1959
Tom Gasque recently published “Letters from Kentucky,” a collection of letters his Aunt Carrie wrote while she was working as a missionary teacher in Appalachia. The book includes his account of his search for everything he could find about the people, places and unusual phrases that appear in the letters.
1964
Robert E. Gregory Jr., a former Wofford trustee and chairman of the board, recently received the Order of the Palmetto, South Carolina’s highest civilian honor. Gregory, who is nationally known as a leading business strategist, spent the past decade guiding Spartanburg Regional Healthcare System through the most transformative period in its 100-year history. Starting in 2011, Gregory served as the chair of the Spartanburg Regional Healthcare System Board of Trustees for six years before transitioning to chair the newly formed Apella Health Management Board of Trustees. His service extends throughout the college, state and nation.
1975
Lou McCraw, managing director and partner of PFG Advisors, was inducted into the inaugural Hall of Fame class of Lincoln Financial’s The Resource Group in Berwyn, Pa. The Resource Group is an invitation-only, nationwide network of the top 200 planning professionals within Lincoln Financial Network. McCraw was one of the 20 founding members of The Resource Group in 1999 and has been a contributing member since. He was elected chairman of the board for 2022.
1981
Rebecca Cubbage Dukes retired in June after 38 years in education, most recently serving as director of federal and accountability programs for the Allendale County School District in Fairfax, S.C. She is the CEO of Schoolhouse Mentoring, an education consulting company providing K-12 professional development and grants training and support to districts across the United States.
1987
The Southern Bank has named David Ward its senior vice president of commercial lending for the Spartanburg branch, which is expected to open at the end of 2022. Ward has 35 years of experience in business development, relationship cultivation, client retention, special assets, collections and retail and commercial credit administration.
1990
Richard Shealy, in his ninth year of freelance copyediting for major science fiction and fantasy titles, has now had two different projects win a Hugo Award (given for the best in science fiction/fiction) in the same year. Works he copyedited won Best Series (“Wayward Children,” currently at eight titles, written by Seanan McGuire) and Best Novella (“A Psalm for the Wild-Built,” by Becky Chambers) at the 80th World Science Fiction Convention in September. S.C. House Speaker Murrell Smith Jr. has received the 2022 Green Tie Award for conservation leadership from the Conservation Voters of South Carolina.
1994
Kimberly Johnson is a member of the North Carolina Bar Association’s paralegal division council and CPE committee. She also serves as chair of the ethics committee. She also is a member of the association’s women in the profession committee and its task force on inclusion. Johnson is a co-planner for the asso- ciation’s 2023 annual meeting in Cary, N.C.
1995
The Rev. Dr. Jonathan Lee Walton has been elected Princeton Theological Seminary’s eighth president. He will assume his duties on Jan. 1, 2023. Walton will be the first Black pres- ident at the seminary, which began as a small school in 1812 on the edge of the Princeton University campus with just one faculty member. He comes to Princeton Seminary from Wake Forest University’s School of Divinity in Winston-Salem, N.C., where he has served as the dean since 2019 and holds the Presidential Chair in Religion and Society. Prior to joining Wake Forest, he served on the faculty at Harvard Divinity School and was the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and the Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church of Harvard University.
1997
Tekion Corp. in Pleasanton, Calif., has hired Jeffery Scott Wood as a senior implemen- tation analyst. Wood spent 20 years working for both Universal Computer Systems and Reynolds and Reynolds in the automotive consulting space.
2001
Tony Hudson has been named principal of Heide Trask High School in Rocky Point, N.C. He has been with the school district since 2005, when he signed on as a teacher and assistant coach at Heide Trask. Most recently, he was the principal at West Pender Middle School.
The S.C. Department of Transportation has named Justin Powell its new chief of staff. He previously served as the department’s deputy secretary for finance and administration.
2005
Colite International in Columbia, S.C., has promoted Adam Regenthal to senior vice president, sales and marketing.
Jonathan Holder made the National Law Journal’s list of the top 100 jury verdicts in the United States for 2021. Williams’ jury verdict of $26.5 million in a case in Milwaukee, Wis., came in at No. 76 for the year.
