Faculty News
Charles Orson Cook is an American historian who has taught for the past 15 years in the University of Houston’s Honors College. Professor Cook teaches the Honors survey course in United States history and is currently leading an Honors seminar on the history of Houston, a subject on which he has focused much of his research.
Nineteen of his entries are in the new Oxford Encyclopedia of African American History, and he has an essay on William Jennings Bryan in Major Documents of American Leaders. Honors College students Ronnie Turner and Amanda Carr assisted with the Oxford entries, and student Dan Gerig worked on the William Jennings Bryan essay.
Dr. Cook is one of several collaborators on a new book, African Americans and the Presidency: The Road to the White House. Student Daniel Mendiola assisted with this work. In the summer of 2011, two of Dr. Cook’s essays—one on James Weldon Johnson and another on Colin Powell—will be featured in an anthology entitled Major Documents of African Americans, and four of his entries will be in the new Congressional Quarterly Encyclopedia of African American Political Thought.
Dr. Cook is currently writing a chapter on Houston that will be in the soon-tobe published The Harlem Renaissance in the West.
Stuart A. Long, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Associate Dean ofUndergraduate Research and The Honors College, was presented the inaugural University of Houston Teaching Excellence Career Award in 2009, the highest teaching award given by the institution.
In addition, Professor Long helped bring two grants to the university this year. The National Science Foundation awarded a group led by Professor Long a five-year, $2 million grant to support programs for recruiting and retaining students in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields. Specific programs involving undergraduate research, student seminars, project based courses, women in engineering, and summer engineering camps for high school students will be developed.
Professor Long and other UH researchers received a nearly $3 million grant in 2009 to support an initiative aimed not only at enriching the education of university graduate students, but for engaging area schoolchildren and teachers in physical sciences. The grant will place UH Ph.D. students from engineering and science into science classes at Houston-area schools to provide an additional knowledge base for the teacher and a role model for the students, as well as training for the graduate students in explaining their research endeavors to general audiences.
David Mikics published Who Was Jacques Derrida? An Intellectual Biography with Yale University Press in 2009. Morris Dickstein of the CUNY Graduate Center wrote about the book that “David Mikics is the real thing, a gifted, polymathic reader,” who “writ[es] not as a polemicist but as a humane interpretive critic.” Publishers’ Weekly called the book “blessedly readable,” and Martin McQuillan, who chose Who Was Jacques Derrida? as the Times Higher Education Book of the Week, wrote, “I applaud Mikics’s intellectual curiosity and open-mindedness... he shows himself to be a reader of considerable range and sensitivity.
Professor Mikics has another book forthcoming in March 2010, The Art of the Sonnet (Harvard University Press, co-written with Stephen Burt).
Iain Morrison, Instructional Assistant Professor in The Honors College, presented “Nietzsche, Economics, and Morality” at the Southwestern Philosophical Society’s annual meeting in Dallas in November. He has been invited to host a “Meet the Author” session at the American Philosophical Association Convention this April in San Francisco to discuss his book on Kant and the role of pleasure in moral action. Professor Morrison is also a finalist for a university-wide teaching excellence award, which will be announced in April. Other publications from our highly esteemed faculty include “The Traditional View of Hamilton’s Federalist No. 77 and an Unexpected Challenge: A Response to Seth Barrett Tillman,” in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy (Vol. 33, No. 1 (2010): 169-84) by Jeremy Bailey.
Tamler Sommers published a book entitled A Very Bad Wizard: Morality Behind the Curtain. (McSweeney’s Press, November 2009) and articles entitled “More Work for Hard Incompatibilism”in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (November 2009) and “The Two Faces of Revenge” in Biology and Philosophy (January 2009).
Staff News
Honors welcomes Libby Ingrassia (’94, English and History) as the new Director of Communications for the College.
We also say goodbye and good luck to Alison Romano (’88, English) and Jason Browning. Alison plans to pursue an MPH this fall, and Jason is currently exploring a wide range of IT-related projects with a group of colleagues—look out Google!
Congratulations to staff members Brenda Rhoden (Director, Student Services) and Ornela Santee (College Business Manager) on the recent additions to their families. Brenda welcomed Callan Joy Rhoden on September 8 and Ornela welcomed Liam Wesley Santee on October 19.
Pictured: (L) Callan Joy Rhoden, (R) Liam Wesley Santee
