The Florida Studies Fellows is an affiliation of high achieving professionals from diverse fields who creatively use their talents to promote the values, aims, and goals of the University of South Florida St. Petersburg Florida Studies Program and the community in which it resides.

David Shedden

David Shedden directs the Eugene Patterson Library at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida. The Poynter Institute is one of the country’s foremost independent schools of journalism.  In addition to serving as the Institute’s library director, Shedden is also a researcher for the Poynter Online Web site.  Since 1995 he has maintained an online resource center of journalism bibliographies and research links. Topics covered include journalism history, media ethics, diversity, reporting, and many other journalism subjects.
 

Shedden recently updated his “Florida Newspaper Chronology: 1900-1910” for the University of Florida Digital Newspaper Project.  This chronology builds on his earlier research about the history of Florida newspapers.  From 1984-1986 Shedden was a volunteer interviewer and archivist for Florida Governor Bob Graham’s Oral History Program.  He also served on the statewide committee for the Florida / U.S. Newspaper Program.
  
 Shedden is the author of the American Society of Newspaper Editors report, “Preserving a Newspaper’s Past: A Guide to Developing a Newspaper Oral History Program.” He contributed to Poynter’s “Best Newspaper Writing” series and the ASNE publication, “The Learning Newsroom.”  He holds a B.A. degree in mass communications, an M.L.S. and an M.A. in history from the University of South Florida.

Peter Rudy Wallace

Peter Rudy Wallace is a St. Petersburg native and alumnus of St. Petersburg High School, a 1976 graduate of Harvard College and a 1979 graduate of Harvard Law School.

Upon graduating from law school Peter clerked for Judge Paul H. Roney on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, and then joined a St. Petersburg law firm.  He was elected to the Florida House of Representatives from a district in St. Petersburg in 1982 and served until 1996.  During his final two years in office he was Speaker of the House, the only person from Pinellas County ever to serve in that post.  In 1998, he ran statewide for the cabinet post of Commission of Education, but lost to Tom Gallagher.

Peter returned to the practice of law with the St. Petersburg firm of Skelton, Willis, Bennett & Wallace, LLP.  His wife, Helen Pruitt Wallace, is a professor of creative writing at Eckerd College.  Peter and Helen’s children, Daniel and Hannah, are a junior and a freshman, respectively, at Harvard College.

Helen Wallace

Helen Wallace's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Tampa Review, Nimrod International, The Midwest Quarterly, The Literary Review, Cumberland Review and other journals.  She’s a graduate of The University of the South, and the Florida State University where she earned a Ph.D. in English. Her manuscript for a first book of poems, Shimming the Glass House, has been a finalist in the Kenyon Review Poetry Contest, and the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry.

Ms. Wallace has been a recipient of an Academy of American Poets Award, a fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, as well as a Tennessee Williams Poetry Scholarship from The Sewanee Writers Conference. She co-edited Isle of Flowers: Poems by Florida’s Individual Artists’ Fellows, published by Anhinga Press in 1995, and she teaches Creative Writing at Eckerd College where she also serves as the faculty advisor for the literary magazine, Eckerd Review.

She lives in St. Petersburg with her husband and two children, and serves on the board of directors for American Stage Theatre.

Jeanne Meinke

Jeanne Meinke’s elegant pen & ink drawings have graced the pages of The New Yorker, Gourmet, Bon Appetit, and Early American Life, as well as literary magazines such as Western Humanities Review, Eckerd Review, and Konglomerati.   She has also illustrated numerous books, ranging from The Phoenix of the Western World (U. of Oklahoma Press) to Light Year ‘87 (Bits Press).  

In addition, she has collaborated with her husband on a children’s book, The Legend of Larry the Lizard (John Knox Press); a bilingual poetry book, Maples & Orange Trees (St. Petersburg, Russia); and five poetry chapbooks, including the prize-winning Campocorto.   Most recently, she has completed 40 drawings for his new children’s book, The Elf Poem.

