Eleven outstanding faculty members from UW-Madison have been named winners of this year’s Kellett Mid-Career Awards -- with six L&S faculty members winning the award.
The Kellett award, supported by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), recognizes outstanding mid-career faculty members who are five to 20 years past the first promotion to a tenured position. Each winner, chosen by a Graduate School committee, receives a $60,000 flexible research award.
The award is named for William R. Kellett, a former president of the WARF board of trustees and retired president of Kimberly-Clark Corp.
This year’s L&S recipients are:
Craig Berridge, psychology, is an internationally recognized expert on the neurobiology of stress and arousal. His recent work provides new insight into the neurobiology of cognition and the neural mechanisms responsible for the cognition-enhancing effects of drugs used to treat attention disorders such as ADHD. He teaches graduate and undergraduate neuropharmacology classes.
Rachel F. Brenner, Hebrew and Semitic studies, is the Max and Frieda Weinstein-Bascom Professor of Jewish Studies and a senior fellow in the UW–Madison Institute for Research in the Humanities. She has published widely on responses to the Holocaust in the Jewish Diaspora, Israeli and Polish literature. Her current project focuses on Warsaw writers’ responses to the Holocaust.
Kenneth George, anthropology, conducts ethnographic research on the cultural politics of art, language, and religion in contemporary Southeast Asia. He is a past editor of the Journal of Asian Studies and the prize-winning author of several books and nearly 30 essays and is now undertaking a comparative project on ethics, iconoclasm and conscience.
Theodore P. Gerber, sociology, has written 42 scholarly articles and numerous op-eds, policy briefs and book reviews on social, political, economic and demographic change in contemporary Russia. He directs the Center for Russia, East Europe and Central Asia and recently received an Honored Instructor Award for his teaching in a first-year interest group core seminar.
Lynn K. Nyhart, history of science, is an historian of modern biology, currently researching the history of concepts of biological individuality. Her book, “Modern Nature: The Rise of the Biological Perspective in Germany,” won the 2009 Susan Abrams Prize of the University of Chicago Press. Nyhart will be president of the History of Science Society in 2012-13.
Michael Witmore, English, is a scholar of Shakespeare and early modern culture who is currently studying wisdom literature and mechanical theories of the “will.” He also uses digital counting techniques to explore what linguistic variation, at the level of words and types of words, can indicate about early modern literature, history and culture.