Junior faculty honored for their teaching and research

Twelve junior faculty members were honored for their outstanding teaching and their research at a dinner hosted by Yale College Dean Mary Miller on Nov. 9.

Each received one of three annual awards — the Arthur Greer Memorial Prize, the Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize, and the Poorvu Family Award — all of which carry funding to support further research.

Arthur Greer Memorial Prize

The Arthur Greer Memorial Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Publication or Research is awarded to a junior faculty member in the natural or social sciences. This year’s four winners are:

André D. Taylor, Department of Chemical & Environmental Engineering, was honored for his work in developing nanostructure materials and in the area of energy storage. 

Ebonya Washington, Department of Economics, was recognized for her work on the empirical analysis of voting and the influence of race, gender, and age on voting patterns.

Michael McGovern, Department of Anthropology, was awarded the prize on the basis of his recent book, “Making War in Côte d’Ivoire,” a multi-country investigation of where wars do and do not take place, and why. 

Elsa Yan, Department of Chemistry, was cited for her innovative work in the area of molecular spectroscopy.

Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Publication

The Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Publication or Research is conferred upon junior faculty members in the humanities. This year there were five recipients:

Barry McCrea, Department of Comparative Literature, was recognized principally for his book, “In the Company of Strangers,” which employs developments in gender and social relations, particularly in the area of queer studies to explore the family narrative in the works of Dickens, Conan Doyle, Joyce, and Proust.

Brian Kane, Department of Music, was cited for his article, “Excavating Lewin’s Phenomenology,” a philosophical and textual critique of David Lewin’s influential article, “Music Theory, Phenomenology, and Modes of Perception,” which has been regarded as the work that introduced phenomenological modes of thinking into the study of music theory.

Irene Peirano, Department of Classics, was awarded for her forthcoming book, “The Rhetoric of the Roman Fake,” a monograph on the significance of falsely attributed Latin texts in understanding the larger story about cultures of reading in antiquity.

Paul North, Department of German, was honored for his recently published first book, “The Problem of Distraction,” a study on 20^th-century modernism that argues for the place of non-thinking in the understanding of thinking. 

Alan Mikhail, Department of History, was awarded the prize for his book, “Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History,” which is a pioneering work on the environmental history of modern Egypt and the environmental history of the Middle East in general. 

Poorvu Family Award for Interdisciplinary Teaching

The Poorvu Family Award for Interdisciplinary Teaching was established to recognize and enhance Yale’s strength in interdisciplinary teaching. It provides the means for distinguished junior faculty in interdisciplinary fields to conduct essential summer research.  This year’s three recipients include:

GerShun Avilez, Departments of African American Studies and English, was cited for his “electrifying presence in the classroom,” having a “genuinely interdisciplinary teaching profile” that blends gender studies, queer theory, African-American studies, and cultural studies with literary criticism.

J.D. Connor, Department of the History of Art, was honored for his exceptional teaching “on a truly startling array of topics,” including painting, film, literature, and literary and cultural theory. 

Paige McGinley, Theater Studies and American Studies programs and the African American Studies Department, was awarded the prize, according to her citation, for her “remarkably expansive intellectual terrain,” which “reaches from Aristotelian poetics to 21st-century destination tourism,” and for helping to renovate the American Studies curriculum through the “interdisciplinary nature of the courses she has offered.”