University of Central Arkansas

UCA publications swept top honors at the Arkansas College Media Awards last week at the ACMA's conference at the University of Arkansas at Monticello.

The Echo was voted the outstanding college newspaper in Arkansas. The Scroll was chosen the state's best college yearbook, and the Vortex was selected the top literary magazine among the state's colleges and universities.

In addition to the publication awards, two UCA students were recognized for individual general excellence. These included Aprille Hanson and Katie Butler of The Echo, who were selected Newspaper Editor of the Year and Newspaper Reporter of the Year, respectively.

"This is an outstanding indicator of the high quality of students involved with the programs that are responsible for these publications, and they are taught by a very talented and dedicated faculty," said Dr. Rollin Potter, dean of the College of Fine Arts and Communication. "Winners all around!"

Subscriptions for the third season of the Arkansas Shakespeare Theatre at UCA are now on sale.

This summer's AST Festival will feature four shows to be presented from June 10-28: Macbeth, The Taming of the Shrew, the Broadway smash The Producers, and the children's classic The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. All four productions will be created from scratch over a one-month rehearsal and construction period by a company of more than 70 artists combining Arkansas artists, out-of-town-professionals, and college students from 11 different universities.

Tickets will range in price from $10-$30 per seat, with discounted season tickets available online and at UCA Ticket Central.

The Division of Academic Outreach at UCA, in collaboration with the UCA College of Business, is currently facilitating a Pre-Employment Training Program for the Arkansas Economic Development Commission (AEDC). The Academic Outreach Center for Training and Consulting Services provides this training for the new Hewlett Packard (HP) Conway Facility. The HP training curriculum, developed by College of Business faculty members, consists of an overview of the company and technical aptitude skills required of all HP employees.

"UCA has been a great business partner" said Julie Palmason, Sales Programs Manager at HP. "From the beginning of this program, they have provided creative ideas on how to best teach and assess students on some very specific skills. Once the program started, we needed to make a few changes to the curriculum. UCA was very flexible, and again offered suggestions on how to adjust the agenda. We could not be more happy with the outcome."

Maria Haley, executive director of the AEDC, said the training and education of our workforce is vital to our economic future.

"Companies locate where people can be effectively trained for the jobs they create. This is why education and training is a priority for our state," said Haley. "This partnership between AEDC and UCA is a perfect example of the type of collaboration needed to make certain our businesses are well served."

In conjunction with the third annual Little Rock Film Festival, award-winning documentary filmmaker Brent Renaud recently visited UCA to present a series of workshops as part of the Artists in Residence series.

Arkansas native Renaud, along with his brother Craig, makes up the brains behind several critically acclaimed films, including the Emmy-nominated drug addiction documentary Dope Sick Love; Off to War, which followed the deployment of a unit of soldiers in the Iraq War; Taking the Hill, which chronicled the journey of war veterans as they ran for political office and Little Rock Central: 50 Years Later, which marked the 50-year anniversary of the controversial integration. The brothers have also produced shows for networks such as MTV, PBS, CBS and ESPN, to name a few.

The Renaud brothers' films have been praised as "provocative," "poignant," and "powerful" by media outlets such as CNN, the New York Times and National Public Radio.

"We're really excited to have Brent Renaud coming to UCA," said Dr. Bruce Hutchinson, Director of Graduate Studies in UCA's Digital Filmmaking Program and the faculty sponsor for the event, said. "He's one of the best young documentary filmmakers in the country. He's traveled the world and has made some of the most interesting documentaries of the past 10 years."

UCA's 38th annual Academic Honors Convocation will take place this Sunday, April 26, at 2 p.m. in the Donald W. Reynolds Performance Hall.

UCA President Tom Courtway and UCA Provost Lance Grahn will recognize superior academic achievement and this year's Outstanding University Students.

The event is free and open to the public.

Dr. Reinaldo (Dito) Morales Jr., assistant professor of art history at UCA, has confirmed a major discovery in the world of rock art: an ancient rock painting at a burial site from the Inca site of Machu Picchu in Peru.

The UCA Debate Team finished its strong 2008-09 season by advancing two competitors to semifinals, three competitors to octo-finals and one to double octo-finals at the national tournament as well as finishing fourth overall for their season-long performance.

In its second year of existence, the team was recognized for finishing fourth in overall season-long success that consisted of third place finishes overall in the Open and Novice divisions and fifth in the Varsity division. Highlighting the season-long success was a second place finish and third place speaker award by UCA Debate co-coach Mark Lowery in the Open division, a seventh place finish in the Novice division by senior accounting major Kristen Qandah and a ninth place finish in the Varsity division by senior speech and public relations major Ashley Hale. Also winning a second place season-long award in Team IPDA competition was the team of Hale and Jerry Garner, a sophomore history major. Season-long awards were compiled by counting the results of the top four UCA competitors in each division at the top six points-earning tournaments.

