Below are the candidates for the International Big History Association's Board of Directors. Voting will begin on July 1 and close on July 31, 2022; information on the election will be sent to each IBHA member on July 1.
In the meantime, please mark down the June 18, 2022 webinar by Dr. Lucy Laffitte on teaching big history; the July 9 webinar on "Big Architecture: Building a Sustainable Society for Humanity," with presentations by Dr. Mohd Tajuddin Mohd Rasdi, Nobuo Tsujimura, Esther Quaedackers, ShanShan Liu; an August webinar on complexity by David Baker, and forthcoming information about the 2023 IBHA conference..
Many thanks to all IBHA members for your many contributions.
Barry Wood,a naturalized American citizen born in Canada, holds a B.A. from University of Toronto, M.A. from University of British Columbia, and an interdisciplinary doctorate in English and American Literature, Humanities, and Religious Studies from Stanford University. He has taught English and American literature at University of Houston since 1972. His teaching experience includes a four-year leave in a cooperative SUNY/Institut Teknologi Mara program in Malaysia. Barry’s 56-lecture survey of American Literature is available on YouTube; in 2005 he added a course in Native American literature that he now teaches annually. His contribution to Big History is a course called “Cosmic Narratives” developed in 2009, now an option in the UH core curriculum, listed as “a narrative history of the Universe from the Big Bang to the present emphasizing its relevance for the human situation.” Barry began his writing career in 1970 with a series of editorials highlighting the first Earth Day, along with two books published (1970, 1972) while enrolled in graduate studies. His literary studies include articles in American Literature, Canadian Literature, PMLA, and Contemporary Literature. An edited collection, Malcolm Lowry: The Writer and His Critics won an Ontario Arts Council Award in 1981. His recent publications include seven articles and seven book reviews in the Journal of Big History, along with four contributions to Origins. His book, Invented History, Fabricated Power (London: Anthem, 2020) has earned a Nonfiction Authors (NFA) Award in World History. A novel, Ironwood Ridge (Cambridge: Vanguard, 2022), is his first work of fiction.
Ken Solis
is a retired internist and ER physician with a master’s degree in bioethics. His long trips to rural ER’s also gave him many hours to listen to lectures on other fields in the sciences, philosophy, and history, including Big History. His special interest in Big History is what thermodynamics, information theory, and complexity science might reveal about how systems have, depending on the circumstance, progressed, regressed, and diversified over time. He has also applied these disciplines to the formulation of an information-centric ethical theory that was published in JBH. Ken has done several presentations at Big History international conferences on the fundamental nature of information and its relevance to complexity, and teaches Big History in adult life-long educational programs. He has also created a spreadsheet that includes the author, subject matter, and key words of every paper written for the journal since its inception. Finally, he has assisted David LePoire in the editing and compilation of recent issues of the Emergence Newsletter
Rubeth Ronquillo-Hipolito
is an assistant professor at Holy Angel University in Angeles City, Philippines. She handles Philosophy subjects such as Ethics, Logic and Humanities along with Big History 1 and Big History 2. She has been in the teaching profession for 19 years. Having served as the School of Arts and Sciences’ Big History Coordinator for AY 2019-2020, she represented the university during the Asian Big History Symposium held at JF. Oberlin University in Tokyo, Japan, November of 2019. She was one of the presenters in the 5-day conference organized by IBHA (Changing the World: Community, Science and Engagement with Big History) August of 2020.
Ms. Hipolito received her Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy at the University of Santo Tomas and pursued her Master of Arts in Teaching to prepare her for a life in the academe. Currently, she is the Coordinator for Region 3 under the International Organization of Educators and Researchers, Inc. (IOER), a reputable organization for educators and researchers. In the future, she intends to foster Big History as a unique and life-altering discipline; and a valuable research and academic endeavor.
Paul Narguizianspecializes in biology education and Big History research, alternating between the classroom and various natural history museums and science centers as a Professor of Biological Sciences and Science Education at California State University, Los Angeles (2002 – present). He works at the intersection of science and science communication to make science, specifically biology, more meaningful and exciting for his students and the public. He has developed pedagogical strategies and curricula for educators and for scientists, largely inspired by the work of Thomas Berry, Brian Swimme, Mary Evelyn Tucker, John Grimm, David Christian, and Fred Spier.
David LePoireResearches, develops, and applies science principles in environmental issues, Big History evolutionary trends, and particle scattering. He has a BS in Physics from CalTech, a PhD in Computer Science from DePaul, and over 30 years of experience at Argonne National Laboratory in the development of scientific analyses, software, training, and modeling. His research interests include Big History synergistic trends among energy, environment, organization, and information. He has presented at the IBHA conferences since the first in 2012 and has presented an IBHA webinar in Oct 2021. He has published articles in the Journal of Big History, the Evolution Almanac, and in 2020 co-edited a book with Andrey Korotayev concerning a Big History perspective of the singularity trend. He (along with Ken Solis) contributes to the “From the Journal” column of the newsletter and now also collaborates on the Emergence newsletter publication. He has started a Big History Research Group for continued international virtual conferencing and online communication.
Andrey Korotayevis a is an anthropologist, macro-historian, comparative political scientist, demographer and sociologist at National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow and Eurasian Center for Big History & System Forecasting, Institute of Oriental Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences. He engages in the study of universal evolution and global history, as well as the analysis and forecasting of modern processes, especially, in the Middle East and Africa. Recently, he co-edited The 21st Century Singularity and Global Futures: A Big History Perspective (Springer, 2020) and co-authored The Big History of Globalization (Springer, 2019). He is especially interested in detecting (and possible mathematical description) of general patterns of the universal evolution, which appears to be only possible in the Big History perspective. He is also enthusiastic about the Big History’s potential to bring together people from different disciplines and with different perspectives, as well as to transform the education system.
David Blanksis a medievalist by training whose early work focused on the social history of southern Europe, western attitudes towards Islam, monasticism, and medieval and early modern travel. He now works on more broadly theoretically issues, especially the philosophy and historiography of big history. Blanks is a Fulbright scholar who, after completing his Ph. D. at The Ohio State University in 1991, and doing a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Cincinnati, worked at the American University in Cairo from 1992 to 2015, and at Arkansas Tech University from 2015-2021. He is editor of the Journal of Big History.
Donna Tew |