Skip to main content Skip to navigation
CAS in the Media Arts and Sciences Media Headlines

Race & Sports: It’s not just a game

It has never been just a game.

History tells us that sports fields, courts, and victories have never been colorblind or devoid of politics. History also tells us that that the story of race and sports didn’t start by taking a knee.

This month, KING 5 is starting a new conversation series called Race & Sports. We’re going to peel back some of the layers and explore the intersection of race and sports from various perspectives. We’ll start by talking with a few high school coaches from the Seattle area. We’ll also talk to local fans and former athletes.

David Leonard.
David Leonard

David Leonard, professor in the School of Languages, Cultures, and Race, is among others interviewed for the series.

“When we look at our high schools, and we look at what sports are available at our high schools, that reflects political decisions,” Leonard said. “That reflects the histories—the ongoing histories—of housing discrimination. That reflects which school districts are being funded. And those decisions have consequences,” he said. “We need to have critical conversations about race so that we can have conversations about inequality and develop programs that rectify these inequities inside and outside of sports.”

Find out more

KING 5 News

‘Who is Scott Free?’ A search for meaning after Trump’s misuse of a medieval idiom.

From the moment he tweeted “covfefe” in the middle of the night, President Trump has been perplexing his millions of Twitter followers with cryptic messages ranging from vague threats to North Korea to his retweets of Islamophobic videos without any comment.

But on Monday, a curious person by the name of Scott Free caught the Internet’s attention.

The unfamiliar proper noun appeared in Trump’s remarkable tweetstorm Monday, in which he wished a long prison sentence on his former personal lawyer Michael Cohen and insisted longtime adviser Roger Stone would not testify against him, leading some to question whether the statements amounted to witness tampering.

Paul Brians.
Brians

People have been assigning wrong origins or spellings to the age-old idiom for years, according to the 2008 book “Common Errors in English Usage” by Paul Brians, a retired English professor at Washington State University.

People might think the term has something to do with Scottish people (or an unfortunate “Scott”) or that it is “scotch-free,” somehow related to whisky. Others, Brians noted, have erroneously believed “scot-free” alludes to Dred Scott, the slave who sued for his freedom only to lose in an 1857 Supreme Court case.

Find out more

Washington Post

History professor emerita teaching in Kazakhstan on Fulbright Fellowship

Marina Tolmacheva.
Tolmacheva

Marina Tolmacheva, WSU professor emerita of history and an expert in Islamic and world history, has been awarded a four‑month Fulbright Fellowship to teach and consult on academic development at KIMEP University in Almaty, Kazakhstan.

Tolmacheva recently began teaching courses on Central Asian history in the context of world history to graduate and undergraduate students at KIMEP, a North American‑style independent university, formerly known as Kazakhstan Institute of Management, Economics and Strategic Research. While in Almaty, she also is teaching graduate students in history at Al‑Farabi National University (KazNU).

“For my lectures, I’m drawing from my many years in teaching interdisciplinary and world history at WSU, as well as my research in broad Islamic cultural history, including women’s history and historiography of Central Asia,” she said. A native speaker of Russian, one of Kazakhstan’s official languages, she is teaching primarily in English.

Tolmacheva’s additional experience in academic development and assessment at WSU and universities overseas also informs her work with KIMEP administrators who are seeking to infuse a global perspective into their Central Asian Studies and General Education curricula.

“Whether it is consulting on matters of curriculum reform, developing student-centered pedagogy or interacting with colleagues and students, I want to help make positive change,” she said.

Find out more

WSU Insider

Professor writes book on success, wins award

Dissects writings by Baldwin, Morrison on black male protagonists

A WSU professor’s new book exploring the successes of black males in literature recently won the 2018 Award for Creative Scholarship, announced at the College Language Association (CLA) annual convention banquet.

Aaron Oforlea.
Oforlea

Aaron Oforlea, associate professor at WSU, published his book, “James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and the Rhetorics of Black Male Subjectivity,” in 2017.

The book is a dissection of multiple writings by prominent black authors James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, he said.

In his writing, he explored how the two writers conceptualized the challenges their black male characters navigated throughout their books, Oforlea said.

“I wanted to know, intellectual curiosity, I guess, what helps us be successful,” he said. “How black men, specifically how these fictional characters, are imagined to be successful by these authors.”

Find out more

Daily Evergreen

CAS faculty receive Office of Research awards

The WSU Office of Research presented awards to eight faculty members, including three in the College of Arts and Sciences, for their outstanding achievements in research, as part of opening ceremonies for WSU Research Week.

Kimberly Christen.
Kim Christen

The Creative Activity, Research and Scholarship Award went to Kim Christen, professor in the Department of English, director of the Digital Technology and Culture Program, director of the Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation, and director of Digital Initiatives for the College of Arts and Sciences.

Christen has generated more than $4 million in external funding, including WSU’s first institutional grant from the Mellon Foundation. She has leveraged this support to create and sustain interdisciplinary projects and workspaces, most prominently establishing with WSU Libraries the new Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation.

She directs several digital humanities projects, including the Plateau Peoples’ Web Portal, a collaboratively curated site of Plateau cultural materials; Mukurtu CMS, a free and open source content management system and community digital archive aimed at the unique needs of indigenous communities; and the Sustainable Heritage Network, an online community of people dedicated to making the preservation and digitization of cultural heritage materials sustainable, simple, and secure.

Tammy Barry.
Tammy Barry

An Exceptional Service to the Office of Research Award went to Tammy Barry, professor in the Department of Psychology. Barry co-chairs the Research and Arts Committee & the Centers, Institutes, or Laboratories task force, and provides outstanding support for the many Office of Research initiatives.

Peter Reilly.
Peter Reilly

The awards included a prize for submitting the best idea to the National Science Foundation’s 2026 Idea Machine, a competition to help set the U.S. agenda for fundamental research in science, technology, engineering and mathematics and STEM education. The winner of this award is Peter Reilly, associate professor in the Department of Chemistry, for his idea “Ultra-High Mass Spectrometry: The Next Frontier.”

Find out more

WSU Insider