In March, Johns Hopkins’ community engagement platform began recruiting students to volunteer as greeters, guides, runners, and observers at the COVID-19 mass vaccination site at M&T Bank Stadium in downtown Baltimore. “Our student volunteers have the opportunity to have a direct impact on the COVID-19 crisis through this volunteer role. As more people in our community become eligible to be vaccinated, our students are playing a key role in nonclinical operations and assisting with the efficiency of this mass vaccination site,” says Misti McKeehen, executive director of civic engagement at the Johns Hopkins Center for Social Concern.
James Arthur, Associate Professor, The Writing Seminars
“I’ve just finished reading Kevin Young’s terrific poetry collection Brown. Many of the poems in Brown are about Young’s coming of age as a Black boy in Topeka, Kansas, but the poet also writes about his son and includes stark, memorable elegies for Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, and Emmett Till. Young pays homage to musical heroes like Prince, Howlin’ Wolf, and the Wu-Tang Clan, often weaving excerpts from their lyrics into his own taut verse. Each poem in Brown functions as a self-contained work of art; together, the poems form a rich, extended narrative.”
“I ‘read’ primarily via audio book these days, and I’ve just finished listening to The Yellow House by Sarah Broom. It is a story of displacement and uprootedness that has resonated with me in this time when our own lives are so dislocated. Broom reminds us that places tell the stories of the people who inhabit them, but they are also part of the story that we tell about ourselves. In both the presence and absence of a place—a home, a gravestone marker, a plot on a zoning map—lives are made both visible and invisible. Who gets to decide the story we tell? And who is included in that story? Broom’s love letter to her yellow house is a testimony to the ways that our built environment, and those who control and maintain it, tell the world who belongs to a place. I will never view New Orleans in the same way.”
Jonathan Flombaum, Associate Professor, Psychological and Brain Sciences
“A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet is a book with deserved hype. The story: a few families share a vacation home, the parents largely ignoring the children. When a giant hurricane approaches, the kids seek higher ground on their own. It’s been described as a ‘climate change novel’ and an allegory. It surely is. But that undersells it. I loved seeing the adult world from a child’s perspective. The book captures the ways that kids and grownups are alien and often alienating to each other. You want to think, ‘These terrible parents!’ You end up thinking twice.”
The Jazz Age character also both parodied and reflected her times, a (short-lived) era in which it seemed nothing much could go wrong. “She can get into terrible things, but with a little flip of her hips, she gets out of it,” says Karen Yasinsky, lecturer in Film and Media Studies.
That observation was one of many dissected in Yasinsky’s Animating Cartoons course last semester, in which a pantheon ranging from Felix the Cat and Bugs Bunny to the Flintstones and the Jetsons became the subject of critical analysis. Yasinsky covered the formal conventions of animated cartooning, how and why those conventions developed and evolved, and the ways they reflected 20th-century social, cultural, and political changes. And then the time-tested characters continued their influence on a new generation, as Johns Hopkins students created their own hand-drawn characters and animated a short scene from a storyboard they developed.
The class gave me an opportunity to be creative in a way I hadn’t had the time to be since high school. Through my animation, I was able to enter a surreal world that was separate from the stressful realities of school and the pandemic.
In a pandemic twist to the course Yasinsky has taught for 11 years, the JHU-MICA Film Centre mailed to each student’s home an iPad with a simple animation app and an Apple pen—timesavers compared to the course’s usual paper, pencil, and lightbox tools, as they eliminated the need to redraw the nonmoving parts in each frame. “From there, the students really took off,” Yasinsky says. “I think it was a combination of inspiration from the old cartoons with more time and few distractions that allowed them to really put great creative energy and time into their work.”
The resulting creations drew on examples from class viewings, like senior Anne Islam’s adventuresome mouse who clutches a cloud to parachute from the sky and then shakes droplets from the cloud onto a pursuing cat—a nod to self-referential elements like characters of yore who use doors to walk into or out of their frames. Sophomore Shaina Gabala’s film features a woman who dances and juggles to entertain a grumpy sun back into a happier mood, returning color to a black-and-white world. And a third film tells the tale of a woman whose broom springs to life and spirits her off into a world of dance.
