UA Research Summary No. 11

Alaska Natives make up 9% of students at the University of Alaska Anchorage, and the number attending classes on the Anchorage campus is up more than 40% since 2000—from 950 to nearly 1,400. But despite that fast growth, few Alaska Native students go on to graduate. Less than 5% of the students earning bachelor’s degrees at UAA in 2007 were Alaska Native. And as Figure 1 shows, only about one in 10 of the Native students who were freshmen in 2000 had earned bachelor’s degrees six years later, in 2006. Alaska Native students begin leaving at high rates in their second year at UAA. Among those who started in 2005, less than 60% of the Native freshmen but 70% of all freshmen went on to the next year. Still, that was an improvement over 2000, when only about half the Alaska Native freshmen continued on to their second year (Figure 1). The low graduation rates among Native students—not only at UAA but throughout the University of Alaska—are worrisome. Alaska Natives are under-represented in teaching, health care, business, and many other professions—and that won’t change until more Alaska Native students get the educational credentials they need. But what about those Alaska Native students who do succeed in earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees and doctorates? What keeps them going, when so many others don’t make it to graduation?University of Alaska Foundatio

Product Assurance Targeted to Meet Mission Objectives

Topics concerning the Common Lunar Lander for the Space Exploration Initiative are covered and include the following: product assurance tools and supports; project goals; and product assurance structured for optimal payback

Editorial

Have you ever felt cramped? Out of space? Short of room? Working on this issue of The Christian Librarian is a continuation of a theme in my life lately. This is issue is jammed packed with articles and features and ACL Conference information that must go out to readers. There wasn\u27t even room for pull-quotes -- those attention grabbing statements that highlight each article in hopes of attracting you to read further, and add an attractive graphic element to each page. We\u27ve even added extra pages so there would be enough room to fit it all in

\u3cem\u3eFrankenstein\u3c/em\u3e, Feminism, and Literary Theory

Cave ab homine unius libri, as the Latin epigram warns us: beware the author of one book. Frankenstein has so overshadowed Mary Shelley\u27s other books in the popular imagination that many readers believe - erroneously - that she is a one-book author. While this is decidedly not the case, Frankenstein has figured more importantly in the development of feminist literary theory than perhaps any other novel, with the possible exception of Charlotte Bronte\u27s Jane Eyre. This essay will discuss the major feminist literary interpretations of the novel, beginning with Ellen Moers\u27s landmark reading in Literary Women and then move to the more recent approaches taken by critics engaged in post-colonial theory, cultural studies, queer theory, and disability studies. In the process we will explore the provocative claim made by Fred Botting, who noted, Frankenstein is a product of criticism, not a work of literature

Review of \u3cem\u3eFatal Women of Romanticism\u3c/em\u3e by Adriana Craciun

The publication of Adriana Craciun\u27s Fatal Women is a welcome event for all those working on British women writers of the early Gothic era. In clearly focused and densely researched chapters on Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Robinson, Mary Lamb, Charlotte Dacre, Anne Bannerman, and Letitia Landon, Craciun develops her thesis about the cultural and literary ambience in which these women were working: \u27women\u27s violence in the contexts of larger political, ideological, and even medical debates specific to the Romantic period, to demonstrate that women\u27s inherent nonviolence was often a necessary feature in arguments for natural, corporeal sexual difference, and that this two-sex system was by no means universally and unquestioningly accepted as unchanging by either women or men\u27 (10). Working almost as a \u27third wave\u27 feminist literary critic, Craciun corrects the older generation of feminist literary critics who have analyzed the period through either a gendercomplementary model (mea culpa!) or through a reading of femme fatales as misogynist male fantasies (mea culpa again). Given that Craciun\u27s ambitions are large in this book, she admirably fulfills them. This book is an impressive achievement, a study that provides solid and mature scholarship on these authors, their milieux, their major works, as well as the conflicted ideologies of the female body and mind that pervaded the period