Faculty & Staff Spotlight

Wes Oliver, associate professor of law, will host a new installment of his series Crime & Punishment at 6:30 p.m. on Sunday, Dec. 22, on the Pennsylvania Cable Network (PCN). During this episode, Oliver will discuss the Michael Skakel case in regards to effective assistance of counsel and mechanisms for determining when an individual has been denied effective assistance.

Dr. John Stolz, director of the Center for Environmental Research and Education and professor of microbiology, presented the poster Arsenic, Anaerobes and Astrobiology at the American Geophysical Union annual meeting Dec. 9-13 in San Francisco.

Four faculty members from the Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies received honors at the annual meeting of the National Communication Association (NCA), Nov. 21-24, 2013, in Washington, D.C.:

Dr. Pat Arneson, associate professor, earned the Franklyn S. Haiman Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Freedom of Expression from the NCA for her article, Mapping Free Speech Scholarship in the Communication Discipline: 1969-2006. Co-authored with David Dewberry of Rider University, the article appeared in the 2010 edition of the Free Speech Yearbook.

Dr. Ronald C. Arnett, professor and holder of the Henry Koren, C.S.Sp., Chair in Scholarly Excellence, received the 2013 Communication Ethics Book of the Year Award from the Communication Ethics Division of the NCA for Communication Ethics in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt’s Rhetoric of Warning and Hope (Southern Illinois University Press, 2013). He also received the Best Book Award from the Philosophy of Communication Division of the NCA for An Overture to Philosophy of Communication (Peter Lang, 2012), co-authored with Annette Holba of Plymouth State University.

Dr. Garnet Butchart, assistant professor, was recognized with the 2013 Top Journal Article Award from the Philosophy of Communication Division of the NCA for his article, Camera as Sign: On the Ethics of Unconcealment in Documentary Film and Video, which appeared in Social Semiotics (Vol. 23, 2013).

Dr. Janie Harden Fritz, professor, received the 2013 Clifford G. Christians Ethics Research Award from the Carl Couch Center for her book Professional Civility: Communicative Virtue at Work (Peter Lang, 2013) for Social and Internet Research.