Victoria Sage, technical writer in the Center for Technology & Training (CTT), is the recipient of the 2018 Carmine Palombo Individual Award from the Michigan Transportation Asset Management Council (TAMC). In addition to her duties as a technical writer at the CTT, Sage is editor of the Michigan Local Technical Assistance Program’s The Bridge newsletter.
In announcing the award, the TAMC notes “Vicki’s work in these roles has been a great service to the TAMC in that many of Vicki’s efforts advance the strategies of the TAMC Work Program through key training and educational initiatives for professionals at local transportation agencies. Vicki has also provided leadership and advocacy of asset management principles as well as communicating relevant programs of the TAMC and transportation agencies across Michigan in helping develop stories in The Bridge.”
One of the driving factors in Sage’s nomination for this award was her role in development of the TAMC Bridge Asset Management Workshop. Using innovative features of common desktop software, she transformed the TAMC training into a focused workshop to quickly and easily create a bridge asset management plan for students attending the training.
“Vicki had a vision to improve the creation of bridge asset management plans, and she developed an innovative way to use everyday tools to help the workshop attendees,” says TAMC Bridge Committee Chair Beckie Curtis. “This innovation has been a game changer in terms of what can be accomplished in the training workshops and making it even easier for people to have a document that they can then use to organize treatments in a way that is financially manageable.”
Transportation asset management is a process of managing public assets, such as roads and bridges, based on the long-range condition of the entire transportation system. TAMC, created in 2002 by the Michigan Legislature, promotes the concept that the transportation system is unified, rather than separated by jurisdictional ownership. Its mission is to recommend an asset management strategy to the State Transportation Commission and the Michigan Legislature for all of Michigan’s roads and bridges.
The Department of Humanities congratulates 
Anna K. Swartz, a graduate of Rhetoric, Theory & Culture, participated as an invited panelist at the 2018 Saks Institute for Mental Health Law, Policy and Ethics Spring Symposium: “Held Against My Will: Conversations About Involuntary Commitment and Forced Treatment” at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law in Los Angeles, California on April 16.
Nancy Henaku, a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the RTC program, has received one of three inaugural Feminist Research Grants awarded by the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition. This will support her travel to archives for her dissertation research on the rhetoric of Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings, the first female candidate for president of Ghana. The review committee “expressed great enthusiasm for [her] dissertation project, which is poised to bring important perspective from the global South and specifically from Ghana to ongoing research in transnational feminist rhetoric.”
Brilliant Books in Traverse City, recently interviewed Rhetoric, Theory and Culture PhD student, writer and poet Edzordzi Agbozo about his writing. Two of Agbozo’s poems appear in the spring 2018 issue of Northern Michigan’s premier literary journal, Dunes Review. See the full interview 
RTC PhD student Sarah Potter received a top paper award and presented the paper on the panel, Top Papers in the Communication Ethics, Activism, and Social Justice Interest Group at the Central States Communication Association Conference. The paper title is “Different Rights (in)Different Times: Rendering the Invisible Visible in a Comparative Iconographic Analysis of the Women’s Suffrage Parade of 1913 and the 2017 Women’s March on Washington.” She was also a panel member for the graduate student discussion session, “When the Experts Don’t Agree: Navigating Differences in Faculty Advice.” The conference was held April 5-8, 2018 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
The Humanities department will be hosting Professor Nicholas Mirzoeff (NYU). He’ll be giving a public lecture entitled “Ungovernable Aesthetics” in the MUB Ballroom on 