Peter Meinke

Peter Meinke has published 14 books of poems, 7 in the prestigious Pitt  Poetry Series, the most recent being The Contracted World (2006), Zinc Fingers (2001), and Scars (1996).   His poetry has received many awards, including 2 NEA Fellowships and 3 prizes from the Poetry Society of America.  

Peter's book of short stories, The Piano Tuner, won the 1986 Flannery O’Connor Award; another collection, Unheard Music, will be published in 2007, along with his book on reading and writing poems, The Shape of Poetry.   He directed the Writing Workshop at Eckerd College for many years, and has often been writer-in-residence at other colleges and universities; from 2003 through 2005 he held the Darden Chair in Creative Writing at Old Dominion University.  

His work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and dozens of other magazines; he and his wife, the artist Jeanne Clark, have lived in St. Petersburg since 1966.

Sheila Stewart

Sheila Stewart is an anthropologist, an archaeologist and an educator.  She has a B.A. in Education and an M.A. in Applied Anthropology from the University of South Florida.  Her M.A. has an emphasis in public archaeology, cultural resource management and museum methods.  

Stewart is the President of the Florida Anthropological Society and was the founding manager of the Weedon Island Preserve Cultural and Natural History Center in Pinellas County.  She has taught archaeological field methods to students and volunteers on excavations in Ireland and Israel, and interpreted archaeological work for the public at Fort Mackinac, Michigan; County Roscommon, Ireland; and St. Augustine, Florida.  She currently teaches archaeology and anthropology to gifted students in St. Petersburg and works on preservation issues with the Florida Archaeological Council, the Trail of the Lost Tribes and the Florida Public Archaeology Network.  She serves on the Advisory Board of ASAP Homeless Services in St. Petersburg. 

Sheila has been married to her husband John for 28 years, and the two live without air conditioning in their 1925 home in St. Petersburg’s Historic Kenwood neighborhood.

Kevin McCarthy

Dr. Kevin McCarthy recently retired from teaching English and Florida Studies at the University of Florida, where he taught for 37 years. He also taught for two years in the Peace Corps in Turkey, plus one year in Lebanon and two years in Saudi Arabia, both as a Fulbright Professor. He has had 35 books published with two more coming out in the next year.

Samuel Davis

"A degree in Florida Studies is a key for any area of occupation, continuing learning, community service, or government agencies in Florida."

Samuel Davis graduated from the University of South Florida in 1969 and received a MA Degree in History 1988.

After forty years, Samuel retired from teaching in the Pinellas County School System in 2009. For the last twenty-five years, he taught IB History at St. Petersburg High School. He was able to influence many young people to consider teaching as a career. The IB program at St. Petersburg High School has produced many teachers that are now working in Pinellas County School System.

Samuel's driving interest in the Florida Studies Program started with his love of Florida. The love of Florida came very early for him when he became aware that Florida was just one big sand box. As his interest grew in the study of history, he began to understand the value of the rich history that exist in this wonderful state.

When Samuel is not focusing on Florida, he is directing his attention to the youth in the Church of God in Christ. Samuel Davis is also an ordained Elder in the Church of God in Christ. He is the president of the YPWW Union, a youth organization that promotes religious training and education.

Peter Golenbock

Peter Golenbock, one of the nation's best-known sports authors, grew up in Stamford, Connecticut, and graduated from Dartmouth College in 1967 and the New York University School of Law in 1970.  Following his launch, writing about sports for The Daily Dartmouth, Golenbock wrote for The New York Times and The Boston Globe. 

After graduating from law school, Golenbock went into the hotel business for two years providing housing for college students in New York City. While working in the legal department of Prentice-Hall Inc., Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, Golenbock approached Nick D'Incecco, the head of the Prentice-Hall trade book division, who gave Golenbock a contract almost on the spot for a sequel to Graham's Yankee book (1948). 

