The research of three Linfield College faculty members will receive a boost after earning the John B. Housley Memorial International Study award.
Peter Buckingham, professor of history; Henny Breen, assistant professor of nursing; and Tom Love, professor of anthropology, each received the award. Established by the family and friends of John B. Housley, who served as vice president for academic affairs and professor of humanities at Linfield from 1976-1983, the endowment is used to strengthen international awareness at Linfield College through the support of faculty and administrative research and study.
Buckingham will use the award to further ongoing research in Ireland in June for a biography of Thomas Aloysius Hickey (1868-1925). Hickey sought to organize the landless, poor majority with an Americanized Marxism in the years before the Great War. Buckingham is gathering information on Hickey’s ancestors and will conduct research at the University College of Dublin and the National Library in Dublin, along with various libraries in County Tipperary, including Nenagh, Clonmel and the town of Tipperary. The information will deepen Buckingham’s understanding of Hickey’s family background, strengthen his manuscript and add to content in Buckingham’s Irish-American history class, which he teaches at Linfield. Buckingham’s work on Hickey was recently featured in an article in the Houston Chronicle.
The Housley award contributed to the funds required for Breen to travel to Malawi in southeast Africa in February of this year in preparation for a research project studying the knowledge, attitudes and beliefs of perinatal Malawian women regarding infant feeding practices and HIV. During the trip, Breen met with her research partners in Malawi to discuss the proposal, toured Ekwendeni Mission Hospital where the women will be interviewed and submitted the project proposal to the National Health Sciences Research Committee in Lilongwe, Malawi. The research will use a tool developed by Linfield professors Neal Rosenburg and Kim Kintz, who have also conducted similar research in Cameroon. In addition to the five Malawian research partners, Breen’s research team includes Rosenburg and Lynette Savage, Linfield adjunct faculty.
Love will conduct fieldwork on a medicinal plant program in Peru this summer, continuing work with a multidisciplinary project in the central Andes with which he and Linfield students have been involved since 2009. Love will work with other United States and Peruvian researchers to lay foundations for a larger research project describing the state of medicinal plant supply chains linking producers and consumers there, focused on the EsSalud Arequipa clinic. The project involves multiple institutions including the Missouri Botanical Garden, Washington University, SUNY Buffalo, Universidad de Trujillo and EsSalud, and intends to transfer the model developed in Northern Peru to multiple sites in Peru and even Bolivia. EsSalud, Peru’s national system of social security-related clinics, links suppliers of medicinal plants with patients in a holistic program that is the first of its kind in South America.
