H&SS eNews, September 2005

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. The eNews is compiled and edited by Kelli McElhinny, director of media relations for H&SS. She can be reached at 412-268-6094 or kellim@andrew.cmu.edu. Contact Kelli to submit news about yourself and your fellow alumni, and to sign up for our newsletters.

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

For news about the entire university, be sure to check out the university’s home page or the Carnegie Mellon Today website.

Announcement

We interrupt your regularly scheduled newsletter to bring you this important announcement: On Friday, Oct. 28, H&SS will host a Homecoming reception for alumni, students, faculty and staff, from 4 to 6 p.m. in the H&SS Auditorium and the Coffee Lounge in Baker Hall. We will be honoring our student and alumni award winners, including filmmaker Greg Marcks (B.A. Creative Writing, 1998), who will be receiving Carnegie Mellon’s Young Alumni Award. H&SS Dean John Lehoczky will talk about some of the great things going on in the college, and faculty authors including History Professor Scott Sandage (“Born Losers: A History of Failure in America”) are tentatively scheduled to be on hand.

H&SS is opening two classes to alumni that day as well: Cognitive Psychology, from 1:30 to 2:20 p.m., and the Nature of Reason, from 2:30 to 3:20 p.m.

We hope that you are able to attend the reception and other Homecoming events, several of which feature H&SS faculty. For more information, go to http://alumni.cmu.edu/homecoming/index.html.

Also, you can purchase a commemorative engraved brick in time for Homecoming. The bricks will be installed in the sidewalk next to the new wing of Baker Hall. For only $100, you can have a brick engraved with your name or a short message. The bricks will be laser engraved so that your message will endure a lifetime of wear. Each brick has space for up to three lines of text. In order to install your brick in time for Homecoming, we must receive your order by September 28. To download an order form, go to http://www.hss.cmu.edu/pressreleases/brickform.pdf.

Alumni News

---Doug Brook (B.A. Professional Writing, 1994; M.A. Professional Writing, 1995) spoke on a panel about "The Impact of Offshore Outsourcing" at this summer's Society for Technical Communication annual conference in Seattle. For three years he has been the Global Publications Program Manager for Hewlett-Packard's NonStop Division (formerly Tandem Computers and Compaq Computers, where he'd been a technical writer and webmaster since 1995). Also, his play "Retrograde", which was performed at the 42nd Street Studios in New York in 2002, is published in the "Eight Tens at Eight Festival" anthology by Smith & Kraus. For more information, visit his website, http://carfax.cnc.net/ .

-- Sarah Dunn (B.A. Russian Studies, 2000) recently was awarded a grant from the Templeton Foundation to participate in the Cognitive and Textual Methods Project at Princeton University's Center for the Study of Religion. The two-year project uses innovative methods to investigate forms of prayer in social contexts. Dunn’s contribution will be "The Rhetoric of Moral Authority: Why the Soviet System Failed from the Perspective of Cognitive Poetics." She plans to complete her Ph.D. in Russian Literature at Princeton in the spring of 2006.

--Sharon Freeman (B.A. Psychology, 1974; M.S. Urban and Public Affairs, 1977) has been named the Outstanding Alumna by Walden University, from which she earned a Ph.D. in applied mathematics and decision science in 1998. Freeman is the founder of Lark-Horton Global Consulting Inc., an international economic development consultancy based in Washington, D.C. She also is the founder of the All American Business Exporters Association (AASBEA), which is the nation's only minority association dedicated exclusively to providing products and services to facilitate the participation of minorities in the global marketplace. She is the author of Conversations with Powerful African Women Leaders. For more information go to http://www.waldenu.edu/c/Ponder_3932.htm

Student News

--Silvia Pessoa, a doctoral student in the Department of Modern Languages, has co-authored a Spanish textbook, “ Mas alla de la pantalla: El mundo hispano a traves del cine” (“Beyond The Screen: The Hispanic World Through Film”).

College/Faculty News

--The Center for Africanamerican Urban Studies and the Economy (CAUSE) in the Department of History will hold a conference Sept. 30-Oct. 1 in celebration of the center's 10th anniversary. The conference, titled "African Americans and the Post-Industrial Age: New Challenges of Urban History and Policy-Making," will feature some of America's most distinguished scholars of the black experience. Lawrence D. Bobo, professor of sociology at Stanford University, will deliver the keynote address, "African Americans, Cities, and Policy-Making in a New Age," at 6 p.m. Sept. 30. All conference events will take place at Carnegie Mellon in Hamburg Hall 1000, and the conference is free and open to the public. During the conference, CAUSE will announce plans for a new multi-year oral history project on African Americans in the city of Pittsburgh since World War II. For more information and a complete conference schedule, go to http://www.hss.cmu.edu/cause/Cconf.html

--Krista Campbell (M.A.M. 1992, Arts Management) has been hired as the assistant to the director of the Center for the Arts in Society. She will be working on resource development as well as program management of community projects, such as Take Back the Hill and the Arts Greenhouse, and other Center events, lecture series, conferences, and student involvement. Campbell has an undergraduate degree in Liberal Arts, with a major in psychology, from Wittenberg University in Ohio. Previously, she worked at the Columbus Museum of Art, Cincinnati Artists Group Effort, Cincinnati Art Museum and the Dairy Barn Cultural Arts Center in Athens, Ohio, where she was executive director.

