Social and Historical Studies

Romanian President Traian Basescu has appointed Political Science professor Aurelian Craiutu to serve as Honorary Chair of the Presidential Committee for the Study of Romania's Political and Constitutional Regime.  The Committee, consisting of constitutional experts and political scientists from Romania, France, and the US,  was entrusted with the task of submitting a report to the president by October 2008 that will then be discussed in Parliament. Criautu is spending the 2008-2009 academic year as a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J.

William Alex Pridemore, Criminal Justice, has been appointed to be the American Society of Criminology’s representative to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was also recently appointed to be the American Society of Criminology’s representative to the Consortium of Social Science Associations.

Stephanie A. Sanders, professor of Gender Studies and associate director of the Kinsey Institute, gave the inaugural lecture at the First National Debate on Sexual Health on September 12 , 2008 in Zielona Gora, Poland. The conference gathered representatives from Polish psychological, medical, sexological, cultural, and political environments to discuss the challenges facing Poland regarding various aspects of sexual health.

The History Learning Project, led by History faculty Arlene Diaz, David Pace, and Leah Shopkow, and Instructional Support Services’ Associate Director of Campus Instructional Consulting Joan Middendorf, was awarded the Robert Menges Research Presentation Award at the Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education Conference in Reno, Nevada, in October 2008.

Anthropology professor Virginia Vitzthum has become a member of the Editorial Board of PLoS One, an open access scientific journal. PLoS is a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource.

Ray DeMallie, Anthropology, received a $125,000 Collaborative Research grant from the NEH with Linda A. Cumberland (a former student in the Department of Anthropology) for the study of Assiniboine Indian oral narratives.

Richard Bauman, Anthropology, received the American Folklore Society Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Award at the recent annual meeting of the AFS in Louisville, KY.

Anya Peterson Royce, Anthropology, is the invited keynote speaker at the Understanding Dance international conference to be held at the Ludwik Solski State Theatre School in Krakow and the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland, in November 2009.

Yvette M. Alex-Assensoh, Political Science and adjunct faculty in African American and African Diaspora Studies, has been named dean of IU’s Office of Women’s Affairs. She served as chair of the Women’s Caucus of the Female Scholars/Activists Network and received the Distinguished Leadership and Service Award at the 26th annual conference of the Association of Third World Studies in October 2008.

Kim Huynh, Economics, continues his research program to understand firm dynamics and the role of financial frictions on small, young, and private firms in Canada. His research has been supported by a Statistics-Canada Research Fellowship and two research grants from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Grant One, valued at $79,200 (CDN), is to support research, while grant Two is for $40,000 (CDN) and used to support data development and fund workshops.

Todd Walker, Economics, was invited to present his research at the Third International Conference on Macroeconomics in Madrid, Spain, in September 2008, and at the Methods and Applications for Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium Models Conference at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland in October 2007.

Roy Gardner, Economics, together with collaborators at the University of Maine, has been awarded a two-year NSF grant, “The Evolution of Norms and Conservation Rules in Two Fisheries.” One fishery, lobsters, has evolved sustainable practices, while other fisheries, such as cod, have not. Better understanding this divergent evolution will prove useful in sustaining economic commons throughout the economy.

Rusty Tchernis, Economics, jointly with Daniel Millimet (SMU), received a two-year award from the US Department of Agriculture in the amount of $200,000. The title of the award is “Evaluating the Effects of Nutrition Programs on Childhood Obesity in the Presence of Selection and Multiple Program Interactions.”