“I knew I wanted my final project to be about dancing, and I wanted it to look colorful and fun,” says Elana Rubin, a senior Writing Seminars major and the creator of the dancing broom. “Animating dance moves turned out to be much more difficult than I expected, but taking on this project taught me a lot about animation.”
The projects required learning the process of storyboarding and how to create narrative tension—an element common to most works of art, Yasinsky points out. And the assignment also provided an opportunity to explore firsthand an art form so direct and immediate that the artist almost becomes the character, and the character’s imagination drives the film.
“It’s like living in slow motion but thinking at normal speed, with the time and power to change actions and outcomes,” Yasinsky says. “You start your animation, and then you come up with other ideas, and I encouraged the students to respond to those ideas. You’re not working with a script and actors, so you can change things; that was really freeing for them.”
In her latest work, Say What Your Longing Heart Desires: Women, Prayer & Poetry in Iran, Niloofar Haeri, professor of anthropology and chair of the Krieger School’s Program in Islamic Studies, provides a rich examination of contemporary religious beliefs and prayer practices among a group of educated, middle-class Muslim women in Iran.
Say What Your Longing Heart Desires outlines lived ritual experiences, where readers witness women’s explorations of the kind of Muslims they strive to be.
“I think there’s a broad misunderstanding about what it is that attracts people to religion,” says Haeri. “Most people assume that the answer is to be found within the various doctrines of any given religion. In my book I try to show how much more complex the answer is.”
The idea for the book began, as so many do, with curiosity. After a relative returned from her evening prayers and said that they “had gone well,” Haeri began to wonder, “Could ritual prayers go well or badly? How does one assess how a prayer turns out? Isn’t a ritual just a ritual?”
Haeri interviewed women who were born in the 1940s and who influenced Iranian society by being the first generation to finish college and go on to become professionals and achieve economic independence. They participate fully in the debates about Islam. “The women that I interviewed became more reflective about religion, they wanted to learn for themselves and discover for themselves as part of a larger conversation,” Haeri says.
The 1979 Iranian Revolution and the subsequent establishment of an Islamic Republic brought the deepest theological questions into the public sphere. The question of what it means to be Muslim was now open for public debate.
“After the revolution, because the government was closing down many places of entertainment and many places where people could get together, a lot came inside,” says Haeri. “The space of the home actually became quasi-public.”
I urge that we pose the question: ‘What does it mean to be religious?’ rather than assume that we know what that means.”
—Niloofar Haeri
Haeri says that Iranian women are often not at the table where theological debate takes place. For the book, she followed a group of educated, middle-class women who have carved out their own spaces—often in private homes—to pray, debate, read, and learn.
Say What Your Longing Heart Desires explores the influence of classical, mystic Persian poetry on the practice of three distinct forms of prayer, each the focus of its own chapter: ritual prayer or namaz that Muslims are required to recite five times a day; spontaneous prayer or do’athat is often said in Persian; and lastly, the practice of reading prayers composed and passed down by Shi’i imams or readingdo’a.
In Iran, children are taught at a young age how to memorize and recite the works of such classical poets as Rumi, Hafez Shirazi, Saadi Shirazi, and Nizami. “In childhood, you teach your children to recite poetry, but you also teach your children to recite prayers,” Haeri explains. But the links between poetry and Islam do not end there. “In the cultural history of Iran all these beloved poets commented extensively on what it is to be a true Muslim. This world of poetry and the world of religion are porous, there has always been this dialogue and this exchange.”
Haeri also addresses ritual prayer and how what may seem like rote recitation is often anything but. She argues that ritual prayer, such as the namaz, can actually achieve what is called “presence of heart,” where one feels a connection to the divine. That is how such a prayer goes well. But if one’s mind is distracted or it is difficult to concentrate, then one might say that the prayer did not go well.
“A repetition does not make something predictable,” she says. “Like practicing a piece of music, even if the notes and routine remain unchanged, each experience is different.”
In her chapter on do’a, or spontaneous prayer, she notes that it is not obligatory under Islamic law, is done in Persian, and can be practiced anywhere at any time.
