The Academic Minute for 2021.01.04-2021.01.08

The Academic Minute from 01.04 – 01.08

Monday, January 4th
Alicia Nordstrom – Misericordia University
Reducing Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Stigma through Real-Life Stories
Dr. Alicia Nordstrom is a professor of Psychology at Misericordia University in Pennsylvania, USA. Her research interests include interventions to reduce stigma and stereotypes and stress and mental health in college students. Alicia is the creator of the stigma reduction program The Voices Project and The Voices Project: Disability (Electric City/Diamond City Best Theatrical Performance Award in 2012). Her most recent program, The Voices Project: Mental Health, was performed at the Broadway Bound Theatre Festival and broadcast on PBS as a documentary.  The Voices Project won several awards for its efficacy in reducing racism in college students including the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues Innovative Teaching Award and the Social Psychology Network Action Teaching Award.  Alicia is also an actor, director, writer and producer of theater, sketch, improv, and film.

Tuesday, January 5th
Amanda Caleb – Misericordia University
The Rhetoric of Pandemics: Health, Politics, and the Public
Amanda M. Caleb is Professor and Founding Director of Medical and Health Humanities and Professor of English at Misericordia University. She received her PhD in English and MA in Nineteenth-Century Studies from the University of Sheffield and her BA in English from Davidson College; she is currently pursuing her MPH from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She has published a number of articles and book chapters on topics ranging from accounts of illness in the Victorian period, to the rhetoric of British eugenics, to dementia and the role of narrative medicine.

Wednesday, January 6th
Patrick Hamilton – Misericordia University
The Secret History of Race & Comics
Patrick L. Hamilton is a Professor of English at Misericordia University and, with Allan W. Austin, Professor of History and Government at MU, co-author of All-New, All-Different?: A History of Race and the American Superhero upon which this Academic Minute is based. Published in 2019 by the University of Texas Press, All-New, All-Different? received the John G. Cawelti Award for Best Textbook/Primer from the Popular Culture Association and the Midwest Popular Culture Association’s award for Best Book for Use in the Classroom. The book is based in part on a class the pair team-taught on race in comics from World War II to the present; that class was also the basis for a chapter they contributed to The Synergistic Classroom: Interdisciplinary Teaching in the Small College Setting from Rutgers University Press.

Thursday, January 7th
Rebecca Steinberger – Misericordia University
Reading Matt Hartley’s Eyam in Quarantine
Rebecca Steinberger, Ph.D., is a Professor of English and Program Director of Theatre at Misericordia University. Her specializations include Shakespeare, Irish and British literature and culture, Contemporary Theatre, and Disability Studies. She is the author of Shakespeare and Twentieth-Century Irish Drama: Conceptualizing Identity and Staging Boundaries (Ashgate) and editor of The Renaissance Literature Handbook (Continuum); Encountering Ephemera 1500-1800: Scholarship, Performance, Classroom (Cambridge Scholars Publishing); Adam Max Cohen’s Shakespeare and Wonder (Palgrave). Her current research projects include a pedagogical chapter on Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s Emilia; a chapter on Margaret of Anjou for the forthcoming volume, Money and Magic in Early Modern Drama (Bloomsbury Publishing); and a book project, The Playing Politics: The [Dis]united Kingdom on the 21st Century Stage.

Friday, January 8th
Yanqui Zheng – Misericordia University
Chinese Cultural Diplomacy in the United States, 1875-1974
The first in his family to attend college in China and study abroad in Scandinavia and the United States, Yanqiu Zheng studied philosophy, education, and human rights before receiving his Ph.D. in history from Northwestern University. As a historian of modern China, he is broadly interested in the politics and pedagogy of intercultural encounters. Having conducted extensive archival research in the United States, Taiwan, and mainland China, he also enjoys teaching a wide range of courses from Chinese to East Asian and world history. His book manuscript, In Search of Admiration and Respect: Chinese Cultural Diplomacy in the United States, 1875-1975, is currently under press review. He is now working on a second book project, tentatively titled Chinese Food on the Margins: A Transnational History. Besides these book projects, he has published articles on the Chinese ethnographic photographs during World War II and the contested legal status of U.S. troops in post-extraterritoriality China.