Two Browne Distinguished Professors Appointed in SAS

Stephanie McCurry and Sharon Thompson-Schill have been appointed Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professors in the School of Arts and Sciences.

Stephanie McCurry has been named the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of History. She is a specialist in 19th-century American history and focuses on the American South and the Civil War era, as well as the history of women and gender.

McCurry is the author of Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country, which received honors including the John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association and the Charles Sydnor Award of the Southern Historical Association. It was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for History. Her most recent book, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South, earned the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, established to stimulate scholarship in the field of slavery and abolition. The book also received the 2011 Merle Curti Award, given annually for the best book published in American social or intellectual history, and the Avery O. Craven Award, presented annually for the most original book on the Civil War era. Both awards are granted by the Organization of American Historians, the largest learned society and professional organization dedicated to the teaching and study of the American past.

McCurry has served as the director of the California History Project, director of the Alice Berline Kaplan Center for the Humanities at Northwestern University, and co-chair of the program committee of the Organization of American Historians.

Sharon Thompson-Schill has been named the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Psychology. Her research focus is the neural basis of human memory and language with an emphasis on semantic memory and frontal lobe function.

Thompson-Schill is the author of numerous articles published in academic journals such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimage. In 2003, she was awarded the Young Investigator Award for outstanding contributions to cognitive neuroscience at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. She also received a Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Foundation Award for Distinguished Teaching, the University’s highest teaching honor, in 2006. She is a past national board member of the Association for Psychological Science.

Thompson-Schill is the director of undergraduate studies in Psychology and director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, a University-wide multidisciplinary center dedicated to understanding the neural bases of human thought.

The chairs are two of 10 Browne Distinguished Professorships created by the late Christopher H. Browne, C’69, former chair of the Board of Overseers of the School and a trustee of the University of Pennsylvania. The Browne Chairs recognize faculty members who have achieved an extraordinary reputation for scholarly contributions, who have demonstrated great distinction in teaching, and who have demonstrated intellectual integrity and unquestioned commitment to free and open discussion of ideas.