School Notes: Graduate School of Arts & Sciences
May/June 2010

Outstanding graduate mentors

The winners of the Graduate Mentor Awards for 2010 are Kelly Brownell, professor of psychology and epidemiology and public health and director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity; John Harley Warner, the Avalon Professor of the History of Medicine and professor of American studies and history; and Suzanne Alonzo, assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. They were honored during Mentoring Week in February and will be further celebrated at the Graduate School’s commencement convocation.

A committee of graduate students and faculty selected the award recipients based on anonymous letters of nomination from grateful advisees. One student, nominating Professor Brownell, wrote, “My mentor … has taught me that science can be a powerful tool in shaping public policy and effecting change on a national and international scale.” Another student wrote, “Having Professor Warner as my academic mentor is like winning the lottery. He has never ceased to raise the mentorship bar to unprecedented levels.” Writing about Professor Alonzo, one student said, “Suzanne’s confidence in my ideas and judgment throughout this process enabled me to develop intellectually to the point that I now feel she treats me more as a colleague than a student.”

Honoring public service

Dean Jon Butler has announced two new awards to honor students who engage in public scholarship and community service while at Yale. “Scholarship is a responsibility as much as it is a privilege, not only toward our disciplines but also toward our local and global communities, where our skills and talents can have special resonance,” says Dean Butler.

The Public Scholar Award will recognize research conducted by a Yale graduate student that directly and concretely engages and betters the world at large. The Community Service Award will honor a student’s volunteer work in the New Haven area while enrolled at Yale. The student’s volunteer work does not need to be related to his or her academic work. Winners will be selected by a student/faculty/staff committee, and the prizes will be awarded at commencement convocation.

History of Art students win national fellowships

Three graduate students have been awarded fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the research institute of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Meredith Gamer ’12 has won the Paul Mellon Fellowship, which enables a candidate completing a doctoral dissertation in Western art to study abroad for two years, with a third year in residency at the center. Gamer’s dissertation, “Criminal and Martyr: Art and Religion in Britain’s Early Modern Eighteenth Century,” explores the relationships among art, religion, and public execution. The Wyeth Fellowship, awarded for 24 months, supports research focused on art of the United States. Dana Byrd ’11 will spend a year in South Carolina, researching Sea Island plantations for her dissertation titled “Reconstructions: The Material Culture of the Plantation, 1861–1877.” Nathaniel Jones ’12, winner of the Finley Fellowship, will spend two years in Italy researching his dissertation titled “Nobilibus Pinacothecae Sunt Faciundae: The Inception of the Fictive Picture Gallery in Augustan Rome,” and a third at the center completing the dissertation and performing curatorial work.