FSU Libraries' Celebration of Tenure 2016

Below are the newly tenured faculty and a brief explanation of the books or materials they hand-picked to be purchased and book plated in their honor.

 

Russell G. Almond

The Evidential Foundations of Probabilistic Reasoning

By David A. Schum

I've always had a strong interest in the use of probability and other similar mathematical models to model human reasoning. Schum looks at these issues in a legal context, in particular, how to apply Bayesian reasoning to explore how evidence in the courtroom influences belief in a specific hypothesis (say the guilt or innocence of the defendant). But Schum moves beyond the courtroom, to also talk about evidence in the context of science and history. When I first began work with Bob Mislevy and Linda Steinberg on what we would later call evidence-centered assessment design, Schum's book was one thing the three of us all read. By translating Schum's ideas into the field of educational assessment we were able to make a contribution which has had a large impact on the field of education.

 

Scotty Barnhart

The World of Jazz Trumpet: A Comprehensive History & Practical Philosophy

By Scotty Barnhart

I chose my book, The World of Jazz Trumpet: A Comprehensive History & Practical Philosophy, because it is the very first book of its kind to codify my particular profession and life's passion, that of jazz trumpet, which has changed my life for the better through constant worldwide travel and interaction with many of the world's greatest musicians and educators. Researching and writing this book helped me to further understand what I am blessed to be a living part of and how I must pass on to subsequent generations the knowledge and understanding of the work of jazz music's greatest pioneers from Louis Armstrong to Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Clora Bryant, Wynton Marsalis, myself and others.

 

Tamara Bertrand Jones

Sisters of the Academy: Emergent Black Women Scholars in Higher Education

Edited by Reitumetse Obakeng Mabokela and Anna L. Green

Without this book, the Sisters of the Academy (SOTA) Institute would not exist.  As new faculty and doctoral students at Florida State University, we could not have anticipated the influence the book and the subsequent organization would have on Black women’s voices in academia.  This book--and the organization--represent the hope and experiences of the new Black woman doctoral student, higher education administrator, tenure track faculty member, and senior scholar. 

 

William H. Butler

Towards Cosmopolis: Planning for Multicultural Cities

By Leonie Sandercock

This visionary book inspired me to pursue the field of urban and regional planning to provide forums in which diverse voices and expressions of truth could find legitimacy and through which social justice and greater equity could be engendered. Sandercock's lyrical writing style draws me in, articulating a world in which the Janus-faced profession of planning is revealed through imagery of devastation and systemic injustice alongside stories of redemption, empowerment, and insurgency.

 

Angela I. Canto

The Tao of Pooh

By Benjamin Hoff

While I’m not a Taoist, The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff (1982) piqued my interest when I read it for the first time as an undergraduate student.  The text encompasses many of the ideals I still admire today to foster social emotional health, acceptance, and a positive social justice mindset, including the notion of the power in self as an “uncarved block” (or “p’u”).  The approach of the text also mirrors my own intentions both in teaching and clinical practice in that I strive to be authentic, engaged, self-reflective, and vulnerable to promote positive learning experiences.  I also simply adore the creativity of the author in narrating his own thoughts while interacting with the characters of the text to explain concepts.  The following excerpt is simply great advice for us on our personal and academic journeys:  “Wisdom, Happiness, and Courage are not waiting somewhere out beyond sight at the end of a straight line; they're part of a continuous cycle that begins right here. They're not only the ending, but the beginning as well.” ― Benjamin Hoff, The Tao of Pooh

 

Bradley E. Cox

How College Affects Students (vols. 1-3)

By Ernest T. Pascarella and Patrick T. Terenzini

How College Affects Students are easily the most marked-up books on my shelf. I was introduced to the first edition as a 22-year old master’s degree student, did my doctoral work under one of the authors (Pat Terenzini) shortly after the second edition came out, and am now eager to see what my colleagues have concluded in the third edition. These books draw conclusions based on the “preponderance of the evidence” after reviewing thousands of individual studies. Simply put, these books serve as the foundation to almost every study I’ve ever done.

