Junior faculty honored for interdisciplinary teaching

Yale College Dean Jonathan Holloway will host a dinner on Dec. 10 to honor the recipients of the annual Poorvu Family Award for Interdisciplinary Teaching.

The award, established to recognize and enhance Yale’s strength in interdisciplinary teaching, provides the means for distinguished junior faculty in interdisciplinary fields to conduct essential summer research.

This year’s recipients are:

Marijeta Bozovic, assistant professor of Slavic languages and literatures, who joined the department in 2013. Her research focuses on 20^th- and 21^st-century Russian and Balkan literature, which she examines against the backdrop of Western European culture. From diverse avant-gardes and poetic movements to cultural diasporas and adaptation through film and other media, her work spans fields and subfields in the departments and programs of the humanities and social sciences.

Joseph Fischel, assistant professor in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program (WGSS) since 2013. Fischel has taught a variety of courses, among them WGSS core seminars (including “Introduction to LGBT Studies”); seminars in the area of his scholarly research — sexuality, politics, and justice (“Theory and Politics of Sexual Consent” and “Sexuality and Social Justice”); and, most recently, a broadly conceived intellectual foundations lecture course, co-taught with Inderpal Grewal (“Sex, Knowledge, Power”).

Christiana Purdy Moudarres, assistant professor and director of undergraduate studies in Italian language and literature. Moudarres — who completed her Ph.D. in Italian literature at Yale and received her Master of Arts in religion from the Divinity School — brings an interdisciplinary approach to her chosen field of medieval studies, in particular the intersection of medieval science and religion, as well as gender studies and literary criticism.

William Rankin, assistant professor in the history of science and director of undergraduate studies for the Program in the History of Science, Medicine, and Public Health major. His primary interests lie in the intersection and relationship of science and space. Focusing on the history of mapping in the 20^th-century, his current research and forthcoming book are thoroughly interdisciplinary, bringing together the textual world of the humanities and the visual world of cartography.

Greg Samanez-Larkin, assistant professor of psychology. Samanez-Larkin studies the neural basis of age-related changes in economic decision-making. By the very nature of his subject of study, his work combines several disciplines, including psychology, behavioral economics, finance, neuroscience, and public health. It also employs and brings together behavioral studies, experience sampling in everyday life, structural and functional MRI, and PET imaging. He teaches introductory statistics and a senior seminar on decision neuroscience.