Awards & Accomplishments

"Matt Moore creates a learning environment that supports and encourages creativity and comprehension.”

Professor Matthew Moore won two prestigious teaching awards in 2014: the Distinguished Teaching Award and the College of Liberal Arts' Early Career Award for Achievement in Teaching.

The Distinguished Teaching Award is a universitywide award based on student nominations and multiple classroom visits from a peer committee selected from across the Cal Poly community. Likewise, faculty nominate their peers for the College of Liberal Arts’ award. 

Moore’s specialty area is in political theory. He teaches courses in Ancient and Medieval Political Thought, Modern Political Thought, and Contemporary Political Thought, as well as courses in the areas of law and American politics. Moore's goal to create an "emotionally engaged" classroom depends on active student participation in courses where students read dense theoretical materials — and students love it. “Matt Moore creates a learning environment that supports and encourages creativity and comprehension,” one student said. “[He] encourages students to voice their perspectives by the tone he sets in the classroom.” 

“It is an understatement to call Dr. Lowham ‘outstanding’ in service; it is more appropriate to state that she is simply off the charts.”

Congratulations to Elizabeth Lowham for winning the College of Liberal Arts' Early Career Award for Achievement in Institutional/Professional Service.

Lowham has directed the Political Science Department’s Master of Public Policy (MPP) program since 2007, her first year at Cal Poly. She shouldered significant administrative and service responsibilities very early in her career. 

“Dr. Lowham completely deserves this award. Frankly, it is an understatement to call Dr. Lowham ‘outstanding’ in service; it is more appropriate to state that she is simply off the charts,” said Political Science Chair Jean Williams.

As MPP director, Lowham has overhauled the program’s curriculum, raised its profile and quality, successfully shepherded it through its first program review cycle, and very ably managed its day-to-day operations. 

In addition to her role as MPP director, Lowham is also director of the new Cal Poly Center for Expressive Technologies (CET). “My vision is for the center to be a central location where people who are interested in this sort of interdisciplinary work can come for support,” she said. “The center is about expanding people’s understanding of how technology and expression interact.”

Faculty Publications

MARTIN BATTLE

Battle, Martin, and James Clinger. “School Resources and Student Outcomes in Kentucky Public High Schools.” The Commonwealth Review of Political Science (forthcoming).

RON DEN OTTER

Den Otter, Ronald. In Defense of Plural Marriage. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

SHELLEY HURT

Hurt, Shelley, and Ronnie D. Lipschutz. Hybrid Rule and State Formation: Public-Private Power in the Twenty-First Century. New York and London: Routledge, 2015.

ELIZABETH LOWHAM

Gillette, David D., Elizabeth Lowham, and Michael Haungs. “When the Hurly-Burly’s Done, of Battles Lost and Won: How a Hybrid Program of Study Emerged from the Toil and Trouble of Stirring Liberal Arts into an Engineering Cauldron at a Public Polytechnic.” Engineering Studies 6.2 (2014): 108-29.

JEAN WILLIAMS

Williams, Jean C., “’It’s Always With You, That You’re Different’: Undocumented Students and Social Exclusion,” Journal of Poverty (forthcoming).

Williams, Jean C., and Jasna Jovanovic. “Third Wave Feminism and Emerging Adult Sexuality: Friends with Benefits Relationships,” Sexuality and Culture 19.1 (2014): 151-171.