H&SS eNews, September 2008

Greetings from H&SS!

The H&SS eNews is a monthly electronic publication of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University.

For more H&SS news, go to our Web site, http://www.hss.cmu.edu/. For other Carnegie Mellon news, be sure to check out http://www.cmu.edu and http://www.cmu.edu/news/blog/.

This edition of the eNews was edited and compiled by Kelli McElhinny. You can email Kelli at kellim@andrew.cmu.edu.

For past eNews publications, please visit the H&SS eNews archive.

Alumni News

-- Leslie McIlroy’s (B.A., Creative Writing, 1986) third book of poems, Liquid Like This, has just been published by WordTech Communications.

-- Karen Rigby (B.A., Creative Writing, 2001) just published her second collection. Savage Machinery, with Finishing Line Press.

Student News

-- Gregory Gaudio is the 2008 recipient of the Erwin R. Steinberg MA in Professional Writing Scholarship. The scholarship is awarded each year to the 3rd semester MAPW student who most exemplifies the qualities of clear writing, intellectual curiosity, integrity and citizenship that were the hallmarks of Erwin’s 60+ years as a faculty member and administrator at Carnegie Mellon.

College/Faculty News

--Psychology Professor Michael F. Scheier, a leading researcher in the field of health psychology, particularly in the exploration of optimism’s influence on health outcomes, has been appointed to a second five-year term as head of the Department of Psychology in H&SS.

Scheier has been on the university’s faculty since 1975 and has been head of the Department of Psychology since 2003. In addition to expanding in terms of faculty and research projects under Scheier’s leadership, the department established an infant research cluster that explores variations in critical early childhood development milestones, including speech perception and the development of categorization.

The department includes 27 full-time faculty members, a number of research centers and an early childhood education center. U.S. News and World Report magazine ranked the department’s graduate program ninth in the nation and deemed the cognitive psychology program the second-best in the country.

For more information: http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2008/August/aug25_scheier.shtml

In Other H&SS News...

Department of English

-- Professor Gerald Costanzo taught a multi-genre workshop during June and July in the Prague Summer Seminars. It was his seventh visit to this program in the Czech Republic. He is in the process of establishing a fellowship so that one or two Carnegie Mellon undergraduates may attend the Program each summer.

-- Professor Peggy Knapp’s book, Chaucerian Aesthetics, came out from Palgrave this summer. Knapp also presented a paper titled “Aesthetics as Genre” at the New Chaucer Society conference in Swansea, Wales, in July.

Department of History

-- Two of the department’s faculty members are Fulbright Scholars this semester. Professor Judith Schachter has a travel/research grant. Her work will compare the roots of American policy in Hawaii with the foundations of German policy in Samoa. She will also lecture on the subject of contemporary sovereignty movements in Hawaii at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, Free University, Berlin. Associate Professor John Soluri is teaching a course on the history of big business in Latin America this fall at the University of Chile, Santiago. In December and January, he also plans to do fieldwork on the environmental history of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego.

-- Jay Aronson, an assistant professor in the Department of History, has received a National Institutes of Health grant of $152,600 for research on the history and politics of humanitarian DNA identification. The funding provides support for two full semesters of research, plus partial summer support, over the next two years. The grant amount was incorrectly reported in the July issue of the eNews.

Department of Modern Languages

-- El Circulo Juvenil will begin its second year of workshops for children from Spanish-speaking households on Saturday, Sept 13. An open house for the program will be held from 10am until noon on Saturday, Sept. 6 in Baker Hall 125B & 126A, giving interested parents the opportunity to get more information and enroll their children. The workshop, which strives to teach children from Latino families about their language and their culture, will focus on theater and music this year, and participants will be split into two age groups: 5-8 and 9-13. More information is available from the program’s coordinator, Associate Professor Mariana Achugar, who can be reached at machugar@andrew.cmu.edu or 412-268-1895.

Department of Philosophy

-- Associate Professor David Danks has received a McDonnell Foundation Scholar Award. The award, which provides $600,000 in research support over the course of six years, will fund Danks’ work exploring the integration of various cognitive processes. Specifically, this project aims to develop and empirically test an integrated model of causal, conceptual, and decision-making cognition based on the computational framework of graphical models.

Department of Psychology

-- R. K. Mellon University Professor of Psychology and Computer Science John Anderson has received a McDonnell Foundation Scholar Award for $600,000 over the course of six years. The award will provide support for Anderson’s research utilizing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to characterize the complex cognitive processes that underlie the mathematical competencies acquired through formal education. In order to overcome barriers to realizing fMRI’s full potential in this area of research, the project will use cognitive architectures to provide a structure for interpreting the significance of the complex activation patterns that emerge in the fMRI-generated data and will rely on behavioral measures such as response times, eye movements, and verbal protocols to provide the signposts for aligning fMRI data from different trials  The imaging data can reveal the engagement of the cognitive processes that provide the foundation for problem-solving.

Department of Social and Decision Sciences

-- A new study co-authored by George Loewenstein, Herbert A. Simon Professor of Economics and Psychology, sheds light on why smokers’ intentions to quit “cold turkey” often fizzle out within days or even hours. Published in the September issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, the study, “Exploring the Cold-to-Hot Empathy Gap in Smokers,” bolsters the theory that smokers not in a state of craving a cigarette will underpredict the intensity of their future urges to smoke. In other words, if a smoker isn’t yearning for a cigarette when he makes the decision to kick the habit — and most aren’t — he isn’t able to foresee how he will feel when he’s in need of a nicotine buzz. The study found that a group of smokers in a “cold” or non-craving state significantly underestimated the amount of money they would need to be paid to postpone smoking when they were craving a cigarette at a later time, while the estimates of smokers who were in a “hot” or craving state when they made that projection were more realistic.

