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Ozarks Symposium 

2008 Symposium Participants' Biographical Information

Presenter Bio
J. Brett Adams Since 2004 Brett Adams has been a full time history instructor at Collin College (Preston Ridge Campus) in Frisco Texas. Adams completed his M.A. in history at the University of Tulsa in 1997 and has completed the course work for the Ph.D. at the University of Oklahoma. He has presented his research on the establishment of the Arkansas National Forest (now the Ouachita National Forest) at local conferences. His research interest is federal land policy during the Progressive Era, and especially how that policy impacted the lives of local people.
Laura Bowles Laura Bowles is an instructor of Writing at the University of Central Arkansas. She holds a M.Ed. in Instructional Technology from Arkansas Tech University, and is pursuing a PhD in Professional Writing and New Media at Old Dominion University in Virginia. She has presented at MOREnet, the Missouri Schools Technology Conference in 2000 and in 2001 on "Technology in the Inclusive Classroom."

Her research interests include: strengthening ties between public schools and academe, improving writing instruction, and Ozarks studies.

Dr. Stanley D. Brunn Stanley D. Brunn is Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Kentucky where he has taught since 1980. Previously he taught at Michigan Stat University and the University of Florida. His interests encompass a wide range of topics of human and human/environmental geography. He has published books on American urban systems, world cities, US political geography, laws and justice, social geography, technological hazards, geography and technology, the geopolitics of terrorism, and Wal-Mart. Also he has served as editor for two major American flagship geography journals, the Annals of the Association of American Geographers and The Professional Geographer and served on many regional and national committees. Earlier this year he organized an international and interdisciplinary conference on “Engineering Earth: The Impacts of Megaengineering Projects.” The papers will appear in a forthcoming book. He has traveled widely in Europe, the former Soviet Union, Central Asia, Australia, China, Japan and the Caribbean. He has also taught at more than a dozen universities in Europe and Eurasia and attended dozens of international and national conferences. During Fall 2007 he was a Fulbright Professor at Semey State University in Semey, Kazakhstan, a city recognized internationally as being near the epicenter of above and below ground nuclear testing. Aside from his academic pursuits, he is active in his local Presbyterian church as a choir member, a leader of book discussions, and cheerleader for projects related to the “greening” of religion and society and reduction of poverty.
Gary L. Buxton Gary L. Buxton earned his PhD in Heritage Studies and teaches English and heritage studies at Black River Technical college at Pocahontas, Arkansas.  he and his wife Elaine have three sons and three granchildren and live on a farm raising cattle and horses. Dr. Buxton preaches regularly for the Stokes Church of Christ and began playing the fiddle six months ago.
Dr. Michael Dougan Michael B. Dougan grew up in Neosho, Missouri. He earned his undergraduate degree from Southwest Missouri State College (now Missouri State University), where he majored in History and minored in Philosophy. He began his Arkansas studies under the noted Civil War professor Bell I. Wiley at Emory University, writing his master’s thesis on the Little Rock press during the Civil War. His first publication, “The Little Rock Press Goes to War,” appeared in Arkansas Historical Quarterly in the spring of 1969. His dissertation on Confederate Arkansas came in 1970, the same year joined the faculty at Arkansas State University, where he remained until 2006.

His first book, Confederate Arkansas; The People and Policies of a Frontier State in Wartime (1976), won the Mrs. Simon Baruch University Award of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. In 1980, he and his wife, Carol, edited By the Cypress Swamp; The Arkansas Stories of Octave Thanet, a book that has prompted a reevaluation of this nineteenth century authoress. Confederate Women of Arkansas in the Civil War (1993) consisted republishing a rare Arkansas imprint and adding new stories and more material about Arkansas women during the War. Following the publication of Arkansas Odyssey; The Saga of Arkansas from Prehistoric Times to Present in 1994, he received an Award of Merit from the American Association for State and Local History and was honored in a joint resolution passed by the Arkansas legislature. In 1995 came Arkansas History: An Annotated Bibliography, complied along with Tom W. Dillard and Timothy G. Nutt. In 1997, he joined Richard P. Wang in editing Arkansas Politics: A Reader. He returned to journalism history for Community Diaries; Arkansas Newspapering, 1819-2002, in 2003.

Dougan served as president of the Arkansas Historical Association from 1984 to 1986. In 1980 he was the first winner of that group’s Violet B. Gingles Award for his article on bridge and ferry law in Arkansas. In 1987 the Arkansas Women’s History Institute presented him with the first Susie Pryor Award for his article on the Arkansas married woman’s property law. In 2005, he produced a compact disk set of the recordings of Arkansas opera star, Mary Lewis. His articles on Mary Lewis appeared in Opera News, Arkansas Times, the Arkansas Historical Quarterly, and The Record Collector Other scholarly papers have dealt with medical history, literature, music, law, drainage ditches, and green beans, the later, along with tomatoes, being a special interest. An article on historic restoration, “The Horseless Carriage House,” written with his wife, appeared in Old-House Journal in 1994, and. Part of his recent fame is due to a Google entry entitled “Puke Buzzard.” In 2006, the Arkansas Historical Association presented him with the Lifetime Achievement Award.

