Divisional news
Faculty books and accolades.

Becker Friedman Institute established

In June, the Milton Friedman Institute for Research in Economics joined with the Becker Center on Chicago Price Theory, founded by Richard O. Ryan, MBA'66. The new entity will be called the Gary Becker Milton Friedman Institute for Research in Economics, and it will continue the work of both former institutes. Read the full announcement on the UChicago News site.

Grossman Institute to support work in biology, neuroscience, and social behavior

This past spring, the University created a new institute to support scholarship at the intersection of quantitative biology, neuroscience, and the study of social and individual behaviors. At present, the Grossman Institute for Quantitative Biology and Human Behavior is a collaborative effort between the Social Sciences Division and the Biological Sciences Division. In the future, it may involve faculty from the physical sciences and the humanities, as well as other parts of the University. The institute is named for University trustee Sanford Grossman, AB'73, AM'74, PhD'75. Grossman is chairman of QFS Asset Management, and he received his advanced degrees from the Department of Economics. Read the full announcement on the UChicago News site. Sociologist Linda Waite, who studies connections among biology, psychology, and the social world, spoke to Dialogo about how the Grossman Institute will further collaborative research. "Humans are biological beings living in a social context," said Waite, the Lucy Flower Professor in Sociology. "So you really can't divorce social behavior from the biological, the physiological, the genetic. For example, there has been very exciting work on debilitating childhood illnesses and how such illnesses affect one's ability to learn later in life. Flipping that around, there has been research on early social deprivation and how that negatively affects later health. Increasingly, we have the theories, the data, and the methods to address these sorts of questions. The Grossman Institute will provide further support for our work, offering additional resources and bringing scholars who are doing this type of sociobiological research to campus. It's very exciting."

Social thought student reflects on Sotomayor

An opinion piece by social thought graduate student John Paul Rollert, AM'09, titled "Justice Sotomayor—Not Guilty of 'Empathy'" appeared in the Christian Science Monitor.

Gender Studies update

This fall, the Center for Gender Studies changed its name to the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. The center also debuted its new website.

New faculty arrive on campus

This autumn, the Social Sciences Division welcomes 13 new faculty members. Anthropology A sociocultural anthropologist, Justin Richland comes to the University from the University of California, Irvine, where he was an associate professor in the Department of Criminology, Law, and Society. Richland holds a JD from the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and a PhD in anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles. His research interests include legal discourse analysis and semiotics, anthropology of law, and contemporary Native American law and politics. Constantine Nakassis received his doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania in 2010 and currently serves as a Mellon Postdoctoral Instructor in the Department of Anthropology. He examines youth culture, mass media, and consumer lifestyles in south India. Nakassis will begin as an assistant professor in the 2012–13 academic year. Comparative Human Development Lindsey Richland earned her PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles, where she also completed a postdoctoral fellowship. Prior to arriving at UChicago, Richland was an assistant professor in the Department of Education at the University of California, Irvine. Richland studies the development of analogical reasoning in young children, most recently focusing on how children learn mathematics. Economics An empirical microeconomist, Alessandra Voena received her PhD from Stanford. She studies labor, development, and family economics, focusing specifically on how divorce laws affect employment and consumption decisions. She will arrive at the University for the 2012–13 academic year. E. Glen Weyl is an applied microeconomic theorist who works on industrial organization. He received his PhD from Princeton and joins the University from the Society of Fellows at Harvard. History Amy Lippert earned her doctorate in history from the University of California, Berkeley. She researches the cultural and social history of 19th-century America, focusing on visual imagery and problems of perception. Before arriving at the University, Lippert taught for a year at Colby College and then held a postdoctoral fellowship at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Political Science Michael Albertus studies the impact of redistributive government policies in Latin America. He is finishing his PhD at Stanford, where he currently holds a postdoctoral fellowship. Albertus will arrive at the University for the 2012–13 academic year. Iza Hussin held an assistant professorship at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and prior to that appointment was a visiting fellow in Harvard University Law School's Islamic Legal Studies Program. She examines how religious self-understanding, indigenous elite formation, and colonial strategies for rule shaped the development of law and state structures in colonial and postcolonial Egypt, India, and Malaysia. Tianna Paschel will serve as a term instructor for the 2011–12 academic year and become a Neubauer Family Assistant Professor next July. She comes to UChicago from the University of California, Berkeley, Department of Sociology, where she completed her PhD in July. Paschel's dissertation examined the role of black social movements in the recent adoption of ethnoracial policies in Colombia and Brazil. Psychology A neuropsychologist, Sarah London studies language acquisition in male zebra finches. Her work focuses on identifying the genes that support song learning. She earned her PhD from the Department of Integrative Biology and Physiology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and then worked as a research scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Social Thought Before becoming an associate professor in the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought, philosopher Irad Kimhi served as an assistant professor of philosophy at Yale and as a visiting professor in the Committee. He has also studied and taught at Tel Aviv University and served as visiting professor in UChicago's Department of Germanic Studies. Sociology Kathleen Cagney joined the University's Department of Health Studies in 1999 as assistant professor. She received her PhD from the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health. Since 2008 she has directed UChicago's Population Research Center, and she is codirector of the Center on Aging. Her research focuses on the social context and demography of health, and her most recent work assesses how social environment influences aging. Michal Engelman is a demographer and gerontologist studying the dynamics of population aging and the determinants of longevity and well-being at older ages. She joins the Division following a postdoctoral fellowship at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, where she earned her PhD.