“Some women say that because they can speak Persian to God they feel closer to God,” she says (the ritual prayer is in Qur’anic Arabic). Haeri found it surprising that the examples the women gave of times when their spontaneous prayer became memorable were those when their life conditions had become difficult and they became angry with God. “So prayer can become an occasion where you ask God to account for himself.”
Haeri says that the details of a religious ritual, whether obligatory or not, whether in one’s mother tongue or not, influence one’s closeness to God.
The title of Haeri’s book comes from a line in a well-known poem by Rumi called “Moses and the Shepherd,” which she says has become a kind of catchphrase people say.
In that story, God tells Moses to convey this message: “Don’t fret about formalities and rules, do what your heart desires.” “The expression captures my ethnography. The women I interviewed repeatedly quoted that line to express their belief that the true seat of religiosity is in the invisible heart,” Haeri says.
This reproduction of the Cup Bearer fresco was part of a larger Minoan collection displayed in Baltimore in the 1930s, commissioned by the Baltimore Society of the Archaeological Institute of America. The left image is a detail of the face and cup. At right is a view of the full panel.
Collection of plaster casts of classical sculpture that was commissioned for the art gallery of the Peabody Institute in 1881. The photo shows the collection as it was exhibited in the North Gallery at the Peabody.
Image: Courtesy Peabody Institute photographs collection, Arthur Friedheim Library, Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University.
Collection of plaster casts of classical sculpture that was commissioned for the art gallery of the Peabody Institute in 1881. The photo shows the collection as it was exhibited in the North Gallery at the Peabody.
Image: Courtesy Peabody Institute photographs collection, Arthur Friedheim Library, Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University.
What do replicas of ancient Greek sculptures and Minoan frescoes have in common with Baltimore culture? It turns out quite a bit, according to Emily Anderson, assistant professor of classics. She and her team of 11 students are examining how and why the arrival of such replicas made a splash in late 19th- and early 20th-century Baltimore, and how it impacted the identity of the ancient cultures.
“The ancient past, as we know it, is always something that’s present,” Anderson says. “The social context in which it takes form ‘now’ is every bit as much of its fiber as the millennia-old artifacts themselves.
Anderson is studying those interactions in her project White to Technicolor, Gilded to Jazz: Ancient Replicas and Cultural Change in Modern Baltimore. It’s funded by a Johns Hopkins Catalyst Award, which grants up to $75,000 to support promising research of early career faculty. The project focuses on researching the impact of two groups of ancient replicas: initially, a collection of plaster casts of Greek and Roman sculptures first displayed at the Peabody Institute in the late 1800s; second, vividly colored ancient replicas of Minoan frescoes and artifacts stemming from fresh excavations in Greece, which arrived in Baltimore in the 1910s to 1930s.
“The two collections of replicas are wrapped up in a lot of what was happening in the city at that time—feeding into creative forms, from theater sets to advertisements,” says Anderson.
Her team intended to spend fall 2020 searching museums and basements for the now-scattered casts. Due to COVID-19, they’re poring over archives to understand how Baltimoreans were able (or unable) to engage with the ancient replicas and other ancient artifacts. They are looking at transportation records, streetcar lines, public school curricula, histories of race relations and immigration, and partnering with local archivists.
The ancient past, as we know it, is always something that’s present. The social context in which it takes form ‘now’ is every bit as much of its fiber as the millennia-old artifacts themselves.
—Emily Anderson
Casts of “classical” sculpture were an established art form in Western Europe before they arrived in the U.S. Those with access flocked to the newly established Peabody Institute to see the elite, pure white casts. Collection catalogues were used as school textbooks, and in the 1920s the sculptures were loaned to public schools and cultural institutions and became a part of the fabric of the city.
But by the early 1900s, America and Baltimore were changing. Jazz was burgeoning as African American culture experienced a powerful renaissance, suffrage clubs were forming, and newspapers were covering the first excavation of a 1500 B.C. Minoan palace. When replicas from that dig arrived in Baltimore, Anderson says locals identified with them as new, modern art, even though the originals were older than those reproduced in the Peabody casts. The perception of the frescoes was less influenced by long-standing European tradition, and inspired a wide range of fashions and art.
