PUBLICATIONS Inside Illinois Vol. 20, No. 14, Feb. 15, 2001

Faculty members appointed associates of Center for Advanced Study

Twelve faculty members were recommended for appointments as associates to the Center for Advanced Study for the Academic Year 2001-02. The UI Board of Trustees approved the appointments at its January meeting in Chicago.

The appointments will provide one semester of release time for creative work. Associates are selected in an annual competition from faculty members of all departments and colleges to carry out self-initiated programs of scholarly research or professional activity.

CAS associates and their projects:

Jane Block, professor, library administration, "Neo-Impressionist Portraiture."

The project entails a book-length study dealing with Neo-Impressionist portraiture – an aspect of Neo-Impressionism that has been little studied and analyzed by scholars. The book focuses upon the corpus of 70, primarily French and Belgian, portraits to reveal new insights into the movement, the practitioners of the style, as well as the artistic centers of production in Paris and Brussels at the fin-de-siècle.

Richard D. Braatz, associate professor, chemical engineering, "Advances in Pharmaceutical Crystallization."

Novel sensor technologies are needed to understand and control the crystallization of pharmaceuticals. This project will create the state-of-the-art in particle size distribution measurement using laser backscattering and video microscopy.

Steven B. Bradlow, associate professor, mathematics, "Augmented Holo-morphic Bundles."

A monograph by this title, covering a new research area in mathematics, is planned in collaboration with one co-author. The book will be the first on a topic that recently has seen great progress but whose results have not yet been organized into a unified coherent framework.

Yoram Bresler, professor, electrical and computer engineering, "Optimal Spatio-Temporal Sampling for Real-Time Magnetic Resonance Imaging."

Faster image acquisition in MRI is essential for diagnostically accurate imaging of dynamic phenomena such as the beating heart or functional activation in the brain. This research project capitalizes on our recent breakthroughs in signal sampling theory to develop new theory and algorithms for fast MRI, which can speed up acquisition by more than an order of magnitude, thus enabling, for the first time, high-resolution 3-D real-time cardiac imaging.

Achsah Guibbory, professor, English, "Imagined Identities: The Uses of Judaism in 17th-Century England."

This project explores the l7th century preoccupation with defining English Christian identity and experiences in relation to Jewish history and Judaism. Tracing the emergence of a strong yet deeply ambivalent identification of England with Israel, Guibbory explores the cultural significance of this phenomenon and suggests its relevance for understanding Christian Jewish relations in the 20th and 21st centuries.

John B. Kogut, professor, physics, "Quantum Chromodynamics in Extreme Environments."

Kogut has secured a contract with Cambridge University Press to write the first theoretical physics text on the subject of quantum chromodynamics in extreme environments, high density, and high temperature, a field that he pioneered. His co author is M.A. Stephanov of the UI at Chicago.

Harry Liebersohn, professor, history, Campus Honors Faculty, "Cosmopolitans: Travelers and Philosophers."

This book studies scientific travelers and their worldly testing of philosophers’ cosmopolitan ideas. It relates how patrons at home and hosts in Polynesia confronted travelers with state, commercial and cultural hindrances to global community, complicating though not completely disappointing their hopes.

Ania Loomba, professor, English, "Shakespeare, ‘Race’ and Colonialism."

This book discusses emergence of ‘race’ as a concept in 16th- and 17th-century Europe, especially England, and discusses its relationship to Shakespearean drama. By examining Shakespeare’s plays as well as medieval and early modern writings on skin color, religion, gender, nation and community, it shows how Shakespeare’s theater contributes to, and is itself crafted from, changing vocabularies about social difference.

Stanley Maloy, professor, microbiology, "Postgenomic Analysis of Membrane Protein Expression."

Overexpression of membrane proteins is often lethal in bacteria, limiting many potential applications in biotechnology. This project will use a combination of postgenomic approaches to determine why overexpression of membrane proteins is toxic in bacteria, and the resulting insights will be used to isolate bacteria that allow expression of high levels of membrane proteins.

Eric Michielssen, professor, electrical and computer engineering, "Fast Kernels for Transient Electromagnetic Analysis in Material and Structured Media."

The purpose of this work is to develop fast computational schemes for evaluating transient electromagnetic fields generated by band-limited sources residing in lossy, dispensive, diffusive and layered environments. These schemes will be coupled to time-domain, integral equation solvers and applied to the analysis of very large-scale scattering, radiation and propagation phenomena of engineering relevance.

Cynthia Radding, professor, history, "In the Shadow of the Empire: Ecology, History and Culture in Two Colonial Frontiers, Northwestern Mexico and Eastern Bolivia (1750 1880)."

This comparative book-length study poses new questions for the themes of culture, colonialism and the historical evolution of hybrid societies in two frontier regions of the Spanish and Portuguese American empires. It addresses some of the central theses espoused by scholars in the humanities and social sciences in reference to culture change in comparative colonial settings of the Americas, Asia and Africa.

Jonathan V. Sweedler, professor, chemistry, "From Invertebrates to Mammals: Following Intracellular Peptidergic Communication in the Mammalian CNS with Chemical and Spatial Specificity Using Mass Spectrometric Imaging."

Sweedler’s research group has developed and applied a new suite of technologies for measuring neurotransmitters and neuropeptides in individual cells and cellular processes using several invertebrate model organisms. This project proposes to adapt several technologies to work with mammalian brain slices to probe the interaction of multiple neuropeptides in several partially characterized systems, including the rat suprachiasmatic nucleus.

Braatz and Michielssen were appointed as CAS Beckman Associates, named for the donor of a gift that permits additional recognition for outstanding younger associate candidates who have already made distinctive scientific contributions.