Celebrating Scholarship

Candice Lowe-Swift, Associate Professor of Anthropology, and Erendira Rueda, Associate Professor of Sociology, received an Alliance to Advance Liberal Arts Colleges award for “Beyond Inclusion and Belonging: Telling Future Histories of Classrooms from 2050,” a multi-institution workshop animated by the question, “What more is needed, beyond current DEIB efforts, to make our colleges nurturing and supportive places to learn?”

Michael H. McCarthy, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, is author of Liberal Education and Democratic Citizenship, published by Rowman and Littlefield. In the book, Professor McCarthy describes the many crises confronting American democracy and identifies their philosophical, cultural, and institutional origins. He argues that a liberal education, properly understood, can address several of these crises effectively.

Kariane Calta, Associate Professor of Mathematics and Statistics, and Benjamin Lotto, Professor and Chair of Mathematics and Statistics, together with colleagues from Skidmore College and Union College, received a grant from the National Science Foundation to co-host the Hudson River Undergraduate Mathematics Conference for the next three years.

Robert DeMaria Jr., Professor of English on the Henry Noble MacCracken Chair, and Robert D. Brown, Professor Emeritus of Greek and Roman Studies, are co-editors of The Complete Poems of Samuel Johnson, published in June 2024 by Routledge for the Longman Annotated English Poets series.

Kirsten Menking, Professor of Earth Science on the Althea Ward Clark Chair and Chair of Earth Science and Geography, was elected as a Fellow of the Geological Society of America (GSA) in recognition of her distinguished contributions to the field.

Josh de Leeuw, Associate Professor of Cognitive Science, received a grant from the National Science Foundation, together with his collaborators from MIT, MGH IHP, and Yale University, for their project entitled “POSE: Phase II: An Open-Source Ecosystem for Behavioral Experiments.” The funded project will create an open-source ecosystem for behavioral experiments centered around jsPsych, an established and highly-used tool for behavioral research.

Haoming Liu, Professor of Chinese and Japanese, is spending the Spring 2024 Semester as a visiting professor in the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences (IHSS) at Peking University on a fellowship awarded by the University and is working on his study and translation of Friedrich Hölderlin’s odes.

Thanks to the efforts of Professor Mootacem Mhiri, Senior Lecturer in Arabic, Vassar has once again been selected to host a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant (FLTA) in Arabic. Professor Mhiri will serve as the Academic Advisor of the FLTA. The presence of an Arabic language FLTA will continue to provide critical instructional support as well as cultural exposure to Vassar students.