Radcliffe recognizes its 2006-07 fellows

Drew Gilpin Faust, dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and Lincoln Professor of History in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, has announced the names of 37 women and 13 men selected to be 2006 – 07 Radcliffe Fellows. At the institute, the fellows  –  among them 16 humanists, 14 scientists, 10 creative artists, and 10 social scientists, working on projects ranging from a study of integrated intelligence in robotics to a biography of Nathaniel Hawthornes sister  –  will work individually and across disciplines on projects chosen for both quality and long-term impact.

“We are delighted to welcome these distinguished scholars and artists to Radcliffe. We look forward to watching their work evolve and change in the course of this fellowship year,” said Faust.

Now in its sixth year, the Radcliffe Institute Fellowship Program is a highly competitive program that has provided yearlong residencies to more than 300 award-winning writers, artists, scientists, and other scholars. Past fellows include Pulitzer Prize – winning writers Geraldine Brooks and Caroline Elkins; geophysicist and planetary scientist Maria Zuber; historian Darlene Clark Hine; anthropologist husband-and-wife team Jean and John L. Comaroff; and philosopher Sari Nusseibeh. Selected from a pool of more than 700 applicants, the 2006 – 07 fellows are a diverse group of distinguished scholars from eight countries and 28 universities. Nine are current Harvard University faculty and scholars.

Creative Arts Fellows: Selected artists include Shimon Attie, who will create a large-scale installation for the Nobel Peace Prize Center in Oslo, Norway, that gives magical and enchanted visual form to the story and tale of the Oslo Peace Accords. Allegra Goodman, who recently published her fifth book, “Intuition” (Dial Press, 2006), will work on a collection of short stories set during the dotcom era and a novel titled “The Cookbook Collection,” about a woman who collects cookbooks but does not cook.

Humanities Fellows: For the first time, Radcliffe will welcome a cluster of scholars in the humanities. Radcliffe’s thematic clusters are groups of fellows who work both individually and collectively in their fields. Past clusters have studied cosmology and theoretical astrophysics, randomness and computation, and immigration. This year, four historians – John Demos from Yale University, Jane Kamensky from Brandeis University, Suzanne Lebsock from Rutgers University, and William S. McFeely from the University of Georgia – will explore the promise and perils of biography as a mode for understanding the past.

Science Fellows: Selected scientists include Megan Núñez, a junior faculty member at Mount Holyoke College whose interdisciplinary research – combining ideas from organic chemistry, biochemistry, and physical chemistry – focuses on DNA repair. Cassandra Fraser, a professor of chemistry at the University of Virginia, will pursue a project that aims at developing biomaterials with important diagnostic and therapeutic applications. Stuart Shieber, the James O. Welch Jr. and Virginia B. Welch Professor of Computer Science at Harvard, will investigate properties of grammar formalisms used in natural-language processing.

Social Sciences Fellows: Among the selected social scientists is Nancy Scheper-Hughes, a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, who will continue work on her book manuscript, “The Ends of the Body: Global (In)Justice and the Traffic in Human Organs.” John Diamond, a professor of sociology at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), will use survey and interview data to examine structural, institutional, and cultural factors that shape students’ achievement in affluent suburbs.

In addition to this year’s class of 50 fellows, there will be one professor in residence and three graduate fellows. The professor in residence, Carolyn Abbate, holds the Radcliffe Alumnae Professorship and is a professor of music at Harvard and one of the world’s foremost musicologists. The three graduate fellows are part of a new program, the Radcliffe Dissertation Completion Fellowship, available to students at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS). They include Cybelle Fox, who will work on her dissertation in social policy, “Race, Immigration and the Politics of Welfare in American Society, 1900 – 1950”; Katarina Mucha Sussner, who will work on her dissertation in biological anthropology, “The Influence of Acculturation on Early Childhood Feeding, Nutritional Status and Obesity: A Study of Latino Immigrant Mothers and Children”; and Therese Leung, who will work on her dissertation in sociology, “The Motherhood Wage Penalty Revisited.”

Unique among the nation’s centers for advanced studies, the Radcliffe Institute hosts academic researchers, as well as artists, musicians, fiction writers, and professionals. 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 applications are then submitted to a fellowship committee, which selects the fellowship class. The 2007 – 08 fellowship applications for creative artists, humanists, and social scientists are due Oct. 2; applications for natural scientists and mathematicians are due Dec. 4 (postmarked for materials sent by mail).

The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study 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. For more information, visit http://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/fellowships/.

The 2006 – 07 Radcliffe Institute Fellows

Carolyn Abbate (professor in residence), Radcliffe alumnae professor, Harvard University, musicology, “Overlooking the Ephemeral”

Abeer Alwan, Lillian Gollay Knafel Fellow, University of California, Los Angeles, electrical engineering: “Speech Perception in Noise: Models and Applications”

Shimon Attie, Mildred Londa Weisman Fellow, independent visual artist: “A Tale of Nobel Dreams”

C. Edwin Baker, University of Pennsylvania, law: “The Possibility of and Foundations of Legitimate Law”

Elizabeth Bradley, Edward, Frances, and Shirley B. Daniels Fellow, University of Colorado, computer science: “Computers, Chaos, and Choreography”

Julie Buckler, Evelyn Green Davis Fellow, Harvard University, cultural studies: “Russian Imperial Masterworks and Their Post-Histories”

Giovanni Capoccia, Rita E. Hauser Fellow, Oxford University, political science: “Militant Democrats: Political Repression in Western Europe”

Bruce Carruthers, Katherine Hampson Bessell Fellow, Northwestern University, sociology: “Credit and Credibility: The Evolution of Economic Trust”

Pierrette Cassou-Noguès,* Institut de Mathématiques de Bordeaux, Université Bordeaux 1, mathematics and applied mathematics: “Newton Trees and Algebraic Curves”

Ganmaa Davaasambuu, Harvard School of Public Health, medical sciences: “Milk, Dairy Intake, and Risk of Endometrial Cancer: A 22-Year Follow-Up”

John Demos,** Yale University, history: “The Heathen School: A Story of Hope and Betrayal in the Age of the Early Republic”

John Diamond, Harvard University, sociology: “At the Crossroads of Success and Struggle”

Frank Dobbin, Harvard University, sociology: “Equal Opportunity in Practice: What Works?”

