November 13, 2003

Faculty honors

Nicola Beisel, associate professor of sociology, has been named the Weinberg College Board of Visitors Research and Teaching Professor.

Beisel studies the place of ethnicity and class in diverse issues such as censorship, abortion, and capital punishment. “Imperiled Innocents,” a book examining 19th century censorship movements, received Distinguished Book awards from the Sex and Gender Section and the Collective Behavior and Social Movement Section of the American Sociological Association.

Presently Beisel is researching the racial aspects of 19th and 20th century abortion politics. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations and the National Humanities Center.

Quassim Cassam, lecturer in philosophy at Oxford University and fellow and tutor in philosophy at Wadham College, Oxford, will visit at Northwestern for the spring quarter as the John Evans Visiting Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy.

Cassam is editor of “Self Knowledge” and author of “Self and World,” two significant works in the field. He is widely published in his areas of research which include Kant, epistemology, metaphysics and the philosophy of mind.

Currently he is conducting research for a book on transcendental epistemology.

Christopher Taber, associate professor of economics, has been named the Household International Inc. Research Professor in Economics.

Taber is a labor economist who has focused primarily on empirical work and development of econometric models of human capital and skill formation. Current research projects include estimation of structural general equilibrium models of human capital investment, wage growth and turnover among low skilled workers, and evaluation of Catholic schools and voucher programs. The National Science Foundation provides funding for his work.

Gordon Wood, a leading historian of Colonial America, has joined the Northwestern faculty as the Board of Trustees Professor of Law and History.

Wood’s research covers how the founding generation of the United States recast inherited ideas about balanced government and popular sovereignty into a totally new system. He describes the American struggle to sustain a meaningful representative structure while encouraging greater popular participation.

Wood is the author of “The Creation of the American Republic 1776-1778” which was nominated for the National Book Award and received the Bancroft and John H. Dunning prizes. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his more recent work, “The Radicalism of the American Revolution.” In 2002 “The American Revolution: A History” was published in the Modern Library Chronicles Series.

A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Wood is the Alva O. Way University Professor of History at Brown University.