Three members of Maxwell School faculty earn promotion
At
their year-end meeting in early May, the Syracuse University Board of Trustees
approved promotions for three Maxwell School members. One, sociologist Scott Landes, was granted tenure while
being promoted to associate professor.
Landes,
who joined the faculty in 2017, is also a faculty associate in SU’s Aging
Studies Institute and a faculty
research affiliate in Maxwell’s Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion. His research
interests include medical sociology, disability, and aging and the life course,
with a specific focus on health and mortality trends across the life course for
those with developmental disability, and for veterans. His research also
addresses the intersections of intellectual disability and social theory. Landes
is currently principal investigator on a project titled “Erroneous Coding of
Developmental Disabilities as Underlying Cause of Death,” funded for $140,610
by the National Institutes of Health/National Institute of Aging. He is the
author or co-author of more than 25 peer-reviewed journal articles and
chapters. Landes earned his PhD from the University of Florida in 2014.
Anthropologist Shannon A. Novak, who joined Maxwell
in 2006, has been promoted to the rank of professor. Novak is a biocultural
anthropologist, whose archaeological research focuses on political and gender
violence; historical memory, movement, and materiality; and multiple ontologies
of the body. She has conducted extensive research on the Mountain Meadows
massacre of 1857, about which she wrote House
of Mourning: A Biocultural History of the Mountain Meadows Massacre (2008,
University of Utah Press); and the Donner Party tragedy of 1846-47, which led
to the edited volume, An Archaeology of
Desperation (2011, University of Oklahoma Press, with Kelly J.
Dixon and Julie M. Schablitsky). Both books received the James Deetz Award from
the Society for Historical Archaeology. More recently, she completed a major
bioarchaeological project at Spring Street Presbyterian Church in lower
Manhattan, which had supported a multi-racial, abolitionist congregation in the
early 19th century; and started an ethnographic project focusing on the
materiality of ritual practices among Guyanese Hindus in New York City and
Toronto. She is a former recipient of Syracuse University’s Excellence in
Graduate Education Faculty Recognition Award and, in 2010, won the Maxwell
School’s Daniel Patrick Moynihan Award for promising untenured faculty members.
She received her PhD in 1999 from the University of Utah.
A. Peter Castro, also an
anthropologist, was promoted to professor while being named the new Robert D.
McClure Professor of Teaching Excellence. (For more on that appointment, see
this previous announcement.) Castro
is an applied cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on the environment
and development planning, especially in East Africa. He has written or edited
five books, and is the author of numerous articles appearing in such journals
as the Journal of International and
Global Studies, the Journal of
Development Studies, and World
Development. In addition to his research and teaching, Castro frequently
consults with external organizations, including the New East Foundation, the
Center for Strategic and International Studies, the United Nations Food and
Agricultural Organization, and the United States Agency for International
Development. He was a recipient of Syracuse University’s Excellence in Graduate
Education Faculty Recognition Award, having served on dozens of dissertation
committees and as primary advisor to 10 PhDs. He himself received his PhD from
the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1988 and joined the Maxwell
faculty that year.
06/18/20