Around the College: February 1999

Originally published in the February 1999 issue of CLASnotes.

Department News

Communication Sciences and Disorders

Linda Lombardino has become a fellow of the American Speech Language and Hearing Association. Of the association's 90,000 members, only 20 or so achieve this honor per year.

English

Nancy Reisman's story collection House Fires has been selected for the 1999 Iowa Short fiction Award. The University of Iowa Press will publish the collection later this year.
Stephanie Smith gave a performative reading of her latest fiction at the Dixon Place Theater in New York City (Soho) on December 16. Her essay "Suckers" has just appeared in the journal Differences (10.1).

Mathematics

Phil Boyland gave an invited special session talk entitled "Isotopy stable dynamics relative to compact invariant sets" at a meeting of the American Mathematical Society in Winston-Salem in October of 1998.
Scott McCullough gave an invited special session talk at the Fall South East Sectional Meeting of the American Mathematical Society in October. The title of his talk was "Commutant lifting on a two-holed domain."

Sociology

In December, Mike Radelet presented a series of public lectures at the University of Westminster Law School in London, England, where he has been a visiting professor of law since 1995. From there he travelled to Harare, Zimbabwe, where he represented Amnesty International at the meetings of the World Council of Churches. Just before Christmas, outgoing Chief Justice of the Florida Supreme court Gerald Kogan (a former death penalty prosecutor) was quoted in newspapers throughout the state praising Radelet's work showing the inevitability of executing the innocent.

Women's Studies and Gender Research

Sue Rosser gave three invited lectures in Sweden in September: "Gender Bias in Clinical Research" at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, "Gender Differences: Implications for Research Design and Curricular Practices" at the Nordic School of Public Health in Goteborg, and "Implications of Feminist Theories for Genetic Engineering and Reproductive Technologies" at the Women's Studies Program at the University of Goteborg.

Physics Department to Host Collaborative Meeting on $500 Million NSF Project

The Physics Department will host a meeting March 4-6 for scientists from the US and abroad who will be participating in The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) experiment. The LIGO project, a $500M effort funded by the National Science Foundation, is a pioneering effort to design and construct a novel scientific facility—a gravitational-wave observatory—that will open a new observational window on the universe. UF is responsible for construction of a major LIGO subsystem.

Participants in the UF meeting will discuss ideas on improving LIGO detectors, better analyzing data from these detectors and creating software to look for gravitational waves from stellar pairs that collapse into one another. Further details can be found at the conference Web site. http://cithe502.cithep.caltech.edu/~donna/LSC_Stanford.html.

Mathematics Department Awarded GTE Grant

The Department of Mathematics was awarded a GTE Focus Grant in the amount of $30,000 to develop a summer program for minority students from local high schools. The intent of the program is to increase students' interest and background in mathematics, and ultimately to increase the likelihood that they will major in mathematics or related fields. The program will include a technology component, including the use of graphing calculators and the MAPLE symbolic algebra package. Six one-week modules on mathematics topics outside the usual curriculum will be presented, including fractals and chaos, game theory, number theory, combinatorics, graph theory, and probability. The program will include small group work, plus some outside speakers.

UF to Host International Particle Physics Conference in March

The Physics Department is hosting an international conference on particle physics March 8-11. The conference, titled "Higgs and Supersymmetry: Search and Discovery," will host about 100 physicists from around the world to evaluate the prospects for new discoveries at particle accelerators currently under construction. Top on the list for particle physicists is the Higgs particle, which is a key ingredient for objects to have mass, and Supersymmetry, which allows for all forces including gravity to be unified into one. Conclusive results on both searches are expected within the next 5-10 years. The University of Florida participates on two large experiments near Chicago and Geneva which are tackling these issues. Further details can be found at the conference web site: http://www.phys.ufl.edu/~rfield/higgs_susy.html.

McQuown Award Deadline Approaching

Undergraduate and graduate women are invited to apply for the O. Ruth McQuown Scholarship Awards through the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. These awards honor UF's female scholars in the humanities, social sciences, individual interdisciplinary studies (that include social sciences/humanities) and women's studies.

For undergraduates, up to five awards of varying amounts will be awarded. In past years, awards have ranged from $500 to $3,000. The deadline for applications is FEBRUARY 22.

Graduate awards include a $8,000 prize and tuition remission to a student who has completed at least one semester of graduate work in CLAS. The deadline is FEBRUARY 22. A $10,000 award and tuition remission will honor an incoming graduate student nominated by the department to which she has applied. The deadline is FEBRUARY 10. Smaller awards to supplement assistantships will also be given to several current and incoming students.

The most important criterion is academic achievement and promise. In addition, the committee may consider contributions or likely contributions to the student's university, local, or larger community. Applications and additional information are available in 2014 Turlington Hall. Two letters of recommendation are required. For more information, contact CLAS Associate Dean Patricia H. Miller at or pmiller@psych.ufl.edu.

Three CLAS Professors Win One-year NEH Grants Worth $30,000 Each

R. Allen Shoaf

R. Allen Shoaf (ENG) will use his grant to continue working on a study of autobiography in late medieval English writing. He will concentrate, in particular, on the works of Geoffrey Chaucer and Thomas Usk. Shoaf recently edited and is currently translating Usk's Testament of Love (under contract with the University Press of Florida).

David Pharies

David Pharies (RLL) will use his fellowship to complete his current research project, entitled Etymological Dictionary of Spanish Suffixes. The dictionary will explain the origin and history of some 350 final elements in Spanish, including suffixes transmitted in popular speech from Latin (-anza), learned suffixes borrowed from Latin (-ancia) and Greek (-ia), and several categories of suffix-like final elements, including elements of Greek compounds (-fobia).

Nora M. Alter

Nora M. Alter's (GSS) project investigates a relatively new cultural and technological medium: the essay film. "Like its literary and philosophical ancestor, the written essay," says Alter, "the essay film is a hybrid medium located between narrative fiction and historical fact, truth and artifice. It poaches across traditional boundaries to constitute one of the most significant, and neglected, forms of social and cultural commentary, criticism, and (self) reflection in an age increasingly dominated by other technologies." Additionally, her project seeks to bridge the increasing divide between traditional literary studies and film studies.

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