Professor Foster's Office Hours - The Professor's Bio

Mark A. Foster, Ph.D., is a traditional, not a metrosexual, Renaissance man. He has been engaged in ventriloquism since he was six years old, after watching The Paul Winchell Show on ABC in the early 1960s (not the later, and syndicated, Winchell Mahoney Time in 1965), and has extensive performance experience in a variety of media. Currently, he has numerous figures (including Dusty Would, by Jack Coats, and Sandy Would, by an unknown designer), a talking cane (Sassafras "Sassy" Twigg III, by Col. Bill Boley), and several puppets. You may also view his Yahoo! ventriloquism profile and listen to the act's original theme song from way back when.
He completed several years of theatrical coaching at Hal and Ruth Persons' prestigious Theatre Academy (Queens, New York City), an offshoot of Lee Strasberg's Little Theatre, and at various other drama schools.
He is a full-time, tenured (full) Professor of Sociology at Johnson County Community College. Located in the Kansas City bedroom community of Overland Park, Kansas, it is one of the top-ranked two-year higher educational institutions in the United States.
He has both a Doctor of Philosophy and a Master of Arts in sociology. His primary research area is in religious studies. He is a radical sociologist of religions.
Macro to Micro, a new sociology text he cowrote and coedited, has been published by Kendall Hunt.
He was the first faculty member in the Johnson County Community College Liberal Arts Division to teach courses over the Internet, which he continues to the present time. He also developed that college's academic ranking system. Previously, he served as chair of two academic departments.
He is a degreed journalist with a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism and an Associate in Arts in English. Between his positions at three radio stations, he was news writer, newscaster, reporter, and producer. He also published the Middle Georgia edition of Builder/Architect Magazine. These days, however, as an opinion journalist and a web publisher, he maintains the SocioSphere webzine and eleven other websites.
He has received numerous certifications and trainings in humanistic counseling, stress management, genogramming, neurolinguistic programming, child abuse treatment, whole brain communication, hatha yoga, human resource development, and in several techniques of meditation.
Professionally, in addition to serving on the board of directors of the Autism Society of the Heartland, I belong to the American Sociological Association (the human rights section and the sociological practice and public sociology section), Sociologists without Borders, the Society for the Study of Social Problems (the mental health section, the social problems theory section, and the disabilities section), the Association for Applied and Clinical Sociology, the New America Foundation, the Association for Religion and Intellectual Life, the Institute for Policy Studies, and the International Society for Textual Reasoning, and he is a signatory to the Earth Charter..
He is the sole owner and web developer of the MarkFoster.NETwork™.
He is a past president of the Kansas Sociological Association (1995).
While a student, he was inducted into lifetime membership in three international honor societies:
1. Phi Theta Kappa (Community College), 1975
2. Phi Alpha Theta (History), 1982
3. Alpha Kappa Delta (Sociology), 1983
He was previously a section leader on three and then two CompuServe forums. He then served as forum manager on America Online.
He was born in the New York City borough of Manhattan and raised in the boroughs of the Bronx (1956-1961) and Queens (1961-1968). He subsequently relocated, with his family, to Long Island, New York (1968-1976). He then lived in Athens, Georgia (1976-1978); White Plains, New York (1978-1979); Long Island, New York (1979-1980); Starkville, Mississippi (1980-1984); Long Island, New York (1984-1985); Wise, Virginia (1985-1989); and Macon, Georgia (1989-1993). He currently resides in Olathe, Kansas (1993-present), a Kansas City suburb.
On a personal note, he was born of Jewish parents (Ashkenazi) and bar mitzvahed. However, he formally converted to the Bahá'í Faith at fourteen-years old.