Musical chairs

This fall, the Division welcomes two new departmental chairs. In sociology, Mario Small follows Kazuo Yamaguchi. Small joined the faculty in 2006, and he is the author of Unanticipated Gains: Origins of Network Inequality in Everyday Life. His research interests include urban poverty, inequality, culture, networks, case study methods, and higher education. Last spring, Small teamed with other social scientists to create the Chicago Urban Network. In addition to developing annual conferences, the network maintains a website called the Urban Portal. The portal gives researchers, practitioners, journalists, and the general public access to research and resources on urban social science. In history, Bruce Cumings resumes his service as chair after a one-year leave of absence. Kathleen Conzen served as interim chair for the 2010–11 academic year. Cumings studies modern Korean history, 20th-century international history, US-East Asian relations, East Asian political economy, and American foreign relations. His first book, The Origins of the Korean War, won the John King Fairbank Book Award of the American Historical Association, and the second volume of the study won the Quincy Wright Book Award of the International Studies Association.

Happy holidays: Publications to ponder

For the past two years, alumni and friends have received a holiday card with book suggestions from Dean Mark Hansen and the chairs of each department. In 2011 we decided to wrap the booklist into Dialogo—our gift to you. The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe's Families after World War II by Tara Zahra (Harvard University Press, 2011)—Recommended by Mark Hansen. The Monkey and the Inkpot: Natural History and Its Transformations in Early Modern China by Carla Nappi (Harvard University Press, 2009)—Recommended by Judith Farquhar: "This is a scholarly book on an esoteric subject, which nevertheless brings a whole natural worldview to life. The writing is marvelously graceful and the intrinsic excitement of a 16th-century Chinese exploration of nature and history is made clear on every page." Sex and Salvation: Imagining the Future in Madagascar by Jennifer Cole (University of Chicago Press, 2010)—Recommended by John Lucy The Conquest of American Inflation by Thomas J. Sargent (Princeton University Press, 2001)—Recommended by Harald Uhlig The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America by Hugh Wilford (Harvard University Press, 2009)—Recommended by Bruce Cumings: "A fascinating book on the CIA's many attempts to establish anticommunist "front groups" in various walks of American life—literary circles, students (the famous one being the National Student Association), Hollywood, academe. I've read many other books about the CIA, but this is one of the very best." Not in Our Lifetimes: The Future of Black Politics by Michael Dawson (University of Chicago Press, 2011)—Recommended by Bernard Harcourt The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom by Jonathan Haidt (Basic Books, 2006)—Recommended by Susan Levine The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell (Harper Collins, 2009)—Recommended by Robert Pippin: "The most amazing and wrenching novel about the Germans and World War II I have ever read. Should come with a warning: may make head explode." Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character by Claude S. Fischer (University of Chicago Press, 2010)—Recommended by Mario Small  

 

New books

Zahra publishes The Lost Children

Last May, Tara Zahra, associate professor of East European history, published The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe's Families after World War II (Harvard University Press, 2011). The Lost Children tells the story of Europe's displaced and refugee children in Eastern and Western Europe from 1918 to 1951. Focusing on national and international activism around children following World War II, the book explores how the reconstruction of families was linked to the development of new ideals of family, human rights, and democracy in postfascist Europe. Also last spring, Zahra was tenured in the Department of History.

Dawson debuts Not in Our Lifetimes

In November, Michael Dawson, the John D. MacArthur Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science, published Not in Our Lifetimes: The Future of Black Politics (University of Chicago Press). In Not in Our Lifetimes, Dawson argues that, despite talk about a new postracial America, the fundamental realities of American racism—and the problems facing black political movements—have not changed. He describes a persistence of racial inequality and structural disadvantages, and ways that white and blacks continue to see the same problems through different, race-inflected lenses.

Lear's Case for Irony

In October, Jonathan Lear, John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor of Social Thought and Philosophy, published A Case for Irony (Harvard University Press). In his book, Lear argues that it is impossible to have a genuinely human life without irony. He claims that human feelings and desires tend toward order, a structure that irony shakes people into seeing.  

Awards

Sargent receives Nobel Prize

Thomas Sargent, a distinguished fellow at the Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics, received the 2011 Nobel Prize in Economics. Sargent is the William R. Berkley Professor of Economics and Business at New York University and served as a faculty member at UChicago from 1992 to 1998.  

Research

Hirschhorn profiled on Haaretz

The research of history doctoral candidate Sara Hirschhorn, AM'05, was featured on Haaretz.com. Hirschhorn's dissertation presents the first known attempt to draw a comprehensive demographic profile of Americans within the Israeli settlement movement.