Dialogo

Spring–Summer/17

What do Mexico City, Platonic magic, and Yiddish epic poetry have in common?

When you walk into the exhibit Tensions in Renaissance Cities, the first display case you see is on Mexico City.

At the time Mexico City was known as the “Rome and Athens of the New World,” according to postdoctoral fellow Stuart McManus, who curated the Mexico City case.

“It’s meant to surprise people,” says Ada Palmer, assistant professor of history. During the colonial period, “Latin humanism and excitement about antiquity,” as she describes the Renaissance, spread as far as the New World and Japan. In Spanish-controlled Central America, Jesuit schools taught students Latin. The students then wrote Latin orations celebrating Central American antiquity: “The language of power for colonial oppressors is also a language of power for colonized peoples,” she says.

The exhibit, which runs through June 9, coincides with the annual conference of the Renaissance Society of America, held in Chicago this year. Palmer invited graduate students in a range of disciplines—history, art history, English, the Committee on Social Thought, Middle Eastern studies, Romance languages, history of science—to participate. Fifteen grad students contributed, including Stuart McManus, a postdoc at the Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge, who curated the Mexico City case.

While Florence wavered between the secular and the sacred, the small city-state identified with David, the boy who defeated a giant. This modern terra cotta bust is a copy of the 15th-century bronze sculpture by Florentine artist Vercocchio.

Palmer originally suggested an exhibit showcasing Renaissance treasures of the library; her cocurators, Hilary Barker, AM’16, and Margo Weitzman, AM’15, came up with the theme of cities. As well as Mexico City, the exhibit looks at Florence, Rome, Venice, Constantinople, London, Geneva, Paris, and Nuremberg. Its curators borrowed a number of Renaissance sculptures and paintings from the Smart Museum of Art, in addition to Special Collections’ holdings.

Another surprise of the exhibit is that it portrays the Renaissance as dangerous, even desperate. The Renaissance is “a period we romanticize,” says Palmer. “Our Renaissance is cathedrals and Raphaels and Michelangelos. And that’s all true, but the average life expectancy in Renaissance Florence was 18”—far below what it was in the so-called Dark Ages. There was more disease, more war, more urban violence: “The actual lived experience was much worse.” So the obsession with classical antiquity during the Renaissance was driven, says Palmer, by a longing for “an impossible golden age of peace—a time when a traveler could go from England to Turkey on safe roads.”

The largest section of the exhibit focuses on Florence and Rome—the tensions within and between them. The two cities “are both the birthplace and the cultural capital of this obsession with Roman antiquity,” says Palmer.

As cities across Europe and beyond attempted to define themselves as the “new Rome,” Rome itself struggled. Population is a useful lens here, Palmer says. During the Renaissance there were five major cities: Milan, Florence, and Naples with 100,000 people each; Paris with 250,000; and Constantinople (before it was conquered and decimated by the Turks) with 500,000.

The exhibit contrasts the lesser-known violence and disease of the period with its artistic and scientific advances. A 17th-century work by Venetian astronomer Giovanni Paolo Gallucci, for example, showed astronomical rituals, or wheels used as nautical navigational tools.

Rome had just 20,000 people, living in a city built for one million. Its population had never recovered from the sack of Rome in 410 AD and the Justinian plague a century later. “It’s a hollow doughnut city,” says Palmer, “with sheep grazing in the Forum and a small population clustered at the edges, around the Vatican and other Christian pilgrim sites.” Rome was now a cultural and economic backwater, and yet remained “absolutely giant politically,” with a pope who could disrupt politics anywhere in Europe. Rome wanted to celebrate its ancient greatness, but that pagan legacy clashed with its newer claim as the capital of Christianity. “It’s a very tense city identity.”

Nearby Florence had a flourishing economy, trade contacts all over Europe, and was the birthplace of the classical revival. But was it trying to be the new Rome or the new Athens? Florence was home to Girolamo Savonarola, a preacher who prophesied that Florence was God’s chosen city, where the church would be reformed against Roman corruption. It was also home to Marsilio Ficino, who conducted Platonic magic experiments, of which the church took a dim view. “There’s a deep tension there,” says Palmer. “How can Florence have these two identities at once?”

One entire display case in the exhibit is dedicated to magic and the occult in Florence—including books on magic with marginalia added by the people who attempted to use them. Another case features volvelles, paper constructions with moveable parts, which could be used to show the movement of the planets, for example.

Yet another case is on pasquinades, anonymous satirical poetry about the pope or the government, which was stuck to the ancient Roman statue of Pasquino, aping handwritten newsletters issued by the papacy that were posted in the same square. “To this day people still do it,” says Palmer. “It was the premodern version of Twitter.” In the catalog for the exhibit, a selection of these short poems is laid out like a Twitter feed.

There’s a case on Jewish humanist scholar Elia Levita, who wrote Yiddish epic poetry as well as scholarly work in Hebrew (and allegedly is an ancestor of former British prime minister David Cameron). It’s one more twist in an exhibit full of the unexpected. “I’ve never gone into Special Collections and not been surprised,” says Palmer. “That’s the point of exhibits.”

Renaissance

Smart Museum of Art

The more things change ...

jmiller — Tue, 13 Jun 2017 16:59:42 +0000

jmiller Tue, 06/13/2017 - 11:59

Jaclyn Wong (left) is working on an update to Joan Feitler’s 1955 survey of women lawyers. (Photography by John Zich)

Jeanie Chung

Spring–Summer/17

Checking in on a groundbreaking master’s thesis more than a half century later.

In 1955, Joan Feitler, AM’55—Joan Elden at the time—wrote a sociology master’s thesis: “The Woman Lawyer: A Report.” She talked to 50 female lawyers in Chicago to conduct the first academic study of women in the legal profession. The study’s two goals were to “obtain a general sociological picture of women lawyers in Chicago” and to examine discrimination they might feel as women in the field.

