Twenty junior faculty members have been selected to receive University fellowships in support of their research in 1998-99, according to an announcement by Yale College Dean Richard H. Brodhead.
The fellowships are awarded annually to outstanding junior faculty members to help advance their research at a critical period in their careers. The recipients are freed from classroom responsibilities and are given leave with salary to allow them to concentrate on their research.
Nine of the fellowships are in the humanities, three are in the natural sciences, and eight are in the social sciences. The humanities fellowships are funded by an endowment established through the bequest of the late Susan A. Ensign Morse, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and by the Sid R. Bass Fellowship Fund. The natural and social science fellowships are funded by support from the Sid R. Bass Fellowship Fund and by the Wendell W. Anderson Fellowship Fund, the Chauncey Keep Hubbard Fellowship Fund, the Allan Shelden Fellowship Fund, the Weyerhaeuser Family Teaching Fellowship Fund and the Woods Fellowship Fund.
The list of fellowship recipients and their descriptions of their projects follow:
Fellowships in the social sciences
Sergey Avrutin, assistant professor of linguistics -- an inquiry into the nature of language deficit through a cross-linguistic study of brain-damaged patients and children who have not yet developed full linguistic capacity.
Dirk Bergemann, assistant professor of economics -- a study of partnership or "match" formation under conditions of uncertainty and imperfect information.
Jennifer Eberhardt, assistant professor of psychology and African and African-American studies -- a comparative study of the role of ethnic identity as a shield against race-based cultural stereotypes.
Bruce Haynes, assistant professor of sociology and African and African-American studies -- an exploration of the lives and opinions of black Jews in the United States.
Allan Stam, assistant professor of political science -- a study of the forces that make states choose to fight as they do in interstate wars, and a critique of rationalist accounts of the logic of such choices.
Anne Underhill, assistant professor of anthropology -- a study of the evolution of complex societies in late prehistoric China through archaeological excavation at Liangchengzhen.
David Watts, assistant professor of anthropology -- field research on the ecology, social relationships and mating behavior of chimpanzees.
Sheila Woody, assistant professor of psychology -- a study of the success of treatments of panic in controlled laboratory conditions and in conditions less sheltered from the real world.
Fellowships in the natural sciences
Sean Barrett, assistant professor of physics -- a study of materials of microscopic dimensions through the technique of optically pumped nuclear magnetic resonance.
Ronald Breaker, assistant professor of biology -- research into the catalytic potential of RNA and DNA enzymes outside the context of the cell.
Robert Grober, assistant professor of applied physics -- the application of near-field scanning optical microscopy to gene mapping.
Morse Fellowships in the humanities
Christy Anderson, assistant professor of the history of art -- a study of the theory of materials in Renaissance architecture.
Stephen Colvin, assistant professor of classics -- an inquiry into the Hellenization of the ancient Mediterranean through a study of the development of the common language or koine in bilingual communities of Asia Minor.
Georgina Dopico-Black, assistant professor of Spanish and Portuguese -- a study of the politics and poetics of the library from Alfonso the Learned to Borges.
Ann Gaylin, assistant professor of comparative literature -- a study of female detectives, masquerade and identity in 19th-century fiction.
Christine Hayes, assistant professor of religious studies -- a reconstruction of theories of the impurity of Gentiles in Biblical Israel and Late Antique Judaism.
Philip Kremer, assistant professor of philosophy -- an inferentialist approach to logic and the philosophy of language.
Kristina Muxfeldt, assistant professor of music -- a study of Franz Schubert's music in relation to social taboos and gender ambiguities.
Kevin Repp, assistant professor of history -- a study of the role of metaphors of organic life in German politics and culture from the 1780s to the 1980s.
Maurice Wallace, assistant professor of English -- an exploration of James Baldwin's life and works in relation to issues of crime and criminality.