 

Hongchang Cui

Systems Biology: Principles, Methods, and Concepts

Edited by Andrzej K. Konopka

I have chosen this book because Systems Biology is a new interdisciplinary approach that has tremendously shaped my career. Combining all sorts of whole genome studies and bioinformatics, Systems Biology allows for the identification of key regulators and pathways in a system (it can be a whole organism, a tissue, or cell type), thus generating hypotheses that can be further tested experimentally. With this novel approach we have made a number of unexpected but exciting new findings in my own research. I therefore highly recommend it to all who are interested in the frontiers of biological science.

 

Annika A. Culver

The American Way of Housekeeping

Inspired by recent popular best sellers like Mari Kondo's Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, or more darkly, haunted by the reality TV show Hoarders, Americans are again fascinated by the seemingly charmed ordering of domestic space. Magazines and brightly photographed coffee table books show us how to arrange furniture in socially-advantageous configurations and create homes that bring positive energy into our lives. In the not-so-recent past until the mid-twentieth century, the American middle-class employed "help" for completion of household tasks, while the neat and orderly private home served as a public showcase of the family's material worth and values. These concepts were exported to postwar Japan during the Allied Occupation (1945-1952), where high-ranking SCAP personnel brought their families to help inculcate the Japanese with the ideals of American democracy. Ironically, housekeeping the "American Way" took place in the requisitioned houses of a deposed Japanese elite, and was no easy task with a damp climate akin to southern portions of the US, foodstuffs only available at the PX, uncertain water quality, and lack of mechanized household appliances. Under the American housewife's direction, a rigorous household efficiency was meant to keep cultural chaos at bay, and reproduce the very values which allowed the US to win the Second World War: boundless optimism, scientific management of problems, and a strong belief in the correctness of one's mission. This delightful volume reminiscent of its time expresses the practical concerns of the expatriate American community of women running their households amidst a culture vastly different from their own, while interfacing with household employees of different racial, social, and national backgrounds. While embodying American values, they were also educating the Japanese around them about how the Occupiers lived and ate: walking on carpets curiously clad in shoes worn inside and out, and smiling amidst preparations of fantastic gelatin deserts or salads while eating seemingly gargantuan portions of meat. Actually a handbook for understanding the habits of the strange new "exotics" mingling amongst the "native" inhabitants, the text speaks to an audience of Japanese domestic handlers to ensure household success in a tutelary exchange meant to broaden both groups' horizons. As noted by historian John Dower in Embracing Defeat, the conquered Japanese actually ended up disarming the American victors through a variety of ways intended to soften the military occupation, and thus, a former maligned enemy slowly emerged into a newly trustworthy ally.

My second book project concerns the intriguing issues in US-Japan relations surrounding an American ornithologist, Dr. Oliver L. Austin, Junior, who came to Japan from 1946-1950 to set up the Wildlife Branch of the Natural Resource Section for SCAP during the US Occupation. He also brought his family and enjoyed an elite expatriate lifestyle complete with servants and a requisitioned house in Tokyo's fanciest residential area largely spared the Allied bombing campaigns. Austin's wife Elizabeth led the initiative to write the text mentioned above. I am interested in his relationships with Japanese scientists who had similar elite backgrounds and education, which no doubt helped smooth their collaboration. Japanese input towards the American's work was considerable, as both sides developed mutually symbiotic relationships furthering scientific inquiry and conservation endeavors while laying wartime antagonisms to rest. 

 

Michael Duncan

Travel by Design: The Influence of Urban Form on Travel

By Marlon G. Boarnet and Randall Crane

Gaining an understanding of how development patterns influence the way people choose to travel is critical to sustainable urban planning. For many years, planning and transportation scholars have sought to better quantify this relationship. This book provided a thorough summary and critique of the work that had been done in this area. More importantly, it provided suggestions on how this work could be improved both theoretically and methodologically. In other word, this book forced everyone working in this area to be much more careful and deliberate. As a result, the research that has been produced in the last 15 years about the impacts of development patterns on travel behavior has been of much higher quality and of much greater use to planning practitioners.

