Honors Faculty Award Recipients

The fellows program is an essential part of our vision for a college that serves as an exemplar of inclusive excellence. Informed by our core mission, the college has enthusiastically joined with the university’s Higher Learning Commission Quality Initiative as we seek to become a more flexible, stronger, and inclusive college through recruitment, admission, support, and retention of an increasingly diverse student population. The university’s Quality Initiative will have a second year theme of Building Bridges across diverse groups of people, which is designed to extend upon the first year’s theme of “Complexities of Identity” and prepare for the third (and final) year’s theme of “Embrace and Celebrate our Differences.” Marshall University’s HLC Quality Initiative hopes to foster a culture of respect, understanding, and collaboration among the Marshall community and beyond.

As members of the second cohort of Honors Faculty Fellows, these projects have been selected to contribute to collaborative intersections that productively explore this theme across different disciplines. Members of the cohort will meet regularly with the college’s administration and our university partners in appropriate areas to develop and act on plans for their projects and for a larger collaboration with substantive, positive impact on the many communities of which we are a part.

Professor Daniel O’Malley

Building Bridges with the Herd Humanities Program

Project precis: Herd Humanities is a interdisciplinary program at Marshall University being developed with grant support from the NEH and the Teagle Foundation. Among our goals are: 1) strengthening the liberal arts, and 2) bringing greater coherence to the gen-ed experience. While the program ultimately will involve a 15-credit certificate (allowing students to choose among concentration tracks in Science & Technology, Environment & Sustainability, Healthcare & Medicine, Management & Organization, and Conflict Resolution & Justice), it will begin in a more immediate sense with an introductory sequence of two courses anchored in “Transformative Texts.” These courses will leverage Marshall’s undergraduate general education requirements, offering a common intellectual experience centered on issues of “identity & community” (course #1) and “reality & perception” (course #2), while fulfilling multiple requirements. Students will engage with texts that evoke enduring human questions, and these courses will help students develop their skills in reading closely, writing clearly, and speaking effectively. All too often students, can feel dissuaded from studying the humanities. Our culture tends to devalue such fields, and students, understandably, might see it as a more sensible–more pragmatic–choice to pursue a major that seems to lead directly to a particular job. Our project aims not so much to pull students away from those other fields but rather to allow them access to a more robust experience whereby they can appreciate, and benefit from, the connections across disciplines. In Herd Humanities, students will build bridges that connect experience and knowledge across different academic fields and the students within them. Through Herd Humanities, the gen-ed component of a student’s degree might not seem so “random,” so “beside the point.” Instead, students in this program will find a coherent pathway through those gen-ed requirements and, ideally, find that the humanities are relevant to them and, in fact, can make them a more effective contributor in their chosen field.

Bio: Daniel J. O’Malley grew up in Missouri and has been on faculty at Marshall since 2012. He holds degrees in anthropology and fiction writing. His teaching includes a variety of classes in literature, composition, and creative writing. He also serves as an advisor as the English Department’s Coordinator of Undergraduate Programs. His short stories have appeared in Gulf Coast, Alaska Quarterly Review, Ninth Letter, Meridian, Third Coast, and The Baltimore Review, among other publications. His writing about fiction has appeared in Tin House and online at The Millions. His story “Bridge” was selected for The Best American Short Stories 2016 and was also broadcast on the NPR’s Selected Shorts.

Project Collaborators: Dr. Allison Carey, Chair of the Department of English; Dr. Zelideth Rivas, Professor, Modern Languages and Assistant Provost for Global Education.

The fellows program is an essential part of our vision for a college that serves as an exemplar of inclusive excellence. Informed by our core mission, the college has enthusiastically joined with the university’s Higher Learning Commission Quality Initiative as we seek to become a more flexible, stronger, and inclusive college through recruitment, admission, support, and retention of an increasingly diverse student population. The university’s Quality Initiative will have a first year theme of Complexities of Identity in which we will, as a community, explore the reality that every person has many intersecting identities.

As members of the inaugural cohort of Honors Faculty Fellows, these projects have been selected to contribute to collaborative intersections that productively explore this theme across different disciplines. Members of the cohort will meet regularly with the college’s administration and our university partners in appropriate areas to develop and act on plans for their projects and for a larger collaboration with substantive, positive impact on the many communities of which we are a part.

Dr. Cicero M. Fain, III

An Experiential and Collaborative Learning Opportunity: The Black Appalachian Migration Heritage Trail

Project precis: This project directly engages the theme of complexities of identity through examination of the historical presence, experiences, and contributions of African Americans who migrated into the state along the James River and Kanawha Turnpike, Midland Trail, US Route 60 pathway from White Sulphur Springs/Lewisburg to Huntington, West Virginia. It will contribute to the theme by explicitly meeting two of the three articulated goals in the Quality Initiative outcomes. First, it will increase students’ readiness to work and live in a global and/or otherwise diverse community by providing them opportunities to grow and learn through contact with others who come from cultures, races, or backgrounds different than their own and second, it will promote student learning through outreach to the community and engagement in such high impact practices as community-based learning and research. Additionally, the project compliments and engages the antebellum and post-bellum Black migratory processes detailed in Dr. Fain’s book, Black Huntington: An Appalachian Story, one of two books chosen by the Quality Initiative Oversight Committee for campus-wide readership.

