Christopher I. Beckwith (Central Eurasian Studies) is teaching at the University of Vienna this spring-summer semester as the Fulbright-University of Vienna Distinguished Chair in Humanities and Cultural Studies. He has recently published the book _Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present_ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).

Chancellor's Professor of Linguistics and Professor Judith Gierut (Speech and Hearing Sciences) have received a renewal for another 5 years on
their NIH funded Learnability Profect.  The award is approximately $2.4 million over a five year period. They have been funded continuously by the NIH for the past 23 years.  The aim of the project is to understand the development of speech sounds by children with functional phonological delays.

Micol Seigel, African American and African Diaspora Studies and American Studies, was awarded an overseas research grant by the Office of the Vice President for International Affairs for research on “Bringing the Cold War Home?  The Lessons of US Police Assistance to Latin America,” an OVPIA conference fund award and a CLACS conference travel award to attend the annual meeting of the Latin American Studies Association in Rio de Janeiro this June.  In addition to the paper she will present at LASA, Micol will participate in a smaller conference at the prestigious National Museum, the anthropology branch of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, following LASA, and then the Tepoztlan Institute for the Transnational History of the Americas in Mexico in July 2009.  Micol has also had a paper and panel proposal accepted by the American Studies Assocation for its meeting in November 2009, and will participate as a panelist in a roundtable at the American Historical Association in January 2010. 

Susan Seizer, Communication and Culture, was awarded a Research & Travel Grant for Summer 2009 from the College Arts & Humanities Institute to complete the shooting of footage for her film on Road Comics: Big Work on Small Stages. In spring, she presented her preliminary findings on the Road Comics research project in talks she gave to the anthropology departments at Bryn Mawr College in PA; the University of Wisconsin-Madison; and here at IU. She also presented this work to the departmental colloquium in her home department of Communication & Culture at IU.

Political Science Professor Elinor Ostrom was invited to be a Keynote Speaker at the forum on “A Systems Approach to Socio-Ecological Resilience: Prioritizing the Gaps in a Changing World” on April 23-24, 2009 at Yale University and to be a Discussant as well as present her own paper with Xavier Basurto on “Studying the Evolution of Rule-Systems” at the “Do Institutions Evolve?” Workshop in Florence, Italy (European University Institute) on May 8-9, 2009.

Political Science Professor Lauren Morris MacLean co-organized and is presenting at an international conference at Harvard University on “The Politics of Non-State Social Service Provision” from Thursday, May 7- Saturday, May 9, 2009.   The conference is sponsored by the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies.  Lauren and her co-chair, Melani Cammett, an Associate Professor at Brown University, anticipate the publication of an edited volume and/or a special journal issue.

Lynn Hooker has been selected as a Fulbright scholar grantee to Hungary. She will be spending Spring 2010 doing archival and oral history research on Hungary’s “Gypsy music” industry under state socialism and after.    Hooker is Assistant Professor of Hungarian Studies, Department of Central Eurasian Studies and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Musicology and Ethnomusicology

Maria Bucur was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative Research Fellowship for the project, The Everyday Experience of Women's Emancipation in the U.S. and Romania in the Twentieth Century and Beyond: A Transnational Study.

Stephen Benard (Sociology) won the Rosabeth Moss Kanter Award for his co-authored article (“Getting a Job: Is There a Motherhood Penalty”) published in the American Journal of Sociology.

Ethan Michelson (Sociology) won a U.S. Department of Education Fulbright-Hayes Faculty Research Abroad Fellowship to support his research in China in 2009-2010.

Ben Eklof, History, has been awarded a Fulbright teaching/research grant [the third in his career] and will spend five months between September and February working in the archives in Kazan, the capitol of Tatarstan on the Volga River in Russia and Russia’s “Gateway to the East”.  

Dror Wahrman was elected a member of the Royal Historical Society, Great Britain.

This summer, Eric Sandweiss (History) will be a Smithsonian Fellow in Museum Practice in Washington, DC.  For the fall, he will serve as a Fulbright Commission Distinguished Scholar and visiting fellow at the University of London’s Centre for Metropolitan History, pursuing research on city museums.

Salih Altoma, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, was received the Recognition Award at the Iraqi Academic Conference in March, in honor of his lifelong leadership accomplishments.

Professor Jamsheed Choksy served on the International Research and Exchanges Commission (IREX), Individual Advanced Research Opportunities Program, Fellowship Selection Committee. He was appointed a Consulting Editor of the Encyclopedia Iranica (New York: Columbia University).  Choksy is professor of Central Eurasian Studies, History, and India Studies; he is adjunct professor of Religious Studies, ffiliated faculty of Ancient Studies, of Medieval Studies, and of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, and he is a member of the National Council on the Humanities.

Jennifer Lee (Sociology) received a $35,000 grant award from the American Educational Research Association for the project entitled “The Role of School Racial/Ethnic Composition in Asian and Latino Achievement.” This is a collaborative project with Joshua Klugman at Temple University

Arlene Díaz, Joan Middendorf, David Pace, and Leah Shopkow (The History Learning Project) have won the McGraw-Hill-Magna Publications Scholarly Work on Teaching and Learning Award for their article "The History Learning Project: A Department 'Decodes' Its Students." The article was chosen for recognition out of a field of 224 by a committee consisting of editors of pedagogical periodicals, authors of books on teaching and learning, and faculty responsible for teaching development at various institutions. The award will be presented at the Teaching Professor Conference to be held June 5-7 in Washington, D.C.