Three faculty members of The University of Arizona College of Social and Behavioral Sciences have been named 2008 Magellan Circle Earl H. Carroll Fellows.

Professors Susan Karant-Nunn, Charles Ragin and Mary Stiner are receiving one of the highest honors that SBS can bestow on its faculty. Each award consists of a one-time stipend of $5,000 and a lifetime membership in the Magellan Circle. This award is made possible by the generosity of Magellan Circle member U.S. District Judge Earl H. Carroll.

"Our Magellan Circle Faculty Fellows Program supports and rewards innovative research, excellent teaching and service to the UA and to the field," said Ed Donnerstein, dean of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences. "Thanks to the generosity of Judge Carroll, we were able to recognize professors whose international stature enhances the entire University."

The Magellan Circle is the college's donor society, which provides financial support for students and faculty. Membership in the Circle begins at $1,000 per year.

2008 Magellan Circle Earl H. Carroll Fellows

Susan Karant-Nunn, professor of history and director of the Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies, is an international expert in German Reformation and early modern social history.

Karant-Nunn is the North American co-editor of the "Archive for Reformation History." She recently completed her fourth single-authored monograph, "The Reformation of Feeling: Shaping the Religious Emotions in Early Modern Germany." Karant-Nunn is the winner of the Roland H. Bainton Book Prize and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship.

Karant-Nunn also has played a central role in the effort to achieve the endowment of the Heiko A. Oberman Chair in Late Medieval and Reformation History at the UA.

Sociologist Charles Ragin's groundbreaking contributions to comparative research have changed the way sociologists and political scientists conceptualize and study large-scale social change.

Ragin has helped bridge the division between "quantitative" and "qualitative" approaches in the social sciences. His 1987 book "The Comparative Method" is a classic that is used by social scientists around the world. He has received the International Social Science Council's prestigious Stein Rokkan Prize in Comparative Research.

Mary Stiner is an internationally recognized archaeologist in the anthropology department. Her research has had a major impact on anthropology, especially in Upper Paleolithic human ecology and demography, evolutionary anthropology, zooarchaeology and taphonomy.

Stiner received a National Science Foundation Career Award for her work on Neanderthal paleoecology. She has done archaeological fieldwork at sites in Italy, Israel, Turkey, Portugal, Greece and France.