Report of the Committee on Faculty Research Lecture
On April 2, 2012, Divisional Council endorsed the nominations of the Committee
on Faculty Research Lecture for the 2013 Martin Meyerson Berkeley Faculty
Research Lectures. The distinguished 2013 lecturers are: Catherine Gallagher,
Professor and Ida May and William J. Eggers Jr. Chair in English, and Barbara
Romanowicz, Professor of Geophysics in the Department of Earth and Planetary
Science. The nomination letter follows.
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY
BERKELEY · DAVIS · IRVINE · LOS ANGELES · RIVERSIDE · SAN DIEGO · SAN FRANCISCO
SANTA BARBARA · SANTA CRUZ
Jean M. J. Fréchet
Professor of the Graduate School in Chemistry and Chemical Engineering
March 24, 2012
TO:
CHAIR, BERKELEY DIVISION, ACADEMIC SENATE
FROM: Jean Frechet, Chair of the Faculty Research Lectures Committee
RE: Nominations of Martin Meyerson Faculty Research Lecturers for 2012-2013
The Faculty Research Lecture Committee considered all this year’s nominations in its meeting February 29 2012
and unanimously recommends that the Martin Meyerson Berkeley Faculty Research Lectures in 2012-13 be delivered by
Professor Barbara Romanowicz of the Department of Earth & Planetary Science and Professor Catherine Gallagher of the
Department of English. This letter is sent on my Berkeley letterhead to attest to its authenticity.
Professor Barbara Romanowicz is one of the world's top seismologists. She is the leading scientist in the broad
field of deep-earth seismology and she heads a very productive and high-impact research program. Her research is focused
on illuminating the structure and dynamics of the deep Earth, reaching from the lower crust to the deep inner core, through
the innovative analysis of the many kinds of seismic waves that propagate through the deep interior of our planet. One
approach to this kind of research is through seismic travel-time tomography, in which the travel times of seismic waves,
originating at an earthquake and recorded at distant seismographs, are used to determine the three-dimensional velocity
structure of the Earth, in a method analogous to medical CAT scan technology. Prof. Romanowicz is one of many
seismologists who use travel-time tomography, and she is the pioneer in the much more difficult but still more informative
technique of attenuation tomography. Through the information from seismic tomography obtained by Prof. Romanowicz
and her students and colleagues, the patterns of very slow flow within the Earth's mantle that drive plate tectonics and
continental drift are being mapped and understood. For example, her work has included mapping of plumes of hot rock
rising from the Earth's core to near the surface beneath Africa and the central Pacific.
For twenty years at Berkeley, Professor Romanowicz served as Director of the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory
(BSL), and tirelessly developed BSL's many infrastructure projects, including the Northern California Earthquake Data
Center, the Berkeley Digital Seismic Network, the Realtime Earthquake Data Integration project, the Bay Area Regional
Deformation Network, (a real-time earthquake notification program), and the statewide collaboration on earthquake reporting
in the framework of the California Integrated Seismic Network.
Barbara Romanowicz is a Member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a Chevalier of the French Légion d'Honneur, and is Chaire de Physique de l'Intérieure
de la Terre, Collège de France. She has received the top honors in seismology, including the Gutenberg Medal of the
European Geophysical Union, the Inge Lehman Medal of the American Geophysical Union, and the Harry Reid Medal of the
Seismological Society of America.
Professor Catherine Gallagher is one of the world’s foremost scholars of nineteenth-century literary studies and
the history and theory of the novel. Gallagher is one of the inventors of New Historicism, a revolutionary approach to
literary texts as part of a spectrum of discourses and practices that organize culture—an approach that developed at Berkeley
in the 1980s and has spread to become one of the most influential paradigms for the study of texts throughout the humanities
and social sciences. She helped spark this theoretically informed re-engagement with history through her first book, The
Industrial Revolution of English Fiction (1985), and with every successive volume she has published (she has three soleauthored monographs, a co-authored book, and several edited volumes to her credit). Gallagher is perhaps best known for
her 1994 book, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Act of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670-1820, in which she
brilliantly interweaves the history of women writers in the first centuries of the rise of fiction with an analysis of the literary
marketplace and the developing abstract economy of credit and debt. Nobody’s Story won the James Russell Lowell Prize
from the Modern Language Association—the highest award given to a work of literary criticism by the MLA.
Continued on page 2.
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY
COLLEGE OF CHEMISTRY, 718 LATIMER HALL #1460
BERKELEY CA 94720-1460 USA
email: Frechet@berkeley.edu
Tel: 510-594-1573
Fax: 510-643-3079
Page 2 of 2
Nominations of Faculty Research Lecturers for 2012-2013
In addition, Gallagher was one of the founding editors of the journal Representations, which has become one of the
most influential critical journals in the interdisciplinary humanities and social sciences of the last quarter century; even now,
Gallagher remains one of the journal’s guiding lights. But although associated with New Historicism, Gallagher has never
been confined by it. Her work remains as impressive for its intellectual independence, its readiness to renew and rethink
itself (and everything around it), as for its uncompromising commitment to modes of historicist inquiry. Thus Gallagher’s
more recent work has significantly engaged with philosophy, with social theory, and with the development over several
centuries of different modes of counterfactual history. All Gallagher’s scholarly writing is characterized by its analytic
incisiveness, audacious originality, and imaginative attunement to its objects, as well as its breadth and depth of learning; and
by its refusal to rest content with any single avenue of inquiry.
Gallagher is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the recipient of every major fellowship
available in the humanities—ACLS, NEH, Guggenheim, as well as residential fellowships at the Institute for Advanced
Study at Princeton and at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina.
Jean Frechet
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY
COLLEGE OF CHEMISTRY, 718 LATIMER HALL #1460
BERKELEY CA 94720-1460 USA
email: Frechet@berkeley.edu
Tel: 510-594-1573
Fax: 510-643-3079