Susan Goldin-Meadow. (University of Chicago News Office)
Accolades, news, books, and events
Updates from the Division of the Social Sciences.
Accolades
Goldin-Meadow receives William James Fellow Award
In March Susan Goldin-Meadow, the Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Psychology, won the Association for Psychological Science 2015 William James Fellow Award. The James Award, the highest honor conferred by the association, honors distinguished members for a lifetime of significant intellectual contributions to the basic science of psychology.
Rudolphs win kudos from India and closer to home
Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, the William Benton Distinguished Service Professor Emerita of Political Science, and Lloyd I. Rudolph, professor emeritus of political science, have received the Padma Bhushan Award, the government of India announced in late January. The country’s third-highest civilian honor, the Padma Bhushan recognizes distinguished service of a high order to the nation, in any field. The Rudolphs will receive another award in June when the Alumni Association bestows them with one of this year’s Norman Maclean Faculty Awards. The Rudolphs joined the University in 1964 and lived for 11 years in India researching and writing. They’ve coauthored eight book together, including Postmodern Gandhi and Other Essays: Gandhi in the World and at Home (Oxford University Press, 2006). In 2008 Oxford University Press published a three-volume career-spanning collection of the couple’s writings: Explaining Indian Democracy: A Fifty-Year Perspective.
An award to remember
In November David Gallo, assistant professor of psychology, received the Federation of Associations in Behavioral & Brain Sciences Foundation Early Career Investigator Award. The award recognizes scientists who are within ten years of receiving their PhD and have made major contributions to the sciences of mind, brain, and behavior. Gallo, director of the Memory Research Laboratory at UChicago, studies the basic neurocognitive processes of human memory, how we reconstruct the past, and how healthy aging and Alzheimer’s disease affect these processes.
Prize for innovation
Professor in the Department of Anthropology Joseph Masco’s book The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post–Cold War New Mexico (Princeton University Press, 2006), has been awarded the 2014 J. I. Staley Prize from the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The prize, presented to a living author of a book that exemplifies outstanding scholarship and writing in anthropology, recognizes innovative works that go beyond the field’s traditional schools of thought. Masco’s current work examines the national security state in the United States, focusing on the affect, technology, and threat perception within a national public sphere.
Divisional news
New education research initiative
In March the University’s Committee on Education and the family of Hymen Milgrom, AB’35, announced a new research initiative, Successful Pathways from School to Work. The initiative will provide doctoral students with up to $25,000 per year for one- or two-year projects that focus on urban education. Students were invited to submit letters of intent through April. Awards will be announced October 1, 2014.
Grant preps history PhDs
UChicago will share a $1.6 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, awarded to broaden the career paths of history PhDs. In March, when the grant was announced, Kenneth Pomeranz, University Professor of Modern Chinese History and in the College, told the Chronicle of Higher Education that the grant will help the University provide more internship opportunities at nonprofits, hold more career-focused seminars for doctoral students, and hire a three-year “career fellow” to institutionalize some of these programs.
New Collegium projects
In February the Neubauer Family Collegium for Culture and Society announced 15 new research projects, five of which feature principal investigators from the Social Sciences Division:The State, Violence, and Social Control in the Contemporary World Principal investigators: Benjamin Lessing (Political Science); Paul Staniland, AB’04 (Political Science); Forrest Stuart (Sociology)
Unpacking the Value of Health Insurance in India: Fostering Dialogue Amongst Methodologies Principal investigators: Anup Malani, AM’96, JD’00, PhD’03 (Law); Alessandra Voena (Economics)
The Changing Social and Rhetorical Foundations of Florentine Republicanism Principal investigators: John P. McCormick, PhD’95 (Political Science); John Padgett (Political Science)
People and Things on the Move: Migrations and Material Culture Principal investigators: Leora Auslander (History); Tara Zahra (History)
Art Scenes: An International Perspective Principal investigator: Terry Clark (Sociology)
Social Science faculty receive named professorships
The following faculty members have received named professorships in 2014: Karin Knorr Cetina, Otto Borchert Distinguished Service Professor, Department of Sociology: Knorr Cetina’s interests include financial markets, knowledge, and information, as well as globalization, theory, and culture. She’s writing a book on global foreign exchange markets and studying post–social knowledge societies. Elisabeth Clemens, William Rainey Harper Professor, Department of Sociology: Clemens, AM’85, PhD’90, is professor and chair of sociology and a former master of the Social Sciences Collegiate Division. Her research explores the role of social movements and organizational innovation in political change. Susan C. Levine, Rebecca Anne Boylan Professor, Department of Psychology: Levine studies cognitive development, development and plasticity of spatial skills, early quantitative development, and language development and functional plasticity in children with early brain injury. John Levi Martin, Florence Borchert Bartling Professor, Department of Sociology: Martin has published work on the formal properties of belief systems and social structures, the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the rationalization of infantry war, and the use of race as a conceptual category in American sociology.
