Patrick Iber and Nicole C. Nelson Awarded H.I. Romnes Faculty Fellowships

Professors Patrick Iber and Nicole C. Nelson have been honored with the H.I. Romnes Fellowships. Eighteen faculty across receive this aware, which is given to recognize faculty with exceptional research contributions within their first six years from promotion to a tenured position. The award is named in recognition of the late WARF trustees president H.I. Romnes and comes with $60,000.

Headshot photograph of Professor Patrick Iber. Iber looks at the camera, wearing glasses and a grey suit, with grass and leaves in the background.
Photo by Kolin Goldschmidt

Patrick Iber, associate professor of History, specializes in the relationship between culture, ideas, and politics during the Cold War, and the consequences of those relationships for authoritarianism, democracy, and social change. He is the author the award-winning Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America. His new book, Poverty of the Imagination: The Cold War and the Social Science of Development in Latin America, examines the five major frameworks of the Cold War social sciences for understanding and combatting poverty. The book uses the lens of the Ford Foundation to explore how these frameworks intersected with political movements and interests; it shows how scholarship on poverty was incorporated into the struggle to recover democracy from military governments. He is now at work on a biography of the Chilean “antipoet” Nicanor Parra, using his 103-year-long life to explore questions of art and politics, global countercultures, and the role of satire in social change. In addition to his academic work, Iber is a contributing editor to The New Republic, and has written for many publications, from The New York Times to Rolling Stone. He is the editor of Dissent magazine, where he works to uphold its tradition of independent political and social criticism.

Nicole Nelson

Nicole C. Nelson, associate professor in the Department of Medical History and Bioethics, is a science and technology studies scholar who studies research cultures, with a focus on reproducibility and rigor in biomedicine. She is the current director of the Holtz Center for STS, a past Editor of Social Studies of Science, and a former fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.