Emory Report

September 28, 1998

Volume 51, No. 6

Seven faculty named to distinguished appointments Seven faculty members have been honored for their contributions to Emory's academic community by being named to distinguished faculty appointments by the academic affairs committee of the Board of Trustees in recent months.   David Edwards Charles Howard Candler Professor of Behavioral Neuroscience PhD University of California, Irvine, 1968 Edwards joined the faculty of the department of psychology in 1968 and has been a full professor since 1977. He currently teaches courses on "Brain and Behavior," "Psychobiology and Cognition" and "The Psychology of Love" and was the 1989 recipient of the Emory Williams Award for Distinguished Teaching in the Social Sciences. Edwards' research is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation and has to do with the psychobiology of motivation, with particular emphasis on the neural, endocrine and sensory control of sexual and aggressive behavior. His recent journal contributions include articles in Physiology and Behavior, Neuroscience, Brain Research and Hormones and Behavior. He contributed a chapter on aggressive behavior to the Encyclopedia of Reproduction, which will be published later this year by Academic Press.   Michael Giles Goodrich C. White Professor of Political Science PhD University of Kentucky, 1971 Giles joined the Emory faculty as full professor and chair of the department of political science in 1983, after teaching for 12 years at Florida Atlantic University. He served as a fellow of The Carter Center from 1992-96, where he was also a senior advisor for research and evaluation for The Atlanta Project (TAP). He currently serves as chair of the educational policy committee, which is charged with implementing the new general education requirements for Emory College. His teaching interests include the courts as social and political institutions, research methods and U.S. politics. He served as the evaluator of TAP, which is a community-based comprehensive initiative of The Carter Center directed at urban problems. His current research interest focuses on assessment of community initiatives such as TAP. He also continues to work on research projects focusing on the policy-making potential of courts. His recent journal contributions include articles in the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Politics and the National Civic Review.   Lee Pederson Charles Howard Candler Professor of English PhD University of Chicago, 1964 Pederson came to the English faculty in 1966 and has been a full professor since 1971. He has taught courses on the English language, the American language, Southern language and culture, the structure of modern English, introductory linguistics, American dialects, Old English, Middle English, early modern English, literary style and stylistics, Shakespeare, Shakespeare's language and introduction to literature. He works as an American dialect consultant to the British/American Bloomsbury Dictionary. His Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States, a seven-volume work that draws from 5,200 hours of tape-recorded interviews between 1968 and 1980, offers a survey of regional and social dialects in eight Southern states. He received funding for a dozen years from the National Endowment for the Humanities for his work on that atlas. He has published The Pronunciation of English in Metropolitan Chicago (1966) and East Tennessee Folk Speech (1983) and two essays in The American Heritage Dictionary (1992) and The Cambridge History of the English Language. He has also published A Manual for Dialect Research in the Southern States and is working on linguistic atlases of the Western states and Middle Rockies. He is currently at work on a history of the American language.   Paul Plotsky SmithKline Beecham Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences PhD Emory University, 1981 Plotsky joined the Emory faculty as a professor of psychiatry in 1992; since then he has directed the Stress Neurobiology Lab and has been a scientist in the Division of Neurobiology at Yerkes. Before coming to Emory, Plotsky taught at the University of California at San Diego and was an associate professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla. Calif. Plotsky has directed the graduate student neuroscience seminar, been the section director and lecturer for the systems neuroscience course and directed the systems neuroanatomy lab course. He has also lectured in "Cell Biology & Histology" and "Molecular Endocrinology." Plotksy's research interests are focused on the determination of the neuroendocrine, behavioral and central nervous system consequences of adverse early experience during the perinatal period in rodent and nonhuman primate models; the role of glucocorticoids on central nervous system gene expression and neurocircuitry; and clinical studies of the long-term consequences of childhood sexual abuse on neuroendocrine, autonomic nervous system and behavioral function. His research is funded by two grants from the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Pharmacia and Upjohn and the Organon Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd.   Ronald Schuchard Goodrich C. White Professor of English PhD University of Texas at Austin, 1970 Schuchard joined the English faculty in 1969 and has been a full professor since 1989. He teaches courses in modern British and Irish literature and is the author of numerous studies of modern authors, particularly T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats. He has recently edited T. S. Eliot's Clark and Turnbull Lectures, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry (Faber, 1993; Harcourt, 1994; Harvest, 1996), and he is co-editor of The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, volume 3 (Oxford University Press, 1994); volumes 4 and 5 are forthcoming. His new book, Eliot's Dark Angel, will be published by Oxford University in 1999. He devotes much of his time developing the archive of Irish literature in Special Collections and organizing the Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature, now published by Harvard University Press. He recently completed a three-year term as director of the Yeats International Summer School in Sligo, Ireland, and is presently the director of Emory's British Studies Program at Oxford University.   Kim Wallen Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Neuroendocrinology PhD University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1979 Wallen joined the psychology faculty in 1979 and has been a full professor since 1992. From 1987-1992 he directed the graduate program in psychobiology and has been a research professor of psychobiology at the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center since 1994. He has taught the undergraduate "Hormonal Influences on Sex and Aggression" and the graduate "Psychobiology Proseminar," "Primate Social Behavior" and "UNIX Tools for Behavioral Research." Since 1993 he has been the recipient of a National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Research Scientist Career Development award and recently received an NIMH Independent Scientist Award for the next five years. Wallen's laboratory investigates the interaction between hormones and social context on the development and expression of sexual and sex-related behavior in nonhuman primates. His current projects focus on the effects of atypical prenatal hormonal exposure on anatomical, neuroendocrine, and behavioral development in rhesus monkeys at the Yerkes Field Station. He is an associate editor of "Hormones and Behavior" and president-elect of the Society for Behavioral Neuroendocrinology. His recent nonhuman primate work has been published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Hormones and Behavior and Developmental Psychobiology. In addition, he has written chapters on hormones and human sexuality in men and women. He is senior editor of the book Reproduction in Context to be published by MIT Press.   Carol Worthman Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Anthropology PhD Harvard University, 1978 Worthman joined the anthropology faculty in 1986; she has been an associate professor since 1992. Prior to teaching at Emory, she was an assistant director of the endocrine core in the Laboratory of Human Reproduction and Reproductive Biology at Harvard Medical School. Worthman specializes in human reproductive ecology, developmental ecology, biocultural theory and research, comparative human biology and life span/life history perspective. Major studies currently concern the relationship of normal puberty to onset of depression and other forms of distress; comparative life span endocrinology in five populations to determine whether people living under differing degrees of environmental stress develop quantitative, rather than qualitative, shifts in endocrine function; and stress in street children of Kathmandu. Current major writing projects concern embodiment, sex and gender, emotion, growth faltering and ecology of breastfeeding. Worthman also co-authored the cultural psychology chapter of the handbook of psychobiology of menopause and culture theory from a developmental-embodied perspective. Return to Sept. 28, 1998, contents page