Academic Chairs

DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY
Dr. Laura Levi, Chair

DEPARTMENT OF ART AND ART HISTORY
Gregory Elliott, Chair

Mr. Gregory Elliott begins his position as Chair of the Art Department at UTSA effective August 18, 2008. Mr. Elliott earned his MFA degree from Southern Methodist University in 1988, where he also received his MA degree in 1980. In 2003 Mr. Elliott, began serving as the Chairman for the Department of Art at the University of Texas at El Paso. During his tenure, the number of art majors grew by approximately 50% and he was instrumental in developing and implementing UTEP's Quality Enhancement Plan. Professor Elliott also served as head of the sculpture area and graduate coordinator at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana from 1998 to 2002.

Professor Elliott comes to UTSA as a widely acknowledged leader of the arts in the El Paso region, and is credited with being instrumental in accomplishing the opening of the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts Center, the cornerstone of cultural activities at UTEP. As a tenured professor, he has shown a dedication to making education a priority and is committed to improving teaching and learning in the visual arts. Mr. Elliott also has a long list of artistic and scholarly awards and exhibitions and has received numerous grants and fellowships.

DEPARTMENT OF COMMUNICATION
Dr. Steven R. Levitt, Chair

Dr. Levitt, who received his B.A. from Montana State University, M.A. from West Virginia, and Ph.D. from The Ohio State University, taught at the University of Kentucky before coming to UTSA in the fall of 1991 to create a new degree program in Communication. His teaching and research interests include applications of technology in organizations, distance learning, gender and power relationships in organizations, and alternative dispute resolution. He was honored with the 2000 President's Distinguished Achievement Award for University Service.

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
Dr. Bridget Drinka, Interim Chair

Dr. Drinka received her B.A. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, her M.S. from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin, specializing in Indo-European and historical linguistics. As a member of the UTSA faculty since 1991, her research has focused on such issues as the sociolinguistic motivations for language change, the role of contact in linguistic innovation, and the importance of geographical contiguity in the diffusion of changes across the Indo-European languages. Her forthcoming book, Language Contact in Europe: The perfect tense through history (Cambridge University Press), explores the complex development of a grammatical category as it spread across the map of Europe. Dr. Drinka is also working on a corpus analysis of Late Middle and Early Modern English, exploring, among other factors, the role that family networks played in transmitting and fostering change. A Fulbright Senior Lecturer at Moscow State University in 1998 and visiting professor at two German universities (Düsseldorf in 2002 and Osnabrück in 2007-8), she has recently been named as a fellow in the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, an honor which entails the presentation of several lectures and participation in symposia and seminars in Japan in September, 2008. She was also recipient of the University of Texas Chancellor's Council Outstanding Teaching Award in 1999.

DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY
Dr. James Schneider, Interim Chair

James C. Schneider received his B.A. in history from St. Lawrence University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He did his graduate work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and completed his doctorate in 1979. He joined UTSA that same year and is currently associate professor of history, specializing in modern American history and the history of American foreign relations. His major published work is Should America Go to War: The Debate over Foreign Policy in Chicago, 1939-1941. His second major project, a study of the Model Cities program, the major urban reform effort of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, is under review. Dr. Schneider is an award-winning teacher and is a past president of the UTSA Faculty Senate.

DEPARTMENT OF MODERN LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES
Dr. Marita Nummikoski, Chair

Associate professor and coordinator of UTSA's Russian program, Dr. Nummikoski was named interim chair of the department beginning with the Spring Semester 2002 and chair the following fall. A member of the UTSA faculty since 1988, she is author of Troika: A Communicative Approach to Russian Language, Life, and Culture, a Russian textbook first published by John Wiley and Sons, New York, in 1996. Since that time, Dr. Nummikoski has added an interactive website to support the text and is working on a second-year Russian textbook with the working title of Sputnik. She received three degrees from Helsinki University in Finland and earned her Ph.D. in foreign language education (Russian) at the University of Texas at Austin in 1991.