In addition to general questions about their educational and socioeconomic backgrounds, Feitler asked: What are your thoughts about women lawyers as a group? Do women take the legal profession as seriously as men? Would you go into law if you had to do it over again? She also asked if the attorneys had felt discrimination at different stages of their careers, from law school admission to treatment by male lawyers, clients, and judges.

Sixty years later, Feitler expressed an interest in seeing the research updated and was pleased when Jaclyn Wong, AM’13, who wrote an undergraduate thesis at University of California, Irvine, on gender inequality and is working on a dissertation on gender inequality in dual-career couples, took on the project.

The two share their thoughts on the original research, the update, and how the profession has—or has not—changed, edited and adapted below.

What made you want to follow up on your original research now?

Feitler: I thought it would be interesting to see, since there was so much prejudice, how much improvement has there been in this 60-year period.

Was there anything that surprised either of you about the other’s findings, or about your own?

Feitler: Jaclyn’s research certainly reaffirmed the fact that there is still an enormous amount of prejudice.

Wong: In my sample, fewer women reported feeling discriminated against in law school and in early stages of their careers. The overt discrimination has somewhat subsided. But that doesn’t mean that the microaggressions and the differences in the type of work that women get versus what men get has changed. And it doesn’t mean that people still don’t experience straight-up harassment or unwelcome comments about their appearance. There’s a consistent story of “People don’t take me seriously at work because I’m a woman,” or “People think that because I’m a mother I’m not as committed to my job as the fathers in the firm.”

You each used different research methods: Joan, you actually went and interviewed each woman in person.

Feitler: Yes. I enjoyed it. I met with women who were all very receptive about wanting to talk about what they were doing.

Wong: For me it was more about Institutional Review Board limitations. The process of getting research approved might have changed over time. I think at the time that you were doing the interview, it was easier to look up how many women were in law.

Feitler: I don’t remember having a problem with that.

Wong: I definitely had a problem with that. I can’t access the bar association information without being a member myself, and I can’t be a member of the bar without having a JD. They’ve really changed the security of what information they’re willing to share with outsiders. What I did instead was translate the interview study into a survey study that could be put online. I circulated it through the Alliance for Women, an association of women lawyers in Chicago.

Some of the questions I updated for 2016 to give more context and address the growth of women in the profession since 1955. To reflect the growth in the number of women in the profession since then, I changed the question to ask whether the increased number of women has made the profession less effective, more effective, or made no difference. Other than that I asked exactly the same questions.

Joan, your study quoted one woman who said of other women lawyers, “If they want to go into a man’s field, they should practice like men. A woman lawyer must divorce herself from feminine attributes. ... [Women] whine, cry, and are poor losers.” What did you think of that at the time?

Feitler: I guess I thought it was worth saving.

Wong: I asked an open-ended question at the end of the survey: What advice would you give to a woman who is interested in starting a career in law? And a lot of the respondents said things like, “Develop a thick skin.” “It’s going to be hard: prepare yourself to hit all of these barriers.” It feels sort of the same, where Joan’s respondents said, “Toughen up. Be more like men.”

Feitler: I’m curious—Is this coming along as you would expect?

Wong: Some of it is surprising. The older women in my sample were less likely to report feeling discriminated against, compared to younger women.

Feitler: Where actually younger women have not faced as much formal discrimination, in terms of hiring and law school admissions—and just attitudes of other lawyers and judges.

Wong: Right. So what’s going on? Is it that younger cohorts are more observant of these behaviors or better able to recognize that this is discrimination? Or maybe they’re earlier in their careers, and they haven’t hit the point of minimizing any struggles or discrimination they might have faced.

Perhaps a woman who’s had a very successful career might choose not to remember some of that.

Wong: Like, “I made it, so it must have been fine.”

Feitler: Are there many women partners at prestige firms here now?

Wong: Today half of law school students are women, but only 20 percent of private practice partners are women, and only 18 percent of equity partners are women. Overall, women only make up 30 percent of practicing lawyers. So you see that attrition as you advance up the career ladder.

When you did your study, it said there had been studies about women in medicine but not about women lawyers.

Wong: My hunch on that is that health care can be seen as a little bit more feminine because it involves caring. So I can see why women might have entered the health care profession as doctors rather than nurses earlier than women entered law. Law is still regarded today as quite a masculine profession.

Feitler: That’s a quotable quote.

Wong: And that’s why law is still interesting to study, even today.

Interview

In the city, in the field

jmiller — Tue, 13 Jun 2017 16:52:51 +0000

jmiller Tue, 06/13/2017 - 11:52

(Illustration by Mike Ellis)

Claire Zulkey

Spring–Summer/17

In Chicago’s schools and neighborhoods, social scientists continue to use the city as their lab—and their work—to improve lives.

“Immersing yourself in your context is a helpful way to do things,” says Elizabeth Hassrick, AM’05, PhD’07 (Sociology), assistant professor at Drexel University’s autism institute. She first learned the value of this approach in 1988, while living in Cameroon as a high school teacher in the Peace Corps.

Hassrick chose to live in the village among the families she taught rather than in a separate expatriate neighborhood. “It didn’t seem to me like I would be as useful to my students if I wasn’t in their community.” It wasn’t an easy route, however. “People refused to sell to me in the market, yelled at me, told me to go home.” Eventually, the situation improved. “Over time I was able to become part of my community,” which, Hassrick says, made her a better teacher.

This decision, to live and work in the same community, helped inspire Hassrick to attend the University of Chicago to study sociology. Along with Stephen Raudenbush and Lisa Rosen, she is the author of The Ambitious Elementary School: Its Conception, Design, and Implications for Educational Equality (University of Chicago Press, 2017), the latest result of the UChicago social scientists’ ongoing investment in youth in Chicago neighborhoods.