Dr. Dougan and his wife Carol reside in the J. V. Bell House in Jonesboro, a property listed on the National Register of Historic Places. A photograph and brief description of it appeared in America’s Painted Ladies (1994). Besides his scholarly awards and publications, Dougan has coached and played slow-pitch softball for more than twenty-five years and is trying to graduate from a half marathon to a full one.

Dr. Dougan is the great great grandson of John R. Woodside of Thomasville. He often stayed with Mable Symonds Woodside at the old farmstead and serves on the selection committee for the scholarship named for her at Arkansas State University.

Dr. Robert Faust Dr. Robert Faust is an Instructor of History at the University of South Alabama in Mobile.  Originally from northern Indiana, he is a graduate of Manchester College, Ball State University, and the University of Missouri-Columbia, from which he received the Ph.D. in history in 2003.  He has taught classes at the University of Missouri-Columbia, Westminster College, and William Woods College, as well as the University of South Alabama.  A specialist in American environmental history, especially in the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, he has conducted extensive research on the history of the lead industry in the Old Lead Belt of southeast Missouri.  His writings on that subject have been published in several scholarly journals and in The Other Missouri History: Populists, Prostitutes, and Regular Folk, edited by Thomas M. Spencer (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005).
John Hensley John Hensley earned his PhD in American Studies from Saint Louis University in 2008.  He has worked as a curator-archivist at the Churchill Memorial and Library and an Instructor at Westminster College in Fulton, MIssouri.  Hensley is a former Director of the Missouri State Museuem in Jefferson City, and a Gallery Director and Assistant Curator for the St. Louis Science Museum.  He has also served as a previous Curator of Collections at the Ralph Foster Museum at College of the Ozarks in Point Lookout, Missouri.  He has published a number of essays and presented papers on Ozarks themes.
Zachary Michael Jack Zachary Michael Jack, fourth generation Iowa farmer’s son and great-grandson of the celebrated farm conservation writer Walter Thomas Jack, is the author or editor of many books, including several previous collections on rural life, Love of the Land: Essential Farm and Conservation Readings from an American Golden Age, 1880-1920; Black Earth and Ivory Tower: New American Essays from Farm and Classroom; and The Furrow and Us: Essays on Soil and Sentiment. Two of the books, Black Earth and Ivory Tower and The Furrow and Us, have been nominated for the Theodore Saloutos Award for the year’s best book on agricultural history. Jack has presented his research on rural life and writing at the Agricultural History national conference and the Newberry Seminar for Rural History, among others. He has also served as a guest editor of the journal Southern Rural Sociology.

Zachary Michael Jack’s love of nature originates in his family’s one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old Iowa Heritage Farm and timber. He is the founding director of the agrarian School of Lost Arts for children, advisory board member for the Interversity Place Studies listserv, and the author of two place-based collections of poetry, The Inanity of Music and Wings and Perfectly Against the Sun. Jack's books have been featured in the Chicago Tribune, the Des Moines Register, and on Chicago and Iowa Public Radio. An assistant professor of English at North Central College, he is a member of the environmental studies faculty and a professor in the urban and suburban studies program, where he specializes in rural studies.
Dr. Gary Kolb Gary Kolb was born in Cleveland, Ohio in July of 1952. He lived there until the age of eighteen when he left to attend Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He graduated from Northwestern with a BA in the History and Literature of Religions with a specialization in Eastern Religious Philosophies in March of 1974. After a year and one-half of working as a construction laborer, a cab driver, and freelance photojournalist, he went to pursue graduate work in Photography at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. He received his MFA in 1977.

Kolb returned to Chicago and worked in varying capacities in the photographic industry for the next two years. In 1979 he was hired as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cinema and Photography at Southern Illinois University Carbondale (SIUC). He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1985 and Professor in 1997. He chaired the department on two occasions for a total of six years.

In 1986 Kolb’s first book, Photogravure: a Process Handbook, was published by the Southern Illinois University Press. In 1993 his second book, Photographing in the Studio, was published by McGraw Hill. Over the years, he has worked in numerous photographic and digital media and been exhibited internationally. Professor Kolb’s current work revolves around issues of landscape and artifacts culled from the landscape brought into photographic and digital studio environments.

He was a regional or national board member of the Society for Photographic Education for eleven years, including two years as National Chairperson of the Society. Kolb was named Acting Director of the New Media Center in SIUC’s College of Mass Communication and Media Arts in July 2002 and in October 2003 he was named Associate Dean of the College. In June 2007 he became Interim Dean of the College and in July 2008 he was appointed Dean.

