Poorvu Family Award

November 4, 2015

We write to share the happy news that Christiana Purdy Moudarres has been selected as a 2015 recipient of the Poorvu Family Award for Interdisciplinary Teaching. This honor reflects her countless contributions, in a still-short space of time on our campus, to innovative teaching at Yale.  We cannot do better than to quote the letter of nomination from Penny Marcus, who in writing about your course on “Science and Creation in a Secular Italy (1870-1920) says:

While interdisciplinarity can easily lend itself to superficial and forced comparisons across disciplines, Christiana’s approach goes to the heart of the process by which scientific thought shapes the literary and artistic imagination. Choosing a key moment in Italian history—the six decade period between the Unification and the signing of the Lateran Pact between Mussolini and the Church—she expertly traces the influence of Darwinism, racial pseudo-science, technology, and psychoanalysis on the cultural production of the time.

Once again, please accept the Departments gratitude for your fine work and our warmest congratulations on receiving the Poorvu Family Award.