People, Papers, Presentations

Adria Baker,
director, Office of International Students & Scholars,
chaired a session during the Region III NAFSA: Association
of International Educators conference in Monterrey, Mexico,
in November. The session, which received recognition as
the “Region Highlight,” will be presented again
at the national NAFSA conference in Philadelphia in May.
The session was titled “Postcards from the U.S.: The
Cultural Journey of Yi Chen, an International Student.”
Baker also served on a panel discussion about community
involvement with international students titled “When
All Else Fails, Ask: Creative Resources for Programming
in International Offices,” which included recent Rice
doctoral graduates Karen Lozano and Javier Arjona-Baez
from Mexico. She also organized a panel discussion that
included U.S. Department of State consular officials and
local immigration attorneys in a session called “Is
That Your Final Answer?: Consular Processing Highlights.”

Darra Keeton,
associate professor, Dept. of Art & Art History, has
received two fellowships that she will take during her sabbatical
next semester. The first is a monthlong residency at Yaddo
in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. Yaddo, which has supported artists
such as Eudora Welty, Phillip Roth and Aaron Copland, is
perhaps the most famous artists’ colony and workshop
in the country. Keeton also has received a monthlong fellowship
from The Rockefeller Foundation to work at the Villa Serbelloni
in Bellagio, Italy, well-known as the acme of academic and
research locations.

Lily Lam,
associate director, Office of International Students &
Scholars, gave a presentation on a panel titled “Death
of an International Student,” which provided advice
on the cultural and practical aspects university administrators
must know in order to best assist students, families and
universities in the event of an emergency or tragedy to
an international student. It was chosen as runner-up for
“Region Highlight.” She also served on a panel
discussion about community involvement with international
students titled “When All Else Fails, Ask: Creative
Resources for Programming in International Offices.”
Both panel discussions were held during the Region III NAFSA:
Association of International Educators meeting in November
in Monterrey, Mexico.

Colleen Lamos,
associate professor, Dept. of English, has been invited
to lecture at the James Joyce Summer School of University
College, Dublin, Ireland, July 8-20. Last June, Lamos lectured
on the relevance of the philosophical writings of Jean-Francois
Lyotard for understanding Joyce’s works at the 17th
International Joyce Symposium held in London.

Carlos A.
Linares-Garcia ’00 won the Banamex Economics Research
Award, the highest recognition given to an economist in
Mexico, for 2000. Peter Mieszkowski, the Allyn R.
and Gladys M. Cline Professor of Economics and Finance,
served as adviser for Linares-Garcia’s dissertation,
which involved the financing and public provision of health
care in Mexico. Linares-Garcia’s study was in competition
with more than 35 research papers, including other Ph.D.
dissertations and studies submitted by faculty of several
universities. The award was presented in Mexico by Banamex,
the largest financial institution in Mexico.

George Marcus,
professor, Dept. of Anthropology, was visiting professor
at l’Ecole des Haute Etudes en Sciences Sociales in
Paris during December. During his time there, he gave a
seminar on the anthropological study of elites, and he gave
a general lecture on the current state of social and cultural
anthropology in the United States.

Linda McNeil,
professor, Dept. of Education, had an article published
in the November issue of the Hispanic Journal of Behavior
Sciences. The article, “Sameness, Bureaucracy and the
Myth of Educational Equity: The TAAS System of Testing in
Texas Public Schools,” appeared in this special issue
on the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) Case:
Perspectives of Plaintiffs’ Experts.

Rafael M.
Mérida-Jiménez, assistant professor, Dept.
of Hispanic & Classical Studies, has published a new
edition of Don Juan Manuel’s “Libro del Conde
Lucanor,” a collection of short stories originally
written c. 1335, with Edebé, Barcelona, Spain. In
addition, one of Mérida-Jiménez’s earlier
articles has been reprinted in “Historia y critica
de la literatura española. 9/1,” which is considered
the most prestigious anthology of Spanish literary criticism
and goes to press only once a decade.

Douglas Natelson,
assistant professor, Dept. of Physics & Astronomy, gave
an invited presentation Dec. 1 of a paper titled “Quantum
Coherence in Sug-10 nm Wires” at the Materials Research
Society Fall meeting in Boston.

The Society
for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP)
is the recipient of the Institutional Award of the American
Printing History Association (APHA). Robert Patten,
the Lynnette S. Autrey Professor in Humanities, has served
as director of this organization since its founding as part
of the Dickens Project in 1991 and as treasurer since 1998.
The APHA award is given each year to an institution that
has made “distinguished contributions to the study,
recording, preservation or dissemination of printing history.”
The award will be presented at the New York Public Library
Jan. 27.

Carl Rau,
professor, Dept. of Physics & Astronomy, presented an
invited lecture titled “Exploring the Nano-world of
Artificial Magnetism” at the Dept. of Chemistry and
the Advanced Materials Research Institute (AMRI) of the
U. of New Orleans, Nov. 20.

Gale Stokes,
the Mary Gibbs Jones Professor of History, professor of
German & Slavic Studies and interim dean of Humanities,
has had a previously published article, “Cognition
and the Function of Nationalism,” reprinted in a book
edited by the editor of the Journal of Interdisciplinary
History and published by the MIT Press. According to editor
Robert Rotberg, this book reprints 14 articles “representative
of the very best articles on modernization, industrialization,
social mobility and unrest, nationalism and methodology
that have appeared in the JIH since its inception (in 1970).”
Rotberg continues: “They are also representative of
three decades of American and European scholarship on the
same and analogous subjects. The criteria of their inclusion
were their intrinsic and lasting scholarly importance, their
subject matter and their interdisciplinary significance.”

Entries
for People, Papers, Presentations should be submitted to
the Office of Media Relations and Information by e-mail,
ricenews@rice.edu ; fax, (713) 348-6380; or campus mail,
MS-300. Entries will run on a space-available basis.