Three UC Santa Cruz faculty members have been honored with emeriti professorships for the 2017–18 academic year.
Murray Baumgarten, professor emeritus of English & Comparative Literature, E.G. Crichton, professor emeritus of art, and Catherine Cooper, professor emeritus of psychology, were each awarded Edward A. Dickson Emeriti Professorships in recognition of their outstanding achievements in scholarship and teaching.
The awards are given annually and funded by an endowment from the estate of former UC Regent Edward A. Dickson. The professorships make it possible for the university to retain the invaluable services of highly accomplished, retired faculty members for the benefit of its students.
Baumgarten is a co-founding director of both the Jewish Studies Program and the Dickens Project at UC Santa Cruz. Recently, he has been working on the afterlife of the Venice Ghetto, and he is also a founder of the Venice Center for International Jewish Studies.
The Dickson emeriti award will help him complete research on Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table, which Baumgarten has described as “one of the great achievements of modern literature, and an indispensable document in the modern history of the Nazi concentration camp—part of a literary history of the Ghetto on which I have been working for a decade.”
Crichton uses a range of art strategies and media to explore social issues, history, and site-specific subject matter. Her work has been exhibited in art institutions and as public installations in Europe, Asia, Australia and across the U.S. She will use the Dickson award to support her research project, OUT/LOOK and the Birth of the Queer, that will launch in October and include a multi-media exhibition at the GLBT History Museum in San Francisco.
A co-founder, art director, and editor for OUT/LOOK National Lesbian and Gay Quarterly, Crichton is collaborating with the GLBT Historical Society (GLBTHS) in San Francisco where the journal records are archived. She describes her role in the project as “initiator, creative director, curator and artist.”
Cooper's work focuses on how youth forge their personal identities by coordinating cultural and family traditions with those of their schools, communities, and work. Over the past three decades, she has developed the Bridging Multiple Worlds Theory and conducted empirical studies to trace how culturally diverse youth create their pathways to college, careers, and cultural identities without losing ties to their families and cultural communities.
The Dickson award will help her to develop and distribute a new edition of the Bridging Multiple Worlds Toolkit--a resource designed to link researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to increase pathways to college and careers among students from low-income, ethnic minority, and immigrant families in multicultural societies.
