The annual awards recognize excellence in teaching in undergraduate programs and enables recipients to dedicate their summer to research.
Four junior faculty members receive Poorvu awards for innovative teaching
Clockwise from top left, Andrea Aldrich, Amymarie Bartholomew, Naomi Levine and Shiro Kuriwaki.
Four Yale faculty members — Andrea Aldrich, Amymarie Bartholomew, Shiro Kuriwaki, and Naomi Levine — have been named recipients of the 2024–25 Poorvu Family Fund for Academic Innovation award, an annual prize that recognizes innovative teaching.
The award, given to outstanding junior faculty members at Yale who have demonstrated excellence in teaching in undergraduate programs, enables them to dedicate the summer to research essential to their development as scholars and teachers.
The recipients, all of whom are members of Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, will be honored during an event to be hosted April 29 by Yale College Dean Pericles Lewis. The Yale Poorvu Family Fund for Academic Innovation is administered by the Yale College Dean’s Office.
Andrea Aldrich is a lecturer in the Department of Political Science and director of Undergraduate Studies. Her research focuses on political representation, gender, and comparative political institutions. Her work examines the relationship between internal political party dynamics and legislative representation, particularly the influence of internal party organization on gender equality in elections. She has published extensively in journals such as The Journal of Politics, Party Politics, and Politics & Gender. She has two forthcoming books. The first, “Glass Ceilings, Glass Cliffs, and Quicksands: Gendered Party Leadership in Parliamentary Systems,” explores gendered dynamics in political party leadership. And “Gender Quotas as Game Changers for the Recruitment, Selection, and Performance of Elected Politicians” examines the dynamic effects of quotas on men’s and women’s political careers from candidacy and election to leadership in office. She teaches courses on women in politics, comparative political parties, and European politics.
Amymarie Bartholomew, an assistant professor of chemistry, studies the design and synthesis of molecular materials with stimuli-responsive properties. Her lab uses strategies from inorganic synthesis, organic synthesis, and materials science to create new solids that respond to light, pressure, temperature, or guest molecules. These materials have applications in nanotechnology, memory storage, sensing, microactuation, and solar energy. Her recent work includes studies on metal-organic frameworks with thermally cleavable bonds and sunlight-driven rolling crystals.
Shiro Kuriwaki, an assistant professor of political science, focuses his research on Congress, U.S. elections, and quantitative methods. He teaches “Applied Quantitative Research Design,” a course that trains students in the tools of a social scientist’s quantitative toolkit through close readings and coding replications of economics and political science papers. He also teaches a lecture course on Congress, combining case studies with data analysis.
Naomi Levine is an assistant professor of English. Her research spans Victorian poetry and poetics, aesthetics, and the history of criticism. Her first book, “The Burden of Rhyme: Victorian Poetry, Formalism, and the Feeling of Literary History,” examines 19th-century ideas about the origin of rhyme and their significance for Victorian poetry and literary studies. She is also working on a project titled “Badness in Poetry,” which explores the aesthetic category of “badness” and its implications for the study of poems. She teaches introductory classes on the history of poetry and advanced seminars in Victorian literature, including “Love and Desire in the Nineteenth Century.”