Debbie Hulsey Cooper is the social worker and family resource specialist for the Open Door Preschool, a non-profit agency in Austin. She has a Masters in Child Development from Texas Woman’s University and has worked on a team of child-therapy trainees in a therapeutic nursery, as a Play Therapist for hospitalized children, as an Assistant Director of a large childcare program, and as an Inclusion Specialist serving children with disabilities and their families for a non-profit, childcare resource and referral agency in Houston.

During her time as a Research Associate, Ms. Cooper will explore the use of art with children, especially preschool children with language delay or behavioral problems. She will also research the use of gardening with preschool children as a means of communication and a way to enhance insight into development and sense of self. She will gather current information on preschool behavior to increase her knowledge base, to support Open Door’s teaching staff in understanding the emotional lives of their students, and to decrease the feeling of burnout that teachers of challenging young children often face.

Alyssa Harad is a writer, independent scholar and consultant. Her current work includes collaborating with intimate violence therapists to help their clients create public testimony. As part of her longstanding interest in university-community partnerships, she helped to develop the Humanities Institute’s Community Sabbatical and Research Associate programs. She received her Ph.D. in English from UT Austin in August 2003.

Dr. Harad is using the Research Associate Program to work on two projects. First, she will be continuing her work on her book project, “After the Scandal,” a post-history of the 1982 Barnard Conference on Sexuality. Bitter confrontations between conference participants and anti-pornography feminists kicked off the “sex wars” of the 1980’s and laid the groundwork for present-day conversations about sex and desire. With her collaborator Dr. Ednie Garrison, Dr. Harad is tracking the post-1982 lives of the conference’s participants and protestors, and the conference’s continued impact on the following generation of activists, writers and scholars.

Second, she will begin preliminary research for a new project on loss and assimilation. This work, which will take the form of a series of lyric essays and creative nonfiction pieces, draws in part on currently obscured family history. As part Dr. Harad will be researching the attempted assimilation of American Jews like her own parents – the children of Eastern European Jews who left their parents and their ethnicity behind on the eastern seaboard of the U.S. to move to a “deracinated” West.

Marisa Huerta earned her doctorate in English from Brown University in 2005. She is a native of Texas who has taught at Adelphi University in New York and the University of Texas at San Antonio. Her scholarly interests include early modern and eighteenth-century British literature and culture; the early history of the Americas; race, gender, and nationalism; and postcolonial theory.

As a Research Associate, Dr. Huerta is working on two projects. First, she is revising her book manuscript, ‘Race’ in the Long Eighteenth Century: 1660-1832, an exploration of English theories and anxieties about racial purity in the early modern period. Dr. Huerta is also beginning a new project on Mexico, the Confederacy, and the ways that colonized peoples reclaim nationhood and defend their “racial” identity in post-1865 literatures of the American South. Her interest in this project stems from her dissertation research on Sir Walter Scott, whose Romantic novels like Ivanhoe, about the conquered Saxon people of England suffering at the hands of the French Normans, greatly influenced the literature of the “New South.” By the end of her Research Associateship, Dr. Huerta hopes to have finished a paper on the subject and have begun to outline a plan for a longer-length study.

Kate Holliday is a historian interested in the development of urban landscapes and the architectural profession in America in the 19th and 20th centuries, with an eye toward the interactions between Europe and America. She received her Ph.D. from the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin in 2003 and is currently an assistant professor in the art history department at Southwestern University.

As a Research Associate, Dr. Holliday will be completing a book manuscript, to be published by W.W. Norton, on the Prague-born New York architect Leopold Eidlitz (1823-1908), America’s first Jewish architect and a central figure in the creation of the conception of organic architecture. She will focus on Eidlitz’s social vision for architecture, particularly in his two books: The Nature and Function of Art (1881), which he hoped would usher in a new era in American architecture, and Big Wages and How to Earn Them (1897), an anti-union reform manifesto which he addressed to workers in the building trades. In both cases, Eidlitz was deeply concerned with how architecture could be a tool for engaging and uplifting all people, an issue that still confronts architects today.

