Five L&S faculty members receive Kellett Awards

April 18th 2014 Simon Kuran
Awards
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Five faculty members in the College of Letters & Science have received Kellett Mid-Career Awards this year.

The award recognizes outstanding faculty who are seven to 20 years past their first promotion to a tenured position. Each year, the Graduate School chooses winners from among departmental, Ph.D. major program unit or interdepartmental group nominees. A faculty member can only be awarded once. Overall, 10 UW-Madison faculty members received awards.

Supported by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, the Kellett Award provides $60,000 of research funding to faculty members at a critical stage of their careers. It was named for William R. Kellett, a former president of the WARF board of trustees and retired president of Kimberly-Clark Corp.

This year's L&S winners are:

Robert Asen, professor of rhetoric, politics and culture in the Department of Communication Arts, who is interested in discourse and how it's used to promote justice as well as to promulgate oppression. His work touches public policy, politics, economics and cultural studies and in 2013 he was named a Vilas Associate.

Anthony Di Sanza, who is professor of percussion and percussion area chair in the School of Music, He is an internationally recognized performer and educator and has appeared as a visiting artist at more than 35 colleges, university and conservatories in North America, Europe and Asia. He is currently principal percussionist with the Madison Symphony Orchestra.

Anthony Ives, Plaenert-Bascom professor of zoology, a community ecology and population biologist with interests in evolution and behavior. He received a Robert H. MacArthur mid-career award from the Ecological Society of America in 2012 and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2013. He studies interspecies interactions, applying theoretical models to real-world situations, and has researched everything from the population dynamics of Icelandic lake midges to predator-prey relationships between Wisconsin pea aphids and their parasitoids.

Travis Pickering, professor of biological anthropology, who studies early Stone Age artifacts from Swartkrans, an Early Pleistocene hominid site in South Africa that yields some of the earliest evidence of human-controlled fire. His current work is focused on understanding the ecology of Swartkrans and the role hominids played 1.8 million years ago. He is also director of the Swartkrans Paleoanthropological Research Project and instructor in the Swartkrans Paleoanthropology Field School.

Russ Shafer-Landau, professor and chair in the department of philosophy, who focuses on the study of morality and its status, rather than what constitutes it. He founded the annual Wisconsin Metaethics Workshop and has authored several books. He also edits the book Oxford Studies in Metaethics and runs the Marc Sanders Prize in Metaethics.

To see the full list of Kellett recipients, read the release from University Communications.