2006
Dr. Erin L. Higgenbotham has joined North Carolina State University’s counseling services in the division of academic and student affairs as the assistant director of clinical services.
Pinnacle Financial Partners in Chattanooga, Tenn., has hired Jim Thurman as a money management advisor. He had been with Regions Bank for seven years, most recently as a cash management sales officer.
David Williams made the National Law Journal’s list of the top 100 jury verdicts in the United States for 2021. Williams’ jury verdict of $90 million in a case in Orangeburg, S.C., came in at No. 25 for the year.
2008
Christie Lee Sapakoff and Michael Cerefice were married on July 3, 2020, in Smithfield, Va. They reside in Chesapeake, Va., with their teen- age daughters, Monica Lee Joyce and Kristyn Nichole, and newborn son, Lincoln Michael, born May 18, 2022. Christie Lee received her doctorate in physical therapy in 2012 and practices as a pelvic floor physical therapist. Michael is a process engineering project manager at a global shipping company.
2009
James Mitchell II was inducted into the Oak Ridge (Tenn.) Sports Hall of Fame. A 2005 graduate of Oak Ridge High School, Mitchell began playing football at age 7. He continued at Jefferson Middle School and ORHS, where he was named to the All-State and Prep-Extra teams. He still holds ORHS records for career individual tackles and total hits. He continued his football career at Wofford, lettering all four years. He currently teaches and coaches in the Oak Ridge Schools.
2012
In July 2022, Jennifer Coggins began a new role as community engagement archivist in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.
Kalle Davis was promoted to managing director of leadership development at Teach for America in June 2022. She resides in Atlanta, Ga.
2015
Ashlee Moody Davis is now serving as director of development for the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. In June, she celebrated her six-year anniversary at VOC, based in Washington, D.C.
The Spartanburg Area Conservancy (SPACE) has named Sam Parrott its executive direc- tor. He previously served as membership and outreach director for Three Rivers Land Trust in Salisbury, N.C.
2017
Jamey Bower recently graduated from The Ohio State University with a Ph.D. in chemistry. He has joined Dow Chemical Co. in Houston, Texas, as a senior research specialist.
The Turner Padget law firm has added Hunter Windham to its Charleston, S.C. office. He joins the insurance litigation practice group and will support the insurance litigation team by representing insurance companies and insureds. Prior to joining Turner Padget, Windham clerked for Judge A. Marvin Quattlebaum Jr. of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.
2018
Dr. Alex Parler graduated from the Medical University of South Carolina in May and began a three-year residency program in pediatrics in Greenville, S.C.
2019
In August, Grant Page joined the Union County School District as a social studies teacher at Sims Middle School.
2021
Jacob Hollifield has joined Forbes Books, the global book publisher of Forbes Media, as an associate editor in Charleston, S.C. He pre- viously worked as the assistant editor at The Local Palate magazine.
Kalle Davis was promoted to managing director of leadership development at Teach for America in June 2022. She resides in Atlanta, Ga.
FACULTY
Dr. David Alvis, associate professor of govern- ment and international affairs, delivered the lecture “A Government of Laws? The Politics of Judicial Review in Marbury v. Madison” during the annual Constitution Day observation at Oglethorpe University in Brookhaven, Ga.
Dr. Laura Barbas Rhoden, professor of Spanish, had the chapter “Environmental Humanities Approaches to Central American Texts in Undergraduate Curricula” published in the volume “Teaching Central American Literature in a Global Context.” Additionally, her article “Ecology, Coloniality, Modernity: Argentine Fictions of Tierra del Fuego” was chosen for inclusion in the special archival issue of Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal. Volume 54.2 of the journal, a collab- orative project with Dutch artist duo Bik Van der Pol, features a dozen articles selected from those published during the last 50 years.
Dr. Christine Sorrell Dinkins, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Philosophy, wrote the foreword for “Hermeneutic Phenomenology in Health and Social Care Research.”