The second half of the project focuses on how the Minoan artifacts connected with that shift in Baltimore’s urban and musical culture. This includes what someone saw when they were listening to jazz in early venues: the stages and costumes, and how the ancient influenced music, album covers, and visual culture of the day. Her team is working with experts from the history department and the Center for Africana Studies, as well as the William J. Watkins, Sr. Educational Institute, the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore Heritage, and the Peale Center for Baltimore History and Architecture to make these connections.
“Those collaborations are a transformative experience for me,” Anderson says. “Part of that is seeing how the students have become so deeply invested in it. This is their city.”
The research project will culminate in academic papers and a book, as well as a virtual exhibition. Anyone with an internet connection will be able to experience the Peabody casts as Baltimoreans did at the turn of the century: in a 3D exhibit where visitors wander at leisure. The exhibit will also reconsider the collection and its position in the city, by including biographies of Peabody staff. The casts are set within a broader examination of Baltimore’s urban space, drawing out different ways people were engaging with the ancient past.
Optical image of ultra-thin crystals of 2D molecular frameworks.
Electron microscopy image of few-atom thick 2D MoS2 crystals.
Scheme showing that nanocrystal light emission can be tuned by sculpting the crystal’s width and other structural features.
Thomas Kempa sometimes thinks of himself and his lab members as artists whose medium is nano and quantum materials. Wielding chemistry as a tool, they sculpt their materials in ways that make them unique and useful in applications ranging from cryptography to sustainability.
An assistant professor of chemistry, Kempa works in what is known to insiders as the world of “flatland” materials—two-dimensional layers that are only a few atoms thick, but that can extend up to several millimeters in the x-y plane, like a sheet of paper. One area of focus for his lab is figuring out how to alter known 2D materials at the nano scale, thereby imbuing them with new properties. A second is making new 2D materials by assembling clusters of atoms into unfamiliar networks.
What makes us a bit different is that we’re more interested in the core properties of the materials and what we can do to make them special….The advantage of being applications-agnostic is that you end up making sure the material you’re proposing is really uniquely capable toward solving a problem.”
—Thomas Kempa
Kempa is mostly interested in learning everything he can about the materials’ varied properties by tailoring their size, shape, phase, and topology and expanding the flatland “kingdom” in the process. But as his understanding of the properties grows, possible applications for the materials begin to suggest themselves. Some materials reveal themselves to be efficient catalysts, converting less desirable molecular fuel to a more desirable form. Others can increase the efficiency of how charges or gas molecules are stored and released. Still others might support a next-gen type of computing that replaces transistor electronics with quantum spintronics.
Yet another material is created by snipping the 2D sheets into strips with atom-precise cuts. These strips are a step in the direction of making single photon emitters that operate in a controlled way, allowing them to function as the quantum bits that replace the 0-1 bits in conventional computers. These “qubits” make quantum computers possible, and can also revolutionize the sensitivity of sensors that measure things like pH, temperature, or even antibodies to viruses like the one that causes COVID-19.
Finally, in this age of big data, the vast amounts of information in constant flight raise security issues beyond the capacity of classical cryptography, says Kempa, who arrived at Hopkins in 2015 after doctoral and postdoctoral work at Harvard and MIT. Operating instantaneously, quantum cryptography—enabled by 2D materials—could prevent security breaches.
What makes us a bit different is that we’re more interested in the core properties of the materials and what we can do to make them special, and we’re kind of open-minded about whatever the material might be actually good for. The advantage of being applications-agnostic is that you end up making sure the material you’re proposing is really uniquely capable toward solving a problem.
Kempa has also been exploring an entirely different class of 2D materials with properties that can turn them into functional skins—something that might be used in a helmet that better dissipates mechanical energy to reduce the likelihood of brain injury, for example, or car bumpers and aircraft skins that can repair themselves after damage.
Kempa anticipates finding fulfillment following the path charted by his flatland materials for a long time to come, but there is one idea—related but with a twist—that he imagines pursuing in the not-too-distant future. Before finding his home in physics and chemistry, he thought he wanted to be a neurosurgeon.
“It would be super-exciting to get back to that early fascination of mine, and try to develop methods or materials that could help us understand the workings of the human mind,” he muses.
