(Posted May 27, 2008)

HUNTINGDON, Pa. -- Nine members of the Juniata College faculty received promotions in the 2007-2008 academic year at a recent Juniata College Board of Trustees meeting.

Marlene Burkhardt, associate professor of business and information technology, was promoted to full professor; Emil Nagengast, associate professor of politics, was promoted to full professor; Russell Shelley, associate professor of music, was promoted to full professor; David Hutto, assistant professor of English, was promoted to associate professor; Mark McKellop, assistant professor of psychology, was promoted to associate professor; Neil Pelkey, assistant professor of environmental science and information technology, was promoted to associate professor; Nancy Siegel, assistant professor of art history, was promoted to associate professor; Douglas Stiffler, assistant professor of history, was promoted to associate professor; and James Tuten, assistant professor of history, was promoted to associate professor.

Marlene Burkhardt came to Juniata in 2002 as associate professor of business and information technology. She earned a bachelor's degree from Wilkes College in 1980. She went on to earn a master's degree in 1982 from the University of Maryland and earned a doctorate in 1990 from Penn State University.

Before joining Juniata's faculty, she was a business consultant from 1998 to 2002 as president of Nittany Research, a firm specializing in organizational survey development and research. She also was named a lecturer in Penn State's Smeal College of Business Administration from 1996 to 1998. She started her academic career as the Anheuser-Busch Assistant Professor of Management at the Wharton School of Business and Finance at the University of Pennsylvania, a position she held from 1990 to 1997.

She received the University of Pennsylvania Junior Faculty Award in 1992.

Emil Nagengast came to Juniata in 1996 as an assistant professor of politics. He was promoted to associate professor in 2002. He earned a bachelor's degree from Middlebury College in 1984. He earned a master's degree in political science in 1990 from the University of Kansas and earned a doctorate in political science at the University of Pittsburgh in 1996.

He received the 2000 Beachley Distinguished Teaching Award for Junior Faculty. More recently, he established a summer study abroad program in the African country The Gambia. He also spent a sabbatical studying and teaching in Ethiopia. He teaches a variety of international politics courses.

Nagengast also attended Karl Marx Universitat in Leipzig, Germany; Middlebury College Summer Russian Language Institute; Krasnodar Russian Language Institute in the former USSR; and Johannes Gutenberg Universitat in Mainz, Germany.

Russell Shelley teaches courses in music theory, classroom music, music appreciation, and conducts the Concert Choir and Choral Union. He was named the Elma Stine Heckler Professor of Music in 2001. He was promoted to associate professor in 2002.

He earned a bachelor's degree from Baptist Bible College in Clarks Summit, Pa., and went on to earn a master's degree at Mansfield University. He earned a doctorate in music education from Penn State University. He received the Beachley Distinguished Faculty Award for Junior Faculty in 1997.

He has conducted over 25 choral festivals in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Virginia. He is the current music director of the State College Choral Society and Madrigal Singers. He is a member of the Music Educators National Conference, the Pennsylvania Music Educators Association and the American Choral Directors Association.

David Hutto joined the Juniata faculty as an assistant professor of English in 2005 from Rowan University, in Glassboro, N.J., where he was assistant professor of English from 2000 to 2005.

He earned a bachelor's degree from West Virginia University, in Morgantown, W.Va., in 1980. He went on to earn a master's degree in 1982 from Purdue University and a master's degree in 1988 from Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, N.C. He earned a doctoral degree from Georgia State University in 1998 in Atlanta, Ga.

Before teaching at Rowan University, he worked as an assistant professor of English at Georgia Perimeter College (formerly Dekalb College) in Atlanta, Ga. from 1995 to 2000. He has published articles in such journals as Technical Communication Quarterly, Humanities in the South and Rhetorica. He has published his fiction in Artists & Madmen, Skylark, Crazyhorse, Blue Moon Review and other journals.

Mark McKellop joined the Juniata faculty in 2002 as an assistant professor of psychology. He earned a bachelor's degree from Ohio State University in 1994. He earned a master's degree in 1996 and a doctorate in 2000, both from the University of Cincinnati.

