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 20^th 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