Faculty of arts and sciences

School Notes: Faculty of Arts & Sciences
November/December 2022

Tamar Gendler | http://fas.yale.edu

Fostering cross-disciplinary teaching

In May, the FAS hosted Faculty Academy: a series of minicourses taught by faculty, to faculty. Morgan Ng (history of art) welcomed scholars of computer science and architecture to his class on the Italian Renaissance. Language courses by Rosamaría León (Spanish and Portuguese), Dina Roginsky (Near Eastern languages and civilizations), and Liselotte Sippel (Germanic languages and literatures) drew faculty participants from across the divisions, as did Dragomir Radev’s (computer science) course on natural language processing. Finally, Elise Morrison (theater and performance studies) collaborated with Matthew Suttor (Yale School of Drama) to teach a course on fostering creativity. 

A similarly exciting set of offerings was prepared for our students. The FAS’s cross-divisional, team-taught course program, which supports new courses by pairs of faculty members from different disciplines, is now in its third year. In 2022–23, FAS faculty will offer four of these innovative courses. Paola Bertucci (history) and Alison Sweeney (ecology and evolutionary biology and physics) will offer Electromagnetism: Physics, Magic, Religion; Ruzica Piscak  (computer science) and Scott Shapiro ’90JD (philosophy and law) will teach Law, Security, and Logic; R. John Williams (English) and Sam McDougle (psychology) will introduce students to The Science and Culture of Memory; and in Biology of Humans, Valerie Horsley (molecular, cellular, and developmental biology) and Carolyn Roberts (African American studies) will explore humanistic and scientific approaches to biology. 

Pre-tenure faculty research honored

The FAS and SEAS recently honored outstanding work by pre-tenure faculty members. The Samuel ’60 and Ronnie ’72 Heyman Prize, recognizing outstanding research in the humanities, was awarded to Cajetan Iheka (English) in recognition of his book African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics

The Arthur Greer Memorial Prize, recognizing research by junior ladder faculty members in the social and natural sciences, was awarded to Joshua Kalla ’14, ’14MA (political science), an expert on political persuasion; David Moore ’06 (physics), an experimental nuclear and particle physicist; and Shruti Puri (applied physics, SEAS), who studies quantum information processing theory and quantum optics.  

The comment period has expired.