Awards & Honors: Fall 2010

Top Teachers Recognized

Six College of Liberal Arts professors have received 2010 Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Awards from The University of Texas System. They are among 72 recipients from across the system’s 15 academic institutions. They will share $2 million in awards. This year’s recipients are:

Mia Carter, associate professor, University Distinguished Teaching Associate Professor, Department of English

Coleman Hutchison, assistant professor, Department of English

Marc Lewis, associate professor, Department of Psychology

Tiffany Gill, assistant professor, Department of History and Department of African and African Diaspora Studies

Frank Guridy, assistant professor, Department of History

George Forgie, University Distinguished Teaching Associate Professor, Department of History

The awards range from $15,000 to $30,000. They are given to faculty members who demonstrate extraordinary classroom performance and innovation at the undergraduate level.

CWGS to Develop Women’s Human Rights Initiative

With a $450,000 grant from the Embrey Family Foundation, the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies (CWGS) will establish a Women’s Human Rights Initiative that will promote teaching, research and activism in the areas of women’s rights and human rights.

CWGS will use the five-year grant to develop new courses for University of Texas at Austin students, develop a curriculum and teacher training 
program for high school classes around the state, and host an international women’s rights conference in May 2012.

“This is a tremendous opportunity for the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies,” says CWGS Director Susan Sage Heinzelman. “We will offer the community, both on and off campus, a vigorous debate about the causes of women’s rights abuses and begin to generate solutions that might lead to systemic and sustainable change around the world.”

The planned women’s rights conference will likely attract prominent experts and activists on the front lines of the struggle for rights worldwide to the university.

J. Lindsay Embrey established the Dallas-based Embrey Family Foundation in 2004. The foundation champions the well-being and rights of all people by supporting programs that advance human rights, healthy communities, education and artistic creativity.

Professor Helps Draft New Kenyan Constitution

In August, Kenyan voters approved a new national constitution that had been developed, in part, with the help of assistant government professor Zachary Elkins.

Together with several colleagues from other American universities, Elkins had counseled Kenyan officials on everything from establishing an effective balance of power to eliminating redundancies or ambiguities in the proposed constitution.

Elkins co-directs the Comparative Constitutions Project (CCP), which has developed a dataset that records the characteristics of more than 900 current and historical constitutions.

The first book from the project recently won a prize from the American Political Science Association for explaining why some constitutions last for generations while others 
fail quickly.

Respecting the scholars’ advice, Kenyan drafters ultimately chose a pure presidential model in the proposed constitution.

“Kenyan leaders wrote a constitution that was remarkably clear, well integrated and detailed,” says Elkins. “We worked with them to anticipate some of the consequences of their choices and to identify alternatives.”

New Award Named for Professor

The Society for Computational Economics has established the David A. Kendrick Distinguished Service Award to recognize outstanding scholars in finance and computational economics.

Recognized for his prolific work in computational economics and his instrumental role in the field, Kendrick, the Ralph W. Yarborough Centennial Professor of Liberal Arts in the Department of Economics, was honored as the inaugural recipient of the award in July at the society’s annual meeting 
in London.

Kendrick, who has been on the Department of Economics faculty for more than 40 years, is a leading scholar in general computational macroeconomics. He has published more than 70 articles and authored or co-authored more than a 
dozen books.

Known for his dedication to his students, Kendrick has received numerous teaching awards including the 2001 Chad Oliver Plan II Teaching Award, the 1993 Silver Spurs Centennial Teaching Fellowship, and the 1992 President’s Associates Teaching Excellence Award.

A nationally recognized economist, Kendrick served as a consultant for Bell Telephone Laboratories from 1968-1969 and the World Bank from 1971-1987. He also served as chairman for the National Science Foundation Initiative on Computational Economics in 1991 and as president of the Society of Computational Economics from 1998-1999.

More Faculty & Staff News

The Franklin Institute awarded Rolando Hinojosa-Smith (English) with a special homage at the León University, in Spain in May 2010. He also conducted a two-week course on Mexican American Literature for international students at Graz University, Austria in July.