This spring, he received the 2008 Gibbel Award for Distinguished Teaching. McKellop was a visiting assistant professor of psychology at Indiana University in Bloomington, Ind. from 2001 to 2002. He also worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Children's Hospital Medical Center in Cincinnati, Ohio from 2000 to 2001. He worked as a predoctoral intern in psychology at Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio from 1999 to 2000.

He is a member of the American Psychological Society, the American Psychological Association, the Society of Pediatric Psychology and the Society for Teaching Psychology.

Neil Pelkey came to Juniata in 2002 as an assistant professor of environmental science and information technology. He earned a bachelor's degree from the University of California-Davis and went on to earn a doctorate from the same institution.

He started a Juniata study-abroad program in marine science in India in 2005. He also has an extensive research career in India, where he researched human-elephant interaction in a wildlife preserve for his doctoral research. He co-founded and is a trustee of the Foundation for Ecological Research, Advocacy and Learning, an Indian scientific research organization that funds ecological research for young science researchers.

Pelkey started his academic career in 1998 as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California-Davis. He was named Brown Faculty Fellow at the University of the South's Landscape Analysis Lab in 2001.

He has published numerous articles in professional journals such as Water Resources Planning and Management, Biological Conservation, African Journal of Ecology and Conservation Biology. He has received research grants from such agencies as the World Bank, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the National Science Foundation and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

Nancy Siegel, who will start a new job as associate professor of American art history at Towson State University in the fall, came to Juniata in 1997. She was director of the Juniata Museum of Art and chair of the department of art and art history.

She earned a bachelor's degree in 1988 from Franklin & Marshall College. She went on to earn a master's degree in 1994 and Museum Studies certificate from Rutgers University. She earned a doctorate in 1999 from Rutgers.

She received numerous grants and awards including: a 2006 Smithsonian American Art Museum Visiting Fellowship; a 2005 Winterthur Museum and Library, Eleanor McD. Thompson Research Fellowship; and a 2004 Everett Helm Visiting Scholar Fellowship, Lilly Library, at the University of Indiana.

Her research focuses on 19th century American landscape studies. She is the author of "Within the Landscape: Essays on Nineteenth-Century American Art and Culture," (2005) "Along the Juniata -- Thomas Cole and the Dissemination of American Landscape Imagery," (2003) and "The Morans: The Artistry of a Nineteenth-Century Family of Painter-Etchers," (2001). Her current book project is "An Acquired Taste: Patriotic Imagery in the Home and the Shaping of a National Culinary Culture."

Douglas Stiffler joined the Juniata faculty in 2002 as an assistant professor of history. He earned a bachelor's degree from Harvard College in 1990. He went on to earn a master's degree in 1993 and a doctorate in 2002, both from the University of California-San Diego.

This spring he received a Fulbright Research Fellowship to China in 2008. He will travel to China this fall to research the relationship between Communist China and the Soviet Union from 1949 to 1960 as a scholar-in-residence at Capital Normal University in Beijing, China. He is currently working on a book, "Socialist Modernity Under Soviet Tutelage."

He teaches courses in world history as well as specialized courses in Chinese and Russian history and a course on samurais.

James Tuten came to Juniata in 1998 from Emory University as a visiting instructor in history. He earned a bachelor's degree in 1990 from the College of Charleston in South Carolina and went on to earn a master's degree in 1992 from Wake Forest University in North Carolina. He earned a doctoral degree in 2003 from Emory University in Atlanta, Ga.

In 2001, he was appointed assistant provost at Juniata, where, among other duties, he coordinated all the visiting speakers who visited campus. In 2006 he returned to the history department as an assistant professor. He has published articles on maderia wine, most notably in American Nineteenth Century History and the cooking journal Slow. He also published articles and reviews in such journals as Agricultural History, Journal of Southern History, South Carolina Historical Magazine, Environmental History and Florida History Quarterly.

He teaches courses on the New South, Contemporary America, and Civil War and Reconstruction.

Contact April Feagley at feaglea@juniata.edu or (814) 641-3131 for more information.