Accolades

Social sciences students lead UChicago Fulbrights

Of the ten UChicago graduate students who won Fulbright-Hays grants in 2012, eight are in the Social Sciences Division. The University leads the nation in the number of Fulbright-Hays awards, given to continue students' dissertation research abroad for six to 12 months, and in total funding, with a combined grant total of $448,899. The US Department of Education awards Fulbright-Hays grants to highlight areas of the world not generally included in standard curricula. UChicago students have been the top recipients of Fulbright-Hays fellowships for more than two decades, except for one year. Among this year's winners is Natalja Czarnecki, AM'12, an anthropology student whose dissertation ("Food-Consumer Encounters: Trust, Uncertainty, and Transition in Post-Socialist Georgia") focuses on citizens of the Republic of Georgia and their food supply. How much they trust their food can be a measure of broader trust in their government and economy, she believes. "The Southern Caucasus are an interesting geopolitical case study, bridging Central Asia and Europe but generally trying to orient themselves toward Europe," Czarnecki says. With the Fulbright-Hays funding, she will work with anthropologists and food-safety experts in Tbilisi for a year. The other seven SSD winners of the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad fellowship are: Erin Glade, AM'04 (History): "We Are Not Enemies of Culture: Literature, Modernization, and the Expansion of American Soft Power in Nasser's Egypt, 1952-67" Patrick Kelly, AM'09 (History): "Transnational Human Rights Advocacy in the Southern Cone in the Long 1970s" Christopher Markiewicz, AM'04, AM'08 (History): "Statesmen and Scholars in the Creation of Empire: Concepts of Ottoman Rulership, 1453-1520" Covell Meyskens, AM'07 (History): "Preparing for a War That Never Happened: Political Economy and Cold War Social Life" Michal Ran-Rubin, AB'05, AM'09 (Anthropology): "The Nature of Citizenship: Cultivating Political Subjects in Israel-Palestine" Travis Warner, AM'09 (Political Science): "The Electoral Connection in the Chinese Countryside: Top-Down Accountability and Rural Governance" Jake Werner, AM'07 (History): "Making Mass Society in Shanghai: Cultural and Economic Transformation among 'The People,' 1949-57"

Chu receives Clifford Geertz Prize

The Society for the Anthropology of Religion awarded its 2012 Clifford Geertz Prize to Cosmologies of Credit: Transnational Mobility and the Politics of Destination in China (Duke University Press, 2010) by Julie Chu, assistant professor of anthropology. In the book Chu provides an account of a woman waiting to be illegally smuggled out of Fuzhou, China. Chu examines the Fuzhounese pursuit of transnational destinations by interpreting the migration of bodies and routes of shipping containers, planes, luggage, immigration papers, and money. Chu, who earned her PhD from New York University in 2004, is a sociocultural anthropologist with interests in mobility and migration, economy and value, ritual life, material culture, media and technology, and state regulatory regimes. Cosmologies of Credit also received the 2011 Sharon Stephens Prize from the American Ethnological Society. Her next writing project is "Infrastructures of Mobility: An Ethnography of Dis/connections in Southern China." Based on three years of fieldwork, largely among Chinese customs inspectors and transnational migrant couriers, this work analyzes border technologies and the infrastructures that manage the flow of people and things between Southern China and the United States.

Alumni Medal for Himmelfarb

On February 22, nearly 80 alumni and guests gathered to honor Gertrude Himmelfarb, AM'44, PhD'50 (History), who received the Alumni Medal, the highest honor given by the University of Chicago Alumni Board of Governors. Himmelfarb, professor emerita at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, is a leading defender of traditional historical methods and practices, as understood through her book The New History and the Old (Harvard University Press, 1987; revised and expanded by Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004). Best known as a historian of Victorian England, she has written on intellectual and social history, as well as on contemporary society and culture. In 2004 former president George W. Bush awarded her the National Humanities Medal. She has also won the Philip Merrill Award for outstanding contributions to liberal arts education and been elected a fellow of the British Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Historical Society, and the Society of American Historians. Himmelfarb was profiled in the Mar-Apr 2013 University of Chicago Magazine, where she discussed how her UChicago education influenced her career. "The rigorous historical scholarship I was initiated into was accompanied by an expansive, interdisciplinary view of history itself," she said. "That, I discovered, was typical of the University as a whole."

Goldstein elected AHA president

Jan Goldstein, the Norman and Edna Freehling Professor of History, is president-elect of the American Historical Association. She will serve a one-year term, succeeding fellow faculty member Kenneth Pomeranz. Goldstein has been involved in the AHA since the 1970s, while a graduate student at Columbia University. She has previously served on the association's nominating committee, as well as on two book-prize committees. Goldstein, who received her doctorate from Columbia in 1988, studies and teaches the history of Europe, especially 18th to 20th-century France and the development of the human sciences. Her 2008 book, The Post-Revolutionary Self (Harvard University Press), examines the period after the French revolution, when the intellectual elite imposed a new educational system to change the prevailing psychology, introducing an active sense of self known as moi to the male bourgeoisie. In 2011 she published Hysteria Complicated by Ecstasy (Princeton University Press), a microhistory of a Savoyard peasant girl whose mysterious psychosomatic symptoms brought her to the medical community's attention in the 1820s. Since 1996 Goldstein has served as an editor of the Journal of Modern History.

Schalliol releases documentary 

In February David Schalliol, AM'04 (Sociology), a doctoral student and photographer, released a short film, The Area, for the Chicago blog Gapers Block, where he is an editor. The Area, the first part of a feature-length documentary, examines a South Side Chicago community displaced by a rail-yard expansion. Chicago magazine's blog described it as "a stunning film, capturing the atmosphere that keeps remaining residents in the neighborhood despite the population decline around them."

Faculty Books

Anti-Judaism and the West

David Nirenberg, the Deborah R. and Edgar D. Jannotta Professor of Social Thought, published Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (Norton, 2013). Nirenberg considers the functions of Jews and Judaism in Western thought, from ancient Egypt to the present, exploring the accompanying rejection of Judaism as an intellectual idea. Nirenberg proposes that certain types of anti-Judaism are so central to Western culture that they have become ingrained. He examines historical varieties of anti-Judaism, using them to create a narrative where he analyzes the full implications of various anti-Jewish texts.

Unemployment and financial markets

Casey B. Mulligan, PhD'93 (Economics), a professor in economics and the College, published The Redistribution Recession: How Labor Market Distortions Contracted The Economy (Oxford University Press, 2012). Mulligan argues that subsidies and regulations enacted to assist the poor were intended to help them endure economic hardships and boost the economy, but they had the unintended consequence of deepening--if not causing--the recession. In the book Mulligan provides evidence to contradict the notion that work incentives stop mattering when interest rates approach zero, and he interprets and explains the interplay between unemployment and financial markets.