Accolades

Richard Stern, the Helen A. Regenstein Professor Emeritus in English Language & Literature, has been awarded a Fulbright Senior Specialists grant in U.S. Studies-Literature at Osmania University in Hyderabad, India.

Described as “a writer’s writer and a complete man of letters,” Stern has produced a body of work spanning novels, short stories, essays, poems and anthologies that has been praised by authors from Philip Roth and Saul Bellow to Joan Didion and Norman Mailer. He has held Guggenheim, Rockefeller and Fulbright fellowships, and his fiction has won numerous awards. Born in 1928, Stern has taught at Chicago since 1955.

In 2002, the University Press published Stern’s fifth “orderly miscellany,” What Is, What Was, which combined his fiction and nonfiction. Stories, such as the well-known “My Ex, the Moral Philosopher,” appear among portraits of W.H. Auden, Ezra Pound, Ralph Ellison, Studs Terkel, W.C. Fields, Bertrand Russell, Walter Benjamin (in both essay and story), Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, and Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. Northwestern University Press will reissue three of Stern’s novels and publish his collected stories next year.

The Fulbright Senior Specialists program offers two- to six-week grants to senior scholars to assist universities abroad in developing curriculum in 140 countries across the world. More information on the program is available at http://www.cies.org.

Daniel Reichart (Ph.D.,’00) has received the 2003 Robert Trumpler Award of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. The society presents the Trumpler Award annually to a recent Ph.D. recipient whose research is considered unusually important to astronomy.

Reichart is an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. At Chicago his Ph.D. research examined the connection between supernovae (exploding stars) and gamma-ray bursts, known as GRBs.

In 1999, Reichart showed that a GRB, which occurred in 1997, coincided with what appeared to be a supernova.

The combination of optical and near-infrared observations made the event the best case at the time for a GRB-supernova connection at cosmological distances.

The connection has been confirmed by a similar event that occurred last April and has led astronomers to the consensus that most gamma-ray busts result from the explosive death of massive stars.