CAMPUS NOTES

Last month, UCSB joined some 90 other colleges and universities in a pilot project to craft a system for rating progress in achieving sustainability across all sectors of higher education. Called STARS, for Sustainability Tracking, Assessment, and Rating System, it is an initiative of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE). Look at AASHE’s Web site <www.aashe.org/stars> for details.

Jim Blascovich, professor of psychology, has received the 2007 Gordon Allport Intergroup Relations Prize from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. A cash prize of $1,000 goes to “the best paper or article of the year on intergroup relations.”

Richard Kemmerer, professor of computer science, recently won the Applied Computer Security Associates Distinguished Practitioner’s Award for an individual. The citation is given to one “who has demonstrated a continuing, vital and influential contribution” to information security.

Rose McDermott, associate professor of political science, has been named a 2008-09 fellow at Stanford University’s prestigious Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. She plans to work on a book about pandemic disease and security.

Sabine Frühstück, professor of East Asian languages and cultural studies, examines Japan’s nontraditional military in her study “Uneasy Warriors: Gender, Memory, and Popular Culture in the Japanese Army” (University of California Press, 2007).

Yunte Huang, professor of English, probes the multiple contributions of Pacific Ocean nations’ literature to American literary history in “Transpacific Imaginations: History, Literature, Counterpoetics” (Harvard University Press, 2008).

Lisa Parks, associate professor of film and media studies, co-edited “Undead TV: Essays on Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (Duke University Press, 2007), an examination of how the show became a marker of social change.

Garay Menicucci, former assistant director with the Center for Middle East Studies, has been appointed associate director of the Office of International Students and Scholars. He first joined UCSB in August 2000.