The legacy of the Chicago school of sociology “city as a laboratory” approach was established in the late 1920s. Today UChicago scholars work with University neighbors as partners in social science research and projects. These include The Ambitious Elementary School’s authors’ objective to improve education as well as Micere Keels’s work to improve school social work models and Forrest Stuart’s aim to better comprehend the motives of Chicago street gangs.

The methodology for The Ambitious Elementary School, for example, involved the authors conducting focus groups, site visitations, and interviews with University of Chicago Charter School teachers, administrators, and parents. They also held workshops with school leaders, teachers, and UChicago researchers. “We tried to bring together different stakeholders to conceive of how the work could be useful to practitioners and researchers at the University,” Hassrick says. “We sought to accurately describe how the UChicago Charter School model worked, both in theory and practice.”

Through their qualitative work, the authors learned that the individual components of the model, like ambitious instruction informed by frequent learning assessments, longer periods of instruction time, and continuous parent engagement were underlying principles that, woven together, changed outcomes for kids.

By writing a book accessible to both researchers and practitioners, Hassrick and her coauthors hope other schools can incorporate key UChicago Charter School tenets, redesign reading and math instruction, and ultimately fight education inequality. For instance, when the adults in a child’s life—teachers, school leaders, social workers, coaches, parents—come together regularly “to support ambitious learning” instead of interacting only during times of crisis or at test time, it yields results: for five consecutive years, UChicago Charter’s graduating seniors have had 100 percent college acceptance rates.

The teachers and administrators were eager collaborators on the project. “They’re used to welcoming people into their classrooms,” says Raudenbush, the Lewis-Sebring Distinguished Service Professor in Sociology. At UChicago Charter, teachers are encouraged to walk into each other’s classrooms to break down metaphorical and literal barriers, and a similar transparency was at work during the research for The Ambitious Elementary School.

“We did a back and forth process to make sure we got it right—they looked at what we wrote,” says coauthor Rosen, executive director of the UChicago Science of Learning Center. “That built trust. It was a sustained, ongoing conversation, not just a drop-in.” The process didn’t end until after the charter school stakeholders confirmed that the researchers accurately represented their voices and viewpoints.

In addition to improving schools, UChicago researchers build community relationships in city neighborhoods. By being forthright with his subjects, Forrest Stuart, assistant professor of sociology, earned trust from Chicago gang members he interviewed, observed, and sometimes gave rides to over the past few years.

“That was what opened doors—me walking up to young men who were told at every turn that they are terrible and they are monsters,” he says. “I was really explicit in our first interactions, saying, ‘We know nobody listens to you, you do things that adults don’t understand, and we know you don’t have a forum to make yourself heard. I want to hear what you think about the world.’”

It worked. Stuart captured the young men’s vulnerabilities, triumphs, and unique problems in vivid detail in an October 2016 Chicago magazine story, “Dispatches from the Rap Wars,” a preview of his forthcoming book on the intersections of poverty, culture, digital social media, and hip-hop on the South Side. “Very quickly I realized,” Stuart says, “these guys are so hungry for anyone to just listen to them and treat them as reasonable interpreters of their own lives.”

Chicago social scientists who work within the community can help improve necessary services. Keels, associate professor of comparative human development, consulted with local school officials and community members when putting together Trauma Responsive Educational Practices, a system that rethinks the method for providing emotional support for at-risk students in Chicago Public Schools.

“I started by going to the principals and asking, ‘How can we better train your social worker or ensure that your school has one?’” she says. Those basic steps, they informed her, wouldn’t be sufficient. Current models presume only one or two traumatized children in a classroom. In reality, she learned, in some parts of the city the majority of children are affected by violence.

“It’s been about trying to connect basic social science research on all of these topics and talking with principals, teachers, community members, as well as those that are organizing teacher training programs,” Keels says. By including community partners, she says, researchers can better understand the gap between traditional models of practice and on-the-ground realities.

Keels’s system trains educators and school administrators to spot the signs of trauma in students (as well as families and staff), realize the effects of trauma on schooling, and integrate knowledge about trauma into policies, procedures, and practices. Just as importantly, the system trains teachers to alter classroom practices to avoid triggering trauma histories. The online system offers schools a virtual online community and access to in-person training.

Now Keels is working with the University of Chicago Urban Teacher Education Program to integrate this learning into teachers’ perseverance training. Next year she plans to work with schools to articulate the barriers to and facilitators of implementing these practices into a whole school model.

Like Keels, Stuart also discovered a gap between typical assumptions and the realities of his research subjects. He describes a gang member asking him for a ride to court. “He was like, ‘Hey, I have no way to get there; if you don’t take me, then there’s going to be a warrant out for my arrest, police will come knocking on my door, and I’ll be taken away.’”

Stuart was torn between his role as an impartial researcher and the “moral responsibility,” he says, “as an adult in your life who wants the best for you. I can’t sit there and finger wag, but I’m conflicted.”

These moral questions were not unusual in his work. He occasionally offered hungry young men a meal at McDonald’s if they’d enroll in school, but he realized his subjects usually had reasons for the decisions they made, including not attending school. “Here’s a hungry kid who I take to school, and he’s violently assaulted by a rival gang.” By conducting fieldwork with marginalized youth, Stuart saw how infrequently there were easy or clear solutions to their problems.

Projects like The Ambitious Elementary School aim to help the Chicago community and reach a wider audience. The effects of a better school blueprint, Raudenbush says, cannot be underestimated. “If we could make schools really good,” he wonders, “would we really be able to improve the chances of very disadvantaged kids?” The authors believe the answer is a resounding yes.

