The College of Arts and Sciences is thrilled to announce its 2019 Distinguished Professor awards. This award serves to honor full professor colleagues who have excelled in teaching, service and research/creative activity, and whose work has demonstrated significant impact on their fields, students, college and university and/or the public. 

The 2019 Distinguished College Professors
 

Alice Conklin

Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of History

Alice L. Conklin is professor in the Department of History. She is a historian of modern France and its empire, with a focus on racism in liberal societies. Her most recent book is In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology and Empire in France, 1850-1950 (Cornell, 2013), which won the David H. Pinkney Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies and the Senior Book Prize from the Ohio Academy of History. An illustrated French edition of the book, Exposer l’humanité: race, ethnologie et empire en France, 1850-1950 (Editions scientifiques du Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle) appeared in 2015. She is also the author of A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930 (Stanford University Press, 1997), which won the Berkshire Prize for Best Book by a Woman. She was the lead author on France and Its Empire since 1870 (Oxford, [2010] 2014) and co-authored European Imperialism, 1830-1930: Climax and Contradictions (Houghton Mifflin, 1998). Her articles have appeared in such journals as the American Historical Review, French Historical Studies, Osiris, French Politics, Culture and Society and Cahiers d’études africaines. She has received several national and international awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a German Marshall Fund Fellowship and a Fulbright Senior Scholar Fellowship. In 2016, she was one of six Ohio State faculty to receive a Distinguished Scholar Award.

She has been teaching at all levels of the curriculum since 1991, first at the University of Rochester (Karp Prize for Distinguished Teaching, 1998) and since 2004 at Ohio State. She offers courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels on France and its empire, modern colonialism and the transnational history of the idea of race. In May 2018, she inaugurated a May term study abroad on inclusion, and exclusion in the francophone world and accompanied 25 undergraduates drawn from Ohio State's diverse populations to France and Morocco. She is currently advising five doctoral students.

Conklin is at work on a transnational history of antiracism at UNESCO between 1950 and 1965 when ideals for cooperation among a global coalition of experts and activists in the struggle against racism collided with unforeseen political realignments triggered by decolonization and the Cold War. 

Linda Mizejewski

Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies

Linda Mizejewski has been at Ohio State since 1991, when she was hired as an assistant professor in the Department of English. She is now a professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, specializing in cinema studies and popular culture. She is the author of Divine Decadence: Fascism, Female Spectacle and the Makings of Sally Bowles (1992); Ziegfeld Girl: Image and Icon in Culture and Cinema (1999); Hardboiled and High Heeled: the Woman Detective in Popular Culture (2004); and It Happened One Night (2010), a study of the landmark film for the Wiley-Blackwell Studies in Film and Television. Her most recent monograph, Pretty/Funny: Women Comedians and Body Politics (2015) has won honorable mention for two national book prizes. She is also the co-editor of the anthology Hysterical! American Women in Comedy (2017), winner of the Susan Koppelman Prize from the Popular Culture Association. She is currently working on a book about the television series "The Americans" and an anthology on Carrie Fisher. Mizejewski has been a Fulbright Lecturer in Slovakia and Romania, and her research has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies. At Ohio State, she has won the Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award and the Harlan Hatcher Distinguished Faculty Award. In 2002, she moved from the Department of English to the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, where she served as chair and has developed new courses in popular culture and women’s literature, as well as a service-learning course, "Feminist Perspectives on Addiction." She serves on the board of the Collegiate Recovery Community on campus and is a speaker for the Ohio Humanities Council. 

Steve MacEachern

Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Statistics

Steve MacEachern is professor and chair in the Department of Statistics, and he holds a courtesy appointment as professor of psychology. He is noted for contributions to Bayesian methods, which combine experimental and observational data with our external-to-the-data knowledge of the world in a principled fashion to improve decision making and prediction. MacEachern has developed computational methods and classes of models that have received intensive study within statistics and that are heavily used by industry and throughout the academic world. His development of models for a collection of related distributions, dependent Dirichlet processes, has been particularly influential. 

In keeping with his wide-ranging research interests, he has served as advisor for 25 PhD students who have written dissertations on topics that range from the purely mathematical to heavily computational to applied. Much of the work has been dedicated to modelling — the development of novel classes of models, exploration of models’ properties and evaluation of the quality of a model’s fit; to inference — the development and implementation of robust and efficient methods of making decisions; and to synthesis — the acquisition and combination of various sources of data and information to enhance understanding and improve prediction. He has collaborated with 16 current and former faculty members in the Department of Statistics and with many researchers elsewhere. 

He has served as president of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis and has had numerous service roles for the American Statistical Association and other professional societies, including serving as program chair for the 2012 Joint Statistical Meetings.  He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and elected member of the International Statistical Institute. He has won awards for excellence in teaching and research. His research has been funded by the Bureaus of the Census and Justice, the National Science Foundation, the National Security Agency and Ohio State’s Nationwide Center for Advanced Customer Insights. 

He joined Ohio State in 1988 immediately upon receiving his PhD in statistics from the University of Minnesota. Prior to his graduate work, he received a BA in Mathematics from Carleton College.

Mark Pitt

Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Psychology

Mark Pitt is a professor in the Department of Psychology. He is recognized for his work in two highly interdisciplinary fields: spoken language understanding and quantitative modeling. Pitt has published more than 90 peer-reviewed journal articles, and his research has been continuously funded for more than 25 years.

Pitt's work has advanced our understanding of how the brain uses knowledge it has learned about a language to comprehend a talker's speech, in particular when speech is unclear (e.g., sloppy or ambiguous pronunciations). He led a large team in creating the first annotated corpus of conversational speech (Buckeye Speech Corpus) which is used worldwide by language researchers in many fields. Pitt's work in quantitative modeling has sought to improve statistical inference in psychology. Along with his close colleague, Professor Jay Myung, he has adapted quantitative methods from statistics and computer science to distinguish competing models of cognition (e.g., memory, categorization), and most recently introduced a technology (adaptive design optimization) that can improve the precision and efficiency of behavioral tests, such as those designed to measure mental states (e.g., impulsivity, cognitive control).

Pitt is also the recipient of the Hatcher Memorial Award (2004) and the Joan N Huber Faculty Fellowship Award (2007), both from the College of Arts and Sciences. He received his PhD from Yale University.