Faculty/Staff
Associate Professor David Barnes has been selected as a Penn Humanities Forum Mellon Faculty Fellow for the 2012-13 academic year.
Professor Jonathan Moreno has been invited to join the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s International Bioethics Committee. Read the full story at this Penn News link. Dr. Moreno is a Penn PIK professor and holds the David and Lyn Silfen University Professorship of Ethics.
Associate Professor Beth Linker just published "A Dangerous Curve: The Role of History in America's Scoliosis Screening Programs," American Journal of Public Health (April 2012). She is also receiving fine reviews for War' Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America (U. Chicago Press, 2011). H-Net Review
The book was also featured in a recent Penn Current.
Professor Susan Lindee has been appointed Associate Dean for the Social Sciences in the School of Arts and Sciences, effective July 1, 2011. In this role she will oversee the Departments of Anthropology, Criminology, Economics, History and Sociology of Science, Political Science, and Sociology, as well as several research centers in the social sciences.
John Tresch is now Associate Professor, having been granted tenure in April 2011.
Matt Hersch, HSSC lecturer, is co-curator of "Blue Sky Metropolis", an exhibit at the Huntington Library that traces the development of Southern California in tandem with the aerospace industry. The exhibit is under that auspices of the Aerospace History Project at The Huntington, directed by Matt's co-curator Peter Westwick, professor of history at the University of Southern California.
Graduate Students
Our new graduate students for fall 2012 are Kate Dorsch, Jesse Smith, Emily Alden
and Luke Messac.
Deanna Day won the H.N. Segall prize for the paper she presented at the recent Canadian Society for the History of Medicine annual conference, in a special section on reproductive health history. The award is for the best graduate student paper presented at the meeting. The title of Deanna's paper is "The Patient Labor of Reproductive Care: The Contested History of Fertility Charting and Female Physiology," and is drawn from her dissertation research.
Five of our doctoral students won Dissertation Research Fellowships from SAS for the 2012-13 academic year: Peter Collopy (Teece Fellowship), Rachel Elder, Samantha Muka, Tamar Novick, and Jason Oakes.
Elaine Lefay has won the 2012 GAPSA-Provost Fellowship for Interdisciplinary Innovation.
Rachel Elder has one of five Dissertation Research Fellowships from SAS won by our grad students, and is also the first recipient (or first fellow) of the Mary L. Nickerson Fellowship in Neuro History, McGill University.
Deanna Day has won a Price Dissertation Fellowship, in residence at the Chemical Heritage Foundation for the 2012-2013 year.
L. Ruth Rand has been awarded a Mellon Graduate Fellowship in the Penn Humanities Forum for the 2012/2013 academic year.
Meggie Crnic has been awarded a Dissertation Completion Fellowship for Spring 2013, and was named a Andrew W. Mellon Graduate Research Fellow for Penn Humanities Forum for 2012-2013
Doctoral candidate Kristoffer Whitney will start a two-year postdoc at the Robert F. and Jean E. Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison next fall.
Doctoral candidate Joanna Radin will soon become Assistant Professor (tenure track) in the Section of the History of Medicine at Yale University School of Medicine. Joanna will also have a secondary appointment in Yale University's Department of Anthropology, where she will play an active role in the creation of a new M.A. program in Medical Anthropology.
Doctoral candidate Peter Sachs Collopy has been named a SAS Dean's Scholar for 2012. Each year the School of Arts and Sciences hosts the Levin Family Dean’s Forum to honor and recognize outstanding undergraduate and graduate students for their academic performance and intellectual promise by designating them as Dean’s Scholars. Peter has also won a Teece Fellowship (DRF) from SAS.
Tamar Novick won a DRF (Penfield) for 2012-2013.
Doctoral candidate Jason Schwartz has been named the Harold T. Shapiro Postdoctoral Fellow in Bioethics at the Princeton University Center for Human Values, beginning September 1, 2012. The University Center for Human Values supports teaching, research, and discussion of ethics and human values throughout the curriculum and across disciplines at Princeton. Its founding director was current Penn President Amy Gutmann.
Doctoral Candidate Kristoffer Whitney, "Tangled up in Knots: An Emotional Ecology of Field Science" on ScienceDirect.com, 12 November 2011 Article link
Graduate student Whitney Laemmli has won the 2011 Robinson Prize of the Society for the History of Technology for her presentation, "The Pointe Shoe as Technology: Making Streamlined Bodies and Interchangeable Ballerinas at the New York City Ballet," at the Society's recent meeting in Cleveland. This prize is awarded annually for the best-presented paper by an individual delivering his or her first paper at the SHOT annual meeting, with special attention by the awards committee to the effectiveness of the presentation as well as to the quality of the scholarship.Two blogs have commented on this paper, The Atlantic, and BoingBoing (see the news item for the blog URLS).
