Radcliffe Institute Announces 2008–2009 Fellows and Their Projects

52 Scholars and Artists to Work on Projects Ranging from the Search for Extrasolar Planets to an Epic Poem About Illness and Healing

May 23, 2008

Jenny Corke
617-496-3078
jcorke@radcliffe.edu

Cambridge, Mass.—The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University has announced the names of 34 women and 18 men selected to be Radcliffe fellows in 2008–2009. These 52 fellows include 16 humanists, 14 scientists, 12 creative artists and 10 social scientists. Selected for the quality of their scholarship, research, or artistic work and the expected long-term impact of their projects, the fellows include the poet laureate of Wales who plans to compose an epic poem about the journey of a patient and caregiver; a social scientist who will investigate how United States politicians and policymakers have grappled with the energy crisis since the 1970s; and an astronomer who will search for transiting extrasolar planets in multiple systems throughout the universe.

“With great enthusiasm for the promise of the year to come, we welcome these distinguished scholars, scientists and artists to Radcliffe. We look forward to watching their work develop into exciting discoveries and to witnessing the meaningful collaborations they form with one another and with members of the Harvard and local communities,” said Barbara J. Grosz, dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and Higgins Professor of Natural Sciences in the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Unique among the nation’s centers for advanced studies, the Radcliffe Institute annually welcomes artists as well as scholars from a wide array of specialties, including among its class filmmakers, mathematicians, musicians, anthropologists, biologists and writers. The 2008–2009 fellows—who were chosen from a pool of 785 applicants—represent a distinguished group of groundbreaking scientists, social scientists, artists and humanists from the United States and beyond.

Examples of fellows in their respective fields appear immediately below; a full list of the 2008–2009 fellows appears at the end of this document.

Creative Arts Fellows
Among the 12 creative arts fellows is Gwyneth Lewis—an award-winning poet, playwright and librettist and the inaugural National Poet of Wales in 2005–2006—who will research and compose an epic poem titled “A Hospital Odyssey.” As she traces the journey of a patient and caregiver through a hospital, Lewis will draw on current medical research and ethical discourse to reimagine the emotions that accompany the stages of illness, diagnosis and healing.

Susan Faludi is an independent journalist and writer, and winner of the 1991 Pulitzer Prize in explanatory journalism and the 1992 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction for her book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (Anchor, 1992). At Radcliffe, she will contemplate the trajectory of historical mother-daughter relations in the United States and their implications for American feminism. She will pay particular attention to how certain characteristics of mother-daughter affiliations in the United States may have influenced and perturbed the women’s movement.

Anne Makepeace is an independent filmmaker who has been a directing fellow at the Sundance Institute and a Sundance Film Festival judge. Her recent documentary about the migration of Somali Bantu refugees to America, titled Rain in a Dry Land, earned her several awards and was broadcast on PBS. Makepeace will spend her year at Radcliffe chronicling, again through documentary film, the disappearance and resuscitation of the Native American Wampanoag language.

Science Fellows
The 14 science fellows include Tsevi Mazeh, an astronomer and the Oren Family Professor of Experimental Physics at Tel Aviv University, Israel. By carefully analyzing accurate photometric and satellite data, Mazeh hopes to discover transiting extrasolar planets in multiple systems throughout the universe. His goal is twofold: to find more planets in systems currently known to have at least one planet, and to find planets orbiting around double stars.

Joanna Aizenberg, the Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at Radcliffe and Gordon McKay Professor of Materials Science at Harvard, will join the community of fellows as she continues her research into the complex behavior in certain species’ mineral components and continues to use biological principles to design multifunctional materials and devices. Her work has shown, for instance, that the skeletons of some simple marine creatures not only provide the expected structural support for the organisms, but also function as exquisite optical devices. Aizenberg’s project will draw on her already interdisciplinary field of biomimetic materials, while also benefiting from Radcliffe’s unique environment of artists and scholars; for instance, she will also consider how art and architecture influence her work and her field.