Bio: Dr. Cicero M. Fain is a fourth-generation black Huntingtonian. He received his B. A. from the University of Hawaii at Manoa and his M.Ed. from George Mason University. He is the recipient of the Carter G. Woodson Fellowship from Marshall University and received his M.A. and Ph.D. in History from The Ohio State University. His teaching career includes positions at Marshall, Ohio University-Southern, Niagara University, and the College of Southern Maryland. He has authored several articles in peer-reviewed journals, including “Buffalo Soldier, Deserter, Criminal: The Remarkably Complicated Life of Charles Ringo,” in the Ohio Valley Journal, which is his current book project. His first book, “Black Huntington: An Appalachian Story,” published in 2019 by the University of Illinois Press was a finalist for the Appalachian Studies Association Weatherford Award. In 2021 it garnered the Literary Merit Award from the West Virginia Library Association. This summer, as a recipient of a 2019 Scholarly Research Fellowship, he will continue research on Ringo’s formative experiences at the Kentucky Historical Society. He is currently serving a two-year appointment as the Visiting Diversity Scholar at Marshall.

Dr. Brian Kinghorn

An Experiential and Collaborative Learning Opportunity: Adding TEDxMarshallU to the Mission of Honors Education at Marshall University

Project precis: For the last 4 years, TEDxMarshallU has been a student, faculty, and staff collaboration culminating in a yearly TEDx event on campus (www.tedxmarshallu.com). Students do most of the work and are organized by a peer leadership team mentored by faculty and staff. Beginning in the 2022-23 academic year, we are establishing the internship in the Honors College as an experiential and collaborative learning opportunity. Student roles on the team include: co-organizer/executive producer; co-organizer/event manager; curation coordinator; sponsorships, budgets, and purchasing manager; designer; communications, editorial, and marketing director; and video and production lead. TEDxMarshallU will align the 2023 theme to the Quality Initiative. Chosen speakers will share ideas related to intersections and complexities of identity. We plan to have significant diversity in chosen speakers as well as their topics.

Bio: Dr. Brian Kinghorn is an Associate Professor of Curriculum, Instruction, and Foundations at Marshall University where he has taught courses in child development, educational psychology, assessment, school diversity, and science for elementary teachers. He has also taught his Psychology of Social Media course as an Honors seminar and is the founding lead organizer and licensee for TEDxMarshallU which moved to the Honors college this year. Kinghorn earned his PhD in Educational Psychology and Educational Technology (with an emphasis in science teacher learning and knowledge) from Michigan State University in 2013. Since 2002, he has conducted inquiry-based extra-curricular science programs and science assemblies and conducted both formal and informal teacher professional development across the nation and internationally. With his extensive science education experience, he was appointed as the director of the National Youth Science Camp in 2019 and is currently planning his third virtual camp. Kinghorn’s areas of research include ways teachers learn science from their own teaching practice, methods for effective teaching, and the psychology of social media. His family is very important to him. He and his wife Leah are happily married with eight children (three girls and five boys) aged 25 years to 8 months old.

Dr. Herman Mays is a zoologist and evolutionary biologist who studies the diversity and history of birds in East and Southeast Asia. He is currently a professor at Marshall University and the director of the West Virginia Biological Survey. His work focuses on using molecular genetic tools to trace the origin and evolution of species, populations, and adaptations of birds in this region.

Dr. Mays received support through the Honors College for this ongoing project which aims to investigate the patterns and processes of speciation and diversification of birds in the Ryukyu Islands, a chain of islands that stretches from Japan to Taiwan. The Ryukyu Islands are a hotspot of biodiversity and endemism, meaning that many species are found only on these islands and nowhere else. Dr. Mays and his collaborators are interested in understanding how these unique species evolved, how they are related to each other and to mainland species, and what factors influenced their distribution and variation across the islands.

To answer these questions, Dr. Mays and his team collect blood samples from various bird species on the islands, such as the Ryukyu robin, the Ryukyu scops owl, the Ryukyu minivet, and the Ryukyu woodpecker. They then use DNA sequencing and analysis to compare the genetic diversity and divergence among these species and populations. They also use morphological measurements, such as body size, shape, color, and plumage patterns, to assess the phenotypic variation and adaptation of these birds. By combining genetic and morphological data, they can infer the evolutionary relationships, historical biogeography, and ecological interactions of these birds.

Dr. Mays’ work has important implications for conservation biology, as many of the bird species he studies are endangered or threatened by habitat loss, invasive species, climate change, and human activities. His research can help identify the most vulnerable populations and prioritize conservation efforts. His work also contributes to the general knowledge of avian evolution and biogeography in East Asia, a region that is rich in biodiversity but understudied by scientists.