H&SS eNews, November 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.

Alumni News

--Heather Arnet (B.A. Literary and Cultural Studies, 1997), the executive director of the Woman and Girls Foundation of Southwest Pennsylvania, appeared recently on NBC’s “Today” show to discuss her organization’s “girlcott” against clothing retailer Abercrombie & Fitch for selling T-shirts that are demeaning to women. H&SS student Anne Di Giovanni, a senior English and history major, is an intern with the foundation who spearheaded the marketing of the girlcott. The successful campaign against the T-shirts was featured on several other major national media outlets. For more information, go to http://www.wgfswpa.org/girlcott.htm.

--Dana Burr Bradley (M.S., Ph.D. Applied History, 1991, 1994) has joined the faculty of Western Kentucky University as the Cliff Todd Distinguished Professor of Gerontology and director of the Center for Gerontology. While at Carnegie Mellon, Bradley was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellowship to support her research on the histories of state aging policies. A Fellow of the Association for Gerontology in Higher Education and of the Gerontological Society of America, in which she is a past chair of the Humanities and Arts Committee, she was named the first Professor of the Year by the UNC Charlotte MPA Graduate Student Association for her leadership in graduate education. Her current research focuses on generational differences in volunteer motivations; faculty work histories and retirement decisions; and intergenerational service learning. Recent publications appear in The Gerontologist, Public Organization Review, HEC Forum and Journal of Educational Gerontology.  Her book, “Enduring Questions in Gerontology” will be released by Springer in November.   

--Ruma Chopra (B.S. Technical Writing, 1990; M.A. English, 1994) has been awarded a research fellowship by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. Chopra will conduct research at the Main Branch of the New York Public Library. Her project title is “Loyalist Persuasions: New York City, 1776-1783.” Chopra is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of California, Davis.

--Greg Marcks (B.A. Creative Writing, 1998) received Carnegie Mellon’s Young Alumni Award last month during Homecoming weekend. Marcks, a filmmaker, is the director of “11:14” which featured an ensemble cast that included Patrick Swayze, Barbara Hershey and two-time Academy Award winner Hilary Swank. Marcks won a Student Academy Award for his film “Lector” which he made while he was a graduate student at the Florida State Film Conservatory.

--Catherine S. Vodrey (B.A. Creative Writing and English, 1985) has been elected vice president of the Tri-State Area Citizens' Scholarship Foundation of East Liverpool, Ohio. The foundation, commonly known as Dollars for Scholars, was launched in 1962 and has awarded well over $4 million to needy college-bound students in western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio and northern West Virginia.

Announcement: Carnegie Mellon invites alumni who plan to attend graduate school and have financial need to apply for the Jack Kent Cooke Scholarship, a nationally prestigious award that can be used at an approved institution abroad or in the United States. Winners receive a maximum of $50,000 per year for a maximum of six years of study. To receive the award, you must have graduated in the last five years. Non-U.S. citizens are eligible. For more information, guidelines and eligibility requirements, see http://www.jackkentcookefoundation.org. The campus deadline is March 1, 2006. If interested, please contact the campus representative, William Alba, at alba@cmu.edu.

Student News

--During Homecoming weekend, two H&SS students received Carnegie Mellon’s Student Service Awards, which are given to seniors who have demonstrated a balance of good grades and participation in extracurricular activities while providing exemplary service to the university, the student body and the community. Receiving the awards were Vijay Jesrani, who is majoring in political science and professional writing, and Darbi Roberts, a double major in psychology and European studies. Jesrani has been a teaching and research assistant in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences, and an intern in the Media Relations Office. He also is a member of the President’s Student Advisory Council and president of ALLIES, the university’s GLBT-Straight Alliance. Roberts’ activities include being the community advisor for West Wing and Resnik; the crew team; Delta Delta Delta sorority; and the Carnegie Clan. She also is a Fifth Year Scholar and a member of the Honors Program.

College/Faculty News

--Jennifer Lerner has published a provocative new study in the journal Biological Psychiatry that says that people who respond to stressful situations with angry facial expressions, rather than fearful expressions, are less likely to suffer such ill effects of stress as high blood pressure and high stress hormone secretion. Darwin first proposed that facial expressions of emotion signal biological responses to challenges and opportunities. Because stress responses are central to survival, Lerner and her co-authors reasoned that stressful situations should be especially likely to reveal coordinated biological reactions and facial communication, in part to warn or warn off others. Lerner found that analyses of facial expressions revealed that the more fear individuals displayed in response to the stressors, the higher their biological responses to stress. By contrast, the more anger and disgust (indignation) individuals displayed in response to the same stressors, the lower theirresponses. This paper builds on a line of work led by Lerner, the Estella Loomis McCandless Associate Professor of Psychology and Decision Science, showing that anger triggers feelings of certainty and control as well as optimistic perceptions of risk. For more information go to http://www.cmu.edu/PR/releases05/051024_faces.html.

--Carnegie Mellon’s innovative Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) now includes the Hong Kong Bilingual Child Language Corpus, which is the world’s largest video-linked database of children learning two first languages. CHILDES is an online, searchable collection of interactions that demonstrate how children learn language in a variety of settings. Carnegie Mellon Psychology Professor Brian MacWhinney created CHILDES in 1984, and it is now the most sophisticated of 13 databases known as TalkBank. Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pennsylvania launched TalkBank in 1999 with a grant from the National Science Foundation. TalkBank includes video and audio recordings, all searchable on the Web, from a variety of disciplines, including law and medicine. The Hong Kong database features 170 hours of audio and video files of four families raising their children bilingually in Cantonese and English. CHILDES and TalkBank can be accessed at http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/.

 Events

--Ted Kooser, the U.S. poet laureate and 2005 Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry, will speak at 8 p.m. Nov. 16 as part of the Adamson Visiting Writers Series. His collection “Winter Morning Walks: One Hundred Postcards to Jim Harrison” was published in 2000 by the Carnegie Mellon University Press. His talk will take place in the Adamson Wing of Baker Hall. The lecture is free and open to the public.

--Winston James, a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, will speak at 4:30 p.m. November 17 in Gregg Hall (Porter Hall 100) as part of the Humanities Center Lectures. His talk is titled "The Caribbean Diaspora and Black Internationalism: Evidence and Explanation" and is free and open to the public.

--The Center for Africanamerican Urban Studies and the Economy (CAUSE) in the Department of History will kick off its 2005-06 lecture series Nov. 18 with a talk by Johanna Fernandez, the center’s postdoctoral fellow. Fernandez’s talk, “The Young Lords, the Black Panthers, and the Social and Structural Roots of Late Sixties Radicalism” will take place at 5 p.m. in the Adamson Wing of Baker Hall. Refreshments will be served at 4:30 p.m. The lecture is free and open to the public.

--The Department of Modern Languages and the School of Music are sponsoring "An Evening of Mélodie: L'Amour et la Mort (Love and Death)" at 7 p.m. Monday, Nov. 21 in the Kresge Recital Hall in the College of Fine Arts. The performance will feature students and faculty from the School of Music, and include the works of Bachelet, Bizet, Chaminade, Debussy, Duparc, Fauré, Massenet and Ravel. The performance is free and open to the public.

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