Linda Shortliffe, the Stanley McCormick Memorial Professor and chair of the Department of Urology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, and chief of urology at Stanford University Hospital and Clinics and the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital. She is the only woman chair of urology in the country and there are currently very few women in the surgical specialty of urology. Believing that the pipeline into surgical specialties has not been adequately addressed with relation to race, gender and family and socioeconomic backgrounds, Shortliffe will investigate and document historical and current data about individuals entering and advancing within the field of urology.

Paul Ginsparg is a professor in the physics and information science departments at Cornell University. He is well-known as the creator of the on-line system arXiv.org that distributes scientific research results. At Radcliffe, he will embark on a theoretical and experimental investigation into how researchers’ interactions change as a result of ever-growing open access. Ginsparg plans to create tools and resources for researchers to communicate more efficiently with one another. 

Humanities Fellows
Among the 16 humanities fellows is Meg Jacobs, an associate professor of American history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and author of Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth Century America (Princeton University Press, 2005), which won an Organization of American Historians’ 2006 Ellis Hawley Prize. At Radcliffe, Jacobs will complete her current project, which centers on the energy crisis and the challenges of conservative governance in the United States during the past three decades.

Marla Frederick is an assistant professor of African and African American Studies and the Study of Religion at Harvard University and coauthor of Local Democracy Under Siege: Activism, Public Interests, and Private Politics (New York University Press, 2007), which was the 2008 winner of the Society for the Anthropology of North America’s Best Book Award. Frederick will be combining cultural studies theory and anthropological methods to examine how people of African descent in the United States and Jamaica interpret and employ religious broadcasting as a tool for social change.

Guoqi Xu, the Wen Chao Chair of History and East Asian Affairs at Kalamazoo College and an expert on modern Chinese history and Chinese foreign relations, will be working on a book about Chinese laborers in France during World War I. Xu will hone in on this rarely studied group in a bid to uncover buried truths, including the laborers’ contributions to the search for a new Chinese national identity and internationalization.

Social Sciences Fellows
Among the 10 social science fellows is John McCormick, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, who will probe the writings of Niccolo Machiavelli and reexamine institutions, other than elections, that enable ordinary citizens to keep political and economic elites accountable. His project has already been featured in the Boston Globe and will culminate in a book titled Machiavellian Democracy (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

Hauwa Ibrahim comes to Radcliffe from Nigeria, where she is a senior partner at Aries Law Firm in Abuja. During her fellowship year, she will examine women’s rights in Western Africa and how these rights have been affected by the theoretical foundations of Islamic Sharia law and by subsequent legal practices. She plans to publish the results of her research for wider use, particularly for use by legal practitioners who must interpret Islamic Sharia law in accordance with doctrines of the rule of law. Ibrahim has received the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, which is the European Parliament’s highest honor to recognize human rights work.

Mona Lena Krook is a professor of political science and of women and gender studies at Washington University in St. Louis. At Radcliffe, she will continue her research into the use of quotas in electing female candidates to political office and explore the challenges posed by gender quotas in politics for current democratic practices. Her work has been published in numerous political journals and she has a book forthcoming, titled Quotas for Women in Politics: Gender and Candidate Selection Reform Worldwide (Oxford University Press, 2009).

Now in its eighth year, the Radcliffe Institute Fellowship Program is a highly competitive program that has provided yearlong residencies to more than 400 award-winning writers, artists, scientists and other scholars. Examples of past fellows include acclaimed installation artist Shimon Attie, who uses contemporary media to animate sites with images of their lost histories; author Junot Díaz, whose novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead, 2007)—which he worked on in part during his Radcliffe fellowship year—recently won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; biologist Susan Lindquist, whose discoveries about protein folding have profoundly affected our understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and mad cow and who recently won the prestigious Otto Warburg Medal; and anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes, a leading commentator on the global traffic in human organs.

The 2009–2010 fellowship applications for creative artists, social scientists and humanists are due October 1, 2008; applications for natural scientists and mathematicians are due December 3, 2008 (postmarked for materials sent by mail).

Applicants are evaluated at two levels of review. In the first level, two leaders in each applicant’s field evaluate and rank the applicant. The top applicants are then submitted to a fellowship committee, which selects the fellowship class.

