Eighteen junior faculty members have been selected to receive University fellowships in support of their research in 1997- 98, according to an announcement by Richard H. Brodhead, dean of Yale College.
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 teaching responsibilities and are given leave with salary to allow them to concentrate on their research.
Eleven of the fellowships are in the humanities, three are in the natural sciences, and four 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 also 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 names of the fellowship recipients and descriptions of their projects follow:
Humanities fellowships
Glenda Gilmore, assistant professor of history -- the social transformation of the American South in the mid-20th century.
Brian M. Hayashi, assistant professor of American studies and history -- the political practices of Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II and their postwar consequences.
Matthew Jacobson, assistant professor of American studies -- the application of the concept of "race" to European immigration to the United States.
Paul S. Landau, assistant professor of history -- interactions of personal narratives of religious experience and social history in South Africa.
Tyrus Miller, assistant professor of comparative literature and English -- the theoretical responses of Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer to changes in 20th- century art and everyday experience.
Thomas J. Otten, assistant professor of English -- the representation of production in African-American literature at the turn of the last century.
Willie Strong, assistant professor of music -- music and African-American cultural ideologies in the post-Civil Rights era.
Michael Thurston, assistant professor of English -- the fate and uses of lyric poetry after the height of experimentalism in poetic modernism.
Blakey Vermeule, assistant professor of English -- literary analogues and consequences of David Hume's philosophical concepts.
Susan Wiener, assistant professor of French -- engagements of French artists, intellectuals and mass media with American life and culture in the 20th century.
William Whobrey, assistant professor of Germanic languages and literatures -- lost books of the middle ages, and the way our understanding of the development of the literary vernacular is shaped by the history of what happens to survive.
Natural sciences fellowships
Peter N. Belhumeur, assistant professor of electrical engineering -- object recognition in computational vision.
Nantian Qian, assistant professor of mathematics -- dynamics, ergodic theory and rigidity of higher rank lattice group actions on compact manifolds.
Charles Schmuttenmaer, assistant professor of chemistry -- opening the far-infrared region of the spectrum to time-resolved studies with very high degrees of temporal resolution.
Social sciences fellowships
Takeshi Inomata, assistant professor of anthropology -- archaeological examination of household organization and domestic activity in Classic Maya society (A.D. 300-700).
Abigail Kaun, assistant professor of linguistics -- a comparative study of the prosodic systems of the Dravidian family of languages.
Benjamin Polak, assistant professor of economics -- applied studies in the theory of choice in conditions of uncertainty.
Linda-Anne Rebhun, assistant professor of anthropology -- changing gender roles and conjugal relationships in Northeast Brazil in a period of rapid social transformation.