Keels believes that if more researchers practice translational work, it could help narrow the seven- to 10-year lag between consensus among researchers and implementation. “Being able to narrow that time span is important,” she says. “Since I work on issues of inequality and children’s development, it’s really important for me that research also has a tangible impact.”

Stuart can see the effects of his work in his research subjects’ simple survival. “Some of the young men in my research are still alive and not in prison because I was in their lives,” he says, citing an agreement they made. If a rival gang shot up his contacts’ block, Stuart would take them to TGI Fridays for three hours of unlimited appetizers to sit out the initial desire to retaliate. “I feel like a few shootings were stopped by getting guys out of the neighborhood context where they had their buddies hyping them out to go shoot at their rivals.”

On a larger scale, Stuart hopes to effect change with a Twitter program he’s been working on that will flag keywords and utterances that seem to predicate a shooting. He hopes that community activists will have first access to the program, “if it can save lives and keep people out of prison instead of put people behind bars.”

With goals such as improving schools and children’s outcomes, Raudenbush believes that collaboration between scholars and community members is necessary. Some community stakeholders “have wonderful ideas, but the ideas will stay in their heads unless we interact,” he says. “By making those ideas explicit and testing them, we can produce new knowledge that is valuable.”

The myth of the millennial monolith

jmiller — Fri, 09 Jun 2017 15:51:10 +0000

jmiller Fri, 06/09/2017 - 10:51

Cathy Cohen. (Photography by Chris Strong)

Sean Carr, AB’90

Spring–Summer/17

Cathy Cohen’s team digs into the opinions of an oft-generalized generation.

Two sentences sum it up: “Any talk of a monolithic youth vote is uninformed. There are vast differences in who young adults plan to vote for in November based on race and ethnicity.”

That’s the first bullet point in the first report from the GenForward Survey. Launched this past June, as the 2016 presidential field narrowed to its two final candidates, GenForward is the first monthly survey to parse the opinions of millennials—people aged 18 to 30—by race and ethnicity: African American, Latino/a, Asian American, and non-Hispanic whites.

“We jokingly call ourselves the Pew of young people,” says Cathy J. Cohen, the David and Mary Winton Green Professor of Political Science and the College, who leads the survey, a collaboration between the Black Youth Project and the Associated Press–NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Through November 8 and its immediate aftermath, GenForward tracked the opinions of young adults on the presidential candidates and election issues, including gun control, race, police-community relations, immigration, and income inequality.

The survey is also responsive to events as they unfold. After the mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in June, it asked respondents about possible motivations behind the attack as well as their views on LGBTQ rights. Meanwhile, as president Barack Obama campaigned for Hillary Clinton, the survey also dug into his popularity and opinions about his possible legacy.

Going forward, Cohen says, the survey will be conducted on a bimonthly basis. “We did it monthly through the election because things moved so quickly. But we also found that we were generating too much data for the media to digest”—even with frequent coverage in the New York Times and other major outlets. And while keeping up with the fast-paced Trump administration has proved challenging, GenForward has entered the new era at full speed, with batteries of questions probing attitudes toward—for a start—immigration, health care, and Russian involvement in the election.

Cohen notes that by 2020, millennials and their successors, generation Z, will comprise the majority of the population. “Unless you’re doing rigorous and insightful polling of young adults, you’re going to miss something consequential,” she says. And because they’ll also be the most diverse voting bloc in US history, Cohen adds, “you just have to pay attention to issues of race and ethnicity.”

For a deep dive on the survey’s methodology and to explore the results of other survey questions, go to genforwardsurvey.com.

The three most important problems, by race and ethnicity

Each month from June through October, the survey asked respondents to identify the top three problems facing the country. These are the last results prior to the election.

African American adults 18–30

Racism
Police brutality
Education

Asian American adults 18–30

Education
Racism
Gun control

Latino/a adults 18–30

Immigration
Terrorism and homeland security
Racism

Non-Hispanic white adults 18–30

Terrorism and homeland security
Education
National debt, environment, climate change, and health care

All cited data from GenForward: A survey of the Black Youth Project with the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Photo bombs

jmiller — Wed, 07 Jun 2017 14:49:48 +0000

jmiller Wed, 06/07/2017 - 09:49

C. H. Graves, Mr. and Mrs. Henpeck Wash the Dishes, 1903. (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC)

Claire Zulkey

Spring–Summer/17

Exploring the serious questions of humor in photography.

Delightful, spooky, and dark images fascinate Louis Kaplan, PhD’88, professor of history and theory of photography and new media at the University of Toronto. The author of books such as The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer (2008) and Gumby: The Authorized Biography of the World’s Favorite Clayboy (1986), which he cowrote as a fun distraction from his thesis, Kaplan published Photography and Humour with Reaktion Books in late 2016. Says Kaplan: “We need humor now more than ever.”

What does humor have to do with the social sciences?

There is the social function of photography, the fact that it acts as a social bond and a source of integration. Pierre Bourdieu, the French sociologist, wrote a book on this, Photography: A Middlebrow Art. There is a chapter in my book called Social Snaps, about the ways in which these photos can also serve disintegration. I talk about a genre of stereoviews from the 19th century that are all about making fun of domestic happiness, like the domestic TV comedies that people are still familiar with—that’s how that visual entertainment took shape in the 19th century. Each chapter of my book is organized around ways in which we have conceived photography’s being in the world and genres that make fun of these theorized functions.

Underwood & Underwood’s 1931 image The New Woman—Wash Day mocked the woman’s liberation movement, implying the reversal of gender roles brings emasculation. (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC)

In the book you quote Charles Dickens: “When photography tries to be funny, there is one, and only one result: vulgarity, and vulgarity of the most tragic and lachrymose kind.” Why did he take such issue with the genre?

