May 2007
CLA Professors Win the 2007 Chancellor's Distinguished Service Award and the Chancellor's Distinguished Scholarship Award

Professor Russell K. Schutt of the Sociology department has been chosen for the 2007 Chancellor's Distinguished Service award. Professor Schutt joined UMB in 1979 and, for the past 28 years, he has with vision and generosity given of himself in wide-ranging areas of activities to all levels of University life and engagement.

He has served as Sociology Department chair, as graduate program director for 12 years, as initiator of the major in Criminal Justice, as recruiter of an outstanding faculty, as mentor of junior faculty, and as leader of two academic quality and development(AQUAD) review. He has served as chair of the Majors, Honors, and Special Programs committee; chair of a Search Committee for the Dean of Liberal Arts; and as a member of the McCormack Institute Director Search Committee, of the Faculty Development Grant Review Committee; and of the Faculty Senate of the College of Arts and Sciences. As well, he served as a chair of the Graduate Studies Subcommittee for our recent NEASC re-accreditation review and is now serving as co-chair of the Admissions and Financial Aid Subcommittee of the Chancellor’s Strategic Planning Task Force.

In the community, he has provided service oriented research to the Boston Health and Hospital’s Long Island Shelter, the Department of Public Health’s LifeLine HIV/AIDS Prevention Project for the Homeless, and the Edith Nourse Rogers Veterans Administration Medical Center. Likewise, he has incorporated broad urban concerns into the teaching of social sciences research methods, and his book, Responding to the Homeless, is at once a work of scholarship focusing on homelessness and a tool to help meet some of the training needs of homeless shelters.

Professor Jennifer Radden of the Philosophy Department has been chosen for the 2007 Chancellor's Distinguished Scholarship Award. Professor Radden joined UMB as an Assistant Professor of Philosophy in 1984. In the greater than two decades of her association with UMB, she has produced a body of scholarship that has won her a deserved international reputation for insightfulness, originality, and intellectual leadership. She has published 4 books, 42 articles; with 2 additional books under contract and 6 other articles accepted for publication. She has also published 16 reviews and given 62 presentations. As remarkable as the quantity of her work has been, the distinguished character of that work is to be found in its quality.

Her work has appeared in scholarly journals of first standing or carried by academic presses of the highest reputation. Among her most important contributions is that of helping to create the field of the Philosophy of Psychiatry, but perhaps as important is the border-crossing character of her work, underlining important links to and deep implications for fields ranging from medicine, psychology, philosophy of science, philosophy of the mind, and intellectual history, to the history of philosophy, social psychology, public policy, jurisprudence, and aesthetic, feminist, and cultural theory.

Psychology Professor Jean Rhodes Featured on newsday.com
Jean Rhodes is quoted in an article on newsday.com about mentoring programs and their effects on kids' behavior.

March 2007
History Professor Honored for Online Teaching

Spencer DiScala, Professor of History at UMass Boston, was recently announced as the 2007 recipient of the Excellence in Teaching Award given annually by the University Continuing Education Association (UCEA).

Prof. DiScala was nominated for the award by the Division of Corporate, Continuing and Distance Education (CCDE) in recognition of his innovations in online pedagogy, in which he uses familiar Internet communication tools such as discussion forums and weblogs to bring historical figures alive for students.

The award will be presented to Prof. DiScala at the annual UCEA conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, April 11-14.