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Presidential Fellow Recommended Reading
If you are interested in the research being conducted by the current Presidential Fellows, you might appreciate these recommendations.
Marianne Hinds Wanamaker
Bourgeois-Pichat, Jean. 1986. “The Unprecedented Shortage of Births in Europe.” Population and Development Review. 12. pp.3-25. This will give you a brief look at the statistics on fertility decline.
McCurry, Stephanie. Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country. A good primer on the lives of the less-wealthy slaveowners in the antebellum South.
Miller, Amalia R. “The Effects of Motherhood Timing on Career Path”. http://www.virginia.edu/economics/papers/miller/fertilitytiming_2007_05_21.pdf
Ever wonder what happens to professional women who have children they weren’t planning on?
Woodman, Harold D. King Cotton and His Retainers. This book is so interesting – a diatribe on a relatively obscure topic (cotton merchants in the South between 1800 and 1925), but it has so much to say about the progression of the economy and the distribution of population in both ante- and postbellum South.
Alan Brothers
James P. Schaffer et al., The Science and Design of Engineering Materials, 2nd ed., WCB McGraw-Hill: New York, 1999
Lorna J. Gibson and Michael F. Ashby, Cellular Solids: Structure and Properties, 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK, 1997
Michael F. Ashby et al., Metal Foams: A Design Guide, Butterworth-Heinemann: Boston, 2001
Paul Cadden-Zimansky
B. d'Espagnat, The Quantum Theory and Reality, Scientific American 241 #5, November 1979
If you learn only one thing about quantum mechanics, it should be the Bell inequalities. This is an excellent introduction to the inequalities and their implications with a simple derivation of the inequalities that uses almost no math.
P.W. Anderson, More Is Different, Science, Vol. 177 No. 4047, August 1972
http://www.jstor.org/view/00368075/ap004233/00a00060/0/
A classic article by Nobel laureate Anderson outlining the place of condensed matter physics (and other fields) in the hierarchy of reductionist science.
A. Cho, Controlling Heat Flow with a Magnet, Physical Review Focus 18, April 2005
http://focus.aps.org/story/v15/st14
A popular article written about some work recently done in our research group.
Chris Campbell
Philip Ball, The Self-Made Tapestry: Pattern Formation in Nature, Oxford University Press, 2001
Stephen Wolfram, A New Kind of Science, Wolfram Media, 2002
D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form, Dover Publications, 1992
Geoff Ozin, A Arsenault, Nanochemistry: A Chemical Approach to Nanomaterials, Royal Society of Chemistry, 2005
G. Nicolis, Ilya Prigogine, Self-Organization in Nonequilibrium Systems: From Dissipative Structures to Order through Fluctuations, John Wiley & Sons, 1977
B.A. Grzybowski, K.J.M. Bishop, C.J. Campbell, M. Fialkowski, S.K. Smoukov, Micro- and nanotechnology via reaction-diffusion, Soft Matter 1(2), 114, 2005
Ben Chen
John M Barry, The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History
Nature’s Avian Flu webfocus: http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/avianflu/index.html
some free articles; most articles require subscription, but can be accessed through Northwestern libraries
Laurie Garrett, The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance
Yael Katz
E., Schrodinger, What is Life? Cambridge University Press, first published 1944
An essay on how fundamental questions in biology can be understood in terms of physics and chemistry by one of the founders of quantum mechanics (can also be downloaded from the internet).
P. Dayan and L. F. Abbott, Theoretical Neuroscience: Computational and Mathematical Modeling of Neural Systems, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001
An introduction to many areas of computational neuroscience (requires some mathematical background).
C. Koch and I. Segev, The role of single neurons in information processing. Nature Neuroscience 3: 1171-1177, 2000
N. Spruston and W. L. Kath, Dendritic arithmetic. Nature Neuroscience 7: 567-569, 2004
Two reviews on single-neuron computation
Carmen Niekrasz
Thomas P. Campbell, Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence, Yale University Press, 2002
Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750, Zone Books, 1998
Peter Harrison, Reading the Passions: The Fall, the Passions, and Dominion over Nature, in Stephen Gaukroger (ed.), The Soft Underbelly of Reason: The Passions in the Seventeenth Century, Routledge, 1998, pp. 49-78
Ben Ponder
Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America, 1992
A helpful and famous approach to textual history
Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth Century America, 1992, and Publics and Counterpublics, 2002
Two interesting books on the constitutive function of texts
John Keane, Tom Paine: A Political Life, 1995
The best contemporary biography of Thomas Paine
Lee Seymour
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 1991
Ever wonder why nationalism has such a tenacious and bloody grip on modern political imagination? Read Anderson for a compelling explanation of the cultural roots of nationalism.
