July 2005

• UA Professor Serves as President of Civil War Historian Society
• Jeanine Brooks Elected Vice President of NACCA
• Dew Named Fellow
• UA Aging Center’s Undergraduate Scholar Program Proves Successful in First Year

UA Professor Serves as President of Civil War Historian Society

Dr. George C. Rable, UA professor and Charles G. Summersell Chair of Southern History, has been named president of the Society of Civil War Historians. The organization is a diverse and growing group of scholars and students committed to the study of the American Civil War. Its aim is to promote the teaching and study of the Civil War in academic settings.

Rable earned his master’s and doctoral degrees from Louisiana State University where he studied under the well-known historian T. Harry Williams. He is the author of well-received books, including Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism, which won the Jefferson Davis Award in 1989. His most recent book Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg! won the 2004 Distinguished Book Award in American History from the Society for Military History.

Rable joined the department of history in UA’s College of Arts and Sciences in 1998. He was selected as a Blackmon-Moody Outstanding Professor in 2003 for bringing national attention to UA through his writing achievements. Rable is currently working on a project that will examine the role of religion in the Civil War for the Littlefield History of the Civil War Era.

Jeanine Brooks Elected Vice President of NACCA

Jeanine Brooks, Director of Action Card within Auxiliary and Support Services, was recently elected vice president of the board of the National Asociation of Campus Card Users (NACCU) at the annual conference. More about NACCA can be found at www.naccu.org.

Dew Named Fellow

Dr. John Dew, director of Continuous Quality Improvement and Planning at UA, was recently awarded “Fellow” status by the American Society for Quality. He was among 19 individuals elected to this status by ASQ’s board of directors. As Fellows, these individuals are being recegonized as having achieved professional distinction and preeminence in the technology, theory, education, application, or management of quality control.

Dew also serves as director for UA’s Leadership Academy, coordinator of the campus-wide effgorts to improve classroom teaching, and serves as the privacy officer for HIPAA compliance.

Dew earned his doctorate in education from the University of Tennessee. He is the author of five books, including Continuous Improvement in Higher Education. More information about ASQ can be found at www.asq.org.

(L-R) Misti Johnson, Emily Anderson

UA Aging Center’s Undergraduate Scholar Program Proves Successful in First Year

Misti Johnson, last year’s recipient of the first UA Center for Mental Health and Aging (CMHA) Undergraduate Scholarship, will be entering the Clinical Geropsychology program at UA this fall, fulfilling what the creators of the scholarship had in mind all along—to encourage students to enter the field of aging.

“The purpose of this scholarship is to encourage interest in aging studies in junior and senior undergraduate students,” said Dr. Louis Burgio, Distinguished Research Professor and Director of the Center for Mental Health and Aging. “We are very excited that Misti has chosen to further her studies in aging studies,” Burgio added.

During her year, Johnson worked on a CMHA project that teaches nursing home staff how to identify pain cues in residents with dementia. This project is currently funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Emily Anderson of Baton Rouge, La., a UA junior majoring in psychology, was recently named the second recipient of the CMHA Undergraduate Scholarship. She will be working on a project that examines the effect of self-focused attention, via the presence or absence of a mirror, on mood states and memory for pictures. Anderson’s study predicts that self-focus will not effect older adults’ mood and memory as much as it will effect the mood and memory of college students. Specifically, self-focus will not cause older adults to report negative mood states and older adults will remember more positive pictures in comparison to young adults.

Anderson spent last spring semester volunteering at Bryce Hospital in Tuscaloosa and at The Pervasive Developmental Disorders Clinic, a specialty service within The University of Alabama's Psychology Clinic.

CMHA’s mission is to develop new knowledge, test new interventions, and disseminate information related to mental health and aging. Through applied interdisciplinary research, the center promotes improved quality of life for older adults.

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