Since 1975, Golenbock has written some of sports' most important books, including five New York Times best sellers. Some of his best-known books, providing readers a behind-the-scenes look at professional sports, include The Bronx Zoo (1979), BUMS: An Oral History of the Brooklyn Dodgers (1984), Personal Fouls (1988), and Wild, High and Tight (1994).  Golenbock spent the 1989-90 season with the St. Petersburg Pelicans of the senior league, rode the buses and was welcomed into the clubhouse and dugout as he wrote about the joys and hardships of playing baseball on the professional level. 

He also was the color broadcaster for the St. Petersburg Pelicans of the Senior Professional Baseball League in 1989-90 and has been a frequent guest on many of the top television and radio talk shows including Biography on A&E, the Fifty Greatest Athletes and the Dynasties on ESPN, Good Morning America, Larry King Live, and Up Close with Roy Firestone. 

Golenbock's latest book is The Spirit of St. Louis, an oral history of the St. Louis Cardinals and St. Louis Browns.  For further information of Peter Golenbock’s life and accomplishments, please visit his website at GolenbockBooks.com.

Merle Allshouse

Dr. Merle Allshouse, Director until 2002 of the Academy of Professionals at Eckerd College (ASPEC), played a substantial role in the financial management, public affairs, planning, and marketing of the ASPEC program.

Merle earned his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees at Yale University; and later taught at universities across the country from Bloomfield College, in New Jersey to the University of Colorado, in Colorado Springs.  Bloomfield College and Dickinson University awarded Allshouse honorary degrees in 1986 respectively, in Doctor of Education and Doctor of Laws.  He was named one of the “100 Most Effective College and University Presidents in the Nation” by the Exxon Education Foundation. 

Among other associations, Allshouse is a current member of The American Philosophical Association, The Metaphysical Society of America, The University of South Florida, St. Petersburg, College of Business Advisory Board, and The Yale Club of N.Y.C.  Merle Allshouse et al recently co-edited Nature, Truth, and Value: Essays in honor of Frederick P. Ferre, and in 2004 he published Comments on Donald Wayne Viney’s paper, The Metaphsyics of Practicality as a Key to the Practicality of Metaphysics: A Study in Pragmatic Indispensables. 

In 2001, Allshouse published Adult Distance Learning: A New National Priority for the Global Good taking part in the Second International Conference on Technology in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education.  For a complete view of Dr. Merle F. Allshouse’s extensive and impressive curriculum vitae, please visit www.allshouse-associates.com.

Betty Jean Steinshouer

Betty Jean Steinshouer has been one of Florida's most requested scholars and Chautauquans since 1989, when she first toured the state with "Willa Cather Speaks" and was convinced by Floridians to add Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings to her repertoire. 

With an individual scholar's grant from the Florida Humanities Council to aid in the first two years of research, "Notes from Cross Creek" premiered in 1991, and has been touring the state widely ever since.  Other authors with ties to Florida who have been added to the repertoire include Laura Ingalls Wilder, Sarah Orne Jewett, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Marjory Stoneman Douglas. 

The Florida Center for the Book requested in 1999 that Steinshouer develop “On Hemingway:  Three Views” with Cather, Rawlings, and Stein.  That compelling treatise on the Lost Generation has been presented throughout Florida as well as in Hemingway's birthplace of Oak Park, Illinois, and at the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum in Piggott, Arkansas.  With an undergraduate background in Debate and Oratory and graduate studies in English Literature, Steinshouer has received several other research fellowships as well as awards for speaking and writing. 

Her first full-length book of nonfiction, Running South in Agitation, upon which she has been at work since 2000, contains substantial chapters on the Florida journeys of Stowe, Jewett, Wilder, Rawlings, and Douglas, as well as chapters on three authors who are not in her repertoire but who had significant relationships with Florida in the 20th century:  Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elizabeth Bishop, and Anne Morrow Lindbergh.  The book, anticipated for publication in 2007, will be a significant contribution to Florida Studies.