Dr. Courtney Dorroll, associate professor of religion and interim co-director of the Center
for Innovation and Learning, and Dr. Rachel Vanderhill, associate professor and chair of government and international affairs, pub- lished the article “Teaching, Self-Care, and Reflective Practice during a Pandemic” in the journal Political Science and Politics.
Dr. Philip Dorroll, associate professor of reli- gion, and colleagues edited the publication Māturīdī Theology: A Bilingual Reader.
The North Spartanburg Rotary Club awarded Dr. Alysa Handelsman, assistant professor of sociology and anthropology, and Sarah Buckmaster ’24 a $3,000 grant to support Spartanburg Housing’s after-school pro- grams at Prince Hall and Camp Croft apart- ments. Sustainability seminar students like Buckmaster have worked with Spartanburg Housing since 2019 to develop, implement and run this program during the school year.
Dr. Dane Hilton, assistant professor of psy- chology, and colleagues published the article, “The importance of executive functioning for social skills in college students: a relative weights analysis,” in the Journal of American College Health.
Dr. Trina Janiec Jones, professor and chair of religion, published “Reconnecting,” the second of two articles for The University of Chicago Divinity School’s Craft of Teaching in the Academic Study of Religion blog.
Dr. Kirsten Krick-Aigner’s article “Crossing Borders in Marianne Gruber’s Erinnerungen eines Narren” and her translation of Judith Nika Pfeifer’s short story “Incident” have been published in the volume “Passages. Crossings. Borders. Openings. In Conversation with Austrian Writers.” Krick-Aigner is professor of German.
Dr. Amanda L. Matousek, associate professor of Spanish, published “Selling Spectacle and Airing Identity: Latinidad in American Dirt and Juliet Takes a Breath” in Volume 12 of the journal Label Me Latina/o. Her article “Selena Schema: Sharing Space through Stories about Selena Quintanilla Pérez” will be published in a special edition of “Camino Real: Estudios de las Hispanidades Norteamericanas” from the Editorial de la Universidad de Alcalá and El Instituto Franklin on Latinx Performance in the 21st century.
Dr. Jeremy Morris, assistant professor of biology, and co-authors published the article “Impacts of conservation activities on people who are incarcerated: a case study based on qualitative and quantitative analyses” in the journal Ecology and Society.
Dr. Patricia Nuriel, associate professor of Spanish, published the article “Jevel Katz y sus paisanos: una recuperación del espectáculo ídish argentino de los años 30” in Mundos del hispanismo: una cartografía para el siglo XXI.
Dr. Dave Pittman, professor of psychology, published two research manuscripts this summer: “A Glucokinase-linked Sensor in the Taste System Contributes to Glucose Appetite” in the journal Molecular Metabolism, and “Further disentangling the motivational pro- cesses underlying benzodiazepine hyperpha- gia,” with four student authors, in the journal Pharmacology, Biochemistry and Behavior.
Sheri Reynolds’ novel, “The Tender Grave,” has been named as a finalist for the Virginia Literary Award for Fiction. Reynolds is the John C. Cobb Professor of Humanities.
Dr. Charles Smith, associate professor of biology, and a colleague published “Tail move- ments by late-term fetal pitvipers resemble caudal luring: prenatal development of an ambush predatory behavior” in the Royal Society of Open Science. Smith also presented two posters — “Tail movements by late-term fetal pitvipers resemble caudal luring: prenatal development of an ambush predatory behav- ior” and “Does rattlesnake rattling resemble the defensive tail motor patterns of non-rat- tlesnake colubroids?” — at the Biology of the PitVipers 4 Conference in Rodeo, N.M.
Dr. Katherine Steinmetz, associate profes- sor of psychology, and Brandon Edwards ’23, along with collaborators at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, have published the article “Investigating social connection as a protective factor against exam stress in college students” in the Journal of American College Health.
Dr. Yongfang Zhang, associate professor of Chinese, published the chapter “Developing a PCA-Informed Learning Spiral for a Beginner- Level STARTALK Chinese Program” in “Performed Culture in Action to Teach Chinese as a Foreign Language: Integrating PCA into Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Assessment.”