Dr. Ed McKinney Dr. Ed McKinney is a professor of history and chair of the Department of History at Missouri State University-West Plains.  He grew up in Texas County, Missouri, and attended Southwest Missouri State University (now Missouri State University-West Plains) where he earned a B.S. Ed. in history and an M.A. in history.  He earned his PhD in history from the University of Missouri-Columbia. His disseration topic was Images, Realities, and Cultural Transformation in the Missouri Ozarks, 1920-1960. 
Matt Meacham
 Matt Meacham is a folklorist with the West Plains Council on the Arts, contributing in various ways to the Council's documentation, conservation, and public presentation of folk culture in the Ozarks of south-central and southeast Missouri.  He is also an occasional instructor at Missouri State University-West Plains.  Originally from southwestern Illinois, Matt is a 1999 graduate of Centre College in Kentucky.  He wrote for a regional newspaper and taught music at a small parochial high school before beginning graduate studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he completed the M.A. in musicology in 2003.  He will receive a second master's degree in folklore, also from UNC, upon completion of his thesis about the only Finnish-American Apostolic Lutheran church in North Carolina.  He held a one-year position with the West Virginia Humanities Council, conducting a study of traditional musical activity in southern West Virginia in preparation for the possible establishment of a proposed regional musical interpretive center there, before coming to West Plains in 2007.
Jan Roddy Jan Roddy lives part-time in a camper in the woods at the eastern most edge of the Ozark uplift near Carbondale, Illinois where she has taught in the Cinema & Photography Department at Southern Illinois University for the last 20 years and currently serves as the Director of Graduate Studies in the College of Mass Communication and Media Arts . The rest of the time she travels between a home in St. Louis and the Missouri Ozarks where her family of farmers has been rooted since before the U.S. Civil War.

She is interested in the regional, the local, the small picture as it relates to the larger one. She has co-published 2 books stemming from community photography projects based on historically marginalized populations and regions. She is currently working on a project set in the Ozarks that explores intergenerational influence and the relationship of people and culture to their land. She has utilized methods such as interpretive documentary, digital montage and a variety of experiments with image and the written/audible word in work that has been both photographic and video based.

Marideth Sisco Marideth Sisco is the producer and host of These Ozarks Hills, a monthly human-interest program on Ozarks Public Radio (KSMU-FM, Springfield, and KSMW-FM, West Plains, Missouri), and an occasional instructor at Drury University's campus in Thayer, Missouri.  A native of southwest Missouri and a graduate of Missouri State University and Antioch University, she wrote news and feature articles addressing many aspects of life in the Missouri Ozarks during her lengthy tenure with the West Plains Daily Quill.  She edited and published a book entitled West Plains as I Knew It by Robert Neathery (as told to Marideth Sisco) (West Plains: Elder Mountain Press, 2001), which examines the history of West Plains in the 20th century from the perspective of Mr. Neathery, the founder of KWPM radio and an influential civic leader.  Also an accomplished photographer and folk singer, she serves on the board of directors of the West Plains Council on the Arts.
Dr. Esther D. Stroh Esther has served as an Ecologist in the Department of Interior for fifteen years. Within the Department of Interior, she has worked for the National Park Service, the National Biological Survey and the US Geological Survey. She has worked as a field scientist and as a coordinator of regional and national research programs. Prior to her Federal career, Esther worked as a teacher and as a tree planting contractor.

Esther has a Bachelor’s degree in Education from National Lewis University, Master’s degrees in Biology and in Environmental Science from Indiana University, and a PhD in Ecology from the University of Missouri-Columbia.

Esther’s primary research interests are plant conservation genetics and plant-climate interactions.

In the Ozarks, her work has focused on the study of native plant communities and rare plant populations. Her work has always been multidisciplinary and conducted in collaboration with university scientists and state and Federal resource managers in support of multiple agency missions.

Esther lives in Columbia, Missouri with her husband and two children. In her free time, Esther is secretary of the Lee Elementary School PTA, and enjoys native plant gardening, home-brewed beer and camping with her family on their land along Sinking Creek in Shannon County, Missouri.

This morning, Esther will discuss an ongoing effort to bring State, Federal, and nonprofit agency scientists and resource managers together to more efficiently and effectively address mutual natural resource objectives in the Ozarks.

Barbara Williams Barbara Williams received her BS from Missouri State University in 1966, and her MFA from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois in 1968.

Her artwork has been included in international juried exhibitions in England, Italy, Poland, Yugoslavia, and the USA, and in numerous juried national and regional shows in the US, including one held at the Smithsonian Institution. Williams' prints and mixed media collages are included in the permanent collection of the Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock, Arkansas, and in private collections in the USA and in Italy.

Williams is an adjunct faculty member at Missouri State University-West Plains.