College News

Historian Steven Sabol’s new book is a happy coincidence of fly-fishing and history. During a 2006 fishing trip to trout-filled Nez Perce Creek in Yellowstone National Park, Sabol spied a sign with tantalizing details about the flight of the Nez Perce through the park in the 19th century. The sign set Sabol on a comparative history journey exploring the treatment of nomadic people by two empires – the U.S. and Russia.

In her book, “Thomas Wolfe and Lost Children in Southern Literature,” scholar Paula Gallant Eckard calls upon Thomas Wolfe’s evocative and autobiographical novella “The Lost Boy” as a touchstone for her analysis of a group of contemporary southern novels. She draws upon her writing and research to enliven learning for her students.

Undergraduate students from around the nation who may have thought graduate school was out of their reach found out in a one-week summer institute at UNC Charlotte that it is within their grasp. UNC Charlotte’s Organizational Science Summer Institute. The institute seeks to diversify the field of organizational science through professional development, specifically targeting historically underrepresented undergraduate students.

UNC Charlotte students work together to prepare a giant red balloon for liftoff. They have attached a camera to the balloon’s string to take aerial photographs of the UNC Charlotte campus that they will use to create a map. Through exercises like this one, students in the geography class on spatial thinking gain hands-on experience that expands their understanding of the concept, which offers a geographic perspective on how objects, processes and phenomena relate to each other in time and space.

More than 100 undergraduate students competed in the 2017 Summer Research Symposium, with three College of Liberal Arts & Sciences students named the winners. “These are the agile minds that will advance understanding in many areas that affect our lives,” distinguished researcher Pinku Mukherjee said of the participants in the university’s research programs.

UNC Charlotte author Bryn Chancellor’s debut novel, Sycamore, has earned critical acclaim on the national stage, lauded as a riveting tale of how a teen-age girl’s mysterious disappearance has haunted her Arizona hometown and how the discovery of her remains leads to unexpected healing and forgiveness.

For a film that illustrates how the arts can promote healing in healthcare settings, UNC Charlotte researcher Margaret M. Quinlan and colleagues Lynn Harter and Evan Shaw have earned a regional Emmy® nomination from the Ohio Valley Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Heather Ann Thompson, a former UNC Charlotte faculty member, has won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in history for Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy (Pantheon). Thompson, currently a professor at the University of Michigan, was a member of the UNC Charlotte History Department from 1997 to 2009.

For humanitarian contributions to the field of Industrial-Organizational Psychology, UNC Charlotte professor Steven Rogelberg has been named the inaugural recipient of the Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology Humanitarian Award.

College of Liberal Arts & Sciences alumna Tisha Greene, principal of the Oakhurst STEAM Academy, has received the 2017 Outstanding Administrator Award from the North Carolina Science, Mathematics, and Technology Education Center. Greene received a bachelor’s degree in English and a master’s degree in English education from UNC Charlotte.

UNC Charlotte has received a $76,521 grant to establish a watershed observatory that will document the impact of land use and invasive plant species on Catawba Watershed water quality and quantity, to guide the development of best conservation practices for uplands here and elsewhere. Dr. Martha Cary Eppes and Dr. David Vinson of the Department of Geography & Earth Sciences will oversee the watershed work, in partnership with North Carolina Plant Conservation Program and the Catawba Lands Conservancy.

With his Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship, Africana Studies faculty member Honoré Missihoun will research and teach texts from Francophone countries in Africa, as he explores how the exploitation of women, land and natural resources relates to patriarchal and male-dominated societies. Missihoun will conduct research at the University of Jos, Nigeria, focused on eco-feminism and eco-criticism in the environmental literature of Francophone Africa and the African Diaspora.