At a campus so focused on engineering, science and technology, it might be easy to overlook the importance of the liberal arts and humanities in providing a well-rounded education. That is not the case at Missouri S&T. In February, the campus turned the spotlight on six humanities faculty members who regularly publish their research and scholarship as well as teach undergraduates in history, English and foreign languages. Their scholarship covers topics as diverse as World War II history, baseball lingo, the literature of the Roaring ‘20s and the treatment of Chinese immigrants in the 1800s.
Honored were:
- Diana Ahmad, associate professor of history and political science and the author of The Opium Debate and Chinese Exclusion Laws in the Nineteenth-Century American West, published in 2007. Ahmad is also the campus archivist.
- Jerry Cohen, professor of arts, languages and philosophy and an expert in word origins. Cohen’s books and monographs touch on such topics as Missouri place names, baseball terms, jazz lingo and even eatery slang. Many of the subjects are covered in his seven-volume series, Studies in Slang.
- Kate Drowne, assistant professor of English and technical communication and director of the campus’s writing center. Her book, Spirits of Defiance: National Prohibition and Jazz Age Literature, 1920-1933, was published in 2005.
- Irina Ivliyeva, assistant professor of arts, languages and philosophy and the author of Problems in the Synthesis of Russian Verbs, published in 2003.
- Ed Malone, assistant professor of English and technical communication and director of the technical communication program. Malone edited and contributed to the first two series of British Rhetoricians and Logicians, 1500-1660, published in 2001 and 2003. He also wrote 13 biographies for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, published in 2004.
- John McManus, associate professor of history and political science. An expert on military history, McManus is the author of several books on the subject, including Alamo in the Ardennes: The Untold Story of the American Soldiers Who Made the Defense of Bastogne Possible and War For Dummies, both published in 2007.