Roosevelt Hall is the hub of Wilkinson College. The historic building houses History, Political Science and Sociology Departments, as well as the Dean’s Suite.

Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences prides itself on providing a personalized education of distinction to our students by proudly championing the humanistic mission of Chapman University’s founders, which focused on diversity, global citizenship, and social justice. The outstanding faculty in our nine academic departments and interdisciplinary centers support innovative curriculum, research, and public programming to ensure that the arts, humanities, and social sciences remain the distinguishing component in every student’s education. Below is a list of Wilkinson College faculty who are recognized with honors and awards this spring. Congratulations to all our faculty for an amazing academic year!

2022 Valerie Scudder Award

The Valerie Scudder Award is in recognition of outstanding achievement in teaching, scholarly/creative activity, and service to the university. The recipients of this award are chosen by their peers for their exceptional contributions. The Valerie Scudder Award was the first award of merit to be given to faculty members by the university. It began around 1980, when trustee Valerie Scudder, a returning adult student to Chapman College, approached the administrators with her desire to honor faculty for their excellence.

In addition to a $9,000 honorarium, award winners’ names are placed on a plaque, exhibited in the Doy and Dee Henley Reading Room of the Leatherby Libraries. This year, Wilkinson College faculty won one of the three Scudder Awards awarded annually.

Mildred Lewis, Assistant Professor, English

2022-23 Unit Faculty Excellence Awards

Unit Faculty Awards are peer recognition of exceptional contributions in the areas of teaching and/or scholarly/creative activity and/or service to the university.  A $1,000 award accompanies this recognition by faculty colleagues.

Dr. Ashley Kranjac, Assistant Professor, Sociology
Mildred Lewis, Assistant Professor, English
Dr. Andrea Molle, Assistant Professor, Political Science

Tenure and Promotion

Claudine Jaenichen, promoted to Full Professor of Graphic Design
Dr. Pete Simi, promoted to Full Professor of Sociology
Dr. Robert Slayton, awarded Professor Emeritus of History

2022-23 Sabbatical and Development Leave Awards

Dr. Lynn Horton, Associate Professor, Sociology
From Caudillos to Technocrats: Elite Advocacy in Latin America at the Intersections of Identity and Class

Dr. Horton will collect and code data and write the initial chapters of a book exploring the gendered discourse and strategies of elite-led advocacy movements in Latin America. From Caudillos to Technocrats: Elite Advocacy in Latin America at the Intersections of Identity and Class will explore the intersections of identity-based claims and economic interests through a comparative analysis of elite-led sociopolitical activism in three Latin American countries.

Pedagogical Innovation Grants

The $5,000 grant for Pedagogical Innovation is intended to support faculty in innovative teaching that advances Chapman’s aim to provide students with personalized education of distinction that leads to inquiring, ethical, and productive lives as global citizens.

Dr. Patrick Fuery, Professor, Creative and Cultural Industries
CCI as Experiential Learning: Intersectionality and Embodiment

The new course will explore how different CCI have constructed ways to mediate the world and reinvent themselves through the use of experiences. The students will examine how different emotions are stirred and manipulated (joy, awe, fear, anxiety, bliss) through these experiences. The innovative pedagogy is based on exploring experientiality as a form of knowledge. That is, rather than locate the sensorial aspects of experience as ‘mere’ feeling, they are seen as crucial aspects in knowledge formation as well as challenges to how such formations emerge and are sustained. In terms of a research and pedagogic basis for the course, the key critical approaches are phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and related theories of subjectivity.

Dr. Renee Hudson, Assistant Professor, English
Chicanx Two-Course Sequence

The first course in the Chicanx Two-Course Sequence will be a First-Year Focus course that serves as an Introduction to Chicanx Literature as part of the Engaging the World: Leading the Conversation on Ethnic Studies. The course will offer students a preliminary introduction to canonical and non-canonical Chicanx literature and serve as the basis for an introductory class in the English department. The second class in the sequence is an upper-division course on “Brownness” that focuses on how the concept of brownness arose during the Chicano Movement and has been recently taken up as an alternative framework for understanding Latinx populations more broadly.

2022-23 Co-teaching Competition Award

Dr. Jan Osborn, Associate Professor, English, and Dr. Nam Lee, Associate Professor, Lawrence and Kristina Dodge College of Film and Media Arts
From Motherhood to motherhoods: Representations of Mothers in Contemporary Literature and Film

This course takes an interdisciplinary approach to the concept of Motherhood to explore the ways in which the conventional myth of motherhood is constructed and shaped through media representations in contemporary literature and film.  Motherhood is deemed one of the most ‘natural’ experiences for women across time and place; however, the texts and discussions in this course will unveil motherhood as a social and cultural construct that can be contested and negotiated. During the course, we will explore the notion of the “feminine” in relation to the myth of motherhood as well as the discourses surrounding women’s bodies, the politics of reproduction, and feminist debates on motherhood from a global perspective.

2022-23 On-Campus Conference Award

Dr. Julye Bidmead, Associate Professor, Religious Studies, and Dr. Stephanie Takaragawa, Associate Professor, Sociology
Motherhood to Motherhoods: Ideologies of “The Feminine”

Taking a multidisciplinary and global perspective, the Motherhood to Motherhoods conference aims to deconstruct the patriarchal mother as a biological and essential category and understand how motherhood is constructed and shaped through media representations in literature, film, and social institutions. The conference will consist of academic lectures and discussions, as well as workshops aimed at a general audience to create a community-based discussion about the role of women’s labor and health, gender identity issues, and the ideological construction of motherhood.