He’s writing at a time when photography is just making the scene. There’s a fear that the visual humor will be a competition for literary humor, and so he’s trying to discipline that new type of humor out, and he does it by being contemptuous and belittling it. In a way it’s ironic because Dickens was a very popular writer. He was always appealing to the masses and to the base instincts in a lot of his writings.

What attracted you to UChicago’s Intellectual History program?

My undergrad degree at Harvard was in social studies—an interdisciplinary program that covered social sciences including social and political theory. What attracted me to Intellectual History was its interdisciplinarity, its ability to cross borders like my undergrad program. I specialized so I wouldn’t have to specialize.

Arthur Lawrence Merrill, Mr. and Mrs. Turtledove’s Next “French” Cook, 1906. (British Library’s Canadian Colonial Copyright Collection, London)

Some of the images in the book are morbid or even racist: Why did you include those?

One of the functions of photos is that we have them in order to remember: photography marks our relationship to our mortality. And humor is disturbing—let’s not deny that. My first chapter gives an overview of some basic philosophical approaches to humor, and one of them comes out of Thomas Hobbes. He’s not a very happy guy. He theorized that humor is based on what he called Superiority Theory. It’s not about laughing with, it’s about laughing at. Laughing at is cruel.

Photography

Humor

Interview

In memoriam

jmiller — Thu, 12 May 2016 20:04:29 +0000

jmiller Thu, 05/12/2016 - 15:04

(Photo courtesy Division of the Social Sciences)

Laura Adamczyk

Spring/Summer 2016

Recent faculty and alumni obituaries.

Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph died December 23 and January 16, respectively, in Oakland, California. Susanne, the William Benton Distinguished Service Professor Emerita of Political Science, was 85. Her husband and colleague, a professor emeritus of political science, was 88. Influential scholars of India, the Rudolphs taught at UChicago from 1964 to 2002. In 2014 the couple received India’s third-highest civilian honor, the Padma Bhushan, in recognition of their scholarly contributions.

Asha Sarangi, PhD’02 (Political Science), a political scientist at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, offers a remembrance:

Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph could be ideally described as a contrapuntal couple, not just in the life that they lived together but also in the manner they departed for their afterlife.

They were towering global figures both in political science and in South Asian studies. Economist J. K. Galbraith once described them as “the most accomplished scholars” on contemporary India in the United States. As reflexive political scientists, they were erudite scholars, prolific writers, and extraordinary intellectuals whose works have marked paradigmatic shifts both methodologically and thematically in the study of Indian society and politics over the last six decades. Together they wrote more than a dozen books and 150 articles, including their iconic works Modernity of Tradition (University of Chicago Press, 1967), In Pursuit of Lakshmi (University of Chicago Press, 1987), and Reversing the Gaze (Oxford University Press, 2011). They supervised around 200 PhDs, taught courses on a variety of themes, and nurtured and guided generations of scholars.

As honest, sincere, dedicated researchers, they spent every fourth year in India, taking 11 yearlong research trips before they retired in 2002. Even after retirement, they continued to visit for three months each year until 2011.

To read notes from the Rudolphs’ 1956 journey driving from Austria to India to begin their life’s work, see mag.uchicago.edu/rudolphs.—Ed.

Raymond T. Smith, professor emeritus of anthropology, died October 1 at age 90. After earning his doctorate at Cambridge, he taught at the University of the West Indies; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Ghana; and McGill University before joining the University of Chicago in 1966. A kinship expert, Smith studied family organization in the Caribbean and the Americas through the lens of class, race, poverty, and gender. He retired from the University in 1995.

Richard G. Hewlett, AM’48, PhD’52 (History), died September 1 in Bethesda, Maryland. He was 92. Hewlett was the chief historian of the US Atomic Energy Commission and its successor agencies from 1957 to 1980, cowriting three books on their history, including Nuclear Navy, 1946–1962 (University of Chicago Press, 1974). After retiring, he cofounded the History Associates—a historical research company—and wrote a biography of the philanthropist Jessie Ball duPont.

George A. “Tad” Mindeman, AM’77 (History), died October 20 at age 61. Mindeman spent most of his career directing libraries in Christian colleges and universities, most recently at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia. A lifelong baseball fan, he umpired youth baseball games for more than 20 years and also played clarinet in local orchestras and ensembles.

Walter L. Wallace, PhD’63 (Sociology), a professor of sociology at Princeton, died September 18. He was 88. Focusing on education and ethnicity, race, and nationality, Wallace taught at Spelman College and Northwestern before joining Princeton’s faculty in 1971, where he advised Michelle Obama, then Robinson, on her senior thesis. In the 1960s he wrote influential pieces on peer effects on graduate students’ aspirations and student achievement. Later in his career he published books on sociological theory, race and nationalism, and philosophy, including The Future of Ethnicity, Race, and Nationality (Praeger, 1997).

Burton C. Kelly, PhD’66 (Comparative Human Development), died December 31 at age 89. He taught psychology at Illinois State University in Normal before joining the faculty of Brigham Young University, where he worked for 30 years in its counseling center. Kelly also sang in choirs, played the piano and organ, and enjoyed the outdoors.

Charles E. Umbanhowar, AM’64, PhD’70 (Political Science), a retired professor of political science at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, died January 5 at age 75. He taught at Syracuse University and Idaho State University before joining St. Olaf in 1978, where he served as an adviser to prelaw students. His courses focused on American politics, American constitutional law, political philosophy, and international law. In the 1980s he helped write and produce a radio series based on correspondence between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

Syn D. Choi, AM’58, died February 28 in Annapolis, Maryland. She was 95. Choi served as an education adviser at the US Operations Mission to Korea and was director of the sociology department at Ewha Womans University in Seoul. She also served as president of the Korean Sociological Association, received awards from the City of Chicago and the Chicago Korean Community, and was appointed an Ambassador for Peace by the Universal Peace Federation.