For more information: http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2008/August/aug26_smokingstudy.shtml

-- Associate Professor Kiron Skinner was a member of a four-person panel that led a roundtable discussion on U.S. foreign policy at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA), which was held in Boston on August 28-31. The roundtable discussion was sponsored by The Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy, which for more than 20 years has brought together America’s top intellectuals for such programs at the APSA annual meeting.

Department of Statistics

--Maurice Falk University Professor of Statistics and Social Science Stephen Fienberg recently began a four-year term as co-chair of the National Academy of Sciences' Report Review Committee (RRC), which oversees the entire review process for reports produced by the National Research Council - the operating wing of the National Academies. The RRC formally monitors the review process through designated RRC members or members of the Academies. Along with fellow co-chair Chris Whipple, who was appointed from the National Academy of Engineering, Fienberg will appoint the monitors, help set standards for review, and work with staff to arbitrate disputes arising in review as well as to approve the final versions of reports before they can be released. The RRC carries out a full review of somewhere between 100 and 200 reports a year.

Information Systems Program

-- All of the finishing touches are nearly complete on the Information Systems program’s brand new 3,200-square-foot wing on the second floor of Porter Hall, and the program’s faculty and staff are getting settled into their space. The wing, which is housed in a floor built from scratch above the Gregg Hall auditorium, is the end result of an eight-month construction project and features six offices, a large conference/seminar room, a lounge area for students and reception space. The space not only brings together faculty members who had previously been in offices scattered through various departments in Baker and Porter Halls, but it also is environmentally friendly, with design and construction meeting the specifications for LEED certification. Green touches include computer-controlled lighting systems, localized heating and cooling controls, use of efficient fixtures and appliances and approved finishing materials like paints and carpets. The renovation also included uncovering the bricked-over windows to reflect the original architectural intent of the building.

“The new wing has exceeded our expectations in every way,” said IS program director Randy Weinberg

Events

-- University of Pennsylvania Associate Professor of History Sarah Igo will give the Giler Humanities Lecture at Carnegie Mellon University at 4:30 p.m., Thursday, Sept. 11 in the Adamson Wing (Baker Hall 136). Her lecture, titled “The Averaged American: Citizens and Statistics in the 20th Century,” was rescheduled from its original date last April.

For more information: http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2008/August/aug25_gilerlecture.shtml

-- Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a frequent commentator on PBS and National Public Radio and American Professor of Communication and the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, will present a lecture titled “What the Rhetoric of the 2008 Campaign Reveals and Conceals,” at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 18 in the Adamson Wing. Dr. Jamieson’s talk is part of the University Lecture Series, and it is co-sponsored by the English Department, H&SS, the Heinz School of Public Policy and Management, and the Humanities Center, as well as the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Communication.

-- New York Times labor and workplace correspondent Steven Greenhouse will discuss his new book, “The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker,” as well as the role of working-class voters in the presidential campaign. His talk will take place at 4:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 24 in Porter Hall 100. It is part of the University Lecture Series and is co-sponsored by the Department of Statistics.

-- The 2008-2009 Center for Africanamerican Urban Studies and the Economy (CAUSE) lecture series kicks off Friday, Sept. 26, when University of California Los Angeles Associate Professor Scot Brown gives a talk titled “’A Fantastic Voyage’: Funk Music in Dayton, Ohio and Politics of African American Community—From the Ohio Players to Roger Troutman.” The talk will begin at 5 p.m. and will be preceded by a reception at 4:30 p.m., and the location is to be determined.

Please visit http://www.hss.cmu.edu/cause/ or call 412.268.8928 for additional information.

-- The Southwestern Pennsylvania Program for Deliberative Democracy, of which Carnegie Mellon Philosophy Professor Robert Cavalier is co-director, is co-sponsoring a deliberative poll on “The Issue of Marriage in America,” on Saturday, Sept. 27. Carnegie Mellon is one of four colleges and universities throughout Pennsylvania serving as sites for the poll, which will indicate what the electorate would think if, hypothetically, it could be immersed in an intensive deliberation process. Poll participants will be selected at random from voter registration records in the counties surrounding each site, but members of each site’s campus community are invited to take part in the poll as well. This program is a central part of the mission of Carnegie Mellon’s Center for the Advancement of Applied Ethics and Political Philosophy.

For more information: http://caae.phil.cmu.edu/caae/dp/polls/fall08/index.html

-- All H&SS alumni are invited to attend the college’s reception during homecoming weekend. The reception will be held from 3:30 until 5 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 24 in the H&SS Coffee Lounge on the ground floor of Baker Hall.

A complete listing of Homecoming 2008 events can be found at: http://www.cmu.edu/alumni/involved/events/homecoming/homecoming_schedule.html.

-- Also during homecoming, the Center for the Arts in Society will offer a tour of campus art at 12:30 Saturday, October 25. Led by Carnegie Mellon faculty member and alumnus Douglas Cooper (A’70), the tour will last approximately one hour and will be followed by a reception/discussion. Registration is required and is limited to 20 participants.

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