Faculty Focus
What's Been Happening

Off-White Hollywood: American Culture and Ethnic Female Stardom by Diane Negra, assistant professor of radio, television and film (Routledge Press). Negra focuses on six key stars of the silent, classical and post-classical eras of Hollywood to demonstrate how each illuminates aspects of ethnicity, gender, consumerism and class at work in American culture. She discusses 1920s Irish American silent film star Colleen Moore; Polish silent film star Pola Negri; Norwegian ice skater Sonja Henie, a star of 1930s and ’40s Hollywood musicals; Austrian-born star Hedy Lamarr; Italian American Marisa Tomei; and Cher, an “ethnic chameleon” without significant ties to a European homeland.

Crime Victim Rights and Remedies by Peggy Tobolowsky, professor of criminal justice (Carolina Academic Press). Before the emergence of a victims’ movement in the United States in the 1970s, crime victims had only limited formal rights and remedies in the modern American justice system. But federal and state authorization of crime victim rights and remedies has increased exponentially since then. Today, an estimated tens of thousands of statutes directly or indirectly affect crime victim rights, and many states have victim-related constitutional provisions. In this book, Tobolowsky describes constitutional and legislative provisions addressing victim rights and remedies and judicial opinions that have interpreted them.

The Voice of the Heart: A Call to Full Living by David ‘Chip’ Dodd (’90 Ph.D.) of Murfreesboro, Tenn. (Sage Hill Books). Dodd believes that the human heart has the capacity to experience eight feelings — hurt, loneliness, sadness, anger, fear, shame, guilt and gladness — and that each feeling is positive because of where it can lead. The book, which comes with an audio CD, describes how to awaken the heart to these feelings.

Turntable Technique: The Art of the DJ by Stephen W. Webber (’81) of Westford, Mass. (Hal Leonard Publishing Corp.) To accompany this DJ how-to manual, Webber has produced six albums and a curriculum for teaching a course in turntabling. He’s an Emmy-winning composer and a professor of music production and engineering at Berklee College of Music.

Fort Worth Then & Now by Carol Roark (’93 M.S.) of Fort Worth (TCU Press). Documenting the effects of time, this book pairs historic photographs of Fort Worth with photographs of the same scenes or events today. Roark is the manager of the special collections division at the Dallas Public Library

Blow by Blow by Stephen A. Blow (’74) of Mesquite (Three Forks Press). Blow joined the Dallas Morning News in 1978 and has been a metropolitan page columnist since 1989. The book is a collection of his favorite columns over the years.