Rita Weinberg, AM’47, PhD’55 (Psychology), known for her pragmatic approach to psychology, died January 28 at age 91 in Valencia, California. Weinberg ran a private practice focusing on children and families, and in 1976 she joined the faculty of National Louis University in Chicago. She also consulted for the Child Development Center’s Infant Welfare Society with Julius Richmond, who later became US surgeon general and helped develop the Head Start early childhood program. After retiring from National Louis in 2011, Weinberg continued her private practice and cowrote a book about how metaphors shape understanding.

John H. Gagnon, AB’55, PhD’69 (Sociology), died February 11 in Palm Springs, California. He was 84. A sociologist with a focus on sex research, Gagnon worked at the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University before joining the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He theorized sexuality was more a social construct than a biological identity, and in the 1980s he worked with NORC at the University of Chicago on an influential, large-scale survey of American sexuality, focusing on respondents’ motivations for and thoughts about sex.

Richard S. Frank, AM’56 (Political Science), editor of the National Journal for two decades, died March 1 in Palm Desert, California. He was 84. Frank was a reporter for the Baltimore Evening Sun and chief of staff to Baltimore mayor Theodore McKeldin before joining the journal in 1971. Now online only, the National Journal was a weekly magazine that detailed the inner workings of Washington, DC, and had an audience of high-level politicians, lobbyists, and media personnel. After retiring in 1997, he served as an editor at Boston University’s Washington Journalism Center from 2000 to 2009.

Deaths

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This article appears in the Spring/Summer 2016 issue of Dialogo, the biannual publication for University of Chicago Division of the Social Sciences alumni.

Accolades, news, and books

jmiller — Thu, 12 May 2016 18:22:43 +0000

jmiller Thu, 05/12/2016 - 13:22

(Photo courtesy Division of the Social Sciences)

Laura Adamczyk

Spring/Summer 2016

Updates from the Division of the Social Sciences.

Divisional News

125 Years of History

As part of the University’s 125th anniversary, the Division explored its own history in November by installing a timeline (on display through mid-June) in the Social Sciences Research Building.

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Comments on “Evolution of a Division,” Fall 2015/Winter 2016 Dialogo

David Mitch, AB’73, AM’74, PhD’82 (Economics), emailed to comment on the entry on the Department of Economics:

I was rather surprised, indeed appalled, to see . . . that 1925 was given as the year in which the Department of Economics was established. By my understanding, the Department of Political Economy goes back to the founding of UChicago, when J. Laurence Laughlin arrived. What happened circa the mid-1920s was that the department changed its name from Political Economy to Economics. I did appreciate the pictures of [Professor] Margaret Reid [PhD’31] as a very young woman (she was around in the flesh in my years at U of C in the mid-1970s) and an even younger John Nef Jr. along with his dad.

Mr. Mitch is correct. The Department of Economics has been around for the full 125 years, going through the name change in 1925.—Ed.

Raven Deerwater, MAT’83, PhD’91 (Education), also commented on the story:

I have always been impressed with the production quality and writing of Dialogo, and this latest issue holds to these high standards. However, I was greatly disturbed by the omission of the education department in “Evolution of a Division.” I am sure that the article intended to give origins to the Division as it is currently stated, but its presentation is that of a history and a timeline. I know education is not completely forgotten, as there was a nice obituary of Philip W. Jackson in the issue. I just hope that this can be a teachable moment for relations between the Division and its alumni whose department is no more.

Alumni News

In September James V. Wertsch, PhD’75 (Education), was named the inaugural David R. Francis Distinguished Professor at Washington University in St. Louis. Wertsch is also the university’s vice chancellor for international affairs and director of the McDonnell International Scholars Academy. Focusing on collective memory and identity, he’s taught at Northwestern; the University of California, San Diego; and Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Charles D. Brooks, AM’81 (International Relations), is now an adviser to the Technology Partner Network of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Brooks has served as Xerox’s vice president and client executive and as director of legislative affairs for the Science and Technology Directorate, both for the US Department of Homeland Security.

Molly E. Flaherty, AM’12, PhD’14 (Psychology), was jointly awarded a Newton International Fellowship by the Royal Society, the British Academy, and the Academy of Medical Sciences in November. The fellowship is given to promising researchers early in their careers in the humanities or the physical, natural, or social sciences. Flaherty studies Nicaraguan Sign Language to better understand human development and language structure.

At a ceremony in October, Stephen J. Morewitz, PhD’83 (Sociology), was honored with the San José State University Author Award for Kidnapping and Violence: New Research and Clinical Perspectives (Springer, 2016). Kidnapping is Morewitz’s ninth book, and this is his fourth book award. He teaches in San José’s Department of Sociology and Interdisciplinary Social Sciences.

Patrick Houlihan, AM’03, PhD’11 (History), received the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History for his book Catholicism and the Great War: Religion and Everyday Life in Germany and Austria-Hungary, 1914–1922 (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Houlihan has taught in the Core and the Department of History and works as an assistant director in the University’s career advancement office. His next book will be written with funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council through the University of Oxford.

This winter Yong-Hak Kim, AM’85, PhD’86 (Sociology), was elected to a four-year term as president of Yonsei University, where he’s been a sociology professor since 1987. In his inauguration address on the university’s Seoul campus, he promised to help students prepare for an era of longer life spans and a culture in which, he said, sympathy for one another is crucial.