Six faculty grants, totaling more than $9,000, were awarded recently by the University of Central Arkansas Foundation.

The UCA Foundation awards grants each year to faculty for programs that enhance learning opportunities at UCA. These grants, generally in amounts less than $3,000, are intended to encourage creative programs that may serve as "seeds" for future programs and provide for unique and timely programs and activities.

Jessica Tabor Lassiter, who graduated from UCA last May, recently received the Best Paper Award at the annual meeting of the International Academy of Business Disciplines in St Louis.

"This is not an award for the best student paper," said Dr. Mike Casey, Chair of UCA's Department of Economics. "It is an award received in competition with Ph.D. business faculty members from around the world. I have never before heard of such prestigious recognition for an undergraduate paper."

Dr. Joseph Horton, UCA Professor of Economics, said, "This demonstrates once again that we have really outstanding students at UCA. Our best students are just as good as the best students at Harvard or anywhere else."

Lassiter wrote the paper as part of her UCA Honors Thesis supervised by Dr. Tim Bisping as part of Horton's Senior Seminar in Economics. Lassiter is now a graduate student at Illinois State University.

UCA will host "Gospel Explosion" on Thursday, April 16, at 7 p.m. at the Donald W. Reynolds Performance Hall on the UCA campus.

Eight gospel choirs and the UCA Ebony Models will take part in the event, which is sponsored by the UCA Financial Aid Office as a tribute and memorial scholarship fund-raising event in honor of the late longtime UCA employee, Fay Dunevant. The goal of the Financial Aid Office is to endow the scholarship.

Dunevant was employed at UCA from May 1979 until her death in July 1999. She left behind two daughters, an extended family, and many friends and co-workers. The majority of her years of service at UCA were with the Financial Aid Office.

The UCA Department of English will host its third annual Graduate Student Conference on Literature this Thursday and Friday, April 9 and 10, in the UCA Student Center. This year's theme is We Are One People: Writing America. Because there are many "Americas" and many American voices, this conference hopes to create a place where those voices may be heard as we consider the idea and ideal behind the United States motto: E pluribus unum ("Out of Many, One").

Graduate and undergraduate students from UCA and neighboring states will present papers on a range of literary topics. In addition, Ramson Lomatewama, a Hopi artist and poet, on April 9 will deliver the keynote address entitled, "The Other Side of Poetry: Looking at the Creative Writing Process from another Culture" at 2:45 p.m. in Student Center room 203B. On April 10, Matt Chiorini, Artistic Director of the Arkansas Shakespeare Theatre, will delivery a Plenary Address entitled, "I Have Seen the Future, and It is Naked Vampires" at 8 a.m. in Student Center room 203B. The Oxford American magazine will host a discussion session on April 10 at 1:30 p.m.

All session, panels, and addresses are open to the public. For a full schedule, visit the conference's Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/event.php?eid=73563079121&ref=ts.

Ashley Byrd, a graduate English M.A. student, recently won the $200 Ellen Millsaps Prize in American Literature at the Alpha Chi National College Honor Society's National convention in Indianapolis for her paper "'Stop mixin' up mah doings wid mah looks': Exploring Surrogacy, Sex, and Separation in Janie Crawford's Early Self-Image." Byrd originally wrote the paper in Dr. Jeffrey Johnson's class.

Brian Besel and Scott Musial, who are students in UCA's Department of Chemistry, recently presented their research at the 29th Annual Undergraduate Research Conference sponsored by the Department of Chemistry at the University of Memphis. Besel, a sophomore chemistry major, presented "A Simple Route to Single-Scorpionate Nickel(II) Complexes with Minimum Steric Requirements," which included results on nickel-based protein sensor/purification materials, and was part of work funded by the National Science Foundation in the laboratory of UCA professors Patrick Desrochers and Richard Tarkka. Musial, a senior chemistry major who works in the laboratory of UCA professor William Taylor, presented "Dipole Orientation Effects on Reactants of Cu+(3D) with Substituted Methanes," based on his investigations of reactions catalyzed by excited state copper with chlorofluorocarbons and other halocarbon molecules. In competition with chemistry students from Tennessee, Arkansas, Alabama, and Mississippi, Besel was recognized for his outstanding presentation with a $200 cash prize sponsored by the U of M Department of Chemistry and Dr. Frank A. Anthony from Schering-Plough HealthCare Products, Inc of Memphis.

