DEAN’S NOTE

Enrollment for Spring 2025 is now open, and students have begun registering for classes. If you are a faculty advisor, please make sure that your students are re-enrolling in a timely manner. Seats are filling up!

IN THE NEWS

Jordan Karsten (Anthropology, Global Religions and Cultures) was part of a team that helped solve and 1959 cold case homicide in Ozaukee County.

DEPARTMENT UPDATES

• Anne Stevens (English/COLS dean’s office) presented on “Engaging Faculty for Change: Experiences from Deans at Public, Private, Large, and Small Universities” at the Council for Colleges of Arts and Sciences annual meeting in Austin, TX.
• Gail Panske (Art) moderated and presented a paper for the panel “Prints R Us” at the Mid America Print Council Conference “From The Ashes,” hosted by Kansas State University.
• Ziyuan Wang (Mathematics) gave a talk, “Extending a priori procedure for simultaneously estimating location and scale parameters in the context of skew normal distributions,” at the 32nd Joint NMSU/UTEP Workshop on Mathematics, Computer Science, and Computational Sciences.

FACULTY RESEARCH

• Bill Gillard’s (English) has just published The Routledge Anthology of Climate Fiction Volume One. The book argues that stories about climate change started much earlier than the current scholarly consensus would have it. These fun tales, many of them drawn from the pages of pulp magazines and published between 1870 and 1940, respond to urbanization, pollution, and industrialization by depicting challenges such as rising sea levels, melting polar ice caps, population displacement, extinction, and technological innovation that define contemporary cli-fi.

STUDENT NEWS

• Voice students from the studios of Anna Hersey and Nathan Krueger (Music) participated in the Wisconsin Chapter Auditions of the National Association of Teachers of Singing at UW Milwaukee. Students competed against students from around the state in Classical, Music Theatre, and Contemporary Music categories. Holly Simpson (senior, Choral Music Education) was a finalist in the 4th/5th Year College Treble Musical Theatre Division and Logan Spahos (sophomore, Radio TV Film) was a semifinalist in the Lower College Musical Theatre Tenor/Baritone/Bass Division.

UPCOMING EVENTS

• Our final all-college meeting of the fall semester will be Friday, November 22, 3:00-4:00 pm. More details to follow.