Greetings!
My first year as the director of CASBS is off to a great start. The 2023-24 class of fellows and visiting scholars arrived the first week of September and I am struck by the vast number of intellectual connections that have already formed amongst them. And, I am enjoying watching the class form strong bonds through meals, games, and walks around the Stanford Dish. We spent the month of September welcoming back three former fellows as guest seminar speakers, which afforded our current class extra time to settle in, while also showcasing the diversity of topics and methodological approaches that are so characteristic of CASBS. We ended the month of September with a reception welcoming me as the new director – an event that was as elegant as it was touching to me!
In October, we sponsored an event to celebrate CASBS board chair Abby Smith Rumsey’s new book, Memory, Edited: Taking Liberties with History. Two-time former CASBS fellow Fred Turner served as interlocutor. We recorded the live conversation for publication as a CASBS podcast episode.
November was busy here on the hill, with the exciting dedication of our new building, the first new construction at CASBS since 1954, as well as the celebration event for the two latest Sage-CASBS Award winners, Elizabeth Anderson and Alondra Nelson. The dedication allowed us the opportunity to welcome back former director Margaret Levi, whose vision for how social and behavioral science research should be done is represented by the collaborative spaces within the new building. It also gave us a nice excuse to have a reception on our new terrace outside the building, named in honor of board member Dave Hitz’s mother, Nancy Hitz. Likewise, the 2023 Sage-CASBS Award Lecture event allowed us to not only honor two impressive scholars and hear from them about their research, but also to welcome friends of CASBS to join in the celebration, whether in person or by livestream.
Three CASBS-based research programs continue this academic year. One is the Social Science of Caregiving. It recently was awarded a grant from the Sloan Foundation, enabling it to rigorously pursue a broad empirical and theoretical account of care we so desperately need. We provide an excellent overview of the project in this newsletter. The other two projects are enCOREage (with Professor Mary Lopez in residence as our second CORE fellow at CASBS) – devoted to greater inclusion and diversity in economics education, and which we profiled in-depth in the fall 2022 newsletter – and Imagining Adaptive Societies.
We look forward to 2024, a year in which we will relaunch our public symposia and welcome back our two summer institutes, the Institute on Diversity and Organizations and their Effectiveness. We also will launch an exciting new program (what we’re calling the “Muses Program,” generously supported by board of directors member Chien Lee) in which we will bring back a set of former fellows in late February to discuss their research around the future of work and capitalism with our current fellows, and be in residence for a few days for conversations with our current fellows.
In closing, my first few months at the helm have been exciting and gratifying. I now understand fully why CASBS is such a special place that transforms so many careers and has such a marvelous impact on so many people.
