First chairs photographs by gary wayne gilbert
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Penelope Ismay
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History Cooney Family Assistant Professor Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences Ph.D.: University of California, Berkeley Representative publication: “Between Providence and Risk: Odd Fellows, Benevolence and the Social Limits of Actuarial Science, 1820s–1880s,” Past & Present (February 2015) A Michigan native, Ismay arrived at Boston College in 2013. She is the past recipient of a Mellon Fellowship and an Anglo-American Fellowship at Cambridge University. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, she served five years at sea with two tours in the Persian Gulf, as an officer of the deck on a destroyer and an aircraft carrier.
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I’m interested in questions of social responsibility, in particular the question of who owes what to whom in a society, and why. My focus is Britain in the late 18th century, when the Industrial Revolution was shifting the economic base from agriculture to manufacturing and triggering a large migration of people from rural areas to cities like Manchester and Liverpool. This massive movement of people whose understanding of their rights and responsibilities had been parish-based—where the rich owed charity to the poor, and the poor owed the rich hard work and deference—threw the well-established social network into disarray. To understand how people in that era created new forms of reciprocity, I study mutual aid organizations like the Odd Fellows and the Ancient Order of Foresters, so-called friendly societies that by the 1870s had four million members. They were trying to figure how to provide a safety net in a world where the needy were no longer one’s neighbors, grappling with the problem of how do you trust strangers? It’s an important issue today, and not only because of immigration. Modern societies are so complex; being among strangers is the norm.
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by the recently completed $1.6 billion Light the World campaign were 12 endowed professorships reserved for assistant professors. Unlike most academic chairs, which honor high-achieving senior faculty, these positions, appointed by the University president on the recommendation of the provost, recognize emerging academic stars and provide funding to support their research projects. The position is held until the faculty member is (or is not) awarded promotion to associate professor and tenure. Endowed professorships have a long history in this country. The Hollis Professorship of Divinity, the oldest endowed chair in North America, was established at Harvard in 1721 by an English merchant (among its perks is the right to graze a cow in Harvard Yard). The named assistant professorship, a more recent invention, has been established at such universities as Brown, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania for the purpose of attracting exceptional young faculty and anchoring them, the better to fend off poaching efforts by competitors. At Boston College between 2006 and 2016, the count of tenured and tenure-track faculty grew by 143, to a total of 782 full, associate, and assistant professors. Included in this figure are 67 additional assistant professorships (for a total of 214). In their own words, the first six endowed assistant professors—six positions remain to be awarded—describe their interests. —Thomas Cooper