Achievements

Marianne Ahokas, Nicolette Amann, Sarah Ben-Zvi, Natalie Giannini, Tessa Head, Kerry Marsden, Jolien Olsen, and Erin Sullivan

English

Humboldt's First Year Composition Program Faculty has received the CCCC's Certificate of Writing Program Excellence. They are recognized for their long-term dedication to co-create the program around research and best practices for first-year writing instruction and to provide professional development leadership across campus. CCCC will present our program with a certificate at the award presentation of the 2024 CCCC Annual Convention in Spokane, Washington, on Friday, April 4, at 6 p.m. 

Sarah Ben-Zvi

English

Sarah Ben-Zvi has worked to support local high school teachers in developing meaningful writing and literacy curricula, coordinated the annual Redwood Writing Contest for students in grades 3-12, and dedicated herself to first-year composition students. Sarah has been invited to accept the 2024 Classroom Excellence Award from the California Association of Teachers of English at the annual CATE convention in Los Angeles. 

Stephen Cunha

Geography

Dr. Stephen Cunha’s paper, Field Notes: Visualizing the Record 2022-23 Record Snowpack in the Southern Sierra Nevada, California (The California Geographer 62: 65-86) combines snow survey data from eight Sierran watersheds, NASA Landsat and NOAA imagery, and his own annotated photographs from skis, aerial outings, and roads, to portray the record snowpack in the Eastern and Southern Sierra from Yosemite south to Mt. Whitney. Every watershed exceeded 250 percent of normal, with the Kern River (326 percent) leading the Western Sierra and the Owens River (318 percent) foremost on the Eastside. Below-average spring temperatures partially mitigated high-water flooding.

Alison Ruth Holmes

Politics

Professor Alison Holmes (Politics) has been accepted to the Summer Intensive Creative Writing Program at Oxford University in the UK. A three-week residential program, the course is led by recognized authors, poets, editors, and publishers who guide a small cohort of students in the development of their writing. The course has both an intermediate and advanced level with a selection process based on a project proposal as well as a portfolio of existing work in two separate writing tracks. Holmes has been admitted to the Advanced Level course for both creative non-fiction and poetry.   

Gabi Kirk

Geography

Dr. Gabi Kirk was awarded the 2023 Eric Wolf Prize of the Political Ecology Society (PESO). This annual award is given to an article-length paper based in substantive field research that make an innovative contribution to political ecology to authors within two years of receiving their Ph.D.

She will deliver a keynote address, “ ‘A fairly good crop for white men’: The political ecology of agricultural science and settler colonialism between the US and Palestine” on March 28 at the Society for Applied Anthropology Conference in Santa Fe. Additionally her article is under review at the Journal of Political Ecology.

Troy Lescher

Dance, Music & Theatre

Dr. Troy Lescher recently gave an invited presentation, titled "Building & Strengthening the Ensemble: Applying Social Emotional Learning to Theatre-making," at an Arts Educator Professional Development event hosted by the Humboldt County Office of Education.

John Meyer

Politics

John Meyer published a journal article titled, "The People" and Climate Justice: Reconceptualizing Populism and Pluralism within Climate Politics in the journal Polity. Available to all as an open access article, it will be included in the April 2024 issue of the journal. The article explores connections between influential conceptions of political populism and climate justice organizing. 

David Fisher

Dance, Music & Theatre

Eight students travelled to Spokane, Washington for the Region 7 Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival. Students entered scholarly competitions, auditions for professional companies and graduate programs, attended workshops with working professionals, and spent five days of intense training and scholarship. Theatre major David Fisher submitted and won the George R Caldwell Undergraduate Scholarly Paper Meritorious Achievement for his dramaturgical research paper.

Alison Holmes

Politics

Dr. Alison Holmes (Politics) presented her chapter, "UK-US Relations: Can Subnational Diplomacy Save the 'Special Relationship?" via zoom to a Special Symposium of the Transatlantic Studies Association in the UK, organized to launch the book Locating the Transatlantic in Twentieth Century Politics, Diplomacy and Culture. The volume was edited by Dr. Gaynor Johnson (University of Kent) and published this month by Bloomsbury Press in London: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/locating-the-transatlantic-in-twentiethce….

Dr. Cutcha Risling Baldy

Native American Studies

Dr. Cutcha Risling Baldy, co-director of the Rou Dalgurr Food Sovereignty Lab and Associate Professor of Native American Studies will serve as co-PI on a California Sea Grant project led by the Tolowa Dee-ni' Nation. The recent decline of California’s ghvtlh-k’vsh (kelp) forests directly affects the cultural lifeways and thus health of the Tolowa Dee-ni' Nation. This project will train and certify up to ten Natural Resources Staff and Tribal Citizens of the Tolowa Dee-ni' Nation to conduct both kelp monitoring and restoration efforts, including establishing kelp nurseries and grow-out sites.