Graduate student Jen Goldsack won the Gold Medal in the Women's Lightweight Single Sculls (that's a rowing event, just Jen alone) representing the United States at the Pan American Games in Guadalajara.
Graduate Student Maxwell Rogoski (MD/PhD program) has won the 2011 GAPSA-Provost's Award for Interdisciplinary Innovation.
Doctoral Candidate Samantha Muka has received a Smithsonian Pre-Doctoral Fellowship for Fall 2011. She is working with Pamela Henson (Smithsonian Institution Archives) and Paula Johnson (National Museum of American History). The working title of her project is "Water Worlds: Aquarium expertise and the amateur-professional borderlands, 1880-1930."
Undergraduates
Flagbearers for 2012 Commencement are chosen for representing the best of the major in academics and service.
STSC: Hilary Gerstein '12
HSOC: Shrestha Singh '12
Rebekah Larsen '12 has won the Society of the College Prize from this department for the best honors thesis this year.
HSOC seniors have won leadership awards: Maria Bellatoni '12 won the Stephen Wise Award, Nana Yaa Misa '12 Studenhas won the James Brister Society Student Leadership Award, and Turja Chakrabarti '12 has won a Sol Feinstone Undergraduate Award.
STSC major Will Kearney '13 has won an Undergraduate Fellowship from the Penn Humanities Forum for his senior thesis project on the Canadian geophysicist Tuzo Wilson.
HSOC major Maria Bellantoni '12 has been invited to be part of two poster sessions at the 2012 American Geriatrics Society Annual Meeting in Seattle presenting her research (from her senior honors thesis) on factors affecting age-of-entry into long-term care. One of these sessions is a special student session sponsored by the Hartford Foundation.
HSOC alum Brian Mertens '11 co-wrote an article with Dr. Susan Sorenson that was recently published in the American Journal of Public Health. The paper was originally developed in the HSOC 471 Guns and Health class in Fall of 2010.
HSOC major Shrestha Singh '12 wrote an article for the Nov/Dec 2011 Pennsylvania Gazette for their column "Notes from the Undergrad" about her work documenting the lives of homeless women who are on a running team. The team is part of a program called "Back on My Feet" that promotes running as a tool of empowerment. Read her article at this link.
Alumni PhDs
Lynn Nyhart is president of the History of Science Society for 2010-2014, and has been awarded a Guggenheim for 2011-2012.
Matt Hersch (PhD '10) is co-curator of "Blue Sky Metropolis", an exhibit at the Huntington Library that traces the development of Southern California in tandem with the aerospace industry. The exhibit is under that auspices of the Aerospace History Project at The Huntington, directed by Matt's co-curator Peter Westwick, professor of history at the University of Southern California.
Dominique Tobbell (PhD '08) has won the eighth annual Stanley Jackson award for the best paper in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences in the preceding four years. The prize committee chose: "Who's Winning the Human Race? Cold War as Pharmaceutical Political Strategy," by Dominique Tobbell of the University of Minnesota. The article can be found at http://jhmas.oxfordjournals.org/content/64/4/429.full
Christopher F. Jones (PhD '10) is the winner of the
2011 Joel A. Tarr Envirotech Prize for his article, “A Landscape of Energy Abundance: Anthracite Coal Canals and the Roots of American Fossil Fuel Dependence, 1820-1860,” Environmental History 15 (July 2010): 449-484. In his article, Jones uses the concept of an “energy landscape” as an effective new tool for visualizing the causes and consequences of society’s energy choices, as well as the contingencies that inform the process of energy change. Drawing upon but also extending the seminal work of William Cronon and James Scott, Jones demonstrates that entrepreneurs, boosters, and other modernists built a new transportation-based energy regime in advance of market demand. By transforming the built environment and aggressively encouraging consumers to adopt anthracite coal, Jones argues, this regime helped to foster the subsequent and ultimately unsustainable American shift to fossil fuel sources that has continued to this day. Prize committee members applauded Jones for his skillful fusing of a detailed empirical analysis of the American Mid-Atlantic region with the broader theoretical concept of “energy landscapes.” Jones also breaks new ground in incorporating the spatial issue of transportation networks into our understanding of energy systems. By offering a fresh approach to dealing with the complex interactions between cultural, economic, technological, and ecological
factors, Jones makes an important contribution to the field of envirotechnical history and theory.
Eric Rau (PhD '99) is now Director of Library Services at the Hagley Museum and Library.