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Four named Conger-Gabel Teaching Professors

Four members of the English department have been named Conger-Gabel Teaching Professors. Philip Barnard, associate professor; Byron Caminero-Santangelo, director of graduate studies; Frank Farmer, associate professor; and Marjorie Swann, associate professor, will hold the title beginning this fall and through the spring semester of 2010.

Barnard teaches a variety of courses in American literature, the novel, U.S. cultural history and contemporary cultural theory. Farmer teaches a variety of undergraduate writing courses and grad courses in rhetorical theory and history. He also frequently teaches the department's practicum for first-year graduate teaching assistants. Caminero-Santangelo teaches 20th century African and British literatures, postcolonial studies and literary theory. Swann regularly teaches classes about pre-1800 British literature, including courses on Renaissance poetry, Queen Elizabeth I and post-Renaissance adaptations of Shakespeare. She also teaches a graduate seminar for the Museum Studies Program about the theory and history of collecting.

The Conger-Gabel Teaching Professorships were endowed in 2001 through a gift from KU graduates Wren Gabel and Esther Conger-Gabel. Conger-Gabel professors receive $5,000 per year for a three-year term in recognition of their outstanding teaching. Selections were made by the outgoing Conger-Gabel recipients Katie Conrad, Jim Hartman and Tom Lorenz, who consulted evaluations from voting department chair Dorice Elliott and other teaching-related data before reaching their decision.

TOPONYMS

S.H. Carpenter of the University of Wisconsin would have been KU's third chancellor, but he arrived in Lawrence on a sweltering summer day in 1874 in the middle of a drought and a grasshopper invasion. He immediately left town and did not even visit the campus. The Board of Regents then hired James Marvin, a professor of mathematics at Allegheny College; the building named for him also honors his son, longtime Dean of Engineering Frank O. Marvin.