Congratulations Carl Grodach, PhD, Associate Professor of City and Regional Planning at the School of Urban and Public Affairs! He recently earned a unique grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to study the impact of the arts on cities.
David Subirats, men’s tennis, was named a 2011-12 Southland Conference Scholar-Athlete of the Year at The University of Texas at Arlington. Subirats was selected by UTA administrators and met all criteria for the award, including being a letter winner, earning a minimum 3.20 cumulative grade-point average and having completed at least two years of intercollegiate competition.
In addtion, nine student-athletes majoring in Interdisciplinary Studies were recently named to the Southland Conference 2012 Spring Commissioner’s Honor Roll. To make the honor roll, the student-athlete must have earned a 3.0 grand point average during the spring semester and must have been eligible to compete. Colten Boothe and Hance Loyd were also recognized for earning 4.0 GPAs in the spring semester.
SUPA’s Interdisciplinary Studies program provides students with a unique approach to higher education with a focus on critical thinking, adaptive learning, collaboration, and research in multiple disciplines. INTS gives students the opportunity to combine several fields of study to meet their distinctive academic and professional goals.
Michan Connor, Ph.D., assistant professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, will spend the 2012-13 academic year on leave from UTA as a Visiting Scholar at the James Weldon Johnson Institute (JWJI) at Emory University in Atlanta. The JWJI, an interdisciplinary research institute funded by the Mellon Foundation, supports research on the history and ongoing legacy of the civil rights movement and its connections to other movements for justice and equality.
Connor will spend his time in residency in Atlanta researching the historical roots and contemporary politics of a movement by residents of several of Atlanta’s northern suburbs to separate from Fulton County and form a separate Milton County. Opponents have argued that this move would exacerbate significant racial inequalities in the metropolitan area and institutionalize racial and class segregation, while proponents contend that their effort is unrelated to race and simply seeks to empower local communities. By studying how those communities were formed in a longer historical perspective, he will explore links between community, local government, and open and hidden forms of racial ideology to evaluate the claim made by several prominent sociologists that the fragmentation of metropolitan areas into communities of high and low opportunity is the most important civil rights challenge of our time.
The School of Urban and Public Affairs is proud to have awarded a record number of doctoral degrees during the 2011-2012 academic year. Congratulations to our Ph.D. graduates:
Public and Urban Administration
Helen Kay Godbey, Ph.D.
G.M. Cox, Ph.D.
J. Randall Farmer, Ph.D.
Linda K. Johnson, Ph.D.
Ravindra Kumar Jain, Ph.D.
Uvaldina Montoya Janecek, Ph.D.
Rebecca Jane Lewis, Ph.D.
Malcolm Khalid Oliver, Ph.D.
Urban Planning and Public Policy Lou Kelley Brewer, Ph.D.
Kent Lee Hurst, Ph.D.
Chawana Mwangeka, Ph.D.
Moses Pologne, Ph.D.
Pratap Narasimha Mandapaka, Ph.D.
Steven Nabieu Rogers, Ph.D.
Ali Tayebi, Ph.D. a