FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Sept. 5, 2007

MUW Residential Honors Program to feature several faculty in residence

By Jill D. O’Bryant

COLUMBUS, Miss.--Students living in Mississippi University for
Women’s Honors residence hall will have the advantage of learning
from three scholars who will live with them as part of the faculty in
residence aspect of the Residential Honors Program.

This is the fourth year for MUW to have a Residential Honors Program.
In addition to living in Grossnickle Hall together, they take classes
together, study abroad in London the summer after their freshman year
and participate in field trips and presentations from upper-level
student mentors and from faculty.

“Studies show that students with similar profiles who are fully
integrated into programming such as this are often more successful,”
said Dr. Eric Daffron, director of the Ina E. Gordy Honors College.
“This kind of program gives these students the opportunity to have
a really stellar academic experience.”

Louise Hawes, one of the participants for the Eudora Welty Writers’
Symposium, will live in the Honors residence hall during the week of the
Symposium in October. She will do a couple of sessions with students,
one on creative writing and one in which she will read from her work.
She also will meet with students in conjunction with the new reading
initiative for this year’s freshmen seminar in which students are
reading and discussing her novel “Waiting for Christopher.”

Hawes’ most recent young adult novel “The Vanishing Point,” which
explores the life of female Renaissance painter Lavinia Fontana, was an
Independent Booksellers Booksense Pick. Her novel “Rosey in the
Present Tense” appeared on the Children's Book Council's
post-September 11 booklist on trauma, tragedy and loss.

Hawes was among the charter faculty in the nation's first MFA program
in Writing for Children at Vermont College and is also author of the new
collection of adult short fiction Anteaters Don't Dream.

One of the actors from Actors from London Stage will live in
Grossnickle the first week of March 2008 when that troupe is on campus
for performances of Shakespeare’s “Taming of the Shrew” and
classroom experiences.

Dr. Richard Pacholski, professor emeritus of English at Millikin
University, will live in the dorm for two weeks in late spring 2008
while he helps Dr. Tom Velek, professor of history, with a seminar on
the Holocaust, and Peppy Biddy, professor of theatre, with a seminar on
Shakespeare.

This is not the first year for the Residential Honors Program to have a
faculty in residence. Dr. Ghazala Irfan, a philosophy professor from
Lahore University of Management Sciences in Lahore, Pakistan, lived in
the Honors residence hall for about five weeks last fall.

Irfan came to MUW as part of the Fulbright Scholar Program, “Direct
Access to the Muslim World.” She taught about the three major
paradigms of Muslim philosophy.

“The goal is to encourage students to think of learning as something
that can also occur outside the classroom,” Daffron said. “That goal
can be accomplished in many ways. One way is to invite a scholar to live
in the residence hall for a period of time so that the students can
interact with the scholar informally and formally.”

Daffron and Chris Holland, MUW’s director of community living, will
do a joint presentation on the benefits of academic residence halls at a
conference in St. Louis in October. This is the second year for MUW to
make a presentation on the living-learning communities at the
living-learning community conference. Last year’s presentation in
Syracuse, N.Y., was by Holland and Dr. Bucky Wesley, vice president for
student services.

“Other universities have academic-oriented residence halls, but the
Honors Residence Hall is unique to our campus,” Daffron said. “The
title of this year’s presentation is ‘Gateway for Success--Building
an Honors LLC at a Small Liberal Arts College.’”

For more information about MUW’s Ina E. Gordy Honors College, please
visit www.muw.edu/honors.