Two CHESS Faculty Earn Promotion to Full Professor

Anne Edwards, professor of human development and family studies

Two CHESS faculty members earned promotion to full professor, effective with the start of the 2020-2021 academic year. They are Anne Edwards, professor of human development and family studies and Colette Morrow, professor of English.

Dean Elaine Carey, Ph.D. congratulated the new professors on their accomplishments.

“Being promoted to the rank of professor is a pinnacle of academic success that fewer than a third of faculty attain,” she said. “Dr. Edwards and Dr. Morrow have achieved national recognition as excellent teachers and scholars by having profound impacts on their chosen subfields. I look forward to their continued contributions to research and teaching.”

Anne Edwards, Ph.D.

Edwards plans to begin a new line of scholarship about adults dealing with developmental disabilities. She said existing scholarship has focused mostly on caregivers and the issues of health and physical therapy. She plans to explore and tell the stories of people with developmental disabilities.

“I want to study their personal relationships,” she said. “They have families of their own. I want to allow them to speak and write in their own voices.”

Edwards, who joined the faculty in 1997 after earning her doctorate from Pennsylvania State University, hopes to help the field of human development and family studies gain wider recognition, since many people know little about it.

“The HDFS field overlaps with psychology, sociology and social work, but there are distinct and unique aspects that I want to emphasize,” she said.

She plans to continue her devotion to mentoring the next generation of care professionals and hopes to expand the role into helping faculty gain full professor status.

“I see it as part of my responsibility to encourage and mentor faculty members in the promotion and tenure process,” she said.

Colette Morrow, Ph.D.

Colette Morrow, professor of English

Morrow sees her scholarly interests in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies and critical race studies as a way to increase the public’s value for the liberal arts and social sciences.

“I am concerned about the pattern of attacks across the country on the liberal arts and humanities,” she said. She hopes to help the public and students to understand that a liberal arts education can lay the groundwork for successful professional career.

Morrow, who led the women’s studies program for ten years after joining Purdue University Calumet in 1994, said her students are especially interested in these subjects and hopes to continue her contributions to building a unified program in women’s, gender and sexuality studies for PNW.

Her scholarly plans include writing a book analyzing the travel narratives written by women of the United States and Europe about their lives in Iran from 1850 to 1940. Her focus will be to analyze the development of a hetero-social culture in Persia as that country’s nation-state evolved into present-day Iran.

She is also interested in developing the use of technology in her courses. “I am always looking for better ways to teach,” she said.

Morrow earned her doctoral degree in English from Texas Christian University in 1994.