 

Tarez Samra Graban

Trust in Texts: A Different History of Rhetoric

By Susan Miller

Susan Miller’s Trust in Texts reflects an important historical movement in rhetoric and writing studies: a shift in thinking about what it means to “look (back) at rhetoric” in any given age. Her way of approaching rhetorical histories as “codes” that guide the production of texts, rather than as failed or expired narratives, is significant for those who acknowledge the vastness of rhetorical traditions beyond the classical West, who wish to study these traditions as they relate to contemporary issues and phenomena, and who wish to study them without discounting other cultural paradigms. Miller constantly encouraged us to think of those codes as invented, delivered, circulated, and perpetuated through our emotion and trust – through our evolving attitudes about what text is and what texts can do, in and outside of the academy. Her work has influenced my own in many ways, not least because it occupies the interdisciplinary space between rhetoric, composition, history, linguistics, and philosophy. Her work has influenced countless others as well, and her premature passing in 2013 (she was 71 years young) was a genuine loss to her discipline.

 

John R. Hamman

Thinking, Fast and Slow

By Daniel Kahneman

Daniel Kahneman, a social psychologist, revolutionized the way economists study decision-making by paying close attention to when, how, and why we may fail to make “rational” choices. This book synthesizes much of his academic career (which earned him a Nobel prize in economics) and is arguably the best, most insightful book on human decision processes since Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. Dr. Kahneman’s work was central to my graduate training, and two hallmarks of his approach to social science have inspired my own research outlook. First, he addresses important and complex issues in very clear and simple ways. This often comes back to me only after I realized I’ve made a problem too complicated. Second, he exemplified how to successfully pursue interdisciplinary research, a lead I have always tried to follow.  

 

R. Michael Holmes Jr.

Crafting and Executing Strategy: The Quest for Competitive Advantage

By Arthur A. Thompson, Margaret A. Peteraf, John E. Gamble, and A. J. Strickland III

A much earlier version of this book was my strategy textbook in the capstone business course at the University of Alabama. The original version of the book was one of the first strategy textbooks and historically has been one of the top-selling strategy textbooks, making it a useful addition to the library’s catalog. On a personal note, that capstone course at Alabama peaked my interest in the strategy field, which eventually became the focus of my academic career. In addition, the professor who taught the course (Dr. Lou Marino) advised me during the graduate school application process and also helped direct me to the school, Texas A&M University, that I attended for my doctoral studies. At Texas A&M, I built relationships with both current and former faculty members at Florida State University, and these individuals eventually helped bring me here (after a brief stop at Louisiana State University). Thus, this book is not only an important piece of the strategy field, but is also important to me personally: In their hearts humans plan their course, but the Lord establishes their steps (Proverbs 16:9).

 

Stephen Kearns

An Essay on Free Will

By Peter van Inwagen

Peter van Inwagen's An Essay on Free Will concerns a series of important questions (Is everything we do fated? Do we have free will? Is free will compatible with determinism? What would life without free will be like?) and provides well-argued, and extremely clear answers to these questions. Indeed, the book revitalized a view about free will which was considered near-dead at the time. The philosophical consensus was that free will is not only compatible with determinism, but that to think otherwise rested on sheer confusion. This book showed that one could argue forcibly that determinism rules out free will without making any obvious error. It also clarified exactly how to understand this claim--providing us with definitions of "determinism" and "free will" that are widely used today. More personally, it is one of the books that taught me how to do philosophy. Though I do not agree with everything in it, it has had a huge influence on both which topics I study and the way I go about my research.

