Research

Gallo Uses Grant to Explore the Nuances of Memory

Assistant Professor of Psychology David Gallo received a two-year National Institute on Aging grant to conduct research aimed at determining which areas of the brain are engaged in recalling words and images. His research subjects will be divided into two groups—college students and people over 65 years old—and the project will employ functional MRI (fMRI), an imaging modality that tracks neural activity by measuring blood flow and oxygenation levels. “These experiments will advance our understanding of how memory works and how aging compromises it,” said Gallo. “They could also lay the foundation for future studies that could identify markers of age-related diseases, including Alzheimer’s.”   

Department/Center/Faculty news

Pippin Lectures on Fatalism in Film Noir

Robert Pippin, the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor of Social Thought, Philosophy, and in the College, delivered a series of three lecturesanalyzing the philosophic condition of heroes or antiheros in American film noir.

 

Issue Two of the Point Debuts

The fall 2009 Dialogo spotlighted the Point, a magazine founded and edited by three social thought graduate students. The second issue is available in bookstores in major cities throughout the United States and Europe and via online ordering.   

Tenorio-Trillo Named Director of the Center for Latin American Studies

The Center for Latin American Studies welcomed its new director, Professor of History Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, whose work focuses on modern urban and cultural history in Mexico, Spain, the United States, and Latin America. Tenorio assumed the role in January, when Associate Professor of History Dain Borges stepped down after nearly seven years of leading the center.  

Conzen Receives Endowed Professorship

Kathleen Conzen, an expert on the social and political history of the United States in the 19th century, has been named the Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of American History and in the College. Conzen studies immigration, religion, ethnicity, Western settlement, and urban development. She is the author of Germans in Minnesota (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2003) and numerous articles on German immigration to the United States.  

Social Sciences Faculty Named to Leadership Roles at the Center in Beijing

As announced in the fall 2009 Dialogo, in September the University will open the Center in Beijing, a home for Chicago students and researchers working in China. Judith Farquhar and Chinese scholar Lili Lai will use the Center in Beijing as they work on a collaborative project examining China’s state-led systemization of enthnomedicines. Here, they meet with an interviewee in Beijing in 2004. Dali Yang, professor in political science and the College, will serve as the first Center in Beijing faculty director. Yang, a leading scholar of political institutions and political economy in China, chaired the faculty committee that recommended creating the center. He was appointed to a three-year term as founding faculty director by Provost Thomas F. Rosenbaum. “The opportunity to help create a permanent base in China for Chicago scholars is a tremendous honor,” Yang said. “The center will position the University at the forefront of U.S.-China educational exchanges, and I am thrilled to work with faculty from across campus on this exciting venture.” In addition to Yang’s appointment, three social sciences faculty were named to the Center in Beijing steering committee: Gary Becker, University Professor in Economics and Sociology; James Hevia, professor of international history and in the New Collegiate Division; and Judith Farquhar, Max Palevsky Professor of Anthropology and in the College. The steering committee is helping shape the center’s intellectual direction and programming. Dialogo asked Farquhar, an expert on traditional medicine in China, how the Center in Beijing will benefit the University and the Division. “We predict that the center will be useful for University scholars in the biological and physical sciences as well as sociologists, political scientists, historians, literary theorists, art historians, and others who work in different parts of the world, especially America and Europe,” she said. “We hope it will help scholars who thought their research would never be related to China to discover that there’s a lot that they can learn from and contribute to.”  

New Books

Galenson Examines Art Revolutions

David Galenson, professor in economics and the College, published Conceptual Revolutions in Twentieth-Century Art (Cambridge University Press, 2009). Galenson argues that 20th-century visual art is dramatically different from the art of earlier eras because it was created primarily by young conceptual innovators.

Pippin Links Westerns to Philosophy

Robert B. Pippin, the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in Social Thought, Philosophy, and the College, published Hollywood Westerns and American Myth: The Importance of Howard Hawks and John Ford for Political Philosophy. Through close readings of three classic Hollywood Westerns—John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and The Searchers as well as Howard Hawks’s Red River—Pippin explores classical problems in political psychology, including the status and authority of law and the nature of political allegiance.  

Johns Publishes Book on Piracy

Adrian Johns, professor of history and chair of the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science, published Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates. The book explores the intellectual property wars from the advent of print culture in the 15th century to the digital age of the 21st. Jones argues that piracy has long stood at the center of human attempts to reconcile creativity and commerce—and that piracy has been an engine of social, technological, and intellectual innovations as often as it has been their adversary.  

Awards

Lear Receives Mellon Foundation Award

Jonathan Lear, the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor in Social Thought and Philosophy, received a 2009 Distinguished Achievement Award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The awards are intended to highlight the “decisive contributions the humanities make to the nation’s intellectual life.” This year, recipients’ institutions were allotted $1.5 million to support the research efforts of recipients and their collaborators.   

Goldstein and Shimer Named Academy Fellows

Jan Goldstein, the Norman and Edna Freehling Professor in History, and Robert Shimer, the Alvin H. Baum Professor in Economics and the College, were elected members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  

Sonnenschein Honored 

Hugo Sonnenschein, the Adam Smith Distinguished Service Professor of Economics and president emeritus of the University, received the 2009 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Economics, Finance, and Management. He shared the honor with Andreu Mas-Colell, professor of economics at Barcelona’s Pompeu Fabra University. Sonnenschein and Mas-Colell were recognized for their collaborative research that has “changed the way in which economics is taught all over the world.” The jury specifically cited their perfecting of general equilibrium theory and authorship of the modern theory of aggregate demand.