R. Scott Moore, professor of history at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, has been selected as the 2019–20 Distinguished University Professor at IUP.
About R. Scott Moore
"Dr. Moore is outstanding on all fronts," IUP President Michael Driscoll said. "He's an internationally known researcher, has made substantial contributions in leadership roles for important university initiatives including co-chairing the University Planning Council and the Council of Chairs, and is an exemplary teacher-scholar, routinely involving undergraduates and graduates in cutting-edge research and technology. The Distinguished University Professor honor is well-deserved."
Moore joined the IUP community in 2002 as an assistant professor. He was promoted to the rank of professor in 2011 and currently serves as chair of his department.
"To be recognized with this award, when there are so many deserving faculty members at IUP, is more than a little humbling," Moore said.
Moore's roles as Hellenistic and Roman ceramicist for six classical archaeology projects and as director of the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project in Cyprus has resulted in international recognition in his field.
Due to Moore's successful prior work on the island, the Cypriot Department of Antiquities awarded him the archaeological project 16 years ago, one of the highest honors for an archaeologist working on Cyprus.
As director, he manages all scholarly, physical, and financial elements, including securing government permits, arranging logistics, securing grants, supervising all work, and scholarly production. As the project's lead ceramicist and historian, the historical interpretation of archaeological evidence is his responsibility, and each year the project continues to yield significant findings.
"The ultimate goal for a classical archaeologist is directing one's own archaeological project," Moore said. "Being granted a permit for archaeological work on Cyprus is a major career accomplishment since the Cypriot government views archaeological sites as national treasures and only proven archaeologists are awarded a permit."
He has also been part of a team that developed a new system for the classification of archaeological artifacts, which has been adopted by several other projects in Cyprus, Greece, and Turkey; and he has incorporated technology from other fields and has worked with the American Schools of Oriental Research to explore the possibilities of digitally enriched scholarship.
"When I began work on my archaeological project in Cyprus in 2002, I made a conscious effort to involve IUP students during the fieldwork phase of the project, providing them with invaluable hands-on archeological and technological experience," Moore said.
To date, 23 undergraduate and six graduate students from IUP departments of Anthropology, History, and Geography and Regional Planning have participated in his fieldwork program. He secured two collaborative National Science Foundation Major Research Instrumentation grants and six IUP Academic Computing Policy Advisory Committee Technological Exploration and Innovation Grants, which provided IUP students with valuable hands-on experience using the most current technological equipment in the field, such as differential GPS, ground penetrating radar, 3D scanning, and aerial photography.
He also worked to secure Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education Faculty Professional Development Council grants to help cover student airfare and lodging expenses, which enabled him to provide the professional field experience to a number of bright, but financially needy, students.
Moore has a robust history of scholarship with three books, 38 articles or chapters, and numerous encyclopedia entries, book reviews, international and national conference papers, with more than $1 million in external grants and over $90,000 in internal grants during his tenure.
He is an integral part of many initiatives for IUP, serving in many university leadership positions. He was recognized with the University Senate Distinguished Service Award in 2018.
He has served as chair of the University-Wide Promotion Committee; cochair, University-Wide Graduate Committee; cochair, University Planning Council; cochair, Council of Chairs; chair, College Technology Committee; and cochair, Academic Computing Policy Advisory Committee. He has been active in service to the Cook Honors College, including serving on the director and assistant director search committees.
In the area of teaching, Moore has taught 33 different courses, developed seven new courses, directed 10 honors theses and three master's degree theses, and served on two anthropology master's degree theses based on his Cypriot archaeology project.
"The values of student research, collaboration, technology, and long-term commitment, which guide me in my field research, have also been core to my teaching and service at IUP," Moore said.
"In the classroom, I have worked hard to design new courses in ancient history, classical archaeology, and digital history, and to continuously update existing courses in ways that allowed me to share the latest developments in research and technology with my students and colleagues.
"Including IUP students in the fieldwork has been a broadening experience for IUP students, as they have the opportunity to interact with students from a wide variety of universities around the world, including the United States, Europe, and Canada," Moore said.
Moore describes himself as a "firm believer in the teacher-scholar model," and works to ensure that his research, teaching, and service are integrated and complementary.
He has been a leader in integrating technology into the curriculum, using his research and scholarship as a base for that work. For example, in 2007, Moore and anthropology faculty member Beverly Chiarulli received an IUP Academic Innovation and Excellence Award for developing "Archaeology Island" in Second Life (an online virtual world) that allowed students in Moore and Chiarulli's courses to virtually explore her work in Belize and Moore's work in Cyprus.
In 2005, he successfully wrote an internal IUP grant for the creation of a Digital History Lab with computers, scanners, video capture equipment, printers, and software to facilitate the training of history students in digital skills. That early digital lab has grown into the Irwin Marcus Public History Lab (housed in the History Department); Moore raised funds to equip the lab with the latest technology for training students for public history fields.
"Public history is a field that has grown in recent years and is poised for continued growth and important opportunities as digital learning expands," Moore said.
To support the development of students' digital history skills, he created two new courses and designed a certificate in Digital History, which the History Department began offering in spring 2016.
The public history program now provides students with skills that help them secure public history internships; admission to graduate programs in fields like digital history, public history, digital information technology, and related fields; and jobs in areas such as instructional design, library management, and curriculum development.
His work, in collaboration with his departmental colleagues, has helped position IUP's History Department ahead of most other undergraduate programs in the field of public history. They have just started work on a multi-year, interdisciplinary public history project (Digital Indiana) that will incorporate both undergraduate and faculty research on the history of Indiana.
During his tenure as Distinguished University Professor, Moore will design and create a more detailed model of how trade and commerce functioned in Cyprus during the time of the Roman Empire. This will shed light on how economic connections across the region functioned during that time.
He will devote time to completing two major components to this project: writing and publishing a monograph on circulation of Late Roman ceramics on Cyprus that focuses on the connections between villages and towns, both Cypriot and those in the eastern Mediterranean basin trading with Cyprus; and the creation of a publicly available website that will visually illustrate the model by showing these trading connections over time.
This research will permit a more nuanced model of how trade and commerce functioned on Cyprus, and it will also result in a fundamental reassessment of the nature of trade in the eastern Mediterranean in Late Antiquity. Using Cyprus as a model will provide a blueprint for better insight into how trade functioned in other provinces in the eastern Mediterranean in the Roman Empire. This insight into connectivity will also provide an important new foundation for those interested in understanding how the Roman Empire was able to oversee a far-flung empire comprised of so many differing elements.