Faculty and Student Highlights
Robert Becket Ebitz (Ph.D. candidate, Neurobiology) is beginning a postdoc in April 2013 in the lab of Tirin Moore, Department of Neurobiology, Stanford University.
Ariel Dorfman (Walter Hines Page Professor of Literature and Latin American Studies and Professor of Romance Studies) received Korea’s Dong-A Award for Best Play of 2012 for his play, Widows. He has also received seven nominations for the prestigious Naledi Theatre Awards, the annual theatre awards in South Africa, for his play, Delirium. In January 2013, he was invited to the DSC Jaipur Literature Festival held in the Diggi Palace in the Rajasthani capital of Jaipur, India, where he helped lead three different sessions.
Srishti Garvey (Ph.D. candidate, Neurobiology) was awarded a one-year Trice Scholarship in January 2013 for research in the brain sciences.
Nathan Hedrick (Ph.D. candidate, Neurobiology) was awarded a Grass Fellowship for Summer 2013 research at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. The award supports investigator-designed, independent research projects by scientists early in their career.
Richard Jaffe (Creed C. Black Associate Professor of Religion) became Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of Religion in January 2013.
Hwansoo Kim (Assistant Professor of Religion) published Empire of the Dharma: Korean and Japanese Buddhism, 1877–1912 (Harvard University Press: March 2013, http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674065758).
Wesley A. Kort (Professor of Religion) published Textual Intimacy: Autobiography and Religious Identity (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2012).
Frank Lentricchia (Katherine Everett Gilbert Professor of Literature) has been elected to the American Academy of Sciences. He is one of 198 new members of the academy, which honors some of the world’s most accomplished leaders in academia, business, public affairs, science, the humanities, and the arts.
Wolfgang Liedtke (Assistant Professor of Neurobiology) was awarded the 2012 Harrington Scholar-Innovator Award for the development of a new class of drugs that inhibit the pain response in skin with potential applications in painful skin conditions including sunburn and wound pain.
Hiroaki Matsunami (Associate Professor of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology and Neurobiology) was awarded the Chancellor’s Discovery Grant for “Molecular mechanisms of acute oxygen sensing.”
Carol Meyers (Mary Grace Wilson Professor of Religion) was elected President of the Society of Biblical Literature for 2013. She also published two books, Archaeology, Bible, Politics, and the Media, edited with Eric M. Meyers (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2012) and Rediscovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). In addition, she delivered the Marcus Breger Memorial Lecture at the University of Arizona on February 4, 2013).
Walter D. Mignolo (William H Wannamaker Professor of Literature, Romance Studies and Cultural Anthropology) was invited by the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa (CISA) at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, under the auspices of the Wits Distinguished Scholars Programme, a prestigious series that brings renowned intellectuals to Johannesburg from around the world.
Ebrahim Moosa (Professor of Religion) has been awarded a Fulbright scholarship for 2013-14.
David Morgan (Professor of Religion) published The Embodied Eye: Religious Visual Culture and the Social Life of Feeling. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). He also published the following essays: “Rhetoric of the Heart: Figuring the Body in Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus,” in Birgit Meyer and Dick Houtman, eds. Things: Material Religion and the Topography of Divine Spaces. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012, pp. 90-111; “The Look of the Sacred,” in Robert A. Orsi, ed., Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 296-318; and “Religion and Visuality in America: Material Economies of the Sacred,” in Stephen J. Stein, ed., Cambridge History of Religions in America. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 748-80.
Geoffrey Pitt (MD/Ph.D., Associate Professor of Medicine, Neurobiology and Pharmacology and Cancer Biology) was awarded a Chancellor’s Discovery Grant for “Increase in bone mass by voltage-gated Ca2+ channels: potential therapy for osteoporosis.”
Kai Zhu (Ph.D. candidate, Environment) has received a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation.