NewsSmithHome

...............................................................................................................................................................


............................

A Star-Studded Cast of Winners

by Ann E. Shanahan '59

Several Smith faculty members and alumnae have received exceptional recognition in recent months. Joseph O'Rourke, Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin Professor of Computer Science, was one of seven faculty members nationwide-and the only one from a liberal arts college-to receive the first Director's Award for Distinguished Teaching Scholars from the National Science Foundation. The award, described by NSF as its "highest honor for excellence in both teaching and research," encourages engineers and scientists to apply their talents to education, both in and out of the classroom, and to present their research to colleagues around the country. Recipients receive $300,000 each over four years to continue and
expand their work beyond their institutions

Hans Vaget, Helen and Laura Shedd Professor of German Studies and professor of comparative literature, received the Forschungspreis der Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung. This senior research award honors the lifetime achievement of its recipients-in Vaget's case, his work in German studies, principally on Thomas Mann, Richard Wagner and Goethe. The prize covers six months of living, travel and work expenses in Germany, where Vaget will be associated with the University of Heidelberg. One hundred and fifty such awards are made each year to scholars from all over the world, most of them in the natural and social sciences. Prizes in German literature are rare, and Vaget's is thought to be the first awarded to someone from an American liberal arts college

Ann Rosalind Jones, Esther Cloudman Dunn Professor of Comparative Literature, and co-author Peter Stallybrass of the English and comparative literature departments at the University of Pennsylvania, received this year's James Russell Lowell Prize for the most outstanding literary or linguistic study by a member of the Modern Language Association. Their book, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Modern Memory (Cambridge University Press), was described in the MLA review as "brilliant, multidisci-plinary, and thoroughly original." This is the first time in the 32-year history of the Lowell prize that it has been awarded to a book whose author is a faculty member from a liberal arts college

Domenico Grasso, Rosemary Bradford Hewlett Professor and chair of the Picker Engineering Program, has been invited to become chair of the Environmental Engineering Committee, a branch of the Environmental Protection Agency's Science Advisory Board. The board is charged by Christine Todd Whitman, EPA administrator, and President George W. Bush with "employing sound science and good sense to pursue the resolution of a broad range of urgent environmental issues"

Ann Arnett Ferguson, associate professor of Afro-American studies and of women's studies, received the distinguished book of the year award from the sex and gender section of the American Sociological Association for Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity (University of Michigan Press). The award honors books that make a significant contribution to the field of sex and gender by being on the "cutting edge" of sociological inquiry

Virginia Euwer Wolff '59 received the National Book Award for young people's literature for her book True Believer (Simon & Schuster), the second novel in the Make Lemonade trilogy. The book's heroine, 15-year-old LaVaughn, surrounded by poverty and violence, strives every day not to be just another inner-city statistic. One reviewer called Wolff's prose "as sumptuous as ever" and her descriptions of LaVaughn's life and feelings "sympathetic and achingly real." Wolff's Smith classmate Gail Mazur was a National Book Award finalist in the poetry category for They Can't Take That Away from Me (University of Chicago)

Naturalist Cynthia Moss '62 won a MacArthur Fellowship award for her work studying the ecology and social behavior of the entire population of a thousand wild African elephants at Amboseli National Park in Kenya. MacArthur fellows, who are chosen for their marked capacity for self-direction and the extraordinary originality of and dedication to their creative pursuits, receive a stipend of $500,000 over five years

Attorney Cassandra Shaylor '92, co-director of Justice Now, was
one of 20 grant recipients, with the program's other co-director, Cynthia Chandler, in the first year of the Ford Foundation's Leadership for a Changing World awards program. The mission of Justice Now is to improve the lives of 8,000 prisoners in the two largest women's prisons in the world, in Chowchilla, California. The program offers legal assistance and information and organ- izes community-based campaigns against inhumane treatment within the penal system. Recipients receive $100,000 to advance their work and an additional $30,000 to strengthen their skills.

..............................................................................................................................................................

 

NewsSmith is published by the Smith College Office of College Relations for alumnae, staff, students and friends.
Copyright © 2002, Smith College. Portions of this publication may be reproduced with the permission of the Office
of College Relations, Garrison Hall, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts 01063. Last update: 2/4/2002.


Made with Macintosh