Kenneth Greene (Government) co-authored a paper “The Latin American Left’s Mandate: Free-Market Policies and Issue Voting in New Democracies,” to be published in Jan. 2011 in World Politics.

“Recovering Reason,” a collection of essays in honor of Thomas Pangle (Government) was published by Lexington Books in Sept. 2010.

Tiffany Gill (History) received the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Award from the Association of Black Women Historians for “Black Beauty Shops: African American Women’s Activism in the Beauty Industry” (University of Illinois Press, 2010).

Coleman Hutchison (English) will spend the 2010-11 academic year as a visiting scholar at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Alan Friedman (English) co-edited a special journal issue, News of Ulysses: Readings and Re-Readings. Texas Studies in Language and Literature in 2009. He also delivered a keynote address titled “Durrell’s Orientalism: Sex, Race, and Politics in The Alexandria Quartet,” at the annual Lawrence Durrell conference in New Orleans on July 8, 2010.

The Ian Hancock Roma Education and Social Center, an education foundation in Croatia, Rome, was created in honor of Ian Hancock (Linguistics/English).

The Pacific Sociological Association held a special session during its annual meeting titled “Riding Glass Escalators and Selling Barbies” in Christine Williams’ (Sociology) honor.

Martha Ann Selby (Asian Studies) has been awarded a research fellowship by the National Humanities Center, where she has been designated a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow for the 2010-11 academic year.

Andrew Riggsby (Classics) received the National Endowment for the Humanities/Roger A. Hornsby Post-Doctoral Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome to work on a new book exploring what it was like to “think like a Roman.”

Jason Baldridge (Linguistics) and his co-principal investigators David Beaver and Katrin Erk  (Linguistics) received a two-year $120,000 grant from the New York Community Trust to support their research in computational linguistics.

Geraldine Heng (English/Middle Eastern Studies/Center for Women’s and Gender Studies) was awarded a residential research fellowship from the Humanities Research Institute of the University of California. The award enables her to participate in the institute’s spring 2011 research seminar “Holy War Redux.”

Carol MacKay (English/Center for Women’s and Gender Studies) published an article titled “A Journal of Her Own The Rise and Fall of Annie Besant’s Our Corner” in the 2009 edition of Victorian Periodicals Review. She also edited “Autobiographical Sketches” by Annie Besant, Broadview Press, July 2010.

Daniel Hamermesh (Economics) has been appointed the Professor of Labour Economics for 2009-12 by the Maastricht University in the Netherlands.

James Galbraith (Government) will receive the Docteur Honoris Causa award from the Université Pierre Mendes-France in Grenoble Oct. 11.

Debra Umberson (Sociology) was appointed as editor of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, a major publication of the American Sociological Association.

Javier Auyero (Sociology) received the 2010 Park Best Book Award from the American Sociological Association for “Flammable,” Oxford University Press, April 2009.

Gloria Gonzalez-Lopez (Sociology) was named the 2009 Center for Women’s and Gender Studies Contributor of the Year.

Carolyn Eastman (History) won the James Broussard Prize for Best First Book from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic for “A Nation of Speechifiiers: Making an American Public after the Revolution.”

Sanford Levinson (Government/Law) will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association at its annual meeting Sept. 1 in Wash., D.C.

Mercedes Lynn de Uriarte (Journalism/Center for Women’s and Gender Studies) was awarded a $150,000 grant from the Kellogg Foundation to study the impact of gentrification on East Austin.

David S. Kirk (Sociology/Population Research Center affiliate) received the 2010 James F. Short Jr. Distinguished Article Award from the Crime, Law and Deviance section of the American Sociological Association for his paper “A Natural Experiment on Residential Change and Recidivism: Lessons from Hurricane Katrina,” published in American Sociological Review.

Julia Mickenberg served as the Jay C. and Ruth Hall Visiting Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was an Honorary Fellow in the Institute for Research in the Humanities during the 2009-10 academic year. The March 2010 issue of American Quarterly published her article “The New Generation and the New Russia: Modern Childhood as Collective Fantasy.”