Studying A Foreign Language Abroad”, a virtual informational with the participation of the Office of International Affairs.

In addition, this past year, AMG members have participated in our departmental “virtual” language tables, El Cafecito and Au Café. And most recently, on Monday, March 8, 2021, the chapter president, the faculty advisor and several members participated in the first virtual “Celebration of World Languages Week” hosted by the Alpha Mu Gamma National Office. During the event, close to twenty chapters from across the country networked and shared ideas on how to promote world languages and cultures on our college campuses. On March 29, 2021, the chapter held its second virtual induction ceremony with eight new members being inducted in English, French and Spanish languages. Next year, the chapter expects to host more events related to world languages and cultures. For more information about our Alpha Mu Gamma chapter, contact Dr. Yvette Fuentes, AMG Advisor (yf60@nova.edu) in the Department of Humanities and Politics. Check out the AMG national page:  https://www.amgnational.org/  and NSU’s chapter’s Instagram page as well:  https://www.instagram.com/nsu_alphamugamma/ 

Nova International Relations Association (NIRA):

The weekend of March 26-28th the Nova International Relations Association (NIRA) competed in the Southern Regional Model United Nations (SRMUN) Annual Conference (usually held in Charlotte, NC – but virtual this year). Led by NIRA President Genesis Alvarez (Legal Studies) and Vice President Janay Joseph (History), the team continued its impressive streak of awards at this prestigious conference. The team, which also included Jackie Chavez, Luke Dombroski, and Angelica Lopez Uscamaita represented Colombia and was awarded a Distinguished Delegation Award for their hard work. This marks the fifth year in a row NIRA won a top award at SRMUN for NSU while competing against students from universities all over the southeast. Congratulations to all the students involved and to Dr. Nelson Bass, the faculty advisor to NIRA and team coach for Model UN.

Phi Alpha Delta:

The DHP chapter of Phil Alpha Delta, the pre-law fraternity, continued a very active year of events with its Winter induction ceremony in March, welcoming five new members into the fold. Congratulations to all the new inductees! A special note of thanks to Sommer Sandler (Legal Studies) and Taylor Margherita (Political Science) for their tremendous leadership of PAD this year and to Dr. Vicki Toscano for serving as the faculty advisor.

Unfortunately this year, due to Covid, we were unable to host our Annual Alumni Gathering. However, through the magic of Zoom, our generous alumni were able to participate in some fantastic mentoring events for our current students.

On February 18, five 2020 graduates, Leydi Arboleda Mocarro, Daniel Ordaz, Sanya Rashad, Kadeem Hall, and Amanda Pravder, shared with our current students their experiences transitioning from undergraduate to graduate school, addressing how they navigated the application process and how their first year in grad school is going. Ledyi, Sanya, Kadeem, and Amanda are currently pursuing law degrees at Florida International University, the University of Connecticut, the University of Florida, and NSU respectively. Daniel is pursuing a Master’s in Political Science at Florida International University. This lively event was hosted by the DHP chapter of Pi Sigma Alpha, the national political science honors society. A note of thanks to Dr. Ransford Edwards, faculty advisor for Pi Sigma Alpha, for convening and hosting the panel.

On March 19, MS in National Security Affairs and International Relations alumni Sherika Hornes (2014), Moriah Johnson (2020), and Eddie Jones (2020), offered guidance and advice in a workshop on career opportunities after graduation for our current NSAIR. Sharika currently works for the U.S. Department of State, Moriah works for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and Eddie currently works in education. The event was sponsored by the DHP Graduate Leadership Council. A special note of thanks for Sarah Campbell (NSAIR) for helping to organize the event and serving as host, and to Dr. Ransford Edwards, faculty advisor to the leadership council, for his role in putting this together.

On Friday April 9 at noon, two alumni, who obtained bachelor of legal studies degrees and then law degrees in the 1990s at NSU, spoke on Zoom to 28 current pre-law students in the Department of Humanities and Politics. John Stevens III explained how he manages a law firm with more than twenty employees that specializes in representing condominium associations. Dashia Trowers, a sole practitioner, told students about her family law practice. This event was sponsored by DHP’s Pre-Law program and facilitated by Professor Stephen Levitt. A special note of thanks to Professor Levitt for all his efforts in alumni outreach this year.

Congratulations to Dr. Charles Zelden for being named co-editor of the Southern Legal Studies book series published by the University of Georgia Press.

Congratulations to Dr. Jim Doan for being named to the board of the Stonewall National Museum & Archives, the largest museum of its kind in the world dedicated to LGBTQ history and culture.

Congratulations to Dr. Marlisa Santos who will take over as director of NSU’s Center for the Humanities at the beginning of the next academic year.

Congratulations to all our graduating seniors. We know you are all destined for great things, but here is just a sample of what a few of our future alumni plan to do in the near future.

Lovely Toby (International Studies):

After graduation, I will be working on getting my TESOL Certificate. While at NSU, I was able to achieve my goal of studying abroad in South Korea. By the middle of 2022, I will be applying to a program allowing me to teach English as a foreign language in Seoul, South Korea.

Janet Lopez (English/Psychology):

Upon graduating, I will be working as a psychology research coordinator in preparation for grad school.

Indya Williams (General Studies):

After graduation, I will be dancing off into the sunset until I start the graduate program in Student Affairs here at NSU in July 2021.

Jose El Khouri (Philosophy):

My post-graduation plans after this intense semester include a much needed relaxation at a south Florida beach, bringing my exercise routine up a notch, and researching/growing my online business endeavors.

Lucas Dombrowski (Political Science/Legal Studies):

Over my time at NSU, I have been able to participate in incredible organizations such as Pi Sigma Alpha and the Model United Nations team, and I was even able to take a trip to Washington, D.C. to present my research! After I graduate in May, I plan to work throughout the summer before beginning law school in the fall at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law!"

Bianca Oliveira (English):

I'm pursuing an M.A. in Composition, Rhetoric, and Digital Media (CRDM) at NSU upon graduation, later enrolling in a doctorate program.

Megan Springer, (Fall 2020, Political Science):

On the day I graduated from NSU, which was also my 23rd birthday, I received a job offer from Charles Schwab. I have been working there for 3 months in their Financial Consultant Academy, where in 2 years, I will be a licensed Broker & Financial Consultant.

The Department of Humanities and Politics recently launched a fundraising campaign to facilitate the creation of a dedicated space in the Mailman Hollywood building for the activities of the NSU Center for Humanities and for the Council for Dialogue and Democracy. We hope you will take a moment to read the prospectus below. If you are interested in contributing or would like to know more about these plans or about either the Humanities Center or the Council for Dialogue and Democracy, please contact Dr. David Kilroy at  dkilroy@nova.edu .

End of Newsletter.