Notables

Ross Brann, professor and chair of Near Eastern Studies, has been awarded a 1998-99 fellowship from the University of Pennsylvania Center for Judaic Studies. Brann joins a small group of fellows developing new critical approaches to medieval Arabic, Hebrew and Romance literatures. He also plans to complete work on Textualizing Ambivalence in Islamic Spain.

Harry M. Kaiser, Cornell associate professor of agricultural economics, has been elected to serve as editor of the Agricultural and Resource Economics Review for 1998-2001. This periodical is the scholarly journal of the Northeastern Agricultural and Resource Economics Association. Kaiser has been a faculty member at Cornell since 1985 and is director of the Cornell Commodity Promotion Research Program.

Francine Blau, the Frances Perkins Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations, as president of the Industrial Relations Research Association, gave an address on "Widening Inequality by Skill: 'An American Dilemma,'" at the annual meetings of the association in Chicago, Jan. 4.

Mildred E. Warner, assistant professor in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning, has been named a Kellogg National Leadership Fellow. She formerly served as an associate director of Cornell's Community and Rural Development Institute (CaRDI). Selected from a field of nearly 750 applicants, the current group of Kellogg Fellows are chosen from academia, government, business, human services and industry. Fellows participate in the Kellogg National Leadership Program for three years.

The Earthquake Engineering Research Institute in Oakland, Calif., has awarded Thomas D. O'Rourke, professor of engineering, for the Outstanding Earthquake Spectra Paper for 1996. O'Rourke and Michael Palmer, Cornell engineering '95, wrote the paper, "Earthquake Performance of Gas Transmission Pipelines," for Earthquake Spectra, the institute's journal. The award was given at the institute's annual meeting in San Francisco in early February. The paper was cited by the institute as being "seminal" in earthquake research examining an aspect of geotechnical and seismic hazards. In addition, O'Rourke was named to a three-year term on the institute's board of directors.