At his National Prayer Breakfast in February, President Barack Obama recounted a story from Rami Nashashibi, AM’98, PhD’11 (Sociology), founder of Inner-City Muslim Action Network in Chicago. The day before, during Obama’s first visit to a mosque in America, Nashashibi told him that following the December 2015 shooting in San Bernardino, California, he was hesitant to pray in Marquette Park, not wanting to draw attention to his family. But, Obama recalled at the breakfast, after Nashashibi’s seven-year-old daughter questioned him, Nashashibi thought of all the times he’d told her the story of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Marx marching to the same park, “enduring hatred and bigotry, dodging rocks and bottles and hateful words, in order to challenge Chicago housing segregation and ask Americans to live up to their highest ideals.”

So Nashashibi put down his rug and prayed.

“I can’t imagine a better expression of the peaceful spirit of Islam,” Obama said, “than when a Muslim father, filled with fear, drew from the example of a Baptist preacher and a Jewish rabbi to teach his children what God demands.”

Lula M. White, AB’60 (Education), AM’63 (History), in recognition of her activism, was given the Thurgood Marshall Award by the Black Law Student Association of the Quinnipiac University School of Law in Hamden, Connecticut. White, a retired high school history teacher, organized protests while at the University of Chicago, was arrested in 1961 as a Freedom Rider, and participated in the March on Washington in 1963.

Alumni Books

Ronald S. Calinger, PhD’71 (History)
Leonhard Euler: Mathematical Genius in the Enlightenment (Princeton University Press, 2015)

Leonhard Euler chronicles the life of one of the greatest mathematicians and theoretical physicists of all time. In this first full-scale biography of Euler (1707–83), Calinger highlights his life and achievements in mathematics and in areas including shipbuilding, cartography, and music theory. Calinger is professor emeritus of history at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, and the founding chancellor of the Euler Society.

Helen Kiyong Kim, AM’97, and Noah Samuel Leavitt, AM’97
JewAsian: Race, Religion, and Identity for America’s Newest Jews (University of Nebraska Press, 2016)

Using in-depth interviews, married couple Kim and Leavitt examine race, religion, and ethnicity in the increasing number of Jewish and Asian American households. JewAsian explores the everyday lives of these intermarriages and how their children negotiate their identities in 21st-century America. Kim is an associate professor and Leavitt is an associate dean of students at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington.

Nancy Waters Ellenberger, AM’72 (International Relations)
Balfour’s World: Aristocracy and Political Culture in the Fin De Siècle (Boydell & Brewer, 2015)

This book chronicles how prime minister Arthur James Balfour (1848–1930) helped build a new “emotional regime” among Britain’s political elite at the turn of the century. Using journals, letters, and publications, Ellenberger explores both the public and private lives of Balfour’s political and social circles at a time of dramatic cultural shifts related to class, gender, imperialism, media, and capitalism. Ellenberger is a professor of history at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.

Timothy Stewart-Winter, AM’03, PhD’09 (History)
Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016)

Called “original, important, and unfailingly smart” (Robert Self, Brown University), Queer Clout traces the political mobilization of Chicago’s LGBT community, from the postwar era to the present, and its alliance with the city’s African American activists. Weaving together activism and electoral politics, Stewart-Winter uses oral histories and archival records, including those of undercover police officers and newly available papers of activists, politicians, and city agencies. He is an assistant professor of history at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, in Newark.

Follow @UChicagoSSD.

Visit the Division of the Social Sciences website.

This article appears in the Spring/Summer 2016 issue of Dialogo, the biannual publication for University of Chicago Division of the Social Sciences alumni.

More than the sum of its parts

jmiller — Mon, 09 May 2016 20:47:34 +0000

jmiller Mon, 05/09/2016 - 15:47

(Illustration by Andi Howard-Rein)

Jeanie Chung

Spring/Summer 2016

A Science of Learning Center collaboration examines math anxiety.

Susan Levine, director of the University’s Science of Learning Center, has always loved math. A triple major in math, psychology, and education at Simmons College in Boston, she student-taught high school math.

Her initial research, begun while a psychology graduate student at MIT, focused on the development of face recognition. But early in her UChicago career, a lecture in the College Core’s Mind course by psychologist James Stigler about infants’ sensitivity to number “got me thinking.”

She turned to children’s math learning, finding that regardless of their socioeconomic status, young children could recognize changes in the number of objects in a set. It was number words that were more likely to cause children from lower socioeconomic groups to struggle.

“It was the language of mathematics that they were having trouble with,” Levine says, “not the basic ideas.” Levine has written about these findings in many journal articles and chapters as well as in a coauthored book, Quantitative Development in Infancy and Early Childhood (Oxford University Press, 2002).

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_original","fid":"3491","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"378","typeof":"foaf:Image","width":"500"}}]] Sian L. Beilock at the University of Chicago’s new Science of Learning Center launch in November. (Photography by Lloyd Degrane)

As Levine’s body of research on math and learning grew, Sian L. Beilock, the Stella M. Rowley Professor of Psychology, was studying the neuroscience of performance anxiety. While Beilock focused on adults, she says, “Susan had been asking really interesting questions about this developmentally: how knowledge and attitudes develop over time.”

About five years ago the two began collaborating, studying the development of “math anxiety” and, more recently, how it can be passed from parent to child—or teacher to student. Their research found that Bedtime Math, a program designed to make math fun and relatable, helped children who were anxious about math to reduce that anxiety and improve performance.

Beilock, a member of the Science of Learning Center’s governing board and author of Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal about Getting It Right When You Have To (Free Press, 2010), says she and Levine didn’t necessarily need the center to work together, but it will be essential to help get their research to those who can most benefit from it.

“Anyone can collaborate,” Beilock says. “But one of the goals is to support collaboration not only across faculty but with educators. A center gives you the opportunity to work with practitioner-partners systematically.”

Learning

Education

“Let Knowledge Grow” (Dialogo, Spring/Summer 2016)

“UChicago Science of Learning Center Seeks to Remove Walls between Research and Practice” (University of Chicago News Office, 12.03.2015)

Learn more about the University’s new Science of Learning Center.

