Berkeleyan

Awards

11 October 2006

Berkeley's Twain Project is the people's choice

Berkeley's Mark Twain Papers and Project - the largest scholarly publishing effort to be devoted to a single writer - has received a "We the People" award from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The award recognizes the Bancroft Library project as a model program that advances "the study, teaching, and understanding of American history and culture." The Bancroft holds all the private papers of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka Mark Twain, who once described himself as "not an American, but the American." The first Twain documents were deposited at Berkeley in 1949 and bequeathed to the campus in 1962, after the death of the author's sole surviving daughter. To learn more about the Twain archives, visit the project's website at bancroft.berkeley.edu/MTP/index.html.

Seasholes cited for investor analysis

Mark Seasholes, an assistant professor at the Haas School of Business, has won the 2006 Goldman Sachs Asset Management prize for the best paper published by the European Finance Association.

Seasholes, a member of the Haas Finance Group, shares the prize with co-author Lei Feng for their paper "Do Investor Sophistication and Trading Experience Eliminate Behavioral Biases in Financial Markets?" in the September 2005 issue of the journal Review of Finance. The pair's research provided an in-depth analysis of an investor's reluctance to realize losses and propensity to realize gains - a behavior known as the "disposition effect"- and found that trading experience greatly reduced the effect.

Coalition for Clean Air honors John Balmes

John Balmes, an investigator with the Berkeley Center for Environmental Public Health Tracking and director of the Center for Occupational and Environmental Health, was recently honored with the Coalition for Clean Air's Carl Moyer Award for Scientific and Technical Leadership. Every year, the coalition recognizes individuals or corporations that advance the cause of restoring clean, healthful air to all Californians. Balmes has spent his career conducting studies on the health effects of air pollution, and has testified at state and national hearings on behalf of the American Lung Association. He regularly shares his expertise as a member of the American Lung Association of California technical advisory group on clean air and serves as a volunteer media spokesperson, helping to raise public awareness of the connection between air pollution and health.

Talmud scholar Daniel Boyarin wins best-book award

Daniel Boyarin, Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture, has been named one of three recipients of the 2006 American Academy of Religion Book Awards, which recognize new scholarly publications "of distinctive originality, intelligence, creativity, and importance," and that "affect decisively how religion is examined, understood, and interpreted." Boyarin took the top prize in the "historical studies" category for his book Border Lines: The Partition of Judeo-Christianity (University of Pennsylvania, 2004). The award will be formally presented in November at the academy's annual meeting in Washington, D.C.