 

Toby Macrae

Speaking: From Intention to Articulation

By Willem J.M. Levelt

Willem Levelt is a Dutch psycholinguist whose theory of the cognitive processing involved in speech production has informed my research and teaching. Levelt (1989) described the many distinct yet related steps involved in speaking a word, e.g., generating a preverbal message, triggering words in memory, and activating grammatical, morphological, and phonological encoding procedures based on the syntactic, morphological, and phonological properties of the word. All of this is done without much conscious thought. Knowledge of these different levels of processing is essential for students who are learning about typical speech-language development and speech-language disorders in children. Levelt’s theory has enabled me to clarify for students in my classes and for those reading my research how children learn to speak and which levels of processing might be in deficit in children with speech-language disorders.

 

Martin Mende

Handbook of Service Marketing Research

Edited by Roland T. Rust and Ming-Hui Huang

This book is a fundamental resource for everyone interested in the field of services marketing, because it covers the most important facets of this field. When I was an undergraduate student in Germany, I read a similar book and it truly opened my eyes to the importance of the service economy and to the academic discipline that has since emerged as 'service science.'

Books like this one motivated me to get my doctorate in Services Marketing and I hope that having this title available in our library helps inspire some of our students in a similar fashion, regardless of whether they choose the path toward becoming a service scholar or a service manager.

 

Murat C. Mungan

Nutuk (The Great Speech)

By Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

Nutuk consists of speeches Atatürk delivered in 1927, contains information about events that took place during Turkey's independence war, and reflects some of the ideas that Atatürk fought for. Nutuk also allows the reader to compare Atatürk's unbelievably ambitious and modern perspective (especially for his time) with the regressive and rent-seeking nature of some policies implemented today. It reminds us that one must be forward-looking and politically responsible to anticipate corruption and downfall. Political erosion often happens gradually and through small changes, but, over time, can have enormous impact. One need not look anywhere besides the country Atatürk founded less than a century ago to see this. I hope that these books will serve as reminders to our students of these realities. As Atatürk states in Nutuk (as best as I can translate): "I advise to my people that, not for a moment should they fail to analyze what lies in the core of the blood and conscience of those who they will embrace and raise above their heads".

 

John C. Myers

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

By Paulo Freire

Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed was an important influence on the direction that my career has taken. I first encountered the ideas from this book after I had already worked as a teacher for several years and was pursuing a master’s degree. I still remember puzzling over the title, understanding the individual words but not the intended meaning when put together. This book pointed me toward the kinds of questions that I wanted to answer as a researcher of educational practices by revealing to me for the first time the relationship of politics and education that has grounded much of my academic work. Yet the book is more than a critique of formal education as it also provides a hopeful understanding of schools and democratic practice. Having knowledge of the Brazilian context from which the book emerged and reading much of the text in Portuguese provided further inspiration and relevance for me.

 

Richard Oberlin

Principles of Mathematical Analysis (3rd edition)

By Walter Rudin

When I first read this book as a student, I learned what it means to be a pure mathematician. Each time I read it now I learn more about what it means to be a teacher. Principles of Mathematical Analysis is as good today as it was when it was written in 1953. I hope they will be using it to teach Advanced Calculus on Mars. Rudin was known for his efficient use of ink, so I will leave it at that.

 

Michael J. Ormsbee

Body for Life

By Bill Phillips and Michael D’Orso

Body-for-Life was the book that ignited a passion in me for starting a career aimed to help people optimize body composition, health, and fitness. When I first read the book, I didn’t know the science behind the transformation techniques described. Yet the book was so readable and so user-friendly—it made me want to read it over and over again. It clearly showed how quality nutrition and exercise truly change not only physique but also your mindset. It is motivational and educational for living a life that involves working towards optimal health and performance. We all have the same amount of time each day, and this book taught me not to waste that time. The plan described in the book became topic of my first large-scale clinical research project and, even now, I still use many of the strategies personally.

 

Insu Paek

Differential Item Functioning: Theory and Practice

Edited by Paul W. Holland and Howard Wainer

The book Differential Item Functioning or DIF opened a door for my dissertation topic and one of my major research directions. The book covers many different methodological and practical aspects of DIF investigation in educational and psychological testing.

