H&SS eNews, May 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.

EDITOR'S NOTE: I am delighted to present my first issue of the H&SS eNews, and I look forward to communicating the many accomplishments of H&SS students, alumni, faculty and staff. Please feel free to drop me a note anytime you have news to share or have a question about the eNews.

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

Alumni News

-- At the 39th NAACP Image Awards, Sue Stauffacher (B.A., Creative Writing 1983) received the honor in the Outstanding Literary Work - Children category for her book "Nothing But Trouble: The Story of Althea Gibson."

-- Oopali Operajita (M.A., Professional Writing 1995) recently organized the First Al Gore Sustainable Technology Venture Competition in New Delhi. Operajita is one of India's most sought after and leading political advisers and strategists. She has served as adviser to The Honourable Kapil Sibal, Union Minister for Science and Technology, and Union Minister for Earth Sciences, and currently advises an array of India's top leaders.

-- Karen Rigby (B.A., Creative Writing, 2001) has had her second poetry chapbook, "Savage Machinery," accepted by Finishing Line Press.

Student News

-- Abiola Fasehun, a senior creative writing major, has received a Zora Neale Hurston Award, which covers the costs associated with the Summer Writing Program at Naropa University in Boulder, Colo. This prestigious honor is awarded to a select group of students from diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds and is based on exceptional literary merit and promise as well as financial need.

-- Michael J. Hartwell, a senior creative writing major, received the Gladys Schmitt Creative Writing Scholarship in a March 25 ceremony in the Gladys Schmitt Creative Writing Center. Hartwell will begin a Master of Fine Arts program at Indiana University this fall.

-- Senior Brittany McCandless, who is majoring in professional writing and creative writing and minoring in international relations, is the recipient of a 2008 Carnegie Mellon Women's Association (CMWA) Award. The CMWA Award is a scholarship presented annually to three outstanding graduating women. The award money can be used for graduate school or expenses related to beginning one's career.

-- Chlotilde ("Chloe") Taylor, a senior social and cultural history major, has been selected as the winner of the 2008 Gretchen Goldsmith Lankford Award. Named after a 1943 Margaret Morrison College graduate who also earned a Master's Degree in Public Management from the Heinz School in 1990, the Lankford Award is granted annually to an outstanding graduating Humanities and Social Sciences student who is committed to post-graduate work and a career in education. Taylor will enter either the Teach for America program or the New York City Teaching Fellows Program next fall.

College/Faculty News

The Global and International Relations program, which is housed in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences and directed by Associate Professor Kiron Skinner, has introduced a new Global Politics major and added a minor in Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Economic Development (IEE) to its offerings as well. The global politics program will provide students with a broad understanding of the complex, interdependent connections among politics, cultures, markets and technology around the world. Students will be able to select global politics as a primary major, an additional major or a minor, while the IEE course of study is available as a minor only. The interdisciplinary IEE minor was created to provide students with the opportunity to pursue academic interests in entrepreneurship, innovation management and economic development. For more information: http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2008/April/april22_globalpolitics.shtml

In other H&SS news.

English Department

-- Creative Writing Professor Terrance Hayes recently was the subject of a Poet Profile on PBS' NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. The story included footage of Hayes on campus and at his home in Pittsburgh's Highland Park neighborhood. To view some of the video and read a transcript of the piece, visit http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/jan-june08/poetry_04-24.html

-- This month, a group of English Faculty - David Kaufer, Suguru Ishizaki and Andreea Ritevoi - along with doctoral student Necia Werner will travel to Mysore, India, to teach a three-week course on the principles of the department's Professional and Technical Writing Programs to faculty at the Infosys Training Center there.

History Department

-- Joe Trotter, who has served as head of the History Department since 2001, has received the Carnegie Mellon's first Giant Eagle Professorship in Humanities and Social Sciences. A nationally recognized scholar and author, Trotter served as the Mellon Bank Professor of History from 1996-2007. Trotter also is the founding director of Carnegie Mellon's Center for Africanamerican Urban Studies and the Economy (CAUSE), an interdisciplinary research institute that fosters scholarship on the intersection of urban history, race and policy. The Giant Eagle Foundation established the professorship to support an outstanding faculty member in Carnegie Mellon's College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

-- Professor Wendy Goldman recently published a book titled "Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin. The Social Dynamics of Repression." On April 4, the History Department held a symposium in honor of the book in which invited Russian history scholars from the University of Illinois and the University of Pittsburgh joined Carnegie Mellon faculty and graduate students and offered critical comments on the book and facilitated a wide ranging discussion of its implications for the future of historical scholarship on the subject.

Department of Modern Languages

-- Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies and Second Language Acquisition Mariana Achugar has received a Spencer Foundation Small Research Grant to explore how the subject of history is taught and learned in multilingual classrooms. Specifically, Achugar and colleagues will collaborate with teachers to design history units that support the development of disciplinary literacy for English language learners in mainstream history classrooms.