James Kraft is assistant professor of philosophy and religion at Huston-Tillotson University. His scholarly interests are in the philosophy of religion, epistemology, and methodologies for inter-religious dialogue.

The projects Dr. Kraft will be working on this year revolve around two issues: How does the presence of religious alternative seriously considered influence the justification of one’s religious belief, if at all? How does the view in quantum physics of indeterminacy influence cosmological arguments for the existence of God, if at all? In order to answer the first, Dr. Kraft will pursue the fruitfulness of new developments in philosophical epistemology for the study of the “epistemology of disagreement” and apply them to the issue of religious disagreement.

The second project involves looking at recent discussions in philosophy of science about the ontological and epistemological implications of quantum indeterminacy. The project also entails using these recent discussions for evaluating cosmological proofs for the existence of God in philosophy of religion. As a Research Associate, Dr. Kraft plans to talk to faculty in the physics department and to do a thorough literature review using UT library databases and journals.

Katherine Durham Oldmixon is a poet, scholar and teacher, salsa dancer, and supporter of arts and cultures on campus and in the community. She serves on the board of Texas Folklife Resources and works closely with ProArts Collective, a non-profit organization supporting African-American theater in Austin. She is also the Director of the Writing Program and Faculty Development and an Assistant Professor of English at Huston-Tillotson University.

Dr. Oldmixon is using her Research Associateship to pursue her study of the cultural insularity of island communities, as well as those communities segregated or self-isolated from dominant cultures sharing the same territory. She will work on an article detailing her concept of insularity and articulating the connections she is discovering among various “insular cultures.” Dr. Oldmixon will also use her associateship to produce curriculum materials that can facilitate classes and discussions with community groups on her work.

Chris Strickling is currently the director of the Actual Lives Performance Project, an award-winning community-based theatre ensemble of adults with disability that she established with deaf performance artist Terry Galloway in the summer of 2000. In 2006, she taught creative writing to adults with mental illness, each of whom produced a chapbook of original work. She wears many hats, dividing her income-generating time between occupational therapy work, ongoing projects with a non-profit arts and disability organization and an Adjunct Faculty position at St. Edwards University, where she teaches a multidisciplinary course entitled “Introduction to Disability Studies.”

In her first year as a Research Associate, Dr. Strickling used her research privileges to complete an essay entitled “The Actual Lives Performance Project: The Liberatory Pedagogy of Difference,” which will appear in Transformative Pedagogies: Feminism, Theatre and Activism, edited by Kathleen Juhl and Ann Elizabeth Armstrong, forthcoming in the Spring of 2007 from Aunt Lute Books. During 2006-7, Dr. Strickling will research three essays for inclusion in The Encyclopedia of American Disability History, a three-volume reference text that is the first of its kind. She is also developing a disability studies perspective lecture series and accompanying training materials designed to be incorporated into the curricula for occupational and physical therapy students in the five Texas universities that offer professional education for therapists.

Caroline Wigginton is a Ph.D. student on leave from the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her M.A. in English from UT Austin in 2005 and will soon return to her position as an Assistant Instructor in the University’s Division of Rhetoric and Writing. Ms. Wigginton is active with departmental organizations, including the Graduate Program Committee, the American Literature(s) Group, and the Native American Literatures Reading Group.

During her year as a Research Associate, Ms. Wigginton will pursue a project on a moment of epistolary convergence between three women in eighteenth-century America: Mary Wollstonecraft, Annis Boudinot Stockton, and Stockton’s daughter, Julia Rush. In a 1793 letter, Stockton reflects upon Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman to her daughter, thereby linking the three women through the acts of writing and reading. By synthesizing bibliographic research on Wollstonecraft’s treatise and a literary reading of Stockton’s letter, Ms. Wigginton will explore the relationship among women, the public sphere, and early America in a conference-length paper she will present at the Society for the Study of American Women Writers conference. She will also use her associateship to expand her conference presentation into a journal-length article for submission in 2007.