Features

Higher Callings

Doctoral Students Search For New Solutions To Age-Old Problems

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Kayla Walker Edin, English
Kayla Walker Edin is following a passion for literature that started soon after she learned to read and fulfilling a dream inspired by a fourth-grade teacher who, impressed with her writing, suggested that she earn a doctorate. As a child, Edin was fascinated by adventure novels and captivating narratives such as Joseph Conrad’s classic Heart of Darkness. Edin has been working with Professor Ross Murfin on edits of the third edition of Conrad’s 1902 novella for the Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism series published by Bedford/St. Martin’s. “This is a transitional text between two periods I’m interested in ... late Victorian and early modernist writing,” says Edin, a member of the English Department’s first group of Ph.D. candidates. Her interests include women’s literature, which began to intrigue her after she read Virginia Woolf's classic 1929 essay “A Room of One’s Own” while enrolled in a study abroad program as an undergraduate. “As a student and a traveler, you’re always with other people and very confined,” she says. “Her essay talks about the importance of women needing a room of their own to write and be creative.” With several years of doctoral study ahead, Edin hasn’t chosen a dissertation topic, but she expects to find inspiration in Woolf’s writing and in the 150 or more books she is reading and discussing with Dennis Foster, the D.D. Frensley Professor of English and the department’s director of graduate studies. He and Edin’s assigned mentor, Associate Professor Nina Schwartz, provide advice and guidance. “I really can’t overstate the kind of support we get from faculty,” says Edin, who taught undergraduate English courses in Portland, Oregon, before coming to SMU. “I want to teach,” she says, “and I want to continue my research and publish. That’s a door that a Ph.D. can open.”

Helen McLure, History
Truth often is darker than fiction, as Helen McLure discovered some years ago when she read a history article that described the lynching of six women and girls in a Parker County family over a period of days in 1873. “I had never heard of this, and I have never met a native Texan who has heard of the Parker County lynchings,” says McLure, a doctoral candidate in the Clements Department of History. The mysterious killings became part of local folklore. In the absence of official reports or investigations, locals spun rumors and gossip into stories about horse theft and wild behavior. The unexplained massacre became the subject of McLure’s Master’s thesis and changed the way she thinks about American history. Old newspaper articles are among her favorite sources, but sometimes they are more fanciful than factual, she found. And illegal activity that was tacitly approved by a community often escaped scrutiny. The fears that drove some communities to verbally and physically assault individuals they disapproved of or did not understand was “part of a whole culture of mob violence that goes back to the very beginning of settlement” in the United States, McLure says. She has studied and written about women and lynching, notorious killings, outlaws and vigilantes in the American West and Midwest. She also wrote chapters about a variety of these topics for the Old West: History and Heritage, edited by Edward Countryman, University Distinguished Professor of History. And she is a research assistant on the subject of Texas lynchings for William Carrigan, a professor at Rowan University in New Jersey. Carrigan’s research, funded by the National Science Foundation, examines the lynching of people of Mexican origin and descent. McLure is completing her dissertation, which looks at the involvement of women and children in lynchings, vigilantism and mob violence in the American West from 1850 to 1930. “I want to put women and children back into the picture,” she says. In 2005, the Coalition for Western Women’s History awarded McLure’s Ph.D. project the Irene Ledesma Prize for graduate research in gender and women’s history, and McLure hopes to turn the dissertation into a book.

Christina Paulson, Biological Sciences
While an undergraduate majoring in dance at Tulane University, Christina Paulson broke her ankle. Sidelined from her dance classes for a semester, she took biology courses and discovered a new love. “I think everything about biology is interesting. You can see it in everything around us. I’m just curious about what’s going on one step smaller than we can see,” Paulson says.

At SMU, she is focusing on worms, in particular a tiny nematode called C. elegans. The worm is one of the most useful creatures in the laboratory for a number of reasons, including the length of its life cycle – three days. Paulson and her adviser, Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences Jim Waddle, thought that the worm might be useful for laboratory toxicity screening. “You normally apply chemicals to individual cells or mice. We wanted to use worms because they’re a nice compromise. They tell us much more than cells, but are much cheaper and have a faster developmental process than mice.”

Worms, however, are filter feeders, which creates problems when testing drugs, Paulson says. They live in the dirt, eating and excreting everything too quickly for toxins to have any effect. So Paulson doused the nematodes with mutagenic chemicals. Then she examined them and thousands more, looking for worms with abnormal intestines. Finally she found a worm that had outpouchings all along the intestine. Paulson and Waddle tested the mutant worm strain and found that it did, indeed, show sensitivity to toxins. This strain of mutant worms some day may be used by pharmaceutical companies to test new, better drugs to treat cancer or heart disease. Paulson presented the results of their research to the International C. elegans Meeting at UCLA in 2007.

In the meantime, Paulson has continued to examine more worms that have been chemically treated and has discovered three more with mutant intestines. “They have mutations in different genes, but all have weird intestines,” she says. “The hope is that we can figure out how these different genes relate to one another and figure out how this affects drug sensitivity.”