Each year, SUNY and numerous academic and professional groups honor hundreds of UUP members for outstanding accomplishments in their disciplines, on campus and in their communities. The Voice is pleased to recognize three of these members.

• Eva Feder Kittay of Stony Brook University has been granted the rank of distinguished professor of philosophy. The distinguished professor designation is conferred on individuals who have achieved national or international prominence in a chosen field.

Kittay’s scholarly work ranges from metaphor to care ethics to feminism. Her book, Love’s Labor, creates an entire area of philosophical inquiry into disability, and most particularly cognitive disability.

Her contributions to disability studies and care ethics earned her the first-ever award given by the Institut Mensche, Ethik, und Wissenshaft, a bioethics and policy institute that has strong influence within the German government.

• Catherine Porter, a professor emerita of French at SUNY Cortland, was elected in December 2009 as president of the Modern Language Association of America (MLA), an international organization serving English and foreign language teachers.

An internationally recognized translator of scholarly works, Porter has been a reviewer of texts and translations for several university presses and reviewed translation grant proposals for the National Endowment for the Humanities. She has also translated 35 books.

• Linda Spear, a distinguished professor of psychology at Binghamton University, has been named to the National Advisory Council on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

The 15-member council oversees and approves the entire portfolio of research for the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), part of the National Institutes of Health. The group decides on priority research areas and future funding for alcohol-related research throughout the United States.

Since 2004, Spear has served on the NIAAA’s Extramural Advisory Board, a board of alcohol experts charged with reviewing the entire research portfolio of the institute and recommending future research opportunities to the council. She will continue in that position as well.

— Karen L. Mattison