Alumni news
In October Dana Leigh Immertreu, AM’09 (History), joined Promet Source, a technology agency specializing in interactive development and continual support and maintenance, as a front-end developer. Previously Immertreu was a freelance designer who created customized Drupal themes based on department graphic identities and architectures for new department websites, including some at the University of Chicago. Stephen J. Spurr, AM’82, PhD’86 (Economics), presented the fourth annual Harold Hotelling Memorial Lecture at Lawrence Technological University in November, discussing US wages and income mobility after the 2008 financial crisis. Spurr is chair of Wayne State’s Department of Economics, where his primary research interests are labor economics and the economic analysis of law. Mitchell Weiss, AM’66 (Social Sciences), received the 24th annual Donald Riegle Community Service Award in October for his commitment to community service. The award was presented to Weiss by the Flint Jewish Federation, in partnership with the Flint Institute of Arts, at a ceremony in Flint, Michigan. Weiss taught political science at Flint’s Charles Stewart Mott Community College from 1972 to 2007 and has served on the Flint Jewish Federation’s Board of Directors since the 1980s. Charles Brooks, AM’81 (International Relations), served as a judge for Government Security News’s Homeland Security Awards program, which highlights the most noteworthy projects from vendors of IT security solutions. Brooks is vice president and client executive of Xerox and is the first director of legislative affairs for the Science and Technology Directorate in the Department of Homeland Security. Stephen J. Morewitz, PhD'83 (Sociology), won a 2013 San Jose State University Annual Book Award for coediting the Handbook of Forensic Sociology and Psychology (Springer, 2013), a road map for sociologists and psychologists to apply theory and research methods as expert witnesses and consultants in the fields of civil, criminal, immigration, and military law. Morewitz is the author of more than 100 publications and a lecturer in the California State University, East Bay, Department of Nursing and Health Sciences. In January David Altshuler, AM’94, PhD’01 (Anthropology), joined StepStone Group, a global private markets firm, where he is a partner and co-head of real assets. Altshuler had been senior vice president and infrastructure practice leader at Meketa Investment Group, and worked with the California Public Employees Retirement System to overcome impediments to pension-fund investments in infrastructure, transportation, water, and energy. Thomas Michels, AM’05 (International Relations), joined BlueWater Strategies, a Washington, DC, energy consulting firm, in February. There he offers “a lot of strategic advice to companies in the energy realm,” he told National Journal. Previously he was a lobbyist with Shell Oil as senior adviser for government relations.
Faculty and alumni books
After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism (The University of Chicago Press, 2013)Robert Pippin, the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor of Social Thought, Philosophy, and in the College, examines modernist paintings by artists such as Édouard Manet and Paul Cézanne through the lens of Hegel. Although Hegel died before the modernist era, he argued that art involves the expression of a distinct collective self-understanding that develops through time. Pippin seeks the significance of modernism itself and what it means in general for art to have a history.
In his book, anthropology professor Russell H. Tuttle analyzes research on primate evolution to explain how apes and humans evolved in relation to one another. Tuttle, who refutes the theory that humans are sophisticated but instinctively destructive beings, said in the Jan–Feb/14 University of Chicago Magazine that what differentiates apes from humans is the latter’s ability to convey information and share ideas.
In this interdisciplinary textbook on internal and international human migration, professor emeritus of sociology Donald J. Bogue (1918–2014) demonstrates that environmental differences will influence an eventual solution to current migration problems, depending on the often confrontational interactions between migrants and natives.
Vinita Moch Ricks, AM’74, formerly a professor of psychology and the social sciences at Harold Washington College, examines heretofore-unacknowledged policies and mind-sets from the transatlantic slave trade (1444–1888) and how they continue to perpetuate injustices and instability in the world today.
Working from the premise that all human beings are folk theologians, David Gortner, PhD’04 (Psychology), through interviews and surveys, regards 18- to 25-year-olds as young theologians who wrestle with fundamental questions of place, purpose, and ultimate aims in life regardless of religious background. Gortner is the director of the Doctor of Ministry programs and professor of evangelism and congregational studies at Virginia Theological Seminary.
Events
Fall Harper Lecture, Boston
Thursday, October 23: “Social Neuroscience,” with John Cacioppo, the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor in Psychology
Social Sciences at Alumni Weekend 2014
11 a.m.–noon Alumni Awards Ceremony Rockefeller Chapel, 5850 S. Woodlawn Ave.Honor social sciences alumni and faculty award winners Leon R. Kass, LAB’54, SB’58, MD’62, the Addie Clark Harding Professor Emeritus in Social Thought and in the College, Professional Achievement Award; Michael L. Shakman, AB’62, AM’64, JD’66, Public Service Award; Susanne and Lloyd Rudolph, Norman Maclean Faculty Award.12:15–1:45 p.m. Economics Table at Alumni BBQ and Family Festival Bartlett Quad, Tent, 5600 S. University Ave.
Reunite with classmates and network with other alumni at the Economics Table hosted by the Chicago Economics Society, a UChicago affinity group with chapters in New York, San Francisco, and Washington, DC.2–3 p.m. UnCommon Core | A New Era for UChicago Economics Hall for Economics, 5757 S. University Ave.
The 2013–14 academic year began with a Nobel Prize for Eugene Fama, MBA’63, PhD’64, and Lars Peter Hansen, continued with some high-profile faculty hires, and culminates with the much-anticipated move into an iconic new home for the Department of Economics and the Becker Friedman Institute. The achievements of the past year will position the discipline of economics at UChicago for an unparalleled future. Come hear from noted UChicago economists, including Nobel laureate Lars Peter Hansen, as we mark this historic moment for the Chicago school of economics.3–5 p.m. A Celebration of UChicago Economics Hall for Economics, 5757 S. University Ave.
On the eve of the move into the new home for the Department of Economics and the Becker Friedman Institute, we invite all economics alumni and friends, whether graduate alumni or College majors, to attend a reception in celebration of economics at UChicago. The reception will take place immediately following the UnCommon Core session and will feature short tours of key areas of the magnificent new hall for economics.