 

Hyejin Park

Nursing Outcomes Classification (NOC): Measurement of Health Outcomes

Edited by Sue Moorhead, Marion Johnson, Meridean L. Maas and Elizabeth Swanson

Although nurses play an important role in contributing to patient outcomes, the lack of a nursing database using a standard form makes it difficult to gather nursing care data for measuring nursing outcomes. As a result, it is a challenge to determine nursing’s unique contributions to patient outcomes within the health care environment. The book Nursing Outcomes Classification (NOC) that I selected provides nursing with standardized nursing-sensitive patient outcomes and measures for effectiveness research. Effectiveness analysis of nursing care is critical because it provides evidence about the benefits, risks, and results of nursing care so health care providers can make better decisions for the best possible patient outcomes. Another reason to select this book is that I was a member of the NOC research team and involved in developing specific NOC during the doctoral degree at the University of Iowa. Through this experience I became more interested in the area of nursing outcomes classification and I was prepared to pursue my research career.

 

Yi Ren

MIF: Most Interesting Factor

Edited by Richard Bucala

Many years ago, when I was still at the start of my career in academia, I attended a speech given by a professor from Yale. He specialized in something that I was extremely unfamiliar with but his work impacted me so much, it got me hooked into his world.

Back then, there was not much information on MIF at all. However, in 2007, I stumbled upon this book MIF: Most Interesting Factor written by the same professor who gave the speech I attended. My knowledge on MIF was very limited due to the lack of resources on the topic but after reading this comprehensive and intricate illustration, my interest blossomed and I believed I had found something incredibly exciting. I knew instinctively that MIF was the direction I wanted to steer my future research in. This book not only influenced my entire career path, it also introduced me to one of my now good friends and collaborators, Dr. Richard Bucala, the world’s leading researcher on MIF. Now, us “MIF folks” meet up every two years to discuss our individual work and progress, continuously contributing to the amazing research done on the role of this fascinating cytokine in disease and inflammation.

I attribute much of my success today in this field to this book and I hold it very dear to my heart. It was serendipitous that I came across this book and I want to share this serendipity with as many people as I can.

 

Ryan Rodenberg

No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller

By Harry Markopolos

The title and substance of Harry Markopolos's No One Would Listen resonates with me.  During my second and third years as a tenure-track assistant professor here at Florida State University, I presented a "sports law analytics" research paper at several academic conferences. The topic pertained to the development of a statistical screening device to detect and prevent gambling-fueled match-fixing in sports. I also presented my research to industry stakeholders, including sports leagues and private firms that specialize in sports data collection and dissemination. The research--covering tennis, basketball, soccer and football--has been published in a variety of scholarly journals and represented a good research line for me. However, in 2012 and 2013, sports industry executives dismissed/ignored such research. In 2016, both sports organizations and data firms embrace it. They listen now.

 

Maura L. Scott

Transformative Consumer Research for Personal and Collective Well-Being

Edited by David Glen Mick, Simone Pettigrew, Cornelia Pechmann, and Julie L. Ozanne

Transformative Consumer Research is a scholarly movement stemming from the marketing discipline that is focused on using research to positively influence consumer well-being. I consider this book, Transformative Consumer Research for Personal and Collective Well-Being, to be the definitive book on this topic. It was co-edited by the founder of this research movement, Dr. David Glen Mick, along with other leading scholars in the field. The book encourages the use of rigorous consumer research to address consumer problems such as addictive consumption (e.g., gambling, technology addiction), consumer health (e.g., nutrition labels, risky behavior), social justice (e.g., marketplace discrimination, subsistence markets), consumer financial decision making (e.g., use of credit, consumer financial literacy), and sustainable consumption behavior. The chapters in the book address these issues using a wide span of methodologies. This book continues to inspire my own work; I hope having it in our libraries will do the same other members of the Florida State University community.