-- German Professor Stephen Brockmann, was recently elected Vice President of the German Studies Association. His two-year term will begin January 1, 2009 and will be followed by a two-year term as President beginning January 1, 2011. With a membership of about 1600, the German Studies Association is the principal organization of specialists in Central Europe--primarily German Studies scholars, historians, and political scientists, but also art, music, and film historians, and other scholars with an interest in Central Europe--in the United States.

Department of Philosophy

-- Associate Teaching Professor Mara Harrell has received funding from the Spencer and Teagle Foundations that will support her research on the use argument mapping or diagramming as an educational tool. Harrell, who has incorporated the concept into her introductory philosophy classes in the past, will work with Danielle Wetzel, director of the first-year program in the English Department, to teach first-year students in English classes about argument mapping.

-- Professor Kevin Kelly received a two-year, $100,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for his project, "Ockham's Razor, A New Explanation." The funding will support Kelly's work arguing that Ockham's Razor -- a principle that says when one is faced with a range of theories compatible with current evidence, one should prefer the simplest such theory -- does not aim directly at the truth but, nonetheless, keeps one on the straightest path in pursuit of it. Kelly's work in this area has a number of potential applications, such the inference of causation from observational data.

-- Teddy Seidenfeld, Herbert A. Simon and University Professor of Philosophy and Statistics, is one of the scholars whose work is featured in "Ending the Mendel-Fisher Controversy," a new book that, attempts to settle the 70-year old debate sparked when esteemed British statistician and geneticist R.A. Fisher proposed that Gregor Mendel, the father of modern genetics, published falsified experimental data to support his classic theory. Seidenfeld's contribution to the book, "P's in a Pod: Some Recipes for Cooking Mendel's Data," addresses two of Fisher's main objections to Mendel's data - that Mendel falsified his data to produce his famous 2:1 ratio and that the data conforms too well to Mendel's gene distribution theories.

Psychology Department

-- A team from the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging led by Center Director and D.O. Hebb Professor of Psychology Marcel Just determined that merely listening to a cell phone conversation can lead drivers to make errors similar to those committed by drivers under the influence of alcohol. The study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Brain Research, used brain imaging to document that listening alone reduces by 37 percent the amount of brain activity associated with driving. The results show that making cell phones hands-free or voice-activated is not sufficient in eliminating distractions to drivers.

-- A Carnegie Mellon study published in the March/April issue of the journal Child Development suggests that playing a simple, inexpensive numerical board game boosts low-income preschoolers' comprehension of a variety of number-related concepts. In the study, which was co-authored by Robert Siegler, the Teresa Heinz Professor of Psychology, four- and five-year-old Head Start students who played a Chutes and Ladders-style board game with consecutively numbered linear squares performed better on four different numerical tasks than did their counterparts, who played a similar game in which the squares were colored rather than numbered.

-- Assistant Professor of Psychology Erik Thiessen received a five-year, $450,000 Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The CAREER Award - NSF's most prestigious for junior faculty - will support Thiessen's research on how infants acquire language skills, which focuses on how certain statistically related aspects of language - although complex - can actually help infants learn how to speak.

Department of Statistics

--Carnegie Mellon has received a major gift from Bruce and Astrid McWilliams to establish the Bruce and Astrid McWilliams Center for Cosmology in its Mellon College of Science. Researchers at the center will strive to unravel the mysteries of the universe through multidisciplinary efforts in astrophysics, particle physics, computer science and statistics. The center's research will include the study of the distribution of dark matter and the behavior of dark energy using the latest tools in data-mining, statistics and computer science. Statistics Professors Chris Genovese and Larry Wasserman, Assistant Professor Chad Schafer and postdoctoral fellow Peter Freeman will be key contributors as members of the center's team of researchers. For more information: http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2008/April/april22_cosmologycenter.shtml

Events

-- Best-selling novelist Russell Banks will present the final talk in the 2007-2008 Adamson Visiting Writers Series at 8 p.m., Friday, May 2 in the Adamson Wing, Baker Hall 136A. After Banks’ lecture, the English Department will present its annual Adamson Awards to honor student writing. For more information: http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2008/April/april17_russellbanks.shtml

-- Children from the El Circulo Juvenil de Cultura outreach program coordinated by Modern Languages faculty members Mariana Achugar, Kenya Dworkin and Felipe Gomez, will present their final projects the weekend of May 3. The program participants will perform their original play, “La gran aventura del viaje por America” (The grand and adventurous journey through America) at 2 p.m., Saturday, May 3 at the Carnegie Library’s Main Branch in Oakland. The students will present songs, poems and video projects that they completed this spring at 4 p.m. on Sunday, May 4 in the Adamson Wing of Baker Hall (136A)

-- Former U.S. Vice President and 2007 Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore will speak at Carnegie Mellon University's 111th commencement ceremony at 11 a.m., Sunday, May 18 in Gesling Stadium on the university campus. For more information: http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2008/April/april21_commencement.shtml

--For a complete list of upcoming alumni events, go to http://alumni2.tepper.cmu.edu/cmuEvents/.

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