2011-2012 Faculty Development Fellows
Dr. Megan Alrutz is assistant professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance where she teaches courses in applied theatre and community engagement, theatre for social change, and digital storytelling. Her creative and scholarly interests focus on applied theatre and theatre for young audiences‹including school-based arts-integration; critical performance pedagogy with youth; and devising and directing theatre and digital storytelling to explore issues around voice and identity, as well as community dialogue. Megan works nationally as a facilitator for professional development in theatre education and drama-based pedagogy, and was the founding director of ArtsBridge/UCF and Digital U. Her publications can be found in journals such as YouthTheatre Journal, Teaching Artist Journal, and TYA Today, and she recently co-edited a collection for Palgrave Macmillan entitled Playing with Theory in Theatre Practice.
Melanie Feinberg has a BA with Honors in Humanities from Stanford University, a MIMS (Master’s of Information Management and Systems) from the University of California at Berkeley, and a PhD in Information Science from the University of Washington. Melanie is a classificationist: her research interests center on the theory, design, and evaluation of systems for organizing information. Such organizational schemes provide a structure through which both physical objects, such as printed documents, items in a museum, or the animal kingdom, and intellectual objects, such as ideas or concepts, are described, grouped, and related. Melanie’s work involves investigating the conceptual basis of such schemes and using that conceptual understanding to propose new design possibilities, new work processes, and new criteria for evaluation.
M. Teresa Granillo is an Assistant Professor at the School of Social Work at The University of Texas, teaching courses in interventions for children and adolescents. Dr. Granillo comes to UT Austin after completing her Ph.D. at The University of Michigan. Her research interests are largely focused on mental health of Latina youth. Specifically, she has conducted studies examining the prevalence and correlates of eating disorders among Latina adolescents both in and outside the U.S. She has also explored mental health issues among Latina college students, including whether Latinas receive mental health services when they are experiencing mental health problems. Dr. Granillo is currently working on further exploring issues related to mental health service utilization among Latina/o youth.
Heather Houser is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. She received a Ph.D. in English from Stanford University, and a B.A. from Reed College. She is completing a manuscript titled Eco-Sickness: Environment, Disease, and Emotion in Contemporary Fiction, which argues for the centrality of sickness and affect to environmental culture of the past three decades. She is also pursuing a project that offers an account of contemporary practices of novelistic description in the context of new technologies of visualization.She has received fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the US Department of Education’s Jacob K. Javits Program, and Stanford University.
Naomi Paik is an assistant professor of American studies and Asian American studies at the University of Texas, Austin. She earned her Ph.D. in American studies from Yale University and was a postdoctoral fellow in Asian American studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is working on a project entitled Rightlessness: Testimonies from the Camp in Narratives of U.S. Culture and Law, which reads testimonial narratives of subjects rendered rightless by the U.S. state through their imprisonment in camps. She recently published an article in Social Text, which examines the testimonies of HIV positive Haitian refugees indefinitely detained in a refugee camp at the Guantánamo naval base. Her research and teaching interests include Asian American and comparative ethnic studies; U.S. imperialism; social and cultural approaches to legal studies; transnational feminism; carceral spaces; and labor, race, and migration.
Kevin D. Thomas received his Ph.D. in advertising at the University of Texas at Austin in 2011. He also holds an MBA in Entrepreneurship from California State Polytechnic University in Ponoma and a BBA in Marketing from Loyola Marymount University. Dr. Thomas investigates the socio-cultural impact of marketing communication and consumer behavior. His primary research interest pertains to understanding the relationship between marketing communication, consumption practices, and notions of self and community. Using a consumer culture theory (CCT) perspective, Dr. Thomas explores the ways in which identity markers (i.e. race, gender, class, and sexuality) are represented in marketing communication and experienced in the marketplace. Other areas of research interests include multicultural advertising, issues of diversity and marketplace discrimination, and entrepreneurship and marketplace empowerment.