Raymond-Jean Frontain, professor of English at UCA, delivered a belated Milton Quartercentenary Lecture title "Milton, Theology and Syntax" at four universities in West Bengal, India: Kalyani University, the University of Burdwan, Vidyasagar University in Midnapore, and Viswa Bharati, the experimental "open world" university founded in 1921 by Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. The lecture will be published in Literature and Criticism, the journal of the Literary Society of India. While in India, Frontain completed work on A Talent for the Particular: Critical Essays on R. K. Narayan, which he has coedited with Professor Basudeb Chakraborti of Kalyani University, and which is forthcoming from World View Press in Kolkata. Frontain also recently coordinated an interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies conference that was held in Hot Springs and was attended by 111 scholars in literature, history, and art history.

Most recently, Frontain has published "Envy, Simple Lines, and the Festive Mode of Skelton's Elynour Rummnyg," Cahiers Elisabethains 68 (Oct. 2008); "Terrence McNally and the Dance of Death," CEA Critic 72, 2 (Winter 2009); "Kipling's Follow Me 'Ome and 2 Samuel 1," ANQ: American Notes and Queries 22, 2 (Spring 2009); and "Sexual Privacy and Gay Literary Biography," Gay and Lesbian Review 16, 3 (May-June 2009), in press. The latter is the extended version of a paper title "Whose Life Is It Anyway?: AIDS, Privacy, and the Writing of Gay Literary Biography" that he presented in December at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association of America in San Francisco.

Michael Gunter, a lecturer in Digital Filmmaking in UCA's Department of Mass Communication and Theatre, and Levi Agee, a graduate student in the MFA program in Digital Filmmaking, recently screened their short narrative films at the Ozark Foothills Film Festival in Batesville, Ark. Gunter's film, Memories of Viola, is a story of love, loss, and the redemptive power of friendship told along the banks of the Ouachita River. Agee's film, What Happened to My Brother, is the story of a young boy whose perception of reality is shattered when he learns the news that his idol, his older brother, has attempted suicide and is now mentally impaired.

The Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards Inc. (CFP Board) recently renewed its registration of the financial planning curriculum offered by the University of Central Arkansas. The CFP Board is the professional regulatory organization for those who hold the CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ certification. In its official letter of renewal to UCA, the CFP Board noted the "depth and quality of your faculty members, your curriculum, and your commitment to offering a quality financial planning curriculum" as exemplary. This renewal registration period expires on September 30, 2010. Dr. Victor A. Puleo, Jr., CFP® assistant professor of insurance and risk management in UCA's College of Business is the program director for the CFP Board-Registered Personal Financial Planning program. UCA faculty teaching in the program include Dr. John Bratton, Dr. Mike Casey, Dr. Patricia Mounce, Dr. Victor Puleo, Dr. Tammy Rogers, Dr. Pam Spikes, and Interim President Tom Courtway.

Students who successfully complete the CFP Board-Registered Program will have met the prerequisite education requirement that allows them to apply for the CFP® certification exam. In addition to this requirement, passing the CFP® Certification Examination plus fulfilling experience, undergraduate degree, and ethics requirements can lead to certification by CFP Board, granting the individual the right to use the CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ and CFP® certification marks. Over 55,000 professionals in the U.S. hold the CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ certification.

The UCA Debate Team followed up strong debate showings in the fall semester with competitive performances in regional competition, and was joined for two tournaments by Honors College individual events competitors who turned in a second place sweeps performance in their third competition.

The debate team continued to be led by Ashley Hale who followed up her varsity win at the LSU-Shreveport Red River Classic in November with a quarterfinal win at the Tri-State competition after going 3–3 in preliminary rounds and ranking as 3rd-best speaker. Hale had also teamed up with Jerry Garner at the LSUS tournament to win the Team IPDA competition.

The highlight of the spring semester to date was UCA's third place sweepstakes honors at the Henderson State "Reddie to Rumble" tournament. The team placed high by advancing 4 of 5 competitors in the novice division and one competitor in the varsity and open divisions. Novice debaters advancing were Caleb Norris, Kristen Qandah, Clermon Acklin and Drew Ayelsworth. Ayelsworth, who had also advanced to semifinals along with UCA finalist Justin Lowery at the LSU Mardi Gras tournament earlier in the semester, was the fourth seed and advanced to finals before losing. Capping off the third place sweepstakes win for UCA was varsity debater Jonathan Welk who advanced to quarterfinals and open debater Mark Lowery who continued to lead in season long points in Open by advancing to finals for the third time in five tournaments dating back to the fall semester.