2017 Moynihan junior faculty award to be given to Hrodmažić, McCormick
This year's Daniel Patrick Moynihan Award for Teaching and
Research, recognizing outstanding non-tenured faculty members at the Maxwell
School, will be given to Azra Hrodmažić and Gladys McCormick, assistant
professors of anthropology and history, respectively.
The award will be presented at the Maxwell School’s annual
Graduate Convocation Ceremony on Friday, May 12, in Hendricks Chapel. As a new
Moynihan Award winner, McCormick will be the featured speaker at Convocation.
(Hrodmažić is out of the country and will be unable to attend.)
The Moynihan Award was established in 1985 by its namesake, who
had once been a junior faculty member at Maxwell himself, prior to his
celebrated career in the U.S. Senate. In creating the award, Moynihan described
the crucial importance of retaining promising young faculty members, and funded
the award to help Maxwell do so.
An an anthropologist, Azra Hrodmažić lists among her specialties
ethno-political violence and post-conflict
reconciliation, socialism and post-socialism, youth cultural practices, and the
Balkans (of which she is a native). Her research is shaped,
in part, by her experiences as a teenager during the war in Bosnia and
Herzegovina, which bore in her “an intense desire to make sense of her own
confusing experiences, and to understand their meaning for human social life
generally,” according to John Burdick, chair of anthropology, who nominated
Hrodmažić for the Moynihan Award. Her approach to the detailed ethnography of
post-war peacebuilding efforts led to Citizens
of an Empty Nation: Youth and State-Making in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina,
published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2015. She now studies the
politics of aging, care, and citizenship in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovia, and
is in Bosnia conducting this research. She is popular and top-rated in the
classroom, where she “views teaching as a conversation between herself and her
students, and among the students in her classes as well — conversations that
will help students along a journey of personal growth,” according to Burdick. She
is a winner of Syracuse University’s Meredith Teaching Recognition Award. Her
service to the School includes four departmental committees, the Ethnographic
Lab Task Force, the International Relations Program Executive Board, the
Maxwell Faculty Council, and the Political Anthropology Working Group, which
she founded. She was also a member of the search committee for a new dean of
the Maxwell School in 2015-16.
Gladys McCormick is a historian who concentrates on Mexico,
Latin America, and the Caribbean. She is the author of The Logic of Compromise in Mexico: How the Countryside Was Key to the
Emergence of Authoritarianism, published by the University of North
Carolina Press (considered the top press in this area of specialization). The
book examines the political importance of peasant sugar cooperatives and
state-owned sugar mills in the Mexican provinces of Morelos and Puebla in the
early 20th century. McCormick teaches a wide array of courses on
Latin America, political violence, and oral history methods, for which (like
Hrodmažić) she was previously recognized with SU’s Meredith Teaching
Recognition Award. She has co-directed the Documentary Film and History MA
program (offered with SU’s Newhouse School) and now serves as interim director
of Maxwell’s Program on Latin America and the Caribbean. And, given changing
U.S. immigration policies, McCormick provides counsel and assistance to
individual students, administrators, and faculty regarding U.S. policies to
deport undocumented immigrants. She is a member of the Ad Hoc Committee on
DACA/Undocumented Students, which will advise the Chancellor on strategies for
assisting undocumented members of the Syracuse community. She was also elected recently
to the History Department’s Executive Committee — “clearly demonstrating the
high esteem that her colleagues hold for her,” according to department Chair
Michael Ebner, who nominated McCormick for the Moynihan Award.
04/19/17