Boardman was professor emeritus in the Department of Mathematics and an internationally recognized expert in the field of homotopy theory, died of natural causes on March 18, 2021. He was 83.
Boardman, who specialized in algebraic and differential topology, was renowned for his construction of the first rigorously correct model of the homotopy category of spectra.
Born in Manchester, England, Boardman served in the Royal Air Force in 1956 before earning a bachelor’s degree and PhD from Trinity College, Cambridge, of the University of Cambridge, in 1961 and 1965, respectively. He served as visiting lecturer at the University of Chicago in 1966 and as assistant lecturer at the University of Warwick (U.K.) in 1967, and came to Johns Hopkins as associate professor in 1969, where he became professor in 1972. He was named professor emeritus in 2010.
Boardman was a Fellow of the Science Research Council and a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
Melvin Kohn
Kohn was an internationally recognized professor emeritus of sociology and Academy Professor, died at home on March 19, 2021. He was 92.
A pioneer in establishing the field of the study of social structure and personality, Kohn spent 27 years in the Department of Sociology before retiring as emeritus in 2012. His research combined class analysis and social psychology, with a particular focus on job conditions and their implications for personality development.
Born in New York City, Kohn earned his BA in psychology and general studies from Cornell University in 1948, and his PhD in sociology, with minors in social psychology and industrial relations, also from Cornell, in 1952. He conducted groundbreaking research on the relationship between social class and schizophrenia in the Laboratory of Socio-environmental Studies at the National Institute of Mental Health from 1952 to 1985.
Kohn arrived at Johns Hopkins in 1985 as professor of sociology. He chaired the department from 1996 to 1999, and served as William D. and Robin Mayer Distinguished Professor, School of Arts and Sciences, from 2009 until he was named emeritus in 2012.
A past president of the American Sociological Association, the Eastern Sociological Society, and the Sociological Research Association, Kohn was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; the American Association for the Advancement of Science; and the Guggenheim Foundation. He was awarded the Cooley-Mead Award, Section on Social Psychology, American Sociological Association; the Merit Award, Eastern Sociological Society; and The Stuart A. Rice Merit Award for Career Achievement, District of Columbia Sociological Society.
J. Hillis Miller
Photo: Jeremy Maryott
Miller was among the most distinguished literary critics and theorists and a 19-year professor in the Krieger School’s Department of English, died February 7, 2021, at his home in Sedgwick, Maine. He was 92.
Part of the Yale School of the literary deconstruction movement, Miller helped revolutionize the study of literature. In dozens of books, he shaped ideas about rhetoric and fiction, literature and ethics, and the ways that texts can and cannot say what they mean.
Miller’s career began at Johns Hopkins in 1953. Named full professor in 1963, he served as department chair from 1964 to 1968. In 1972, he moved to Yale.
Born in Newport News, Virginia, Miller earned a BA at Oberlin College in 1948 in English. He earned a MA and PhD at Harvard in 1949 and 1952, respectively. Miller served as a senior member of the editorial board of Hopkins’ quarterly literary journal ELH from 1955 through 2021. He served as president of the Modern Language Association and received a lifetime achievement award from the MLA.
Paul R. Olson
Olson, professor emeritus in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, died in December 2020. He was 95.
Renowned for his scholarship and teaching of Spanish literature, Olson researched and wrote about medieval Spanish and Italian literature, linguistics, 20th-century Spanish poetry, and the works of Miguel de Unamuno. He arrived at Hopkins in 1961 as assistant professor of modern Spanish literature, and became associate professor in 1963 and professor in 1967, serving for a time as chair of the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures, as it was then known. He was named emeritus in 1991.
A native of Rockford, Illinois, Olson earned a BA and AM from the University of Illinois in 1948 and 1950, respectively, and a PhD from Harvard in 1959. Before coming to Hopkins, he served as instructor (1956–1959) and assistant professor (1959–1961) at Dartmouth College.
Olson was a Guggenheim Fellow, Fulbright grantee, and American Council of Learned Societies grantee, and was a member of the Modern Language Association, Association International Hispanistas, and National Association of Scholars.
