Four Yale faculty members — Nana Osei Quarshie, Ian Turner, Erika Valdivieso, and Meryem Ezgi Yalçın — have been named recipients of the 2023–24 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 later this semester by Yale College Dean Pericles Lewis. The Yale Poorvu Family Fund for Academic Innovation is administered by the Yale College Dean’s Office.
“It’s such a pleasure to recognize these instructors’ gifts as teachers and the excellence they bring to the classroom,” said Lewis.
Nana Osei Quarshie is an assistant professor in the Program in the History of Science and Medicine. He is also affiliated with the Department of Anthropology and the Yale School of Medicine. An anthropologist and historian by training, he examines the relationship among mental healing, political expulsions, immigration, and urban belonging in West Africa since the seventeenth century. His research has been funded by the Chateaubriand Fellowship, the Social Science Research Council, the University of Michigan, and Yale University. He is currently revising his first monograph, “An African Pharmakon: Psychiatry and the Mind Politic of Modern Ghana.” He teaches interdisciplinary courses on various subjects, including African systems of thought, global histories of confinement, decolonizing the mind, and history beyond the archive.