People, Papers, Presentations

John Boles,
the William Pettus Hobby Professor of History, has had published
two books that he edited. “A Companion to the American
South,” one of the Blackwell Companions to American
History series, came out in August. Tony Badger of Cambridge
U., a prominent historian of the American South, said about
the volume: “Teachers and students alike will owe a
great debt to John B. Boles for years to come …”
and “… will indeed be an indispensable companion
to every Southern history course.” The second edited
book, “Autobiographical Reflections on Southern Religious
History,” was published in August by Georgia U. Press.

Jane Chance,
professor of English, will have two of her well-known works
appear shortly in revised editions. The Times Literary Supplement
mentioned the following about the first of these, “Tolkien’s
Art: A Mythology for England”: “An attractively
presented short study based on an excellent idea, namely
that of tracing the nature of the relationship between Tolkien’s
scholarship in Old and Middle English and his creative writing.”
The second book is “Lord of the Rings: The Mythology
of Power.” “The author has taken a complex and
convoluted masterpiece and dissected it in a clear and concise
style. Fans of Tolkien’s classic will welcome it,”
a School Library Journal article stated. Both books will
appear this fall from the U. of Kentucky Press.

Robert L.
Dipboye, professor of psychology and management, delivered
a keynote address at the fourth Australian Industrial and
Organizational Psychology Conference in Sydney, Australia,
June 23. The title of his address was “Why I/O is All
O: Lessons from 100 Years of Research, Theory and Practice.”
At this same conference, Dipboye also conducted a workshop
on “A Social Process Perspective on Selection in Organizations:
Implications for Practice and Research” and served
as a discussant on a symposium on “Research on Employee
Selection.” Dipboye chaired a symposium, “Organizational
Resistance to HRM Technologies: Sources of the Problem and
Potential Remedies,” at the annual meetings of the
Academy of Management in Washington, D.C., Aug. 6. He delivered
a paper at this symposium titled “Bridging the Gap
Between HR Theory and Practice: Perhaps We Need a Broader
Bridge.”

Jerry E.
Finger, adjunct professor in the practice of management,
Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management, and his wife,
Nanette Finger, have been awarded the 2001 Del Sarto Humanitarian
Award by St. Pius X High School. The Fingers were given
the award because of their extensive philanthropic efforts,
both of them having served on the boards of many endeavors.
Their accomplishments include a longstanding friendship
with St. Pius X High School. The award is to be presented
Oct. 4 at the seventh annual St. Pius X High School Foundation
Gala.

Malcolm Gillis,
president of Rice University and the Ervin Kenneth Zingler
Professor of Economics, has accepted an invitation to serve
as chair of the Houston Savings Bond Campaign. The invitation
was issued by U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul H. O’Neill.
Scott Marler, graduate student, Dept. of History, has been
named as one of only two Americans from a pool of applicants
to participate in a doctoral workshop being held in September
in Terni, Italy, under the auspices of the European Business
History Association. An international group of scholars
will conduct a weeklong seminar on current methods and approaches
to business history. The graduate attendees are from Italy,
England, Finland, Spain and Denmark; the other American
is from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Honey Meconi,
associate professor of musicology and music history, edited
“Fortuna Desperata: 36 Settings of an Italian Song”
(A.R. Editions, 2001).

Angelo Miele,
research professor and the Foyt Professor Emeritus, Dept.
of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science, presented
the paper “New Approach to the Collision Avoidance
Problem for a Ship” at the Workshop on Dynamic Games
and Applications, held at the Institute for Scientific Studies
of Cargese, Corsica, France, July 16-21. The workshop was
organized by a consortium of French universities. The paper
was co-authored by Tong Wang, senior research scientist,
Dept. of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science.

Albert Napier,
professor of management and psychology, Jones School, presented
a paper titled “Venture Capital-Funded Companies and
Post IPO Market Performance: Recent Experience” at
the Babson 2001 Entrepreneurship Research Conference held
in Jonkoping, Sweden, June 14. Napier is co-author of the
paper along with James Thompson, the Noah Harding
Professor of Statistics, and Edward Williams, the
Henry Gardiner Symonds Professor of Management and professor
of statistics.

Robert L.
Patten, the Lynette S. Autrey Professor in Humanities,
was re-elected treasurer of SHARP, the international Society
for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, at
its annual meeting in Williamsburg, Va., July 19-22. He
delivered a plenary session talk on “London” at
UC–Santa Cruz’s annual Dickens Universe summer
session sponsored by a consortium of international universities,
including Rice, that comprise the Dickens Project. His chapter
on Dickens’ early writings, “From ‘Sketches’
to ‘Nickleby,’” appears in the “Cambridge
Companion to Charles Dickens,” which was edited by
the director of the Dickens Project, John Jordan, and launched
at the Dickens Universe.

J. Bernardo
Pérez, associate professor, Dept. of Hispanic
& Classical Studies, organized a session on “Literatura
Gallega” at the 83rd annual meeting of the American
Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese, San Francisco,
July 5-9. He also delivered a paper on “Funciones de
la ironía en las novelas de Torrente Ballester”
at this meeting.

David Queller,
professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, gave a presentation
on competition in chimeras in social amoebae at the International
Dictyostelium Conference, UC–San Diego, July 22.

Malcolm Rector,
graduate student, Shepherd School of Music, was one of three
finalists in the Acapulco Black Film Festival for composing
music for film. He received a trophy and $10,000 as well
as “a few possible connections for future films.”

Barbara J.
Rozek, assistant editor, Jefferson Davis Papers, has
edited and written an introduction for “The Forgotten
Texas Census: The First Annual Report of the Agricultural
Bureau of the Department of Agriculture, Insurance, Statistics
and History, 1887-1888,” published by Texas A&M
U. Press.

Joan Strassmann,
professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, gave presentations
on evolutionary conflicts in social amoebae at Mountain
Lake Biological Station in Virginia June 28 and at the Microbial
Population Biology Gordon Conference, Williams College,
July 29.

Harvey Yunis,
professor of classics, has published a new edition of Demosthenes’
most famous speech, “On the Crown,” in the Cambridge
Greek and Latin Classics series. The cover of the book reads
“Yunis has provided not only a new Greek text of this
basic classical work, but an extensive textual apparatus
and a contextual introduction.”

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