--Jim Daniels, director of the Creative Writing Program, has collaborated with Charlee Brodsky, a professor in Carnegie Mellon's School of Design, on a book of photography and poetry called "Street," which is slated to be published this month by Bottom Dog Press. "Street" is a collection of photographs shot by Brodsky in the 1980s of people in Pittsburgh's neighborhoods. Each photograph is accompanied by a poem written by Daniels that tells the imagined story of the person pictured. Daniels and Brodsky have been collaborating since 2002, and their work has appeared in several journals. Most recently, Brodsky and Daniels have collaborated with Jane McCafferty, an associate professor of creative writing, on the Homestead Project, an exhibition of photos of modern-day Homestead, Pa., juxtaposed with a series of old-town Homestead photos. All are accompanied by Daniels' and McCafferty's poetry. For more information go to http://www.cmu.edu/PR/releases05/050907_book.html or http://members.aol.com/lsmithdog/bottomdog/WorkingLiveshomepage2.html

-- A recent study by researchers in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences demonstrates that intense emotions have a powerful effect on how Americans continue to perceive the risk of terrorism and their memories of 9/11. The study was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. The researchers surveyed a national sample of Americans late in 2001, and then again a year later. Each time, they created experiences that accentuated one of the multiple emotions that the attacks evoked: fear, anger or sadness. One year out, the respondents' emotional reactions to the attacks continued to predict their perception of the risk of terrorism: Those who had their fear heightened were more pessimistic about the likelihood of future attacks and coping with the risk of terrorism, while those who had their anger heightened were more optimistic. Overall, the respondents in 2002 believed future attacks were less likely than they had the previous year. However, when asked to recall their predictions from 2001, people remembered being more optimistic than they actually had been. That is, they remembered having seen a safer world than they actually had shortly after the attacks. The study was co-authored by Baruch Fischhoff, Roxana Gonzalez , Jennifer Lerner and Deborah Small. For more information, go to http://www.cmu.edu/PR/releases05/050816_911.html

--George Loewenstein, professor of economics and psychology, co-authored a paper with University of Pittsburgh School of Law Professor Jules Lobel that examines the role that emotions play on public policy. The paper, to be published in the Chicago-Kent Law Review, demonstrates that the emotional responses that guide much of human behavior have a tremendous impact on public policy and international affairs, prompting government officials to make decisions in response to a crisis-such as the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks-with little regard to the long-term consequences. Intense emotions can undermine a person's capacity for rational decision-making, even when the individual is aware of the need to make careful decisions. With regard to public policy, when people are angry, afraid, or in other elevated emotional states, they tend to favor symbolic, viscerally satisfying solutions to problems over more substantive, complex, but ultimately more effective policies, according to the authors. For more information, go to http://www.cmu.edu/PR/releases05/050818_emotions.html

--The July/August issue of History Ireland features a three-page interview with Carnegie Mellon History Professor David Miller. Miller is an expert in Irish social history primarily between 1760 and 1870. He currently is at work on a book under the working title "Ulster Presbyterians and Irish Catholics, 1829-69." He is the author of "Church, State and Nation in Ireland 1898-1921."

--Carnegie Mellon is celebrating the 10th anniversary of its Master of Science in Computational Finance (MSCF) program, the first degree of its kind in the United States. Combining mathematical sciences, finance, computer science and statistics, the MSCF program uniquely prepares students for successful careers in the financial services industry teaching them how to leverage quantitative and technological methods in the world of finance. MSCF is an interdisciplinary program with 20 full-time faculty from the H&SS (statistics), Heinz School of Public Policy (information systems), Mellon College of Science (mathematical sciences) and Tepper School of Business (finance, management).

 Events

--The 2005 Asian Film Festival will get underway Friday, Oct. 7 at 7 p.m. with a screening of the Japanese film "Godzilla: Final Wars" (2004) in McConomy Hall at the University Center. The film festival is sponsored by the Department of Modern Languages; the Modern Languages Student Advisory Council; the Asian Studies Center and the University Center for International Studies of the University of Pittsburgh. The films are free and open to the public. All other films will be shown at 7 p.m. in McConomy Hall. They are: Oct. 14, "Christmas in August" (1998, South Korea) Oct. 21, "Shanghai Dreams" (2005, China)

--Franklin Toker will speak at 5:30 p.m. Oct. 10 in the Philip Chosky Theatre in the Purnell Center for the Arts as part of the "Aesthetics Out of Bounds" arts histories lecture series, sponsored by the Center for the Arts in Society. A broadly based scholar who was the first non-Italian called to teach the history of art at the University of Florence, Toker has researched the Gothic Revival, the ancient cathedral of Florence (whose excavation he directed over more than a decade), and the architecture and urban history of Pittsburgh. Toker is a professor of art and architecture at the University of Pittsburgh, where he teaches urban history and the history of medieval and American architecture. For a complete schedule and more information about the lecture series, go to http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/mwitmore/aesthetics/

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