DEPARTMENT OF MUSIC
Dr. David Frego, Chair

Dr. David Frego began his duties as Chair of the Music Department at UTSA on July 1, 2008. Dr. Frego received his PhD from Florida State University in 1996 and has obtained both a license and certification in Dalcroze Eurhythmics from Carnegie Mellon University. He received his Master of Music Education and Master of Music, Choral Performance from Florida State University. Dr. Frego is considered a first rate musician, as a pianist, a conductor, a dancer and singer. He is supportive of choral and vocal programs and is committed to music performance and education. As an expert in Dalcroze Eurhythmics, Dr. Frego is has received international recognition for his research. Dr. Frego comes to UTSA from Ohio State University where he served as Associate Director of the School of Music and Associate Professor of Music Education and Dalcroze Eurhythmics. He is credited with increasing the scholarship budget and has been successful in developing community financial support. Dr. Frego is admired nationally and internationally as a Dalcroze clinician and performs numerous workshops per year, including workshops in Bosnia-Herzegovina, France, Japan and Egypt. He has been widely published in major research journals, and recently completed a chapter for Oxford University Press and a new chapter for the Revised Handbook on Research in Music Education.

DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY AND CLASSICS
Dr. Michael Almeida, Interim Chair

Dr. Almeida received a Ph.D. from The Ohio State University. He came to UTSA in 1991, became Associate Professor in 1996 and has been Full Professor since 2004. His teaching and research interests are primarily in Ethical Theory, Metaphysics and Philosophy of Religion. He is the recipient of the President's Distinguished Achievement Award for Research Excellence in 2000; he received a National Endowment for the Humanities Research Grant 2005-2006, and was appointed as adviser to the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics in 2007. He has organized the Annual UTSA Philosophy Symposium since 1996. He has published widely in Metaethics, Deontic Logic and Philosophy of Religion. His recent book is The Metaphysics of Perfect Beings (London: Routledge, 2008).

DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE AND GEOGRAPHY
Dr. Mansour El-Kikhia, Chair

Since 1989, Dr. El-Kikhia has been a member of the Political Science faculty at UTSA. He received his B.A. from the American University of Beirut and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California at Santa Barbara. Before joining UTSA Dr. El-Kikhia also held positions at the University of California at Riverside and the University of Arizona at Tucson. Specializing in International Relations and Comparative Politics with particular emphasis on the Middle East, his published works on Libyan Politics and Human Rights in the Middle East are highly regarded. He has testified on these issues before the United States Congress, the European Parliament, specialized United Nations committees as well as American, Canadian, and European governmental agencies. His weekly columns on international issues are published across the globe. Active in faculty affairs, he was elected for two terms to serve as the Secretary of the General Faculty and re-elected in 2004 to serve as President of UTSA Faculty Senate.

DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY
Dr. Robert Fuhrman, Chair

Bob Fuhrman received his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. His primary training was in Social Psychology with additional work in Cognitive Psychology, Personality, and Psychological Measurement. His graduate research, conducted under the supervision of Bob Wyer and Tom Srull, investigated the cognitive processes and memory structures used when people make social and personality judgments about themselves and other persons. This work touched on a number of issues pertaining to stereotyping and confirmatory search biases and explored the manner in which people organize and use autobiographic events for judgments pertaining to both self and others (cf. Wyer, R.W., Shoben, E.J., Fuhrman, R.W. & Bodenhausen, G.V. , 1985; Fuhrman, R.W. & Wyer, R.S., 1988). Following his graduate work, Bob served as a postdoctoral fellow at The Ohio State University. He collaborated with Tom Ostrom, Constantine Sedikides, and Patricia Devine on a series of person memory projects, several of which examined the memory structures involved when people form impressions of others with whom they expect to interact (cf. Devine, P.G., Sedikides, C. & Fuhrman, R.W., 1989; Sedikides, C., Devine, P.G., & Fuhrman, R.W., 1991). Bob returned to Illinois as a postdoctoral fellow and pursued several projects that investigated the relationship between trait judgments made about the self and the retrieval of specific autobiographical events (Klein, S., Loftus, J., Trafton, G., & Fuhrman, R.W., 1992). He also compared the cognitive processes that underlie trait judgments made about the self with the processes used by familiar peers to make trait judgments about the same person (Fuhrman, R.W. & Funder, D.C., 1995).

DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY
Dr. Raquel Marquez, Chair

Dr. Marquez was born and raised in the border community of Brownsville, Texas. After receiving her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin, Dr. Marquez joined the sociology department at the UTSA in 1999. She has most recently served as the department's Graduate Advisor of Record. Dr. Marquez's research often focuses on issues affecting Mexican women as they migrate to the U.S. and her current research project funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation has taken her to the border communities of Laredo/Nuevo Laredo. Dr. Marquez acts as the principal convenor for Las Fronterizas, a bi-national working group of Latina scholars. She is co-editor of a forthcoming collaborative cross-border book by Las Fronterizas - Transformation of Las Familias on the U.S.-Mexico Border, Notre Dame Press.