For more information about the Radcliffe Institute Fellowship Program, please call 617-495-8212 or visit www.radcliffe.edu/fellowships. Media representatives seeking more information about the Radcliffe Institute or a fellow should contact Jenny Corke at 617-496-3078 or jcorke@radcliffe.edu.

The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University is a scholarly community where individuals pursue advanced work across a wide range of academic disciplines, professions and creative arts. Within this broad purpose, the Institute sustains a continuing commitment to the study of women, gender and society.

The 2008–2009 Radcliffe Institute Fellows and their projects are:

Martha Ackmann
Augustus Anson Whitney Scholar
Mount Holyoke College
Nonfiction
Curveball: Toni Stone's Challenge to Baseball and America

Joanna Aizenberg
Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at Radcliffe
Harvard University
Natural Sciences and Mathematics
Connecting Engineering, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Architecture Through Biomimetics

Katharina Al-Shamery*
Carl von Ossietzky University (Germany)
Materials Science
Using Light for Chemical Reactions

Anne E. Becker
Elizabeth S. and Richard M. Cashin Fellow
Harvard Medical School
Anthropology
Navigating Body, Self, and Society Across Adolescence: A Mental Health Crisis in Fiji

Wendy Cadge
Suzanne Young Murray Fellow
Brandeis University
Sociology
Paging God: Religion in the Halls of Medicine

Peter S. Cahn
Katherine Hampson Bessell Fellow
University of Oklahoma
Anthropology
The Great Commission: Direct Sales and Direct Faith

Vicki Caron
Walter Jackson Bate Fellow
Cornell University
History
Catholic-Jewish Relations in France, 1870–1914

Michelle Clayton
University of California at Los Angeles
Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies
Moving Bodies of the Avant-Garde

Judith Coffin
University of Texas at Austin
History
Reading Beauvoir: The Second Sex in the Postwar World

Carol Espy-Wilson
Sargent-Faull Fellow
University of Maryland at College Park
Electrical Engineering
Robust Speech Recognition

Susan Faludi
Evelyn Green Davis Fellow
Independent Writer (United States)
Nonfiction and Current Issues
Mother-Daughter Relations and Their Effect on US Feminism

David Fisher
Indiana University
Mathematics and Applied Mathematics
Quasi-isometry Classification of Groups and Graphs

Ellen Fitzpatrick
Lillian Gollay Knafel Fellow
University of New Hampshire
History
Where We Were in ’68: Presidential Politics and American Ideals

Marla Frederick
Joy Foundation Fellow
Harvard University
Religion
Televised Redemption: Religion, Media, and Racial Uplift in the Black Atlantic World

Paul Ginsparg
Benjamin White Whitney Scholar
Cornell University
Physics
Applied Open Access

Laury Gutiérrez
La Donna Musicale (United States)
Music
The Artistic Development of Repertory for Concerts, Educational Performances, and Recordings of Early Music Written by Women Composers

James Haber
Helen Putnam Fellow
Brandeis University
Genetics
DNA Repair by Recombination

Martin Harries
Burkhardt Fellow
New York University
Comparative Literature
Theater After Film

Hauwa Ibrahim
Rita E. Hauser Fellow
Aries Law Firm (Nigeria)
Women’s and Gender Studies
Women, Justice, and Sharia Law

Meg Jacobs
Jeanne Rosselet Fellow
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
History
Panic at the Pump: The Energy Crisis and the Challenges of Conservative Governance Since the 1970s

Hyun kyung Kim
David and Roberta Logie Fellow and Radcliffe-Harvard Film Study Center Fellow
Independent Filmmaker (South Korea)
Film/Video Making
In Search of a State of Mind

Mona Lena Krook
Hrdy Fellow
Washington University in St. Louis
Political Science
The Global Diffusion and Impact of Candidate Gender Quotas

Erin Leahey
William Bentinck-Smith Fellow
University of Arizona
Sociology
Interdisciplinarity and Inequality

Gwyneth Lewis
Mildred Londa Weisman Fellow
Independent Scholar (Wales)
Poetry
A Hospital Odyssey

Anne Makepeace
David and Roberta Logie Fellow and Radcliffe-Harvard Film Study Center Fellow
Independent Artist (United States)
Film/Video Making
Âs Nutayuneân—We Still Live Here

