Four promising young members of the College of Letters & Science faculty have been honored with Romnes Faculty Fellowships.
Romnes awards recognize exceptional faculty members who have earned tenure within the last six years. Selected by a Graduate School committee, winners receive an unrestricted $50,000 award for research, supported by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF).
The award is named for the late H. I. Romnes, former chairman of the board of AT&T and former president of the WARF Board of Trustees.
This year’s awardees from Letters & Science are:
Michael Massoglia, professor of sociology, who focuses on the social consequences of the expansion of the penal system, the relationship between the use of legal controls and demographic change in the United States, and patterns and consequences of criminal behavior over the life course. Massoglia, a Vilas Associate of the College of Letters & Science and director of the Center for Law, Society & Justice, is an award-winning instructor who teaches classes on criminology, delinquency and deviance.
Mario Ortiz-Robles, professor of English, studies 19th-century literature and literary theory, and has written extensively on Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins and William Morris. Ortiz-Robles has published two books —Narrative Middles: Navigating the Victorian Novel and The Novel as Event— and is working on a third investigating how changing views of nature affected the representation of animals in British literature before and after the 1859 publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.
Marzena Rostek, professor of economics, works on theory of financial markets and game theory. Her research has challenged the traditional view of decentralized markets as a friction by recognizing the potential for market decentralization to increase efficiency. Her work suggests new possibilities that economic theory and market design offer in accomplishing certain efficiency, revenue and incentive objectives. She teaches a popular game theory course.
Michael Titelbaum, associate professor of philosophy, uses Bayesian probability mathematics to study how evidence supports hypotheses. He has received the Sanders Prize in Epistemology, the Arlt Award for best book in the humanities, and an honorable mention for the American Philosophical Association’s Book Prize. One of his articles was recognized among the 10 best published in philosophy in 2008.
View all of the campus award winners here: Twelve professors receive Romnes Faculty Fellowships