Celebrating Scholarship

Shirley Johnson-Lans, Professor Emerita of Economics, is the editor and a contributing author of The Coronavirus Pandemic and Inequality: A Global Perspective, which was recently published by Palgrave Macmillan.

Amitava Kumar, Professor of English on the Helen D. Lockwood Chair, is a Fellow of the New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. Professor Kumar will complete work on a new novel entitled My Beloved Life at the Cullman Center.

Ashanti Shih, Assistant Professor of History, is a 2023 Sinnott Award recipient. Ashanti’s scholarly work, which brings issues of race and indigeneity into dialogue with histories of science and environment, will focus on the colonial histories and legacies of the Arboretum’s vast collections of temperate woody plants from North America and East Asia.

Ed Buie II, Assistant Professor of Astronomy, received a grant award from the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in support of the program titled "A Systematic Search for Wind-CGM Interactions in Star-forming Galaxies.”

Curtis Dozier, Assistant Professor of Greek and Roman Studies, received a Loeb Classical Library Foundation Fellowship from Harvard University for the 2023–2024 academic year to support his book project Hateful Classicism: Greco-Roman Antiquity and White Nationalism.

Sofia Ortiz-Hinojosa, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, is the recipient of a New Directions Fellowship from the Mellon Foundation in support of her project “Mesoamerican Worldviews: How Indigenous Philosophies Influence Latin America.”

Simon Hoellerbauer, Post Doctoral Fellow in Data Science and Society, has secured a project award from the Liberal Arts Collaborative for Digital Innovation (LACOL) in support of his class titled “Applied Machine Learning” for Summer 2023.

Thanks to the efforts of Professor Mootacem Mhiri, Senior Lecturer in Arabic, Vassar has been selected to host a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant (FLTA) in Arabic. Professor Mhiri will serve as the Academic Advisor of the FLTA. “As part of the Fulbright Foreign Student Program, the Fulbright FLTA Program is designed to develop Americans’ knowledge of foreign cultures and languages” (Fulbright Foreign Student Program).

Mia Mask, The Mary Riepma Ross Professor of Film, is the author of Black Rodeo: A History of the African American Western published for 2023 by University of Illinois Press. The new book examines the African American western hero in the broader context of film history by considering how African American westerns evolved and approached various goals.