Brigid Doherty, David and Roberta Logie Fellow, Princeton University, art history: “Homesickness for Things”

Marwa Elshakry, Joy Foundation Fellow, Harvard University, history: “Darwinian Conversions: Science, Religion, and Politics in Egypt and Greater Syria”

Wendy Espeland, Northwestern University, sociology: “Commensurate Worlds: How We Do Things with Numbers”

Maria Evangelatou, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, art history: “Weaving Christ’s Body: Clothing, Femininity, and Sexuality in the Marian Imagery of Byzantium”

Cassandra Fraser, University of Virginia, chemistry: “Designing Matter”

Rebecca Goldstein, Frieda L. Miller Fellowship, Trinity College, fiction: “Disenchantment of the World: A Novel”

Allegra Goodman, independent writer, fiction: “The Cookbook Collector: A Work in Progress”

Alma Guillermoprieto, Rita E. and Gustav M. Hauser Fund Fellow, independent writer, journalism: “Many Mexicos, a Lot of Songs: How Culture Grows”

Major Jackson, University of Vermont, poetry: “Urban Renewal”

Nozima Kamalova, sponsored by the Harvard Scholar at Risk Program, Legal Aid Society of Uzbekistan, human rights law: “The War on Terror and Its Implication to Civil Rights in Uzbekistan”

Jane Kamensky,** Emeline Bigelow Conland Fellow, Brandeis University, history: “A Tale of Seven Cities: The Life and Times of Gilbert Stuart”

Ranjana Khanna, Duke University, literature and women’s studies: “Asylum: The Concept and the Practice”

Emilio Kourí, Burkhardt Fellow, University of Chicago, history: “The ‘Indian Community’ in Mexican Social Thought”

Michèle Lamont, Matina S. Horner Distinguished Visiting Professor, Harvard University, sociology: “Cream Rising: Funding Excellence in the Social Studies and the Humanities”

Suzanne Lebsock,** William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Fellow, Rutgers University, history: “The Summer of ’44: Farming for Freedom”

Megan Marshall, American fellow, independent writer, nonfiction: “Ebe: The Untold Story of Hawthorne’s Forgotten Sister”

William McFeely,** Constance E. Smith Fellow, University of Georgia, history: “Life History: Biography and Its Borders”

Anita Mehta, SN Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences (Calcutta), physics: “The World in a Grain of Sand”

Peggy Miller, Helen Putnam Fellow, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, psychology: “Cultivating Children’s Self-Esteem: Discourse and Practices of Self-Enhancement”

David Mindell, University of Michigan, life sciences: “The Microevolution-Macroevolution Continuum Book Project”

Meenakshi Narain,*** Jeanne Rosselet Fellow, Boston University, physics: “Development of Techniques to Identify the Signatures of Little Higgs Models at the Large Hadron Collider with the ATLAS Detector”

Megan Núñez, Helen Putnam Fellow, Mount Holyoke College,

chemical biology: “Needle in a Haystack: Removing Base Lesions from DNA”

Tayhas Palmore, Grass Fellow, Brown University, engineering and medical science: “At the Bioelectronic Interface: Creating Smart, Adaptable, Microelectronic Circuitry”

Leah Price, Walter Jackson Bate Fellow, Harvard University, literature: “The Stenographic Imagination: Literature and the Office in Britain, 1837 – 1937”

Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Vera N. Schuyler Institute Fellow, University of California, Berkeley, anthropology: “The Ends of the Body: Global (In)Justice and the Traffic in Human Organs”

Anna Schuleit, David and Roberta Logie Fellow, independent visual artist, “INTERTIDAL”

Stuart Shieber, Benjamin White Whitney Scholar, Harvard University, computer science: “A Unified View of String and Tree Relations”

Marjorie Spruill, Hrdy Fellow, University of South Carolina, history, “Women’s Rights and Family Values: Gender and America’s Right Turn”

Christine Stansell, Mary I. Bunting Institute Fellow, Princeton University, history: “A Political History of American Feminism, 1776 – 2002”

Antónia Szabari, Bunting Fellow, University of Southern California, literature: “Less Rightly Said: The Literature of Insult in the French Reformation”

Maria Tatar, Marion Cabot Putnam Fellow, Harvard University, literature: “Reading for Life: Children’s Stories and Their Transformative Power”

Francesca Trivellato, Bunting Fellow, Yale University, history: “Images and Practices of Cosmopolitanism in European Commercial Society 1500 – 1800”

Katherine Vaz, Harvard University, fiction: “Below the Salt”

Manuela Veloso, Sargent-Faull Fellow, Carnegie Mellon University, computer science: “Integrated Intelligence: Robots, Teams of Robots, and Beyond”

Marie-France Vigneras,*** Université de Paris 7, Denis Diderot, mathematics: “The p-adic and mod p Local Langlands Correspondence”

Clea T. Waite, Radcliffe-Harvard Film Study Center Fellow, Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen Konrad Wolf, film/video making: “Moonwalk”

Amy Waldman, The New York Times, journalism: “British Islam”

Anthony Zee, Augustus Anson Whitney Scholar, University of California, Santa Barbara, physics: “Gravity, Neutrino, and Writing”

*Spring only

**Humanities cluster

***Fall only