Peter Privalov
Privalov was a research professor in the Department of Biology and a founding father of the field of biological microcalorimetry, died of lymphoma on December 20, 2020. He was 88.
Throughout his career, Privalov focused on the physical principles of the architecture of biological macromolecules: proteins, nucleic acids, and their complexes. Specifically, he studied the energetics of formation of their three-dimensional structures: the forces stabilizing their structure, the mechanism of cooperation of these forces, and their interaction with the surrounding media of water or lipids.
Born in Georgia, Russia, Privalov came to Johns Hopkins in 1991 as professor of biology and biophysics, becoming research professor in 2011. Before that, he served as head of the Laboratory of Thermodynamics (1966–1991) and professor (1984–1991) at the Institute of Protein Research in Moscow.
Privalov earned a master’s degree and PhD in physics at Tbilisi University in Georgia, Russia, in 1956 and 1964, respectively, and a DSc in biophysics at the Institute of Biophysics in Moscow in 1971. Awards include the AICAT-SETERAM Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Thermodynamics of Biomacromolecules, the Julian Sturtevant Award for Services to Experimental Thermodynamics, the Christensen Memorial Award and the Huffman Memorial Award of the Calorimetry Conference, and the Alexander von Humboldt Research Award.
Nilabh Shastri
Groundbreaking immunologist Nilabh Shastri, a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor in the Department of Pathology in the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the Department of Biology in the Krieger School, died January 22, 2020, after a long illness. He was 68.
Shastri devoted decades of research to understanding how the human immune system recognizes rapidly changing foreign elements—such as viruses, microbes, tissues, or other diseases—in order to elicit an effective immune response.
Shastri was born and raised in the Himalayan valley of Dehradun, India. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in chemistry from Panjab University in Chandigarh in 1972 and 1973, respectively, and his PhD in biochemistry from the All India Institute of Medicine Sciences in New Delhi in 1980.
Before he joined Hopkins in 2018, Shastri spent more than 30 years as a faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley, where he headed the Division of Immunology and Pathogenesis. He has also held visiting professorships at Yale University and the University of Oxford.
Mack Walker
Walker, professor emeritus in the Department of History, died February 10, 2021, of COVID-19. He was 91.
An esteemed historian of German intellectual history, Walker spent 25 years at Johns Hopkins. His four books spanned topics ranging from small-town life in 1930s Germany to rationalist foundations for public law in the Holy Roman Empire.
Born near Springfield, Massachusetts, Walker earned a BA from Bowdoin College in 1950 and a PhD from Harvard in 1959.
Walker served as instructor at the Rhode Island School of Design from 1957 to 1959; instructor and assistant professor at Harvard from 1959 to 1966; and associate professor and professor at Cornell from 1966 to 1974, when he arrived at Hopkins. He served as department chair from 1979 to 1982, and was named emeritus in 1999.
Walker was a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Humanities.
We will all learn what happens to the kind of capacities and insights of Black women in politics when those capacities and insights are permitted to lead.
Policymakers just need to recognize who is going to socially distance, for how long, why and under what circumstances to give us accurate predictions of how the disease will spread and help us establish policies that will be useful.
Sharon Achinstein, Sir William Osler Professor of English, and Jacob Lauinger, Associate Professor, Near Eastern Studies, received a 2021 Seed Funding Award from The Institute for Data Intensive Engineering and Science.
Disenfranchised: The Rise and Fall of Industrial Citizenship in China by Joel Andreas, Professor, Sociology, received the Joseph Levenson Book Prize by the Association for Asian Studies.
Doug Barrick, Professor, Biophysics, received the Biophysics Society’s Emily M. Gray Award for his “masterpiece textbook” on biomolecular thermodynamics.
Nichole Broderick, Assistant Professor, Biology, received the American Society for Microbiology’s Award for Education.
An article co-authored by Erin Aeran Chung, Charles D. Miller Associate Professor of East Asian Politics, Political Science, won the Outstanding Paper Award for the Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Migration Studies section of the International Studies Association.
Danielle Evans, Assistant Professor, The Writing Seminars, was named a Joyce Carol Oates Prize Finalist by the Simpson Literary Project. Evans was also one of three finalists for the Story Prize for The Office of Historical Corrections.
