Zenith 2024

25 Dr. Rebecca Sheehan Last academic year, I served .5FTE as Interim Associate Dean of Academic Affairs in OSU’s Graduate College. In addition to academic affairs, I led two projects for the college: 1) Revising Procedures for Graduate Faculty Appointment, Nomination, and Renewal and having these procedures run through an online platform and 2) Orange Rise: Cultivating a Culture of Mentoring, a workshop series to assist graduate faculty in their work with graduate students. (I will be back in the Department of Geography full-time for the 2024-2025 academic year!) In October, I presented a co-authored paper, with Kim Johnson Maier, “Obfuscating Gender and Race in the American Frontier through Embodied Affect: Historical Fiction Tourism at the Ingalls Homestead in De Smet, South Dakota” at the annual SWAAG Conference in Laredo, TX. The conference coincided with the Day of the Dead 2023! In October 2023, my advisee, Kim Johnson Maier, successfully defended her dissertation, Sustaining the Frontier Myth at the Ingalls Homestead: A Relational and Spatialized Analysis of a Wilderscape. She then graduated with her PhD in December 2023. We have already coauthored a submitted book chapter, “The Ethics of Simple Technologies: Affect, The Frontier Myth, and Literary Tourism at the Ingalls Homestead in Desmet, South Dakota, USA,” to the International Handbook of Heritage and Affect: Designing and Experiencing Places of Heritage. Dr. Johnson Maier will begin a tenure-track assistant professor position at South Dakota State University in the Department of Geography and Geospatial Sciences in Fall 2024. I look forward to continued collaboration with Kim. I also continued research on public spaces and memorialization, especially in the US South. Over the last year, I spent time hiking and relaxing at the Black Mesa in Oklahoma as well as in Abiquiu, New Mexico! Day of the Dead, La Posada Hotel, Laredo, Tx Abiquiu, New Mexico Hooding Dr. Kim Johnson Maier

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