Follow @UChicagoSSD.

Visit the Division of the Social Sciences website.

This article appears in the Spring/Summer 2016 issue of Dialogo, the biannual publication for University of Chicago Division of the Social Sciences alumni.

Report from the dean

jmiller — Thu, 05 May 2016 16:36:35 +0000

jmiller Thu, 05/05/2016 - 11:36

(Photo courtesy Division of the Social Sciences)

David Nirenberg

Spring/Summer 2016

Myriad methods.

Can extremist organizations’ propaganda videos actually incite violence? If so, how? Those are the questions animating the Social and Neurological Construction of Martyrdom Project, a collaboration between Robert Pape, PhD’88, professor of political science, and Jean Decety, the Irving B. Harris Distinguished Service Professor in Psychology. The project unites Pape’s vast database of terrorist attack and recruitment videos with Decety’s expertise in using functional magnetic resonance imaging to detect brain activity patterns in volunteers shown those videos. The goal: to learn what happens in the brain when an individual is persuaded to change his or her beliefs. The project exemplifies the type of research being done in the Division: research that couples disciplines or deploys new techniques. Sometimes multiple methods are used by the same person. Micere Keels, associate professor in comparative human development, combines ethnographic and statistical methods to investigate the intersection between neighborhoods’ and schools’ poverty and inequality in public school choice. Jenny Trinitapoli, associate professor of sociology, deploys demography with the sociology of religion to understand how Malawians make sexual and reproductive choices in the midst of the AIDS epidemic. Sometimes bringing two methods together requires that faculty who had long been physical neighbors, as in the case of Pape and Decety, collaborate. Sometimes accessing new methods means bringing a new member into our community. This summer, for example, Luc Anselin will join the Department of Sociology and launch the Center for Spatial Data Science. The center, a joint project between the Division and the Computation Institute, will introduce new software, geographic information systems methodologies, and statistical techniques. Anselin’s research and his tools—these methods and techniques—will help us tackle questions from the local to the global and can be applied in areas such as economic geography, environmental economics, criminology, urban planning, and public health. What are the techniques and forms of collaboration that the diverse faculty and students of the Division of the Social Sciences will need close at hand in the coming years? A difficult question at a time when new theories, computational tools, brain imaging techniques and biological assays, big data and text-mining resources, and other methods are appearing with dizzying speed. Difficult but very exciting, and that excitement is something my colleagues and I feel every day as we think about the next 125 years of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago.

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Visit the Division of the Social Sciences website.

This article appears in the Spring/Summer 2016 issue of Dialogo, the biannual publication for University of Chicago Division of the Social Sciences alumni.

Great expectations

jmiller — Thu, 05 May 2016 16:06:25 +0000

jmiller Thu, 05/05/2016 - 11:06

Robert Lucas Jr., shown here in 1978, transcends “conceptual elegance” to offer “concrete answers to macroeconomic policy questions,” says Lars Peter Hansen. (UChicago Photographic Archive, apf7-00681, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library)

Laura Adamczyk

Spring/Summer 2016

Division awards rare prize to economist Robert Lucas Jr.

For the first time in over a decade, the Division of the Social Sciences will award its Phoenix Prize to a faculty member who has “changed the trajectory of research in the social sciences” and contributed to “intellectual renewal across the disciplines.”

At a conference to be held in his honor this October, Robert Lucas Jr., AB’59 (History), PhD’64 (Economics), the John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in Economics and the College, will receive the prize for his “outstanding and loyal service to the University of Chicago and the enormous influence his work has had on the field of economics.” The prize was last awarded to Gary Becker, AM’53, PhD’55 (Economics), in 2001 and to Marshall Sahlins in 1998.

A professor at the University since 1974, Lucas won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1995 for his hypothesis of rational expectations, the idea that agents will use available information to predict outcomes without making mistakes implied by earlier theories.

“He’s a truly special scholar and superb economic theorist,” says Lars Peter Hansen, the David Rockefeller Distinguished Service Professor in Economics, Statistics, and the College.

Hansen, who won the economics Nobel in 2013, says it’s hard to overstate Lucas’s influence because his contributions are so fundamental. “His research has a conceptual appeal—a theoretical nicety,” Hansen says. “At the same time, it opens the door for modeling advances. He aimed for going beyond conceptual elegance to producing concrete answers to macroeconomic policy questions.”

Another colleague, Fernando Alvarez, the William C. Norby Professor in Economics and the College, calls Lucas “truly revolutionary.” His work, Alvarez says, especially with regard to methodology, created a “before and after” effect: “If we talk about what the impact of rational expectations was, it initiated different ways of thinking.”

Lucas’s interests go beyond economics, Alvarez says. It was Lucas who introduced him to the works of the writer Roberto Bolaño, for instance. Alvarez also praises Lucas’s academic writing, noting that he makes his very technical work accessible to those outside the field. He cites Lucas’s 1988 UChicago convocation speech, in which he explained money supply and economic depressions using an amusement park as a metaphor.

The Division first awarded the Phoenix Prize in 1994 to University Professor in Sociology James Coleman, known for his work on school desegregation. Coleman’s son Thomas Coleman, AM’81, PhD’84 (Economics), the executive director of the Center for Economic Policy at Chicago Harris, was at the conference when his father was presented with the award. “He was really excited by everyone coming together by the work that he had done,” the younger Coleman says.

While the prize was a “huge honor” for his father, Coleman says, more important was the research and its contribution to the intellectual life of the country and the University. “That was the case with my father and is the case with Lucas. They believe they can contribute to society in fundamental ways.”

Economics

Phoenix Prize

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This article appears in the Spring/Summer 2016 issue of Dialogo, the biannual publication for University of Chicago Division of the Social Sciences alumni.