Carol Dameron

Carol Dameron began her formal art education at the Sophie Neucomb College of Tulane University continuing at the Louvre Museum and The Centre Americain in Paris.

Further studies at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Dijon, France and an appointment to the Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam led to four years of landscape and plein air paintings in southern Portugal. Her paintings and drawings are collected in Europe and the United States.

Carol Dameron has been a faculty member for several years at The Arts Center in St. Petersburg, Florida. She is presently working on her new allegorical series, Wake Up Different in the Terrible Mirror Of The Sky. Her abundant commission work includes many portraits, public and private murals and narrative paintings. She maintains a studio at Salt Creek Artworks in St. Petersburg, Florida.  To view her artwork and learn more about Carol Dameron, visit www.caroldameron.com.

Howard Troxler

Howard Troxler was a columnist for the St. Petersburg Times from 1991 to 2011. (Click here to read his farewell colum.) He was the Times' political editor from July 1995 to November 1997, serving as the newspaper's lead reporter on national, state and local politics. Before the Times, Troxler worked for nine years for The Tampa Tribune as a reporter, editor and columnist. He came to Florida in 1982 after working as a reporter for The News and Observer in Raleigh, N.C., and as a magazine writer.

In 2003, Troxler won first place in the serious commentary category of the Green Eyeshade (southeastern U.S.) competition sponsored by the Atlanta SPJ chapter, after being a finalist twice before. He is a three-time winner of first place for column-writing in the annual competition of the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. He has twice been a national finalist in the annual competition of the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

Troxler was born March 19, 1959, in Burlington, N.C., where he grew up and attended public school. He has a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master's degree in ancient history from the University of South Florida in Tampa. In 2010, Troxler taught Florida Government & Politics at USF St. Petersburg.

Bob Devin Jones

Bob Devin Jones, a native of Los Angeles, has been a Theatre Worker for over twenty-five years. He began as an actor performing in Shakespeare Festivals which have included the Oregon, Berkeley, Illinois, Idaho, and American Stage's Shakespeare in the Park. A graduate of Loyola Marymount University, He also attended the American Conservatory in San Francisco, as well as a one year tutorial at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, England.
For the past fourteen years he has worked in the Theatre primarily as a Playwright and as a Director. As a writer he has received play commissions from Theaters across the country which include, "Miss Julia," for American Stage, "the Manhattan Casino," and "I Got 'Em" for Live Arts, "Clarissa Street Reunion" for the Geva Theatre in Rochester, New York, and the "Millennium Monologues" for the Sacramento Theatre Company.

This past summer Bob's newest play, "Further Down the Road" inspired by the Florida Highwaymen painters; had it's debut at Studio 620. Bob’s first play "Uncle Bends a home-cooked negro narrative" was developed at the New Works Festival at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angles.

He has performed "Bends" at the Cork Arts Festival in Ireland, the New York Theatre Workshop, American Stage, and the Piccolo Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina. His directing assignments include "The Black Nativity" and “Smokey Joe's Café” at the Palladium Theater, the West cost premieres of "Dinah Was" in Los Angeles, and "On the Hills of Black America" in San Francisco, and the theatrical world premiere of "Tommy J and Sally" for Woolly Mammoth, among others.  For the past eight seasons Bob has been resident director for the Low Country Shakespeare Festival in Beaufort South Carolina.

He has been a resident of St. Petersburg since 1997, participating in many educational and cultural organizations. He's on the boards of the Art Center, Creative Clay, and First Night. A recipient of numerous awards and grants; the Weekly Planet Best of the Bay: Directing 2001, Playwright 2002, New Gallery (Studio @ 620) 2005, Bank of America 2005 Local Hero Award, Theatre Communication Group (TCG) Artist Collaborative Grant, Los Angeles Cultural Affairs, and Florida Humanities Grant. Bob is Artistic Director of The Studio @ 620, a recently launched creative venue in downtown St. Petersburg.

For further information on the Florida Studies Program please contact:

Florida Studies Program
(727) 873-4872