Alumni Gazette
Stephanie McCurry ’83 (MA) Writes Prize-Winning Book on Confederacy
Stephanie McCurry ’83 (MA), a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, won dual honors for her book A Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Harvard University Press, 2010). She won the 2011 Merle Curti Award for the best book in American social or intellectual history and the Avery O. Craven Award for the most original book on the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, both given by the Organization for American Historians, the main professional organization for scholars of American history. The book was also named a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in history. McCurry argues that the Confederate experiment to build an allegedly democratic government in which political rights extended only to slaveholding white men—a minority of the population as well as a minority of the population of Southern white men—collapsed due to its internal contradictions and the agitation of groups long assumed powerless, namely slaves and poor women.
Stephen Cook ’07M (MPH) Honored by American Heart Association
Stephen Cook ’07M (MPH), an assistant professor of pediatrics at the School of Medicine and Dentistry, has been named Science Advocate of the Year by the American Heart Association. The national award recognizes a medical professional who engages lawmakers on issues related to heart disease and strokes. Cook chairs the childhood obesity committee of the New York state chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics and is a member of the National Advocacy Task Force of the Obesity Society, a national organization founded in 1982 to study obesity. He also helped develop the Monroe County, N.Y., program HEALTHI Kids (“Healthy Eating and Active Living THrough policy and practice Initiatives for Kids”) and participates in the association’s You’re the Cure policy advocacy network.
Arthur Miller ’55 Honored by Queen Elizabeth II
Arthur Miller ’55, University Professor at New York University School of Law, has received one of the United Kingdom’s highest honors, Commander of the Order of the British Empire. The honor, bestowed by Queen Elizabeth II, is an order of chivalry recognizing distinguished public service to the UK. For 15 years, Miller helped moderate panel discussions on public policy issues, modeled after the Fred Friendly dialogues he moderated for PBS, for the BBC and Grenada Television. In addition, Miller donated more than 1,800 woodblock prints by the 19th-century Japanese artist Utagawa Kuniyoshi to the American Friends of the British Museum, which were exhibited in 2010 at the Royal Academy in London and at the Japan Society in New York.
Rochester Alumni Claim Rhodes College Top Honors
The Clarence Day Awards—the top two faculty honors at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tenn.—both went to Rochester alumni at the school’s 2011 convocation. Jeffrey Jackson ’99 (PhD), an associate professor of history, won the Clarence Day Award for Outstanding Research and Creative Activity following the publication of his 2010 book, Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910 (Palgrave Macmillan). Bernadette McNary-Zak ’88, an associate professor of religion, won Rhodes’s Clarence Day Award for Outstanding Teaching. Students and colleagues cited McNary-Zak’s imaginative pedagogy and ability to inspire students. She has also coedited a book on undergraduate research in religious studies to be released by Oxford University Press later this year.
