Six Women Scholars Receive Notable Awards

Hannah Sanghee Park has been chosen as the winner of the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets for her collection of poems The Same-Different. The collection will be published by Louisiana State University Press in 2015.

Park is currently a student at the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. She is a graduate of the University of Washington and holds a master of fine arts degree from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.

Kathy Lee Heuston, an associate professor of communication at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee, has won the Award of Excellence from the Broadcast Education Association for her short documentary film, An American Journalist, Dorothy Nix. Dorothy Nix, who died in 1951, was an advice columnist who was syndicated in newspapers throughout the world. Austin Peay State University holds the largest archive of materials relating to Nix.

Alicia Dewey, an associate professor of history at Biola University in La Mirada, California, has won the Robert A. Calvert Book Prize from Texas A&M University Press. The award is given to the best submitted manuscript on the history of the American South, West or Southwest. Her book, Pesos and Dollars: Entrepreneurs in the Texas-Mexico Borderlands, 1880-1940, will be published in June.

Dr. Dewey is a graduate of Davidson College in North Carolina. She holds a master’s degree, a law degree, and a Ph.D. from Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

Sylvia Barack Fishman, chair of Near Eastern and Judaic studies and the Joseph and Esther Foster Professor of Contemporary Jewish Life at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, has been selected to receive the 2014 Marshall Sklare Award from the Association for the Social Scientific Study of Jewry. She will be honored at the association’s annual meeting in December in Baltimore.

Professor Fishman is the author of seven books including The Way Into the Varieties of Jewishness (2006), Double or Nothing: Jewish Families and Mixed Marriage (2004), and A Breath of Life: Feminism in the American Jewish Community (1993). She is a graduate of Yeshiva University in New York and holds a Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis.

Donna E. Shalala, president of the University of Miami, received the Harry S. Truman Legacy of Leadership Award from the Harry S. Truman Library Institute in Independence, Missouri. President Shalala is the former secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Before joining the Clinton administration she was chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and president of Hunter College in New York City.

Dr. Shalala is a graduate of  Western College of Women (now part of Miami University of Ohio) and holds a Ph.D. from Syracuse University.

Diana Lados, associate professor of mechanical engineering and founding director of the Integrative Materials Design Center at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, received the 2014 Ralph R. Teetor Educational Award from SAE International. She also received the Brimacombe Medal from the Minerals, Metals, and Materials Society. Dr. Lados’ research focuses on metal fatigue.

Dr. Lados joined the WPI faculty in 2006. She holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Polytechnic University of Bucharest, a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Southern Illinois University Carbondale and a Ph.D. in materials science and engineering at WPI.