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Endowments go to two arts and sciences professors


Two professors in the College of Arts and Sciences were appointed to endowed professorships beginning July 1. They are:

* John F. Kasson, history and American studies, Bank of America Honors Professorship, through June 30, 2004; and

* Donald T. Lysle, psychology, Gillian T. Cell Distinguished Professorship for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, though June 30, 2006.

Kasson

Kasson is the first to be named to this chair. Half of his teaching during its term will be devoted to honors courses, including an interdisciplinary investigation of American life and culture from European contact through the Civil War and "Young America: Art and Culture in the New Republic" that will build on an exhibit at the Ackland Art Museum.

American cultural history in the 19th and early 20th centuries has been the focus of Kasson's research. This year he published Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America, a topic that is part of an undergraduate research seminar he leads.

Since joining the faculty in 1971, Kasson has received a Bowman and Gordon Gray Professorship, has been elected to the Society of American Historians and has received numerous fellowships.

Kasson earned a Ph.D. in American studies at Yale University. An avid swimmer, he also enjoys local performance art. His web

page link is at http://www.unc.edu/depts/history/faculty/faculty.html

The Bank of America Professorship is meant to promote innovative teaching, to raise the profile of the Honors Program both on campus and beyond and to link the honors curriculum more effectively to the main currents of undergraduate education by extending students' learning beyond the classroom and opening the recipient's teaching to a broad interdisciplinary audience.

Lysle

Lysle teaches a course on the fundamentals of learning theory and one on human and animal behavior based on evolutionary theory and theoretical biology, as well as graduate courses on experimental psychology. He is director of the Biological Psychology Program in the Department of Psychology.

In his research he explores the complex relationships between drugs of abuse, immunity and disease, specifically opioid-induced immune alterations. His publications reflect this interest, for example the 1999 article "Endogenous opioids regulate the expression of inducible nitric oxide sythase by splenocytes" in the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics.

He is currently the principal investigator in two studies funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse Research and has received a Research Scientist Award from the institute.

In addition to serving on the University Teaching Awards Committee, Lysle serves on the editorial boards of Brain, Behavior, and Immunity and Behavioral Neuroscience.

The Gillian T. Cell Professorship for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching was renamed in 1993 by the Arts and Sciences Foundation to honor Cell, former dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. Originally it was called the Arts and Sciences Foundation Professorship. A native of England, Cell received a Ph.D. in history in 1964 from the University of Liverpool, after which she joined the Carolina faculty. Her teaching career here was accompanied by a continuing increase in administrative responsibilities. She resigned in 1991 to become provost of Pennsylvania's Lafayette College and later provost of The College of William & Mary.


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