New Faculty Arrive on Campus

This autumn, the Social Sciences Division welcomed nine new faculty members: Junior hires: Anthropology Michael Fisch received his doctorate in 2008 from Columbia University. He subsequently held adjunct assistant professorships at New York University and Sophia University in Tokyo as well as a postdoctoral fellowship at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard. Fisch studies mass media and technology in Japan's urban areas, focusing on the vast commuter train networks and technologies for Internet communication. Economics  With a focus on applied microeconomics and game theory, Brent Hickman received his PhD in 2010 from the University of Iowa. His dissertation project was a theoretical and empirical investigation of affirmative action policies in U.S. college admissions. After earning his doctorate from Yale in 2010, Richard Van Weelden began a postdoctoral fellowship at the European University Institute in Florence. He studies game theory and political economy, investigating how incentives influence voter behavior, and will arrive at the University for the 2011–12 academic year. History Faith Hillis is a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University's Harriman Institute and will join the Division for the 2011–12 academic year. She received her PhD from Yale and studies late imperial Russia. Political Science Paul Staniland's (AB'04) research combines comparative politics and international relations. Staniland received his PhD in 2010 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is a 2004 graduate of the College. His dissertation examined the variation in military cohesion among insurgent groups. Psychology Kimberly Rios Morrison comes to the Division from Ohio State University, where she taught in the School of Communications. She received her PhD in organizational behavior from Stanford's Graduate School of Business. Morrison studies how people whose views are in the minority express those opinions. Jasmin Cloutier studies the cognitive basis of face perception. After receiving his PhD from Dartmouth in 2008, he held a joint postdoctoral fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Tufts University. Senior hires: Anthropology Kaushik Sundar Rajan, associate professor of anthropology, comes to the Division from UC–Irvine, where he taught for seven years. He received his doctorate in the history and social studies of science and technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and spent a year as an NSF-sponsored postdoctoral fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School. His research focuses on the biotechnology industry, particularly the global industry of genetics-based pharmaceuticals. Psychology Amanda Woodward, the William S. Gray Professor in Psychology and the College, returns to the Department of Psychology, where she taught from 1993 to 2005. Prior to her return, Woodward taught in the University of Maryland's Department of Psychology and Program in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science. With a focus on infant cognition, Woodward studies children's understanding of human actions and how children understand words as conventions. She earned her psychology doctorate from Stanford in 1992, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Cornell.

Musical Chairs

This fall, the Division welcomes two new departmental chairs and one interim chair.  In psychology, Susan Levine follows Howard Nusbaum. Levine joined the UChicago faculty in 1976. Her research examines how variations in home and school input affect the cognitive development of children, including language, spatial, and mathematical skills. She also examines plasticity of language and cognitive skills following early brain injury. In political science, Bernard Harcourt follows Lisa Wedeen. Harcourt arrived at the University in 2003 and holds a joint appointment in the Law School. His scholarship crosses social and political theory, the sociology of punishment, criminal law and procedure, and criminology. In 2009, he was awarded the annual Gordon J. Laing Prize for his book Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing and Punishing in the Actuarial Age (University of Chicago Press, 2006). In history, Kathleen Conzen is serving as interim chair during Bruce Cumings's one-year sabbatical. Conzen's research and teaching focus on the social and political history of the United States in the 19th century, with a special interest in issues of immigration, ethnicity, religion, western settlement, and urban development.

Hansen Receives Endowed Professorship

Lars Hansen was named the David Rockefeller Distinguished Service Professor in Economics, Statistics, and the College. Hansen was formerly the Homer J. Livingston Distinguished Service Professor. His research looks at ways to bridge the gap between dynamic economic theories and data. Hansen's work has led to improved methods for formulating, analyzing, and testing models of dynamic economies.

Strauss Center in the Wall Street Journal

The Leo Strauss Center and its director Nathan Tarcov, profiled in the spring/summer 2009 Dialogo, were also featured in a Wall Street Journal story.

Center Spotlight: Cognitive and Social Neuroscience

Read the online edition of the newsletter of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience.

Unanticipated Gains

The work of sociology professor Mario Small was featured in an October New York Times article about the resurgence of scholarship on how culture and poverty are intertwined.

