News from the Center

LaDonna Sullivan

Gary Copeland, political science professor and director of the Carl Albert Center, taught American government in an American Studies Workshop in Amman, Jordan, October 20-23,. The workshop was conducted under the auspices of the Center for Peace Studies (CPS) of the International Programs Center of the University of Oklahoma. The objective was to increase knowledge and understanding of the United States by Arab professors and students of American studies in Jordan with the goal of improving United States-Arab relations. Also participating from OU were Ambassador Ed Corr, Professor Alan Velie (English), Professor Jamil Ragep (Center for Peace Studies, and History of Science); and Professor Bethany Walker from the History Department at Oklahoma State University.

Recent Publications

Copeland recently co-authored with Ronald Keith Gaddie a book chapter, "Oklahoma: God and the Grassroots" for Southern Politics in the New Millenium, edited by Charles S. Bullock III and Mark Rozell (Rowman and Littlefield Press).

Associate Director Cindy Simon Rosenthal has published "Teaching about Gender Through Experience: A Pedagogy of Engagement" in Women in Higher Education: Empowering Change, edited by JoAnn DiGeorgio-Lutz (Greenwood Publishing Group).

Former Fellows

Lauren Cohen Bell, assistant professor of political science at Randolph-Macon College, has recently publishedWarring Factions: Interest Groups, Money, and the New Politics of Senate Confirmation (Ohio State University Press) and is also the author of "Senatorial Discourtesy: The Senate's Use of Delay to Shape the Federal Judiciary" in the September 2002 issue of Political Research Quarterly.

Robin M. LeBlanc, associate professor of politics at Washington and Lee University, is conducting research in Tokyo during the current fall semester under a Fulbright grant. To follow-up on her 1999 local politics study in Tokyo, she is now concentrating especially on male activists and the way in which their notions of what it means to be a good man shape their interactions with community power structures.

Under an earlier Fulbright Graduate Research Fellowship grant, LeBlanc was in Japan in 1991-1993. Her doctoral dissertation on the political world of the Japanese housewife received both the Carrie Chapman Catt Prize for Research on Women and Politics (1994) and the best dissertation award from the Women and Politics Research Section of APSA (1995). Her research was published by University of California Press in 1999 under the title Bicycle Citizens: The Political World of the Japanese Housewife.

Jocelyn Jones presented a paper, ÒCongressional Behavior: The Effects of Political PartiesÓ at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, and in November she successfully completed her dissertation, "It's My Party: Examining Women as Partisans within the U.S. Congress."

Michael Willis, a former undergraduate fellow, is currently assisting Tulsa Mayor Bill LaFortune in legislative affairs, intergovernmental relations, public policy development and analysis.

Congressional Archives

The Oklahoma Humanities Council has awarded the Carl Albert Center a $7,499 grant to produce the exhibit "Doing Their Part: Oklahomans and the World War II Experience." The twelve-panel exhibit will be created by Assistant Curator Todd Kosmerick and Archivist Carolyn Hanneman. Through text and accompanying reproductions of photographs and other materials (including cards, letters, V-mail, comic books, ration books, brochures, and pamphlet covers) from the Center's Congressional Archives and other libraries and historical societies throughout Oklahoma, the exhibit will show the impact the war had on Sooners at home and abroad. The grant will help in the research, design, and fabrication of the exhibit, and it will allow for construction of display cases and crates to make it accessible to school students and the general public through a traveling exhibit program administered by the Oklahoma Museums Association. The grant will also allow for the development and reproduction of school study guides and publicity posters and other materials. Funding is made available in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

National Education for Women's Leadership ~ Oklahoma

N.E.W. Leadership Director Cindy Simon Rosenthal and Program Specialist Jean Shumway Warner are making plans for a second seminar for undergraduate women interested in leadership development and public service. The seminar will be conducted on the Norman campus in May 2003.

The first seminar, conducted in May 2002, was showcased at the Journal Record Publishing Company's annual Woman of the Year banquet in Oklahoma City on October 19. Rosenthal and Warner, along with N.E.W. Leadership graduates Leslie Blair and Mary Milben, accepted a contribution from Journal Record Publisher Mary Melon at the banquet.

Warner is working with university development staff to raise funds among corporate and individual sponsors to assure the continuance of N.E.W. Leadership. The Oklahoma Commission on the Status of Women has pledged $10,000 to help fund the 2003 N.E.W. Leadership Institute.

Further information regarding the 2003 N.E.W. Leadership Institute and a photo gallery of the 2002 sessions can be viewed on the N.E.W. Leadership web page at www.ou.edu/special/albertctr/NLO/.

National High School Civic Engagement Initiative

The Carl Albert Center is partnering with the Oklahoma Department of Education to provide new opportunities for 10,000 high sc
hool students to participate in civic education training, study circles, and public forums during the current academic year. The students will have expanded opportunities to apply civic knowledge and skills to develop their own strategies for civic engagement in their communities. The project is part of a national initiative funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts through Providence

College.

Gary Copeland is providing research, evaluation, and programmatic support for the project in Oklahoma. He is assisted by undergraduate intern Rebecca Edington, who also works with Lisa Pryor of the Oklahoma Department of Education in coordinating the project, training the student leaders, and monitoring progress in the 30 participating high schools.

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