Enrollment Increases 128% In Six Years - Tiffin University

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pROFESSOR pRESENTS aT
aNNual CONVENTION
Matt Bereza, Assistant Professor of
Psychology at Tiffin University, has been
selected to present his data at the upcoming
Ohio Psychological Association’s annual
convention in Columbus. Dr. Bereza’s
presentation, ‘Psychology, Nutrition, and
Barriers to Growth,’ will cover his current
line of research. “My areas of expertise are
cross-cultural psychology, Spanish speaking
populations, health psychology, biological basis for behavior and cognition,
and gay and lesbian issues in psychology. I primarily conduct research in the
areas of nutrition and how psychology intersects,” said Bereza.
pROFESSOR puBlISHES
aRTIClE
Dr. Sherry Truffin, Associate Professor of
English, has published an article in Reading
Chuck Palahniuk: American Monsters and
Literary Mayhem. Truffin’s article is titled,
“This is What Passes For Free Will: Chuck
Palahniuk’s Postmodern Gothic.”
In her article, Dr. Truffin notes that the
popular Fight Club author has a penchant
for writing about freakish characters, such as a refugee from a suicide cult
in love with a barren psychic who hires herself out as a surrogate mother
(Survivor, 1999), a disfigured former model who hides beneath a veil and
plots revenge against those who have wronged her (Invisible Monsters,
1999), and a reporter who faces down strange supernatural forces in a quest
for redemption after inadvertently killing his wife and their child with a poem
(Lullaby, 2002).
Dr. Truffin argues that Palahniuk uses freakish characters to update the Gothic
tradition for a postmodern age that seeks perfection in miracle “makeovers”
of all kinds. In Survivor, Invisible Monsters, and Lullaby, a character confronts
traumatic experiences from the past while feeling trapped in a conformist,
image-oriented, mass-media-saturated culture.
In the course of each novel, the character becomes paranoid and monstrous,
ultimately transgressing the bounds of law, reason, and good taste in an
effort to gain a sense of freedom and control in his or her life. Ultimately,
such gestures turn out to be violent, destructive, partial, and compromised.
For Dr. Truffin, Palahniuk’s fiction suggests a bleak view of contemporary
America as an incarcerating place in which the only possible expressions of
free choice are destructive to self and others. Dr. Truffin’s view is that Gothic
works always express the underlying fears and anxieties of a culture. Chuck
Palahniuk’s very popular books suggest that there is a dark side to our “selfhelp”
culture.
18 CHALLENGE > Fall / Winter 09
DaNgEROuS lIVES
Dr. James Rovira presented “The Dangerous
Lives of Unbound Pages in Chris Fuhrman
and William Blake” at the American
Literature Association’s Fiction Symposium
in Savannah, Georgia in October. Dr. Rovira
argues that Chris Fuhrman’s The Dangerous
Lives of Altar Boys and William Blake’s The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793) present
post-Enlightenment conceptions of reason
—embodied in the academic institutions
that legitimate and perpetuate them and
the books these institutions produce — as tyrannical forces that blind
people from initially painful but ultimately liberating truths excluded from
the Enlightenment tradition. In both authors, the post-Enlightenment
era book—the physically bound book as opposed to the unbound pages
of a manuscript or a comic book—comes to symbolize the oppressive
practices of Britain’s church/state complex (in Blake) and the Catholic school
institution (in Furhman). Blake’s Medieval-style illuminated books represent
to Fuhrman’s characters visionary emancipation from these structures and
inspire them to engage in similar resistance through the production of comic
books.
EMERgENCY MaNagEMENT
TRaININg
Dr. Allen Smith, School of Criminal Justice
and Social Sciences, taught 28 Ohio Military
Reserve Officers the ICS 300-400 series at
the Annual Training at Camp Perry. The
training was designed to satisfy significant
training requirements for the new mission as
the 6th Brigade of the Ohio National Guard.
Dr. Smith is working in the Brigade Training
Academy to develop courses in incident
command and related issues. The primary responsibilities as an organization
will be providing support services to the guard for ESF’s 6 & 7 of the National
Response Framework that relates to the National Response Plans for disasters.
The organization will deal with mass casualties and volunteer organizations
responding to declared emergencies.
Warrant Officer 2 “Boats” West and Dr. Smith have the required certification
from FEMA to conduct this training.