Radcliffe Institute Announces 2010–2011 Fellows and Their Projects

Cheryl Klufio
617-495-8608
cheryl_klufio@radcliffe.edu

Cambridge, Mass.—The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University has announced the 48 women and men selected to be Radcliffe Institute fellows in 2010–2011. These creative artists, humanists, scientists and social scientists were chosen––from an international pool of nearly 900 applicants––for their superior scholarship, research or artistic endeavors, as well as the potential of their projects to yield long-term impact. While at Radcliffe, they will work within and across disciplines.

Two Radcliffe Institute professors will join the community of fellows next year. Joanna Aizenberg, the Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at Radcliffe and the Amy Smith Berylson Professor of Materials Science at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, will lead a thematic cluster in biomimetics, and Nancy E. Hill, the Suzanne Murray Professor at Radcliffe and a professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, will study cultural belief systems and ethnic group variations in parenting and children’s development.

“We welcome these distinguished fellows to the Radcliffe Institute and we enthusiastically await the important discoveries, artistic creations, and collaborations––within Radcliffe and in the wider Harvard and local communities––that will emerge during their time here,” said Barbara J. Grosz, dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and Higgins Professor of Natural Sciences in the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

A leader among the world’s institutes for advanced study, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard annually hosts award-winning artists, academics and professionals, including musicians, mathematicians, filmmakers, anthropologists, biologists and writers.

Examples of the 2010–2011 fellows within each of four broad disciplinary areas (creative arts, humanities, sciences and social sciences) appear immediately below; a full list of the 2010–2011 fellows may be viewed here.

Creative Arts
The creative arts fellows include:

• Suzanne Rivecca, a development associate at the Homeless Youth Alliance and an independent writer, who will work on a novel (under contract with W. W. Norton) tentatively titled The Habitants. The book explores the personal, creative and artistic revelations that shaped Walt Whitman during his brief stint as a reporter for a fledgling newspaper in New Orleans.
• Amy Sillman, a visual artist and a cochair of the painting department at Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. Her award-winning work has been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among other places. At Radcliffe, she will continue to paint and draw and also develop a video/text work about painting practices in New York City.
• John Tiffany, who has been the associate director of the National Theatre of Scotland from its inception in 2006. His critically acclaimed plays include Black Watch, which garnered a Laurence Olivier Award and a Critics’ Circle Theatre Award and which will tour the United States and other countries in 2010–2011. His Radcliffe project is an investigation of how a person’s voice communicates his or her identity to the world.

Humanities
Among the humanities fellows are:

• Caroline Bruzelius, the Anne M. Cogan Professor of Art History at Duke University and a historian of French and Italian medieval architecture, who will complete a book on mendicant architecture and the medieval city. Her book centers on the argument that the economic structure of mendicant orders conditioned their construction projects.
• Margot Canaday, assistant professor of history at Princeton University and the author of The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton University Press, 2009), a book said to be “the most expansive study of the federal regulation of homosexuality yet written.” At Radcliffe, she plans to do research that demonstrates how the workplace––which is often overlooked by historians of sexuality––has shaped gay life in the 20th century.
• Walter Johnson, Winthrop Professor of History and professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. His Radcliffe project, titled “River of Dark Dreams: Slavery, Capitalism, and Imperialism in the Mississippi Valley’s Cotton Kingdom,” is a history of slavery in the Mississippi Valley between the Louisiana Purchase and the Civil War.

Social Sciences
The social science fellows include:

• Abigail English, a lawyer who is the director and president of the Center for Adolescent Health and the Law (CAHL). At Radcliffe, she will explore ways in which lawyers and health care professionals can collaborate to develop policy recommendations and an agenda for stemming the sexual exploitation and trafficking of adolescents as well as protecting the health of victims.
• Jennifer S. Lerner, an experimental social psychologist, a professor of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School and the recipient, in 2004, of a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. She will work on a book about emotion and decision making, beginning with the premise that public policies will be more effective if they take into consideration the impact of emotions on decisions.
• Rose McDermott, a political psychologist, a professor of political science at Brown University and the author of several books on subjects including international relations and emotion and decision making. Her Radcliffe project is a book that synthesizes and integrates experimental work she has conducted over the last eight years on sex differences in aggression.

Sciences
Among the science fellows is:

• A biomimetics cluster, led by Joanna Aizenberg, that includes Elisabeth Logak, professor of mathematics at Université de Cergy-Pontoise (France), and Lev Truskinovsky, research director in the Laboratoire de Méchanique des Solides at École Polytechnique (France). In a project titled “Biomimetics and Quantitative Biology: Conceptual Interpretation and Mathematical Modeling of the Adaptive Design Strategies in Biological Materials, Structures and Mechanisms,” the cluster will fabricate a new class of biomimetic “hairy” surfaces that respond to environmental cues and develop new theoretical and computational models to capture and predict their behavior. By uniting applied engineering, natural sciences and pure mathematics, the team aims to establish principles for designing artificial systems that exhibit unprecedented biomimetic functionality.

Now in its 10th year, the Radcliffe Institute Fellowship Program has awarded fellowships to more than 500 accomplished and promising artists, scientists and scholars. Past fellows include Elizabeth Alexander, the fourth U.S. presidential inaugural poet; Mulatu Astatke, founder of the hybrid musical form Ethio Jazz; Debra Fischer, who has participated in the discovery of roughly half the known extrasolar planets; and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Tony Horwitz.

About the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study
The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University 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. Please visit www.radcliffe.edu or call 617-495-8608 for more information.