---

Research

Spotlight on the Greenstone Memorial Fund

The J. David Greenstone Memorial Fund was created in memory of J. David Greenstone, the William Benton Distinguished Service Professor in Political Science. Greenstone's family, colleagues, students, and friends established the permanently endowed fund, which supports the research of social-sciences junior faculty. Norman Nie, professor emeritus in political science and one of the original supporters of the fund, says, "J. David Greenstone was not only an outstanding teacher and scholar in the great Chicago tradition, but was also a tireless mentor of junior faculty and their research. The Greenstone Fund that supports the research of junior faculty is a perfect tribute to J. David who spent so much of his time and energy on the careers, manuscripts, and research of his junior colleagues." Each year, Dean Mark Hansen appoints a committee to review junior-faculty research proposals, and approximately 10 to 12 grants are awarded. This year's recipients are: Paul Cheney (history); Jennifer Cole (comparative human development); Julie Cooper (political science); Rachel Jean-Baptiste (history); Katherine Kinzler (psychology); Cheol-Sung Lee (sociology); William Mazzarella (anthropology); Jong Hee Park (political science); and Betsy Sinclair (political science). Sinclair and Cooper provided Dialogo with brief overviews of their respective projects: Betsy Sinclair: "This year (2010–11) my SSD funding allows me to focus on why individuals make campaign contributions, with a particular emphasis on understanding the role social networks (family, friends, neighbors) play in those decisions. I have collected all the federally recorded donation data from the 10th Congressional District of Illinois and linked this data to the Illinois voter file. I then mailed a survey to 1,000 of the donors in the district asking a series of questions about their contribution choices. "I have two primary findings at this point in the research. First, there is fairly strong evidence that campaign giving is encouraged within social relationships. About 31 percent of the survey respondents indicated that they believed they had successfully influenced others. Giving also appeared to be prevalent within social ties: of the survey respondents, 67 percent indicated that their immediate family members also made contributions, and 66 percent indicated that their friends made contributions. Yet only 26 percent indicated their neighbors contributed and 38 percent that their extended family contributed. Second, individuals are likely to give more money to organizations that are supported by other district residents. Controlling for the total number of contributions by each individual (as some individuals make many contributions), there is an increase of just under $300 in total dollars contributed when comparing the least popular and most popular campaigns in the district."  Julie Cooper: "I received a grant of $2,000 to fund a one-day workshop for the manuscript of my book in progress, Modesty and Dignity in Modern Political Theory. At the workshop, four external scholars (Arash Abizadeh, Dan Garber, Elizabeth Wingrove, and Steven White) will present critiques of the manuscript and suggestions for revision. The workshop will be open to the public, and I expect that faculty and graduate students will attend. Prior to submitting the manuscript to publishers, I will revise it in light of feedback received at the workshop."

---

Awards

Dawdy Receives Milestone Fellowship

Shannon Dawdy, assistant professor of anthropology and the social sciences in the College, was named a 2010 MacArthur Fellow. Dawdy was one of 23 people to receive the award from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The honor includes a $500,000 unrestricted grant, paid over a period of five years, intended as seed money for intellectual, social, and artistic endeavors. Dawdy is the first faculty member with a sole appointment in SSD to receive the award. 

Smith Garners a Guggenheim Award

Adam Smith, associate professor in anthropology and the College, received a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship to continue a book project exploring the role that material objects play in forming political communities. Dialogo caught up with Smith this summer to ask how the project was coming along. "Right now I'm working on a chapter examining the status of objects in several key traditions of political thought," he said. "Typically, we read writers from Rousseau and Locke to Rawls and Habermas with an eye to what they imply for the human relationships that we think central to citizenship. I'm trying to read them archaeologically by bringing forward what kinds of relationships they presume between objects and people. My goal in the chapter is to define the implications of these human-object relationships for a broader understanding of political community."

---

New Books

Beilock Publishes Choke

Sian Beilock, associate professor in the Department of Psychology, published Choke: What the Secrets of the Brian Reveal about Getting it Right When You Have To(Simon & Schuster, Free Press). The book explores the science of why humans tend to blunder when the stakes are high.

Cohen Debuts Democracy Remixed

In her new book, Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics (Oxford University Press), Cathy Cohen argues that many of the assumptions people have about black youth are false stereotypes. Cohen's research included a national representative survey of young people ages 15–25 that included an oversample of black youth. The survey was developed by Cohen's team of graduate and undergraduate researchers and was fielded by the National Opinion Center at the University in 2005. 

Holt's Children of Fire

Thomas Holt published Children of Fire: A History of African Americans (Hill and Wang). The book chronicles the lives of Olaudah Equiano (1745–1797), Richard Allen (1761–1831), Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), and W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963). According to the review in Publisher's Weekly, Holt's portrayal of these four men reveals "a more complex history of African-Americans than the one that simply moves in a linear fashion from slavery to the civil rights movement."

Stansell's The Feminist Promise

Christine Stansell, the Stein-Freiler Distinguished Service Professor in United States History and the College, published The Feminist Promise: 1792 to the Present(Random House/Modern Library). The book traces the history of feminism, accounting for its failures and successes.