The University Record, April 8, 1998
By Wono Lee
News and Information Services
The Michigan Society of Fellows has selected four new Fellows to serve three-year appointments as postdoctoral scholars and assistant professors. Fellows are chosen for their independent scholarship and interdisciplinary intellectual interests. While here, they will teach selected courses in their affiliated departments and continue their scholarly research.
The Fellows, their affiliated departments and research interests are:
Oz Frankel, Department of History, will receive a Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Berkeley, in June. His research will focus on the role of eccentricity and eccentrics in English society and English self-understanding from 1780 to 1914. His dissertation topic is discovering society: the politics, culture and rituals of social investigations in Britain and the United States, 1830-1870.
Tiffany Holmes will be affiliated with the School of Art and Design. Holmes has a master’s degree in painting from the Maryland Institute, College of Art, and a second one in digital art from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She is creating an interactive CD titled MarkSPOT that reveals the threshold of personal expression when merged with the computer. Holmes will continue to work concurrently as a painter and as a computer artist and plans to devise different strategies for involving the viewer in the investigation of artistic process in cyberspace.
Ram Mahalingam, Department of Psychology, will complete a Ph.D. in developmental psychology at the University of Pittsburgh in August. His primary research interest is understanding the relation between power and cognition, with a particular interest in the areas of social categorization, learning, moral development and self in various multicultural contexts and settings. He has explored the developmental changes in children’s thinking about the origins of caste and the mechanisms for changing one’s caste, and hopes to further the understanding of how humans think about social categories.
Carla Mazzio will be affiliated with the Department of English. She holds a Ph.D. in English and American literature from Harvard University. Her research will focus on the relation between literature and mathematics, considering issues of form, prosody, and numerical and geometric allegory in light of the expansion and shifting contexts of mathematical knowledge in early modern England.
Unique to public universities, the Michigan Society of Fellows was founded in 1970 with grants from the Ford Foundation and Horace H. and Mary Rackham Funds. The society provides financial and intellectual support to individuals selected for outstanding achievement, professional promise and interdisciplinary interests. Competition for the fellowships is open to eligible candidates in the physical and life sciences, engineering, social sciences and education, the humanities, and the arts.
