Spring 2000 One-world dilemmas New faculty Bullets & bytes, Recent faculty honors, Promotions to tenure     All issues This issue only Help   Soundings is a publication of the School of Humanities and Social Science at MIT Comments and questions to www-shss@mit.edu

Bullets & Bytes Recent faculty honors Promotions to tenure   Dower wins Pulitzer Prize John W. Dower, the Elting E. Morison Professor of History, won the Pulitzer Prize (general non-fiction), as well as the National Book Award (non-fiction), for Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. The book also received Columbia University's Bancroft Prize for American history, the American Historical Association's John K. Fairbank Prize for East Asian history, the PEN/New England L. L. Winship Award for the best book with a New England author or subject, and is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in non-fiction. "After spending more than 10 years researching and writing about defeat, it was disorienting but decidedly pleasant to be unexpectedly embracing victory," Professor Dower observes. Described by The New York Times Book Review as a "magisterial and beautifully written," Embracing Defeat portrays Japan and Japanese-American relations between August 1945 and April 1952 and explores the still-rippling impact of General Douglas MacArthur's top-down occupation policies on modern Japanese political and economic life. Dower's 1986 book, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, won the 1986 National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction and was a finalist for the National Book Award.   Fisher named inaugural holder of Carlton Chair Franklin Fisher of the Department of Economics has been named the first holder of the Jane Berkowitz Carlton and Dennis William Carlton Chair in Microeconomics. An outstanding economic theorist and econometrician, Fisher is a leader in the application of economic analysis to problems in industrial organization, the subfield of economics focusing on the interaction between companies, firms, consumers and governments. Author of more than a dozen books and 100 scholarly articles, Fisher is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the 1973 recipient of the American Economic Association's John Bates Clark medal, which honors outstanding economists under the age of 40, past president of the Econometric Society and past editor of Econometrica, the leading journal of econometrics and economic theory. He joined the MIT faculty in 1961. Dennis Carlton, who received his PhD from MIT in Economics in 1975, is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business and president of Lexecon, a leading economics consulting firm. His wife Jane holds a PhD in organic chemistry from Harvard University. Their daughter Debby received her SB Degree from MIT in Economics in 1999. Professor Fisher supervised Dennis Carlton's doctoral dissertation and taught Debbie's first MIT economics course.   Solow wins National Medal of Science Nobel laureate and Institute Professor Emeritus Robert M. Solow received the 1999 National Medal of Science in economics. Creator of the modern framework for analyzing the effects of investment and technological progress on economic growth, Solow showed how to separately measure the effects of increases in the labor supply, capital stock and improved technological possibilities on economic growth. His analysis revolutionized research in many areas of economics, including statistical processes of inequality, effects of taxation, level of national debt, design of institutions in developing countries, use of renewable and nonrenewable resources, determination of exchange rates and effects of monetary policy. Subjects previously explored individually are now studied in an integrated fashion, with attention to long term consequences. For this contribution, Solow was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1987. Recent faculty honors Susan Slyomovics, Geneviève McMillan-Reba Stewart Professor of the Study of Women in the Developing World and Professor of Anthropology, received two awards for her book, The Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village:, the 1999 Albert Hourani Book Award of the Middle East Studies Association and the Chicago Folklore Prize for the best folklore book worldwide. Promotions to tenure Hugh Gusterson Associate Professor of Anthropology and Science Studies   BACK TO TOP

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Spring 2000