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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 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 |
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