Stephen Fried, Assistant Professor, Chemistry, received the Biopolymers in vivo Young Investigator Award from the Biophysical Society.
Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World by Jessica M. Johnson, Assistant Professor, History, won a 2020 Rebel Women’s Lit Caribbean Readers’ Award for Best Non-Fiction Book. Johnson also received the 2020 Garfinkel Prize in Digital Humanities from the American Studies Association for two of her projects, Taller Electric Marronage and LifexCode: Digital Humanities Against Enclosure.
Tim Heckman, Dr. A. Hermann Pfund Professor and Chair, Physics and Astronomy, was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Vincent Hilser, Professor and Chair, Biology, was named a fellow of the Biophysical Society.
Sarah Hörst, Associate Professor, Earth and Planetary Sciences, received the James B. Macelwane Medal from the American Geophysical Union.
Aaron Hyman, Assistant Professor, History of Art, received a Historians of Netherlandish Art fellowship and a Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication grant for Rubens in Repeat: The Logic of the Copy in Colonial Latin America.
A paper co-authored by Jared Kaplan, Associate Professor, Physics and Astronomy, was selected by the Neural Information Processing Systems for a Best Paper Award.
Christopher Krupenye, Assistant Research Professor, Psychological and Brain Sciences, was awarded the New Investigator Award from the European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association.
Daeyeol Lee, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Neuroscience and Psychological and Brain Sciences, was named a 2021 Laureate in Medicine by the Ho-Am Foundation.
Anne E. Lester, John W. Baldwin and Jenny Jochens Associate Professor of Medieval History, was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship to complete her book Fragments of Devotion: Relics and Remembrance in the Aftermath of the Fourth Crusade, 1204–1264.
“All the Stops,” a poem by Dora Malech, Assistant Professor, The Writing Seminars, was chosen for inclusion in The Best American Poetry 2021.
Only Among Women: Philosophies of Community in the Russian and Soviet Imagination, 1860–1940 by Anne Eakin Moss, Assistant Professor, Comparative Thought and Literature, was shortlisted for the Best First Book Award by the American Association for Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages.
The Shore by Christopher Nealon, John Dewey Professor, English, was named a finalist in the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award in the poetry category.
Black Land: Imperial Ethiopianism and African America by Nadia Nurhussein, Associate Professor, English, is this year’s Modernist Studies Association’s Book Prize Winner.
“Rogues, Degenerates, and Heroes: Disobedience as Politics in Military Organizations,” co-authored by Sarah Parkinson, Aronson Assistant Professor, Political Science and International Studies, won the 2020 Outstanding Article Award in International Security and the 2020 Outstanding Article Award in International History and Politics from the American Political Science Association.
Ian Phillips, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Psychological and Brain Sciences, and Harvard colleague Ned Block won the 2021 Dr. Martin R. Lebowitz and Eve Lewellis Lebowitz Prize for Philosophical Achievement and Contribution.
John K.H. Quah, Professor, Economics, was named an Econometric Society 2020 Fellow.
Black Saints in Early Modern Global Catholicism by Erin Rowe, Associate Professor, History, won the Roland H. Bainton Prize from the Sixteenth Century Society and the Albert C. Outler Prize from the American Society of Church History.
Todd Shepard, Arthur O. Lovejoy Professor, History, was named a Guggenheim Fellow for Affirmative Action and the End of Empires: France, Algeria, and the Race Question in the Era of Decolonization.
Robbie Shilliam, Professor, Political Science, was elected a vice president of the International Studies Association (2022–23).
A project on the disparate impact of new policing technology in Black communities by Joanne Cavanaugh Simpson, Lecturer, The Writing Seminars, was named one of the Pulitzer Center’s top 20 projects of 2020 in the social justice category.
Yannick Sire, Professor, Mathematics, was named Fellow of the American Mathematical Society for contributions to analysis and geometry.
Emmy Smith, Assistant Professor, Earth and Planetary Sciences, received a Sloan Research Fellowship for her work in Earth systems science.
David Yarkony, Chair and D. Mead Johnson Professor of Chemistry, was named 2020 Chemist of the Year by the American Chemical Society.
