Dr. McDaniel is a historian who specializes in Russia and the Soviet Union with particular emphasis on Central Asia. His research, in large part, focuses on migration and the environment in the region of the Kazakh Steppe. Dr. McDaniel’s first major project – now manuscript in progress – is an analysis of the centrality of horses to the convergence of Russian and Soviet state power with both Slavic settler and indigenous Kazakh societies in the Kazakh Steppe. His research was funded primarily by the US Department of State’s Fulbright-Hays Program, allowing him to conduct archival fieldwork in Almaty, Kazakhstan, and St. Petersburg, Russia over the course of the 2017 calendar year.

Dr. McDaniel’s current project, still in its infancy, is an exploration of the Virgin Lands Campaign – Nikita Khrushchev’s ambitious plan to boost agricultural production in the Soviet Union by opening vast tracts of untilled land in the Kazakh Steppe and bordering regions. While the program initiated far-reaching environmental and societal change in Kazakhstan and beyond, relatively few works exist on the period. With the support of CU’s W.P. Bone Research Grant, he conducted preliminary field research in Kazakhstan for the project in the summer of 2023.

Amongst his other hobbies, Dr. McDaniel has a passion for foreign languages and travel. He has lived and traveled in Russia, Central Asia, and beyond and always loves to share his experiences with those wanting to hear more.

In January 2023, Dr. McDaniel was fortunate enough to travel to Riga, Latvia with students from across the country participating in the US Department of State’s National Security Language Initiative for Youth. At CU, he has helped initiate a travel abroad group which has two separate trips to Europe planned for the 2023-24 scholastic year.

Dr. McDaniel regularly teaches lower-division survey courses on Western Civilization (1715-Present) and World Civilization (1500-Present), and upper division courses on the Soviet Union, Central Asian History, and Comparative Empire, a course most recently focused on contextualizing Russian and the US expansion.

His research publications include: “Our Greatest Riches’: Horses at the Intersection of Settler and Kazakh Society in the Late Imperial Period.” Journal of Migration History 3 (2017): 210-228.

Manuscript: “Equine Empire: Horses and Power on the Kazakh Steppe, 1880s- 1920s.” (In Progress).

Dr. McDaniel’s awards include: Cumberland University- W.P. Bone Research Grant. 2023, Dissertation Completion Fellowship – Michigan State University – Dissertation Completion Fellowship, 2019, Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Grant (for fieldwork in Russia and Kazakhstan. 2017), and University of Illinois – Summer Research Lab Fisher Research Fellowship, 2015.

“Doc” Menefee joined the faculty in 1996 as Professor of Theatre and Speech. He has served as Director of Theatre at several universities and has directed more than a hundred university and community theatre productions. He has written and published several articles in regional and national theatre journals, as well as serving as editor for Theatre Southwest, a regional theatre journal.  Dr. Menefee has also completed his own translation and adaptation of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King from the original Greek which was produced as a main stage production at Cumberland. 

Dr. Menefee is an avid reader with wide-ranging interests from the classical to contemporary novels.  He particularly enjoys novels of other cultures, sci-fi, and western fiction.  Two of his favorite novels are The Count of Monte Cristo and Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. His personal study regularly involves reading from the Greek New Testament and the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament).

An accomplished speaker, Dr. Menefee has taught thousands of students in basic communication courses, and has taught courses in Linguistics, public speaking, oral interpretation, speech for the elementary school teacher, and presently teaches voice and articulation for theatre which focuses on dialect problems, stage speech, phonetics (IPA), and the British dialect.

Kerry Ann Moore joined Cumberland University in the fall of 2015, and she teaches Creative Writing and English courses in the School of Humanities Education and the Arts. Mrs. Moore specializes in teaching the writing and reading of Creative Nonfiction and Fiction. Before coming to Cumberland, she studied and taught courses at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Mrs. Moore holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and a Master of Arts in English. Her writing earned a prestigious fellowship from the University of Minnesota, various graduate assistantships and arts grants, and publication in a longstanding, reputable literary journal. She participated in several writers’ conferences and workshops with award-winning authors from around the world.

Dr. Tara Mitchell Mielnik began teaching history courses at Cumberland University, first as an adjunct in 2013, and then as full-time faculty in 2017.  Her areas of emphasis include Public History and 20th century American History, with specific research interests in the built environment, the homefront in World War I, and the Depression and New Deal.  Courses that she offers at Cumberland include Emergence of Modern America; Environmental History; Introduction to Public History; Museum Studies; American Crime and American Sports History, among others. Dr. Mielnik began serving as Program Director in History in 2020.

Prior to coming to Cumberland, Dr. Mielnik was a historic preservation specialist with the Metropolitan Nashville Davidson County Historical Commission for fifteen years and served previously at the Tennessee Historical Commission and the South Carolina Department of Archives and History.  She currently serves on the Tennessee State Review Board for the National Register of Historic Places. 

Dr. Mielnik combined work in historic preservation, New Deal history, and environmental history with her book, New Deal, New Landscape: The Civilian Conservation Corps in South Carolina State Parks (University of South Carolina Press), and is a contributor in Tennessee’s Experience in World War I (University of Tennessee Press), and the Tennessee Encyclopedia.

Dr. Mielnik is a frequent invited presenter to local historical groups as well as at regional and national conferences.  In her classes, she strives to connect local historic events and buildings to larger national historical themes, and to connect to history to other disciplines.  She serves as the faculty advisor for Pi Gamma Mu, the social science honor society, and is active in the campus chapters of Phi Alpha Theta and Omicron Delta Kappa.

Dr. Jenny Mason is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Cumberland University’s Dean of the Millard and J.J. Oakley School of Humanities, Education and the Arts. Dr. Mason began at Cumberland in the fall of 2014 where her teaching responsibilities have included undergraduate courses in developmental psychology, abnormal psychology, statistics for the behavioral sciences, and research methods in psychology, as well as graduate statistics courses in other programs at the university. She served as Assistant Dean for one semester and then Interim Dean for one year before being selected to her current position. Prior to arriving at Cumberland, she taught as an Adjunct Professor at Lipscomb and Belmont Universities, was a Research and Corporate Consultant across the state, and a Clinical Therapist working in both individual and group settings with a concentration on aggression and sexual violence.

A Nashville native, Dr. Mason graduated from St. Cecilia Academy and went on to attend college at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky. In search for more research opportunities, she transferred to the University of Tennessee, Knoxville her junior year, where she graduated with a Bachelor’s of Science degree in Psychology. Following graduation from Auburn University with her Master’s degree in Community/Agency Psychology, Dr. Mason worked for two years as a Child Therapist before returning to school to obtain her doctoral degree in Experimental Psychology from the University of Southern Mississippi, taking nearly the full course load required for doctoral degrees in both Counseling Psychology and Experimental Psychology.

Research experiences for Dr. Mason included assisting parents of diabetic children to better understand medication and nutrition regimes in managing Type I Diabetes, developmental-based parenting training for parents of children ages 2 to 6, determining levels of change agency and diversity valuing in college students, and assessing the characteristics of those who most effectively challenge workplace bullying in order to provide useful training opportunities for new hires in a business or academic setting.