The Maxwell School of Syracuse University is honoring four inspirational teachers and scholars as the first O’Hanley Faculty Scholars. 

Mehrzad Boroujerdi, associate professor of political science; Yingyi Ma, associate professor of sociology; Junko Takeda, associate professor of history; and Jamie Winders, associate professor of geography were selected on the basis of outstanding teaching and scholarship, plus attributes such as success with external grant support and service to the institution.  They will hold the title for three years, during which time they will receive supplemental financial support for teaching and research. 

The O’Hanley Faculty Endowed Fund for Faculty Excellence was created with a major gift from Ron O’Hanley, president of Fidelity Investments Asset Management and a 1981 graduate of the Maxwell School with a BA in political science. For O’Hanley, also a member of the Maxwell Advisory Board, the fund serves a desire to help recognize, reward, and retain excellent teachers at the School.

“I had extraordinary professors during my time at Syracuse, and I recognize how essential they were to both my academic and professional success.  Encouraging and retaining excellent scholars and teachers is a top priority for the Dean, and I am pleased to be able to provide funding for that need,” says O’Hanley.

“We applaud Ron O’Hanley’s recognition of the crucial need for faculty support,” said James Steinberg, dean of the Maxwell School. “A school is only as strong as the teachers and professors at its core. This fund — supporting, as it does, emerging leaders within the Maxwell faculty — will go a long way toward assuring the long-term quality of scholarship conducted under our roof.”

Mehrzad Boroujerdi, a member of the faculty since 1992, is a recognized expert on Middle Eastern affairs, sought after as a speaker and commentator on foreign affairs. He is the founding director of Syracuse University’s Middle East Studies Program and leads the Middle East Center in the Maxwell School’s Daniel Patrick Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs. He is the editor of Mirror for the Muslim Prince: Islam and the Theory of Statecraft (2013) and author of Iranian Intellectuals and the West: The Tormented Triumph of Nativism (1996) and I Carved, Worshiped and Shattered: Essays on Iranian Politics and Identity (2010), in addition to more than 30 journal articles and book chapters.  He serves as president of the International Society for Iranian Studies and is a past recipient of the School’s Moynihan Prize for non-tenured faculty members who exhibit promise in their teaching, research, and service.

Yingyi Ma conducts research and has written dozens of journal articles on social difference themes related to education, gender, and migration.  She also has secured multiple National Science Foundation grants to support her and her students’ research.  Her latest research compares the preparation of Chinese secondary-school students with their experiences as students on American college campuses; this expands on previous work studying the adaptation of such students after their arrival in the United States. She has also recently studied bachelor’s degree attainment in so-called STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and its effects on income inequality after graduation. Ma joined the Maxwell faculty in 2006.

Junko Takeda, a member of the History Department faculty since 2006, studies early modern France and economic globalization. Her current project, Silk and Statecraft: France and Economic Globalization, 1660-1914, examines economic globalization as central to nation building in early modern and modern France. As in her first book, which focused on the cosmopolitan Mediterranean port of Marseilles, Takeda analyzes the implications of global trade for citizenship; she follows a particular emphasis on silk production, which encouraged exchange among French and Ottoman artisans and launched a debate over the impact of luxury, and particularly foreign luxuries, on France. Takeda holds a Syracuse University Teaching Recognition Award and has received School’s Moynihan Prize.

Jamie Winders, who joined the faculty in 2004, is a geographer examining conceptualizations of race, the production of racial categories, and the material consequences of these formations, particularly vis-a-vis migration. Her empirical research focuses on Latino immigration, especially to the American South, and the impacts of immigrant settlement on racial and immigrant politics in workplaces, public schools, residential neighborhoods, and other such social spaces. She recently held a Russell Sage Foundation fellowship, leading to her 2013 book, Nashville in the New Millennium: Immigrant Settlement, Urban Transformation, and Social Belonging. She also co-edited The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Cultural Geography, published last year by Blackwell. She, too, is a past recipient of the School’s Moynihan Prize for non-tenured faculty members and has received the Syracuse University Teaching Recognition Award.