Portland State University recently shared their annual Outstanding Teaching Awards. We want to celebrate the two winners of the Adjunct Excellence Award: Chris Allen for his teaching in Psychology and Molly Wallace for her research in Conflict Resolution.
Here’s a little more about this year’s winners.
Christopher Allen, Ph.D. serves as a senior adjunct instructor in the psychology department at Portland State University. He has been teaching at Portland State University since 2011 and has twice been awarded the John Eliot Alan outstanding teaching award. Dr. Allen draws on a rich background of working in organizational and clinical psychology and regularly teaches for PSU in abnormal psychology and personality theory. More recently Dr. Allen teaches classes on the psychology of happiness and Tibetan Buddhism, including live streaming virtual education abroad classes from Tibet and Nepal.
Dr. Allen would like to dedicate his award to his students and let them know he feels honored to be their teacher, and to all adjunct faculty members at Portland State University. Dr. Allen served as an executive council member for the Portland State University Faculty Association union and was deeply touched by the stories of the PSU adjunct faculty members and their incredible devotion.
Molly Wallace teaches in Portland State University’s Conflict Resolution Program and serves as contributing editor of the Peace Science Digest at the War Prevention Initiative. Her research and teaching interests include nonviolent action; unarmed civilian peacekeeping/protection (UCP); conflict resolution/transformation; military desertion/defection; transitional justice, reconciliation, and peacebuilding; the relationship between weapons and protection/vulnerability; humanitarian intervention, civilian protection, and the “Responsibility to Protect” in postcolonial contexts; the legitimation of political violence (discursive and psychological mechanisms); humanitarian negotiation; gender and global politics; and ethics of war and peace. Her recent book, Security without Weapons: Rethinking Violence, Nonviolent Action, and Civilian Protection (Routledge 2017), explores nonviolent alternatives for civilian protection in war zones—and particularly the unarmed civilian peacekeeping work of Nonviolent Peaceforce in Sri Lanka during the last few years of that country’s civil war. She has also published research in Critical Studies on Security, Global Society, and International Politics and presents regularly at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association. In 2017, she was invited to deliver a keynote lecture at the Rethinking Pacifism for Revolution, Security and Politics conference at the University of Otago, Aotearoa/New Zealand.
Dr. Wallace earned her Ph.D. and M.A. in Political Science from Brown University and her B.A. (magna cum laude) in Peace and Conflict Studies from Mount Holyoke College. At Brown, she was awarded the P. Terrence Hopmann Award for Excellence in Teaching and was recipient of the Graduate Program in Development Fellowship through the Watson Institute for International Studies. Beyond PSU, she has taught in the International Affairs and/or Political Science Programs at Brown University, the University of New Hampshire, and Lewis & Clark College. Currently a volunteer facilitator with Multnomah County's restorative dialogue program, she previously served for several years as a volunteer mediator with the Community Mediation Center of Rhode Island and on the staff of various non-governmental organizations in the fields of conflict resolution and international affairs in Washington, DC. More recently, she has also worked with the James Lawson Institute (as a facilitator) and the Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice at the University of San Diego (as an editor).
In addition, we want to acknowledge all of the runners-up. Congrats to everyone, and your hard work is appreciated.
Samuel Mohler
Jessicah Carver
Larry Becker
Martin Lipsky
Quang Truong
Patrick Hiller