Academics Scholarly Achievements

Wendy Woodson, the Roger C. Holden 1919 Professor of Theater and Dance—in collaboration with designer Kathy Couch ’95 and sound designer Myles Mumford—has created a video installation titled Belonging: Reflections on Place, which will run in the Immigration Museum in Melbourne, Australia, until Jan. 22, 2012. The installation incorporates ambient music and street sounds, projected footage of movement and travel, and video interviews in which dozens of people from around the world reflect on their experiences as immigrants and refugees to Australia.

John E. Drabinski, visiting associate professor of Black studies, is the author of Levinas and the Postcolonial: Race, Nation, Other (published by Edinburgh University Press; distributed in North America by Columbia University Press). He calls the book “an effort at bringing some of the debates in contemporary European postmodern theory into conversation with a set of international authors who speak from the perspective of former colonized people.”

Sept. 9, 2011

Justin Kimball, associate professor of art, has received a $10,000 Individual Photographer’s Fellowship (IPF) from the Aaron Siskind Foundation. The funding will support his latest photography project, through which he intends to document some of the effects of the nation’s economic downturn. 

June 17, 2011

Howell D. “Chick” Chickering, the G. Armour Craig Professor of Language and Literature, has received the 2011 CARA Award for Excellence in Teaching Medieval Studies from the Medieval Academy of America (MAA). Chickering said he was delighted to have received the award, which he described as “national public validation of [his] work as a teacher at Amherst College.”

Luca Grillo, assistant professor of classics and European studies, received an honorable mention “for excellence of scholarly and teaching achievements” in the recent competition for the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation’s Career Enhancement Fellowship for Junior Faculty.

On Friday, March 25, in Los Angeles at the Triennial Symposium of the Arts Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA), Rowland Abiodun, the John C. Newton Professor of Art and the History of Art and Black Studies, received the ACASA Leadership Award.

Austin D. Sarat, the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, has been selected to receive the Lasting Contribution Award from the American Political Science Association’s Law and Courts section for his scholarly article “The Emergence and Transformation of Disputes: Naming, Blaming, Claiming.”

Ilan Stavans, the Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture, has edited The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry: An Anthology (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011). To mark the book’s official publication date of Tuesday, March 29, Stavans will conduct a discussion and poetry reading with poet and University of Massachusetts Professor Martín Espada at 4:30 p.m. in the Cole Assembly Room of Converse Hall.

Deborah Gewertz, the G. Henry Whitcomb 1874 Professor of Anthropology, and her research collaborator, Frederick Errington, a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus, at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., were jointly named honorary fellows of the Association of Social Anthropologists in Oceania (ASAO) at the organization’s annual meeting Feb. 9 to 12. Including Gewertz and Errington, the distinction is currently held by 16 scholars in recognition of their distinguished contributions to the field of social anthropology in Oceania.

John E. Drabinski, visiting associate professor of Black studies, has recently taken over as co-editor, with Oklahoma City University Professor Scott Davidson, of the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy.

Austin Sarat, the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought, has been awarded a $168,376 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to support a summer seminar for K-12 teachers and current full-time graduate students who intend to pursue a career in K-12 teaching. The gathering, which will be offered in the summer of 2011, will be the 15th such seminar that Sarat has taught.

December 2, 2010

Anthony Bishop, associate professor of chemistry, is one of just six chemistry professors nationwide to receive a 2010 Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award. The award provides Bishop with a $60,000 unrestricted grant that will be used for project titled “Target-Specific Control of Protein Tyrosine Phosphatase (PTP) Activity: Chemical-Genetic Tools for the Study of PTP-Mediated Cell Signaling.”

November 19, 2010

Schooling Citizens: The Struggle for African American Education in Antebellum America, by Hilary Moss, assistant professor of black studies and history, has been honored with the History of Education Society’s (HES) 2010 award for the year’s most outstanding book on the history of education.

The HES Book Prize Committee annually solicits nominations for the award, and this year, 22 publications were nominated. The group first narrowed their choice to five finalists and then reread these volumes carefully, evaluating each book’s thesis and supporting arguments, the work’s significance to the field, its use of sources and its aesthetic qualities. Schooling Citizens came out on top because the committee believed it to be “an important contribution to the historiography of American education, focusing as it does on the purpose of public education,” said HES Book Prize Committee Chair Amy Thompson McCandless, professor of history and dean of the Graduate School at the College of Charleston, in an announcement about the prize. “Well-argued and well written, it deals with issues of race, class, ethnicity, religion and gender that continue to confront educators from pre-school to post-doctoral levels in the 21st century.”

November 10, 2010

Rick A. López ’93, an associate professor of history at Amherst, is the author of Crafting Mexico: Intellectuals, Artisans, and the State after the Revolution (Duke University Press). In this new book, scheduled for release on Nov. 11, 2010, López explores how, after Mexico’s revolution of 1910–1920, its artists and intellectuals used dance, music and handicrafts to formulate a unified cultural identity for the Mexican people and to symbolize the nation’s modernity. Lopez will appear in the Mead Art Museum to discuss and sign his book on Nov. 17 from 4:30 to 5:30 p.m.

Fulvio Melia, distinguished professor in the Physics, Astronomy and Applied Mathematics departments at the University of Arizona, who is visiting Amherst this fall as a John Woodruff Simpson Lecturer, has been named editor of a recently launched astronomy journal.

Melia was appointed editor-in-chief of European Astronomy Studies Development, an open access journal that seeks to publish high-quality, peer-reviewed, original manuscripts in all fields of astronomy and astrophysics, with a particular focus on computational astronomy: mathematical and astronomy techniques and methodology, simulations, modeling and numerical results and computational techniques in instrumentation.