Benjamin Markovits
Constance E. Smith Fellow
Royal Holloway, University of London (England)
Fiction
Childish Love

Emanuel Mayer
Radcliffe Institute Fellow
University of Chicago
Classic/Ancient Languages
The Ancient Bourgeoisie: Economics, Urban Planning, and a New Aesthetic, 100 BC–AD 200

Tsevi Mazeh
Tel Aviv University (Israel)
Astronomy
Discovery of Transiting Extrasolar Planets

Gail Mazur
The Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Fellow
Emerson College
Poetry
In Another Country

John P. McCormick
American Fellow
University of Chicago
Political Science
Machiavellian Democracy

Elizabeth McCracken
Frieda L. Miller Fellow
Independent Writer (United States)
Fiction
Thunderstruck Not Lightning-struck

Sarah Messer
University of North Carolina at Wilmington
Poetry
Mouse Oracle

Chiori Miyagawa
Bard College
Playwriting
The True Flower: Deity, Warrior, Madwoman, Ghost, and Demon

Thrishantha Nanayakkara
Cosponsored by the Harvard University Committee on Human Rights Studies
Independent Scholar (Sri Lanka)
Mechanical Engineering
Ground Contact, Force Constrained Robot Locomotion on Soft-Terrain Conditions for Humanitarian Demining

Priyamvada Natarajan
Emeline Bigelow Conland Fellow and Bunting Fellow
Yale University
Astronomy
Probing the Nature of Dark Energy with Gravitational Lensing

Viet Thanh Nguyen
Suzanne Young Murray Fellow
University of Southern California
American Studies
A Country Not Our Own: Memory and the American War in Viet Nam

Rachel Ollivier*
École Normale Supérieure (France)
Mathematics and Applied Mathematics
Representations of p-adic Reductive Groups in Characteristic p

Sheila Patek
Edward, Frances, and Shirley B. Daniels Fellow
University of California at Berkeley
Evolutionary and Organismic Biology
Acoustic Communication in Ancient and Living Seas

Daven Presgraves
Grass Fellow
University of Rochester
Evolutionary and Organismic Biology
Sex Chromosomes and the Origin of Species

Joanne Rappaport
Matina S. Horner Distinguished Visiting Professor
Georgetown University
Anthropology
The Meaning of Mestizaje in Early Colonial New Granada

Kay Rhie
Rieman and Baketel Fellow for Music
Cornell University
Music
“Songs Without Words” and a Percussion Concerto

Linda Dairiki Shortliffe
William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Fellow
Stanford University
Medical Sciences
Dynamics of Gender, Race, and Background in Urology

Kathleen Siwicki
Swarthmore College
Neuroscience
Flirt or Flight: The Neuroscience of Social Behavior in Fruit Flies

Jing Tsu
Yale University
Literature
Bend the Mother Tongue: Sinophone Literature

Manuel Vargas
University of San Francisco
Philosophy
Building Better Beings: Agency and the Circumstances of Responsibility

Koen Vermeir**
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium)
History and Philosophy
The Powers of the Imagination: Subtle Vapours Connecting Body and Soul

Jane Waldfogel
Marion Cabot Putnam Memorial Fellow
Columbia University School of Social Work
Social Sciences
Britain’s War on Poverty

Nicholas Watson
Katherine and Peter Sachs Faculty Associate Fellow
Harvard University
Literature
Balaam’s Ass: Vernacular Theology and the Secularization of England, 1050–1550

Björn Weiler
Aberystwyth University (Wales)
History
Kingship in the Medieval West, 950–1250

Kim M. Williams
Mary I. Bunting Institute Fellow
John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
Political Science
Transition: The Politics of Racial and Ethnic Change in Urban America

Guoqi Xu
Kalamazoo College
History
Fusion of Civilizations: Chinese Laborers in Europe and the United States during the Great War and Their Role in China’s Search for Internationalization

Steven J. Zipperstein
Vera M. Schuyler Institute Fellow
Stanford University
History
A Cultural History of Russian and East European Jewry, Eighteenth Century to the Present

*Fall only
**Spring only

As of 9/9/08