Georgi Derlugian, Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus, 2005
Few books in social science feature a protagonist. Northwestern’s own Derlugian shows why this is so unfortunate, using the biography of Musa Shanibov to guide a wide-ranging account of the collapse of the Soviet Union, nationalist wars of secession, and Islamic militancy.
Deborah Scroggins, Emma’s War: An Aid Worker, a Warlord, Radical Islam, and the Politics of Oil, 2004
The book is an accessible and well-researched account of Sudanese politics with insights that bear on the depth and range of problems facing contemporary Africa. Few books provide a better or more readable account of Africa’s civil wars or the terms of the continent’s engagement with the West. Read it before it becomes a bad movie.
Aidan Hartley, The Zanzibar Chest, 2005
Hartley, a Kenyan journalist, weaves together two stories: the first is about the complexity of the colonial project in Africa; the second covers Hartley’s experiences growing up in postcolonial Kenya, then as a journalist covering wars in Ethiopia, Somalia and Rwanda.
Tobin Shearer
Harold S. Bender, The Anabaptist Vision. In Guy F. Hershberger and Harold Stauffer Bender (eds.) The Recovery of the Anabaptist Vision, Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 1957, pp. 29-54
For information on basic Mennonite/Anabaptist theology
Daniel L. Pals, Seven Theories of Religion, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996
An excellent introduction to the study of religion
John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North, Historical Studies of Urban America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996
For an orientation to the study of race and religion (Unfortunately there isn’t much out there on Mennonites and race - hence my project!)
Rhiannon Stephens
David L. Schoenbrun, A Green Place, A Good Place: Agrarian Change, Gender, and Social Identity in the Great Lakes Region to the 15th Century, Heinemann, 1998
Christopher Ehret, Language change and the material correlates of language and ethnic shift, Antiquity 62: 236, 1988
Jan Vansina, Path in the Rainforest: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa, University of Wisconsin Press, 1990
Tomasz Strzalecki
Tim Harford, The Undercover Economist: Exposing Why the Rich Are Rich, the Poor Are Poor--and Why You Can Never Buy a Decent Used Car!, Oxford University Press, 2005
Econ is everywhere!
Philip D. Straffin. Game Theory and Strategy, The Mathematical Association of America, 1993
A neat introduction to game theory for interdisciplinary audience
John Geanakoplos, Common Knowledge, The Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 6, No. 4. (Autumn, 1992), pp. 53-82. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0895-3309%28199223%296%3A4%3C53%3ACK%3E2.0.CO%3B2-4
How do we model knowledge? How do we model reasoning about knowledge? How do we model reasoning about reasoning about knowledge? ...
Kristen Syrett
Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1994
A must-read for anyone interested in language and linguistics (and probably the book most frequently assigned in introductory linguistics courses). The author explores a number of pertinent linguistic issues in entertaining prose. Try to find another index that includes entries for Woody Allen, MRI, the Muppets, Nicaraguan Sign Language, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Infant Cognition, and the Watergate Tapes.
Elizabeth Spelke and Elissa Newport, Nativism, Empiricism, and the Development of Language, in R.M. Lerner (ed.) The Handbook of Child Psychology, 5th ed, New York: Wiley, 1998
The authors consider deep and provocative questions such as, How much of language is innate? How much is learned? What kind of knowledge about the world around us guides our acquisition of language?
Becoming a Word Learner: A Debate on Lexical Acquisition, Counterpoints: Cognition, Memory and Language, Oxford University Press, 2000
Includes contributions from some of today’s premier researchers in language acquisition and development, offering a variety of perspectives on what infants know about language and how they learned it.
Roberta Michnick Golinkoff and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, How Babies Talk, Plume Books, Penguin, 2000
An excellent introduction to language acquisition for parents. The authors, perennial collaborators, present experimental evidence in an incredibly accessible way demonstrating how children acquire language and how their linguistic abilities develop from before birth to age three. Each chapter has a fun ‘try this at home’ section.
Last updated: Jan 31 2008 3:10PM
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