H&SS eNews, June 2005

Greetings from H&SS. The H&SS eNews is a monthly electronic publication of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. The eNews is compiled and edited by Kelli McElhinny, director of media relations for H&SS. She can be reached at 412-268-6094 or jpotts@andrew.cmu.edu. Contact Kelli to submit news about yourself and your fellow alumni, and to sign up for our newsletters.

For past eNews publications, please visit the H&SS eNews archive.

For news about the entire university, be sure to check out the university’s home page or the Carnegie Mellon Today website.

Alumni News

--Michael Gartland (B.A. Creative Writing and Professional Writing, 1996), a religion reporter at The Post and Courier in Charleston, S.C., recently was named one of 10 finalists for the Religion Newswriters Association's Supple Award in which he's competing against reporters from the Chicago Sun-Times, The Boston Globe and The Christian Science Monitor. He also recently won a fellowship from the International Reporting Project and will be working as a foreign correspondent in Indonesia this fall.

--Angela Molloy (B.A. Professional Writing and French, 1997) has accepted a job as Director of Development for 3Ball Productions in Manhattan Beach, Calif. The company is one of the most successful reality television producers with hits like The Biggest Loser, For Love or Money, and Endurance on Discovery Kids on NBC. Molloy will be creating and selling new series to cable and broadcast networks, and working on 3Ball's productions. Previously, Molloy worked for the TLC cable network.

-- Stan Muschweck (B.A. English and Creative Writing, 1974) has been promoted to president of Giant Ideas, a Pittsburgh marketing and advertising agency that is among the fastest-growing firms on the East Coast.

--Jessica Phillips-Silver (B.H.A Psychology and Music, 1999) co-authored a groundbreaking study in the June 3 edition of Science that demonstrates how babies begin to perceive rhythm and appreciate music. The study shows that the rocking or bouncing motion made by parents when they sing to an infant wires a child's brain to hear rhythm and may trigger an appreciation for music later in life. Phillips-Silver is a Ph.D. candidate in the Psychology Department at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. She wrote the study with McMaster Psychology Professor Laurel Trainor. (For more information, go to http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/308/5727/1430.pdf)

--Sue Stauffacher (B.A. Creative Writing and Professional Writing, 1983) has written Harry Sue, which will be published this summer by Knopf. Her fourth children's book, Harry Sue is the tale of an 11-year-old girl with convicted felons for parents and a quadriplegic friend who won't come out of his tree house. Stauffacher also has developed a comic book series called Wireman that is designed to help children learn to read. To learn more about Stauffacher's books and Wireman go to http://www.suestauffacher.com/.

Student News

--Andy Butler, a senior economics major, has written New House 5: How a Dorm Becomes a Home, a true-to-life novel about his experiences as a resident assistant for a freshman dormitory cluster. New House 5 is being published July 2 by PublishAmerica. New House 5 chronicles a year in the life of 56 freshmen students at the fictional Ashford University. The author drew on his experiences living in Carnegie Mellon's New House residence hall, where he was the resident assistant in a first-year housing cluster for students in the university's Science and Humanities Scholars Program (SHS). Butler said his goal in writing the book was to paint an accurate picture of modern college life, so that parents and students can learn from the trials and tribulations that his characters face. Butler, who is a minor in professional writing, is enrolled in the SHS program. The book is available through Amazon.com and PublishAmerica.com.

--Eleven students and recent graduates of Carnegie Mellon University are spending 10 weeks in the Cook Islands, Palau, Micronesia and Sri Lanka to help government and nonprofit agencies develop computer systems that will allow them to better serve their citizens and maintain vital information. The trip is part of a program called Technology Consulting in the Global Community and is based on an undergraduate course in which students work with local nonprofit organizations to implement technology and information systems that meet the organizations' goals. The course is part of the university's TechBridgeWorld initiative, which aims to help developing nations design and implement technology that can enhance suitable and sustainable development. The students represent the H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management, the School of Computer Science and the Information Systems Program in H&SS. Four students will work in the Cook Islands, four in Micronesia, two in Palau and one in Sri Lanka. In the Cook Islands, students will help the government digitize its laws, develop systems to manage welfare and border control information, and develop electronic government policies. (For more information, go to http://www.cmu.edu/PR/releases05/050524_developing.html)

--Silvia Pessoa, a doctoral student in the Department of Modern Languages, will receive this year's G. Richard Tucker Fellowship at the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) in Washington, D.C. Pessoa's dissertation will examine the socio-cultural factors that influence the bi-literacy development in English and Spanish of Uruguayan adolescents in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Tucker, the Paul Mellon Professor of Applied Linguistics and head of the Modern Languages Department, was the president of CAL for 13 years. The fellowship was created in his honor, with support from the Ford Foundation, when he left the organization to come to Carnegie Mellon in 1992.

College / Faculty News

--Carnegie Mellon has named as a University Professor Teddy Seidenfeld, the Herbert A. Simon Professor of Philosophy and Statistics. University Professor is the highest academic distinction faculty members at Carnegie Mellon can achieve. The title is awarded on the basis of national or international recognition for research, artistic and literary accomplishments, and other scholarly activities. Seidenfeld has been at Carnegie Mellon for 20 years. He is the co-director of the graduate program in Knowledge Discovery and Datamining at the Center for Automated Learning and Discovery, and he is the graduate director of the Logic and Computation Program in the Department of Philosophy. From 1989 to 1994 he was head of the Philosophy Department, and he is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

--The Computer Assisted Language Instruction Consortium (CALICO) will give The Esperanto Access to Language Education Award to German Resources on the Web, a Web site created in 1999 by Anne Green, an associate teaching professor of German. The Web site, http://grow.aatg.org/, provides links to the best web resources, Web exercises, Web activities, standards-based thematic units, free online German courses and other resources.

--History Professor Steven Schlossman has written a new introduction for the re-issue of his seminal book Transforming Juvenile Justice: Reform Ideals and Institutional Realites, 1825 to 1920. The book originally was published in 1977 under the title Love and the American Delinquent. The book is a history of the origins of the juvenile court system in America, and it examines the Milwaukee Juvenile Court and the Wisconsin State Reform School to reveal how Progressive social reforms played out in practice. Schlossman had unprecedented access to the records of the Milwaukee Juvenile Court system from 1901 to 1920, and his book remains the empirical benchmark for studies of juvenile courts.

--Margaret E. Kinsky has been named business manager of the Department of English. From 1991-2004, she was the Business Manager of the Department of Psychology, where she won an Outstanding Service Award and an Andy Team Award for Excellence in Increasing Productivity. For the past year, Margaret has been working in the Carnegie Mellon Development Office.

About the Quick Links