Of Note
Weatherhead Center Director Awarded John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship
Weatherhead Center Director and Clarence Dillon Professor of International Affairs Beth A. Simmons was awarded a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Simmons received this recognition with 180 other scholars, artists, and scientists “appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise,” having been chosen from nearly 3,000 applicants. Professor Simmons's Guggenheim proposal was sparked by a grant from the Weatherhead Center's incubation fund. Her research focuses on cooperative exchanges in confronting transnational crime and trust relationships in transnational criminal justice.
Weatherhead Center Faculty Associate Receives Cundill Prize in History and Named Finalist for the George Washington Book Prize
History Professor Maya Jasanoff won a Recognition of Excellence Award as part of the 2011 Cundill Prize in History at McGill University for her book, Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World. The prize recognizes history books that have a profound literary, social, and academic impact.
“Liberty's Exiles tells the story of loyalists who fled the US after the American Revolution and settled all over the British Empire, especially in Canada,” Jasanoff said. “It argues for the importance of taking history out of patriotic, national boxes and seeing it from many sides, so it's wonderful to be recognized by an international history prize that's also dedicated to crossing borders, and especially appropriate, given my subject, to receive this recognition from a Canadian university, at a ceremony in London.”
Jasanoff's Liberty's Exiles is also one of three finalists for the $50,000 George Washington Book Prize. The prize—which is cosponsored by Washington College, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and George Washington's Mount Vernon—recognizes the past year's best books on the nation's founding era, especially those that have the potential to advance broad public understanding of American history. In praising Jasanoff's Liberty's Exiles, the jury applauded the book's “impressive archival research, its sweeping conceptualization, perspectives and aims, its enviable prose style and the penetrating insights it yields into its characters' lives.”
Weatherhead Center Associate Inducted into Alumni Hall of Fame
Amitabh Chandra, professor of public policy, was inducted into the University of Kentucky Gatton College of Business and Economics Alumni Hall of Fame.
“Induction into the Gatton Hall of Fame is a prestigious honor for our business school alumni,” said Merl Hackbart, interim dean of the college. “The inductees represent several different professions and career paths, yet all have distinguished themselves in their business pursuits and in civic and community leadership.”
A total of 75 men and women have been recognized by Gatton College since the inception of the Hall of Fame in 1994. This is the eighteenth group of inductees to the hall.
Chandra's research focuses on productivity, cost-growth, and racial disparities in health care.
Institute Renamed after Weatherhead Center Associate
The Vienna-based Institute for Integrative Conflict Transformation and Peace Building was officially renamed the Herbert C. Kelman Institute for Interactive Conflict Transformation. Herbert C. Kelman is the Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics Emeritus, and for a decade directed the Center's Program for International Conflict Analysis and Resolution. Kelman was also elected as the institute's honorary president.
The Kelman Institute is affiliated with the Center for Peace Research and Peace Education at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria. Its primary focus is conflict transformation and peace building in international and intercommunal relations. Its work follows the tradition of interactive problem solving—an approach developed by Kelman and his associates. This approach was derived from the pioneering work of John Burton and is anchored in social-psychological principles, and which Kelman has applied most extensively to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the past four decades.
Weatherhead Center Associate Wins 2011 National Humanities Medal and Receives Notre Dame Award for International Human Development and Solidarity
The Nobel Prize-winning economist and philosopher Amartya Sen will receive the 2012 Notre Dame Award for International Human Development and Solidarity in recognition of his contributions to the field of human development. The award was presented at a campus ceremony on April 17, 2012.
A visionary and spirited advocate for the world's poorest people, Sen has worked for 50 years to illuminate the true causes of poverty and suffering. He has transformed how development is defined and measured by focusing attention on positive freedoms and human capabilities rather than income alone.
On February 10, 2012, President Obama announced the nine winners of the 2011 National Humanities Medals—awarded for outstanding achievements in history, literature, education, philosophy, and musicology. Sen was recognized “for his insights into the causes of poverty, famine, and injustice. By applying philosophical thinking to questions of policy, he has changed how standards of living are measured and increased our understanding of how to fight hunger.”
Weatherhead Center Associate Named Director of the Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies
In an announcement made by Dean Peter Marsden, Theodore Bestor, Reischauer Institute Professor of Social Anthropology and Chair of the Department of Anthropology, was named the next director of Harvard's Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies. The appointment becomes effective on July 1, 2012.