Holy Cross Professors Honored with Distinguished O’Leary Faculty Recognition Award

WORCESTER, Mass. – Two members of the College of the Holy Cross faculty have been honored with the Arthur J. O’Leary Faculty Recognition Award. These $10,000 honoraria are given each year by the senior vice president to senior faculty members who make a special contribution to Holy Cross through their teaching, scholarship and/or service. The O'Leary Awards are intended to honor the recipients, to advance their work, and to encourage other members of the faculty to attain a high level of professional achievement and to be a positive influence in the lives of students.

The 2009 recipients are:

Ann Marie Leshkowich, professor of sociology and anthropology, received her Ph.D. in social anthropology from Harvard University in 2000.  Her research concentrates on gender, economic transformation, globalization, fashion, and transnational adoption in Vietnam.  Leshkowich has published articles on socioeconomic transformation in Vietnam, focusing on gender and moral issues, female entrepreneurs, fashion, and the middle classes. Currently she is studying matters of culture, kinship, and ethnicity surrounding adoption within Vietnam and the experiences of Vietnamese American adoptive families.  The O’Leary award will support Leshkowich’s fieldwork on transnational adoption between the Vietnam and the U.S. In Vietnam, she will conduct interviews with social workers at orphanages, domestic adoptive families, and birth mothers whose children have been adopted abroad.  Her research in the U.S. will explore the cultural experience of Vietnamese American adoptive families.  She hopes this research will reveal shifts in attitudes toward family, conceptions of cultural identity, and the role of adoption in the economic and political relations between Vietnam and the U.S.  She resides in Cambridge, Mass.

Kenneth Prestwich, professor of biology, received his Ph.D. in zoology from the University of Florida.  In addition to teaching at Holy Cross, he continues to study forestry at the University of Florida’s Natural Area of Teaching Laboratory.  Prestwich serves on the executive board of the American Arachnological Society (AAS) and this past summer, he received a distinguished service award at the annual meeting of the AAS for creating the association’s Web site and uploading its publications into online databases.  Prestwich also is on the advisory board of the University of Florida’s Natural Area Teaching Lab and in 2006 he received a service award for his work in restoring a portion of the University of Florida’s campus into an upland pine community. Prestwich will use his award to enhance the teaching of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and mathematical modeling in conjunction with biology and geology courses at Holy Cross. The honoraria will be used to purchase tablet type computers, GPS units for field work, modeling software, and equipment in his research lab. Prestwich and his wife divide their time between North Brookfield, Mass. and Gainesville, Fla.

The Arthur J. O'Leary Faculty Recognition Awards have been made possible by an endowed gift to the College from Thomas H. O'Leary '54, former President, CEO and Chairman of Burlington Resources, one of the largest independent oil and gas companies in the United States.