Awards and Accolades

Professor Gay Seidman has been awarded a $100,000 multi-year grant from the UW-Madison Center for World Affairs and the Global Economy. Seidman's collaborative is called "Governance in Economic Development: Law, Politics and the Role of the State." (4/8/2008)

Michel Guillot has received an H.I. Romnes Faculty Fellowship. The award, supported by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), recognizes great potential in faculty who have earned tenure within the last four years. Award-winners receive a $50,000 award to be used in support of research. Link to news release

Angela Barian has been selected as a Letters & Science Teaching Fellow for the year 2008. This is a high honor, and recognizes the superior quality of performance as a Teaching Assistant. In addition to a cash award, Angela will lead workshops to train graduate student/teaching assistant colleagues preceding fall semester 2008.

M. Giovanna Merli delivered the 2007 William H. Sewell lecture. Her talk was entitled "Epidemiology, Social Sciences and the Spread of HIV/AIDS in China."

Jane Piliavin is the 2008 recipient of the Cooley-Mead award from the ASA Section on Social Psychology. The award recognizes lifetime contributions to scholarship in social psychology. The 2008 recipient of ASA's Cox-Johnson-Frazier Award is Cora Marrett. This award recognizes her lifetime of teaching, research, and service in the intellectual tradition of Cox, Charles Johnson, and Franklin Frazier. Both of these awards will be presented at the annual meetings in Boston in August of this 2008.

Three sociology majors, along with their faculty collaborators, have been awarded Hilldale Undergraduate/Faculty Research Fellowships! Congratulations to Janna Jurowicz and Professor Joe Elder, Caitlin Gilbert and Professor John DeLamater, and Emily Nell and Associate Professor Debby Carr!

Sandy Levitsky (UW Soc PhD 2006) has just been selected as the winner of the Law and Society Association's 2007 Dissertation Prize, for her study "Private Dilemmas of Public Provision: The Formation of Political Demand for State Entitlements to Long-Term Care." The Law and Society Association is the premier scholarly body in the interdisciplinary field of socio-legal studies.

Ivan Ermakoff delivered the 2006 William H. Sewell lecture.

Congratulations to Elizabeth Geglia and Kyle Rolnick, Sociology majors and winners of two highly competitive College of Letters and Science scholarships. Ms. Geglia is the recipient of the Leo and Jean Besozzi Scholarship and Mr. Rolnick is the recipient of the Florence Waste Pulver Scholarship.

John DeLamater delivered the 2007 William and Joyce Wartman Lecture on Human Sexuality and the Liberal Religious Tradition at the First Unitarian Society of Madison.

Sarah Bowen, Sarah Warren and Jennifer Wiegel have each been awarded Tinker-Nave Field Grants from the Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies (LACIS) Program to facilitate their research.

The January 2007 issue of Footnotes (newsletter of the American Sociology Association) has an article on our department's Undergraduate Concentration in Analysis and Research (CAR).

Shane Sharp has been selected as an L&S Teaching Fellow for the year 2007. The Teaching Fellow Award is granted to TAs from the College of Letters and Science, the College of Ag and Life Sciences, and the School of Human Ecology who have achieved outstanding success as students and teachers. Winners of this award are named L&S Fellows and serve as instructors at the L&S TA training session at the start of the fall semester. Graduate student Peter Brinson is a current L&S Teaching Fellow.

Daniel Kleinman, Professor of Rural Sociology, has been awarded a Vilas Associateship by the Graduate School. The award provides two years of support for Daniel's work on his project "Disease and Discipline: The Formation, Solidification, and Development of Plant Pathology in the United States." Congratulations, Daniel!

Pamela Oliver has been recognized for her "impact on the criminal justice system, legislature, and re-entry process" by Voices Beyond Bars, a program of the Madison-Area Urban Ministry. Pam will receive her award at a ceremony next month. Good work indeed!

Joan Fujimura has won a Vilas Associate fellowship to work on her study "Race, Biomedical Genomics, and Society," which focuses on the debates about the use of "race" or "ethnicity" as concepts in biomedical research, with a special emphasis on the imprecise ways the concept of a "population" has been used. Congratulations, Joan!

James Benson, Danielle Berman, Peter Brinson and Kristen Springer have each won a 2006 Graduate Student Mentor Award awarded by the Graduate Student Collaborative.

Michael Bell's 2004 book, Farming for Us All: Practical Agriculture and the Cultivation of Sustainability recently won an Outstanding Academic Title award from the American Library Association.

Peter Brinson has won an L&S Teaching Fellow Award for "....achieving outstanding success as a student and teacher. Winners of this award are named L&S Fellows and serve as instructors at the L&S TA training session at the start of the fall semester." Congratulations, Peter!

Ellen Jacobson has won the 2005-06 College of Letters and Science Advising Award! From the nomination criteria: Academic advising is critical to the success of both undergraduate and graduate students. These annual advising awards acknowledge the importance of all advisors, and they allow the College to recognize and reward the exemplary work of faculty and academic staff advisors.

Jennifer L. Dykema has won the the Kathryn DuPre Lumpkin Award for the Best Dissertation in the Sociology Department during 2004-05. Jennifer's dissertation, Analysis of Factors Influencing Errors in Self-Reports About Child Support and Other Family-Related Variables, was nominated by Nora Cate Schaeffer. Congratulations, Jennifer!

Erin Hatton wins a Campus-Wide 2006 Teaching Assistant Award for Early Excellence.
The Early Excellence Award recognizes outstanding and inspirational achievement on the part of TAs with fewer than 4 semesters of teaching experience. Congratulations, Erin!

Jeremy Freese delivered the 2005 William H. Sewell lecture

Congratulations to Sarah Faith Nehrling! Sarah has just been appointed as a 2006 Junior Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. An undergraduate in Sociology, Sarah also won a prestigious Alfred Reschke Scholarship this fall. Congratulations again to Sarah and her faculty nominator, Jane Piliavin!

Doctoral candidate Carolina Milesi has been awarded a 2005-06 Spencer Dissertation Fellowship for research related to education.

Alberto Palloni has received a highly selective MERIT award (or Method to Extend Research in Time) from the National Institutes of Health. http://www.news.wisc.edu/11458.html

Faculty honors:
Robert M. Hauser has been elected to the American Philosophical Society
Alberto Palloni has been elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Elizabeth Thomson has been elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

Wisconsin Sociology is ranked #1 in the new US News & World Report rankings of graduate programs. Read UW news release on rankings | View rankings at USNews.com