Neubauer Family Collegium for Culture and Society

This summer the University announced plans for the Neubauer Family Collegium for Culture and Society, a destination for visiting scholars in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. At the center, founded with a $26.5 million gift from Joseph, MBA’65, and Jeanette Lerman-Neubauer, scholars will explore questions that transcend any single field or methodology.  

New faculty

This year the Social Sciences Division welcomed seven new faculty members. Anthropology  Archaeologist Alice Yao, AB’99, studies China, examining the Han Empire’s conquest of frontier regions and how different communities and social classes respond to momentous changes in local history. Before joining the University as an assistant professor of anthropology, Yao was an assistant professor at the University of Toronto. History Kenneth Pomeranz, a leading scholar of modern China, joined the faculty as University Professor of History. Previously a distinguished professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, Pomeranz researches the reciprocal influences of state, society, and economy in late imperial and 20th-century China; the origins of the world economy; and comparative studies of labor, family organization, and economic change in Europe and East Asia. His work contributes to the intellectual life of the Center in Beijing. Read Dialogo’s profile of Pomeranz.  Psychology Greg Norman joined the faculty as an assistant professor of psychology with a secondary appointment in psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience. After receiving his PhD from Ohio State University, Norman continued his research in social neuroscience at UChicago, working as a postdoctoral research scholar in the laboratory of psychologist John Cacioppo. In addition to social neuroscience, Norman does research on psychophysiology, behavioral endocrinology, and behavioral genetics. Political Science  Benjamin Lessing, who joins UChicago as an assistant professor in 2013, studies the intersection of criminal violence and state consolidation in Latin America. As a field researcher, he has studied drug-war-related violence in Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil. His work combines qualitative methods with formal modeling and focuses on internal strife among noninsurgent groups such as drug cartels, prison gangs, and paramilitaries. Lessing earned his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and is now a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford. A PhD candidate in political science and African American studies at Yale, Brandon Terry will join the UChicago faculty in July 2014 as an assistant professor, after two academic years at Harvard as a junior fellow in the Program of Prize Fellowships in Economics, History, and Politics. His academic interests include black intellectual and political thought; contemporary political theory; 19th- and 20th-century US history; the philosophy of race and racism; poverty, crime, and incarceration in political and social theory; and the aesthetics and sociology of hip-hop culture. Social Thought Poet Rosanna Warren has been named the Hanna Holborn Gray Distinguished Service Professor in the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought and the College. The former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Warren’s works include Stained Glass (Norton, 2003), winner of the Lamont Award from the Academy of American Poets, and most recently Ghost in a Red Hat (Norton, 2011). Her research interests include translation, literary biography, literature and the visual arts, and the relationship between classical and modern literature. Sociology  Forrest Stuart, assistant professor of sociology, focuses on sociological and criminological theory, including how authorities attempt to control marginal social groups and how those groups counteract and resist such efforts. His current project is an ethnography of Los Angeles’s skid row. Stuart earned a PhD and master’s from the University of California, Los Angeles; he also holds a degree in justice, law, and society from American University.  

Musical chairs

The Division has named four new departmental chairs. In sociology, Elisabeth Clemens, AM’85, PhD’90, replaces Mario Small, who became dean of the Division on July 1. Clemens served as SSD collegiate master from 2008 to 2011. Her theoretical interests concern processes of institutional change. Her empirical work ranges from historical transformations in US political participation to the changing roles of nonprofits, firms, and political agencies in systems of governance. In economics, John List follows Harald Uhlig. List develops economic theory and experimental methods, in addition to conducting field experiments. He has researched pricing behavior, market structure, environmental regulation, and incentives for education, weight loss, and philanthropy. In 2010 List and UChicago colleague Steven Levitt teamed with Harvard’s Roland Fryer on a field study in Chicago Heights schools that tests financial-incentive strategies for improving academic performance. In anthropology, Alan Kolata takes on the role previously held by Judith Farquhar, AM’75, AM’79, PhD’86. Kolata leads interdisciplinary research projects studying human-environment interactions over the past 3,000 years in the Lake Titicaca basin of Bolivia, on the north coast of Peru, and most recently in Thailand and Cambodia. His research interests also include comparative work on agroecological systems; the human dimension of global change, agricultural, and rural development; and archaeology and ethnohistory, particularly in the Andean region. In comparative human development, Richard Taub follows John Lucy, PhD’87. Taub studies urban, rural, and community economic development; the nature of entrepreneurship; public policy focusing on the implementation and organization of policy initiatives; evaluation of social programs; and the sociology of India. He is currently studying how neighborhood contexts shape aspiration.   

Books

Matthew M. Briones, Jim and Jap Crow: A Cultural History of 1940s Interracial America

An assistant professor of American history, Matthew Briones published Jim and Jap Crow: A Cultural History of 1940s Interracial America (Princeton, 2012). The book examines the life and diaries of Charles Kikuchi, a Japanese American sent to an internment camp following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and then drafted into the Army on the eve of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Through Kikuchi’s life story, Briones looks at a watershed era in American race relations, exposing what he considers both the promise and hypocrisy of American democracy.

Moishe Postone, South Atlantic Quarterly Special Issue: “Perspectives on the Global Crisis”

Moishe Postone, the Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of History, served as editor of a special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly (Spring 2012). Called “Perspectives on the Global Crisis,” the issue examines the economic crisis, encompassing economic, social, and cultural dimensions of contemporary life. (Issue page) (Full text of issue)

Bernard Wasserstein, On the Eve: The Jews of Europe before the Second World War

European Jews faced an “impossible dilemma” in the 1930s, Chicago historian Bernard Wasserstein writes in On the Eve: The Jews of Europe before the Second World War (Simon & Schuster, 2012). An intimate study that focuses on individual Jews, their communities, and institutions—as opposed to their oppressors—On the Eve argues that acceptance and success in the 1920s sparked jealous hostility across Europe. In response, many Jews tried harder to disguise distinctive traits, diminishing the importance of religious and cultural practices. The loss of those traditions diminished Jewish identity, Wasserstein writes, but not the racist resentment that left them “wholly defenseless, largely friendless, and more and more hopeless” as World War II loomed.

J. Eric Oliver, Local Elections and the Politics of Small-Scale Democracy

Professor of political science J. Eric Oliver published Local Elections and the Politics of Small-Scale Democracy with Shang E. Ha and Zachary Callen (Princeton University Press, 2012). Examining the “managerial democracies” of local elections, the book offers an analysis of the electoral politics in America’s municipalities.

Robert Pippin, Fatalism in American Film Noir: Some Cinematic Philosophy and Introductions to Nietzsche

Robert B. Pippin, the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the John U. Nef Committee of Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy, and the College, published two books this spring. Fatalism in American Film Noir: Some Cinematic Philosophy (University of Virginia Press, February 2012) stemmed from Pippin’s 2010 Page-Barbour lectures at the University of Virginia. Through close readings of three genre classics—Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street, Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai, and Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past—Pippin argues that the works show the declining credibility of individual agency. Pippin also edited Introductions to Nietzsche, which brings together 11 pieces on Nietzsche’s major works.