Category: Michael F. Adams Early Career Scholar

Chloe Wigston Smith

on February 18, 2016

Michael F. Adams Early Career Scholar 2015

Chloe Wigston Smith, assistant professor of English, is an outstanding scholar and author of the recently published bookWomen, Work and Clothes in the Eighteenth-Century Novel. This ground-breaking work shows, for the first time, how women’s work with textiles and garments contributed to the creation of the British novel. It revises current approaches to the role of labor in fiction and the history of sexuality to reveal how the novel reshaped women’s roles and the value of their work. Using an innovative interdisciplinary methodology, this book juxtaposes novels with a wide-ranging collection of clothes, engravings, criminal trials and trade debates in order to examine the genre from a new perspective.  Research for the project was supported by external grants from the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale University, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among other grants. Wigston Smith is currently working on a new book project that examines gender, the novel, and domestic crafts in an imperial setting. Like her previous book, this work will draw on her joint expertise in literary studies and art history, and bring together a diverse range of texts and material artifacts.

Jessica Rodell

on February 18, 2016

Michael F. Adams Early Career Scholar 2014

Jessica Rodell, assistant professor of management, is a remarkable scholar who has accomplished a great deal in her young career. She conducts research that cuts across several different fields of study. One is employee volunteering, a nascent literature that examines why employees devote time and skills to volunteer groups and how such activities impact their relationships with their employers. Rodell is one of a handful of scholars at the forefront of this intriguing area of research. She also conducts work in some of the more well-established areas of management, including the concept of justice, which examines what causes employees to feel fairly treated, and how such perceptions impact job attitudes and behaviors. She also studies the concept of personality, which explores the traits and predispositions that explain characteristic patterns of emotions, cognitions and behaviors among employees. Rodell has set the standard for research productivity among junior faculty, publishing six top-tier articles in the past four years.

Bettina Love

on February 18, 2016

Michael F. Adams Early Career Scholar 2014

Bettina Love, assistant professor of educational theory and practice, is an outstanding scholar whose work focuses on the ways in which urban youth negotiate hip hop music and culture to form social, cultural and political identities. A continuing thread of her scholarship explores new ways of thinking about urban education and culturally relevant pedagogical approaches for urban learners. She is a founding board member of Atlanta Word Works, an empowerment program that engages youth through creative writing and spoken word. She also served on the founding board of the Kindezi School, a charter school that champions alternative teaching methods. Love has authored a book, seven peer-reviewed journal articles and seven book chapters. Her first book, Hip Hop’s Li’l Sistas Speak: Negotiating Identities and Politics in the New South, was awarded the 2013 Critic’s Choice Award by the American Educational Studies Association. The book provides important perspectives on how to better support young Black women both in and out of school.

Andrew Park

on February 18, 2016

Michael F. Adams Early Career Scholar 2014

Andrew Park, assistant professor in the Odum School of Ecology, engages in interdisciplinary and ground-breaking research to advance our understanding of infectious diseases. His 2009 paper in Science, a rare example of the connection between parasite evolution and outbreak dynamics in host populations, involved synthesizing a large amount of isolated experiments combined with statistical modeling, antigenic cartography and mechanistic modeling to illustrate the degree to which a few mutations in a virus can trigger outbreaks via their subtle effects on individual hosts. Recently, he has been establishing how environmental factors, such as climate and land use, influence disease outbreaks in human and animal populations. His lab demonstrated a novel mechanism in Lyme disease in which climate-driven tick activity can drastically change which version of the parasite will prosper across the U.S. landscape, helping to explain the burden of disease in different regions. He has also led studies on hemorrhagic disease in deer.