 

Mark P. Spottswood

The American Jury

By Harry Kalven, Jr. and Hans Zeisel

Most modern rules of evidence and procedure were developed by judges, rulemakers, and legislators who relied on their own intuitions and legal folk wisdom to decide what might influence juries to decide cases fairly or unfairly. When law professors studied or critiqued these rules, they tended to proceed similarly. In their landmark study of jury decision-making, Harry Kalven, Jr. and Hans Zeisel took the novel step of collecting systematic data about actual jury decisions in order to put these assumptions to the test. They did this at some costs to their own reputation; in particular, members of the legal profession and the press reacted quite harshly to their efforts to obtain recordings of jury deliberations, even though they did this only by consent of both parties in any given case. Despite this unfortunate overreaction, Kalven and Zeisel’s efforts spawned a revolution in the study of legal fact-finding, and it is now commonplace to draw on the knowledge and methods of sociology, psychology, and economics to critique existing legal rules and practices. My own research, which attempts to locate situations in which a better understanding of human psychology can help improve our litigation system, is but a small part of this larger revolution that Kalven and Zeisel helped to bring about. 

 

M. Elizabeth Stroupe

Biological Inorganic Chemistry: Structure and Reactivity

Edited by Ivano Bertini, Harry B. Gray, Edward I. Stiefel and Joan Selverstone Valentine

Before the emergence of carbon-based, oxygen-dependent organic life, inorganic elements dominated the earth. Iron, copper, zinc, and magnesium are some examples of these inorganic elements that persisted through evolution and now are essential to life. For example, a magnesium ion is at the core of the protein molecules in plants that harnesses light energy to convert it to organic fuel. An iron atom is at the core of the protein in mammals that carries oxygen to cells and removes carbon dioxide waste. Oxygen itself serves to drive energy production. A copper atom is found in a protein enzyme that helps mitigate the damaging effect of oxygen when it is transformed into a radical species. A zinc atom is found holding together proteins that interact with DNA and direct the way in which genetic information is expressed. These are just a handful of the fascinating “bio-inorganic” molecules that are the building blocks of life. The link between ancient inorganic chemistry and modern organic life is, to me, fascinating and awe-inspiring. Biological Inorganic Chemistry: Structure and Reactivity is a summary textbook that teaches about this intersection between inorganic chemistry and the biological world.  My research program studies a bio-inorganic protein enzyme called sulfite reductase that directs the bio-geo cycle of sulfur.

 

Tianming Zhang

Journey to the West (vols. 1-3)

Translated and edited by Anthony C. Yu

I struggled big time in the elementary school. I hated school from the first grade through fifth grade because I had no interest in books and did poorly on exams. Then one day while playing at my friend's home, I saw this book The Journey to the West (a simplified version for kids, in Chinese, with lots of pictures). I read the first page and could not put it down. I enjoyed it so much that for the next few days I would find every opportunity to go to my friend's home just to read the book. Later I learned that The Journey to the West is a classic Chinese mythological novel. It was written during the Ming Dynasty based on traditional folktales that relate the adventures of a Tang Dynasty priest Sanzang and his three disciples, Monkey, Pig and Friar Sand, as they travel west in search of Buddhist Sutra. I was fascinated by how they vanquish demons and monsters, tramp over the Fiery Mountain, and cross the Milky Way. It was this book that stimulated my interest in acquiring knowledge and excited my imagination. Since then an almost overwhelming curiosity has taken hold of me. The curiosity helped me do well in school, eventually earning a PhD in Physics and then a PhD in Accounting. So when I think back on my "journey" thus far, I am very appreciative of the impact that the book The Journey to the West had on me.

 

Mary Ziegler

After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate

By Mary Ziegler

In a deep sense, After Roe came into being because of the supportive, engaging, and intellectually intense environment I found at the Florida State University College of Law. I presented portions of the book when interviewing as a lateral candidate, and the book would not have been the same without all the rich interactions with colleagues and students I have enjoyed here. The book reflects much about what I appreciate about Florida State: a willingness to reexamine old truths and a commitment to fairness and openness, even to ideas that test our commitments most. Writing the book made me all the more grateful to be a faculty member here.