The Baruch College Faculty Handbook

Fellowships from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation

Last updated on 8/27/08

In Spring 2002 Baruch College was chosen by the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation to receive $150,000 per year for four years to support the research and scholarly writing of excellent teachers among our junior, tenure-track faculty in the Humanities. (In spring 2005 Baruch was informed that the Foundation would extend our participation for four additional years, and in spring 2008 we were informed that a four-year commitment would continue for the forseeable future.) These funds provide one year’s or one semester’s respite from teaching so that the faculty member can focus on her/his research. The basis for the award is excellence in teaching.

Recipients of the award are selected during the spring semester for the following academic year. They are chosen from faculty in the humanities currently in their second or third year of teaching at Baruch. (In other words, the respite from teaching comes during the third or fourth year at the College.) The College defines “Humanities” broadly, so faculty members may be nominated from departments that do not traditionally fall under that rubric; individuals should judge the appropriateness of their own work.

Candidates are nominated by their Chairs. By the end of January, nominees submit:

An updated CV;
A complete set of teaching observation and post-observation reports;
A complete set of student evaluations;
Sample syllabi, examinations, and a brief statement of teaching philosophy;
A copy of their teaching schedule (with rooms) for the upcoming spring semester;
A description of the research project(s) the candidate intends to pursue;
A letter of support from the Chair.

Recipients are decided by a committee that is appointed by the Provost. The committee members, which include previous recipients of the College’s teaching awards, observe a class session taught by each candidate. The timing of the observation is by arrangement with the candidate. Winners are announced in March or early April.

Whiting Fellows also are expected to be able to serve as mentors to subsequent Whiting recipients and to help in the selection process.

After their fellowship period, recipients of Whiting Fellowships submit a report on research and scholarly work carried out during the award period and make a public presentation of the results of their research. At the most recent such presentation (in March 2008), Profs. Dov Waxman and Cheryl Smith presented brief summaries of the work they accomplished during their fellowship period.

Whiting Winners at Baruch College

Whiting Fellows for the Academic Year 2008-2009

Julie Des Jardins (Department of History): One-semester release from teaching.

Thomas Teufel (Department of Philosophy): Full-year release from teaching to work on a set of papers investigating Immanuel Kant’s conception of "reflection" in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. The first paper seeks to show that "reflection" there does not refer to the comparison of objects with concepts, as is commonly held, but to an epistemologically much more fundamental cognitive operation. The second paper seeks to show that this operation provides an explanation of teleology in nature that is superior not only to theological but also to Darwinian accounts.

Whiting Fellows for the Academic Year 2007-2008

Timothy Aubry (Department of English): Full-year release from teaching to complete draft of his manuscript, Literature as Self-Help: Postwar U.S. Fiction and the Middle-Class Hunger for Trouble, which assesses the rhetorical and psychological strategies various popular postwar novels offer middlebrow readers for coping and coming to terms with particular social and historical dilemmas.

Jessica Lang (Department of English): One-semester release from teaching to work on Textual Survivors: Holocaust Representation and the Third Generation, which examines a selection of the most recent contributions to Holocaust literature by considering a range of texts written by authors who are at least three generations removed from the Holocaust, and some who are not direct descendants of Holocaust survivors.

Robin Root (Department of Anthropology/Sociology): One-semester release from teaching to investigate how revivalist Christianity (institutions, social networks, beliefs) mediates risk, stigma, and the flow of biomedical information regrading HIV testing and treatment in Swaziland.

Whiting Fellows for the Academic Year 2006-2007

Ali Nematollahy (Department of Modern Languages and Comparative Literature): One-semester release from teaching to do research on ideas of decadence in late 19th-century France. Prof. Nematollahy endeavors to unearth connections between the Symbolist and Decadent movements in literature and expects to link his study to the Naturiste movement and federalism, while developing and exploring their broader political and social dimensions.

Cheryl Smith (Department of English): One-semester release from teaching to work on two articles and perhaps to begin work on a book. The first article explores the tension within English departments between writing instruction and literary study and how these tensions play out in the important undergraduate core English courses. The second article analyses the high-stakes testing environments in writing programs and the effectiveness of evaluating student writers within such environments. The book-length study would examine the complicated role English departments play within the academy.

Dov Waxman (Department of Political Science): Full-year release from teaching to develop a book-length study of Jewish foreign policy whose working title is Jewish Foreign Policy: A Case Study of Trans-State Ethno-Nationalist Foreign Policy. Professor Waxman notes that a study of Jewish foreign policy is critical for understanding international relations and has to date received little attention because international relations as a discipline privileges “the state” as the principal unit of analysis, rather than non-state actors such as multinational corporations, ethnic or national diaspora.

Whiting Fellows for the Academic Year 2005-2006

María Mercedes Andrade (Departments of Modern Languages and Comparative Literature and Black and Hispanic Studies): Full-year release from teaching for book-length project entitled, Ambivalent Desires: Elites and the Notion of Modernity in Columbia, 1890s-1950s. The manuscript will build on previous research and will include new research on Ignacio Gómez and Fabiola Aguirre.

Katherine Pence (History): One-semester release from teaching for work on three interrelated projects: final editing of her first book (on German consumer culture during the Cold War); completion of a first draft of a short introductory level book on European consumption; and a new research project on Germany's cultural and economic relationships with de-colonizing countries in the 1960s and 1970s.

Whiting Fellows for the Academic Year 2004-2005

Shelly Eversley (English): Full-year release from teaching. Archival research for her book, Integration and Its Discontents: African-American Literature, 1944-1967.

Noriko Watanabe (Modern Languages and Comparative Literature): One-semester release from teaching. Book-length study of rakugo, a 300-year-old professional storytelling genre in Japan that is still active today.

Whiting Fellows for the Academic Year 2003-2004

Benedetto Fontana (Political Science): Full-year release from teaching. Book with the working title Hegemony and State in Gramsci, which will explore the concepts of state and hegemony in the thought of the Italian political intellectual, Antonio Gramsci.

Mary McGlynn (English): One-semester release from teaching. Book-length study of contemporary fiction of Britain and Ireland, entitled “Urban Peripheries: Versions of the Vernacular in Contemporary Fiction of the British Isles.”

Whiting Fellows for the Academic Year 2002-2003

Stephanie Golob (Political Science): Full year release from teaching. Two projects: “Globalizing the ‘Rule of Law’? Epistemic Communities, Chilean Judicial Culture, and the Repatriation of the Pinochet Case,” and “A Polis Too Far? Building a ‘North American Community.’”

Geanne Rosenberg (English): Full year release from teaching. Two books: one on the role of lawyers as advocates for the freedom of the press; the other focused on major disasters that have afflicted American corporations.

Nancy Yousef (English): One semester release from teaching. A book-length interdisciplinary study of the concept of autonomy in enlightenment philosophy and literature, “Isolated Cases: Literature, Philosophy, and the anxious Imagination of Autonomy.”