Current Research in the College of Liberal Arts

Dr. Ben Kracht is an associate professor of anthropology/sociology and the Coordinator of Native American studies. He is currently writing a book review for American Indian Culture and Research Journal on Robert Conley's new book, Cherokee Medicine Man. He is also finishing a book on Kiowa religion which is a culmination of 22 plus years of research on the Kiowa culture. The working title is Kiowa Belief and Ritual: An Ethnohistory, 1832-2005 and will be published by the University of Nebraska Press. Dr. Kracht has also authored four articles in the 3 volume American Indian Religious Traditions. An Encyclopedia, edited by Suzanne Crawford and Dennis F. Kelley, published by ABC-CLIO, titled Dance, Plains; Sacred Societies, Plains; Spiritual and Ceremonial Practitioners, Plains, and; Yuwipi Ceremony.

On July 12 - 19, 2005, Dr. Kracht and Dr. Erik Terdal, Associate Professor, Biology, took six students on a cultural ecology field trip to Belize as part of the class Tropical Ecology and Maya Archaeology. They stayed at Clarissa Falls, near the town of San Ignacio, about 6 miles from the Guatemala border. Rainforest hikes included an ethnomedicine tutorial by their hostess, Chena Galvez, a renowned local healer trained by a Maya shaman. Students got to visit some Maya archaeological sites in Belize, including Xunantunich, Caracol, and Cahal Pech. They also rode horses to the unexcavated site of Buena Vista where their guide slashed his way through the forest and they climbed a tree-covered pyramid that was abandoned 1,100 years ago. Hurricane Emily prevented them from visiting Caye Caulker, so some of the group crossed the border into Guatemala to visit the famous Maya site of Tikal, "city of the sound of evil voices." En route students observed first hand the rampant deforestation of the rainforest.

Dr. Chris Malone is an assistant professor of English and is the winner of the Circle of Excellence for Research in 2005. Dr. Malone's research interests range from modern Irish culture to contemporary literature and theory. He has recently published essays in collections dealing with Irish modernists such as W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett. He has also written about the cultural function of life writing, in particular, the differences between multicultural and postmodern memoir forms. He will present a paper dealing with this subject at the Midwest Conference on British Studies, at the University of Notre Dame in the fall of 2005.

Dr. Malone is currently interested in exploring (with his colleague in Humanities, Dr. Andrew Vassar) the ways in which travel can enrich the teaching of literature and humanities courses.

Dr. John A. Milbauer is a professor of geography and seeks to answer questions of the cultural region of Oklahoma. "For many years geographers have not quite been able to comfortably place Oklahoma in a culture region. Is it an appendage of the Upland South? Does the Lowland South enter the state? Is Oklahoma part of the Midwest? What about the West and Southwest? In order to answer this question the researcher must study the material and non-material culture of the entire state. Topics include agriculture, architecture, cemeteries, Civil War monuments, foodways, courthouse squares, birthplace of settlers, religion, dialect, toponomy, and voting patterns. The courthouse square is the concern here. Throughout the Upland South the Shelbyville courthouse square prevails. Named after Shelbyville, Tennessee, the courthouse occupies a square in the center of town. City streets converge at the corners of square. The number of Shelbyville squares will indicate Oklahoma’s status with respect to the Upland South. There is another viewpoint, however, that asserts that town morphology is more a function of time than regional connections. Towns laid out in the pre-railroad era often have a central courthouse square, we are told, but those that developed along rail lines often lack them. Since most of Oklahoma towns were established during the railroad age, courthouse squares might be scarce here. Is the shape of the Oklahoma county seat determined by regional affiliation or time and railroad influence? It will be interesting to find out."

Dr. John Unger is an assistant professor in the Department of Languages and Literature. He is currently writing articles related to dissertation research, and conducting related research into video games, media literacy, and the gestures of ESL (English as a Second Language) learners. All related strands of research involve case-study design, ethnographic research methods, semiotics, discourse analysis, and sociocultural theory (i.e., work derived from or tangential to the ideas of Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky). The emphasis of this research is on how signs and symbols are learned and how they transform individual and social activity: specifically, how representations mediate perception. One in-press publication (a book chapter; see references) has resulted from the current video game research, and one paper on gesture that was presented at our last teaching and learning conference at NSU has been submitted, rejected, and is currently undergoing revision. The third author on the video game chapter, Victoria Hamilton, was a graduate student at the time the chapter was written, she wrote her thesis on video games, and she is currently an adjunct teaching writing.

A related strand of curriculum research, which is currently being used to build a foundation for future literacy/linguistic research, is a recent grant-funded trip to southern Yunnan, People’s Republic of China (June 12, 2005-July 8,2005), which included a side trip to northern Thailand to investigate educational and linguistic resources there. See pictures from trip. NSU’s Rural Education Institute funded this trip. Foundational data gathered from the trip are being used to build middle school and high school social studies lessons and to compile a linguistic/literacy database of Hani orthography and language-use patterns and pedagogical strategies for teaching Hani. These data will be used to write larger literacy and teacher-education research grants to assist Chinese/Hani colleagues in researching, teaching, and promoting Hani language and literacy in southern Yunnan. In addition, the data from this trip will be used in second language acquisition courses, foundational linguistic courses, and as writing prompts in ESL writing courses and English grammar and usage courses. One specific project that this data aims to support is a grant to bring Cherokee students, Native American students from other Oklahoma tribes, and other minorities from NSU to southern Yunnan to learn about the Hani and other minority peoples of Yunnan, and compare and contrast a number of discipline areas (e.g., Humanities, Health and Science, Business, Language/Literature, Liberal Arts, Education) using semiotics and sociocultural theory.