Vassar Today

Portrait of Professor Yvonne Elet.

Eric Spitzer

Yvonne Elet, Professor of Art at Vassar, was awarded the Elisabeth Blair MacDougall Book Award for her recent book, Urban Landscape in the Third Rome: Raphael’s Villa and Mussolini’s Forum (Edifir-Edizioni Firenze, 2023), which details a study of the urban landscape of Fascist Rome through the restoration of the gardens of Raphael’s Villa Madama.

Bestowed by the Society of Architectural Historians, this award honors the most distinguished work of scholarship in the history of landscape architecture or garden design. The award was named for the late Elisabeth Blair MacDougall ’46, who was instrumental in the development of those fields. The book also received the David R. Coffin Publication Grant from the University of Virginia Center for Cultural Landscapes in 2023.

Portrait of Tova Gelb ‘25 as she receives an award from Jason Bartow ‘98.
Courtesy of the Jewish Sports Hall of Fame
Tova Gelb ’25 was one of two college athletes nationwide to receive the honor of National Jewish Sports Hall of Fame and Museum College Athlete of the Year for her contributions to the Vassar women’s basketball team. This achievement is given to one male and one female college athlete this year for excellence both on and off the field. Gelb has helped lead the Brewers to back-to-back Liberty League Championships and along the way has been named First Team All-Liberty League twice, the 2025 Liberty League player and Defensive Player of the Year, First Team All-Region III twice, the D3hoops.com Region III Player of the Year, a Women’s Basketball Coaches Association All-American and a D3hoops.com All-American. Gelb scored her 1,000th career point in January during a game in which she scored a record 36 points in a single game. Gelb has also excelled off the court and has been named an Academic All-District–Liberty League Honoree twice as well as a Third Team Academic All-American by College Sports Communicators, just the second such honor for a women’s basketball player in program history. This award was bestowed by Jason Bartow ’98, chairperson of the National Jewish Sports Hall of Fame on May 29, 2025.
Portrait of Mae Buck.

Courtesy of the subject

Mae Buck ’26 has been awarded a Beinecke Scholarship worth $35,000 in support of her graduate education. According to its official website, the scholarship program provides this aid for the graduate education of students with “exceptional promise,” aiming to empower highly motivated students to “pursue opportunities available to them and to be courageous in the selection of a graduate course of study in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.”

Born and raised in Chattanooga, TN, Buck is studying geography and anthropology at the College. Her research examines social movements, the politics of solidarity, and urban political economy, particularly in the U.S. South. Presently, she is studying the linkage between histories of the Black freedom struggle and contemporary activist efforts toward economic cooperation in Mississippi. Outside of research, she is a peer-consultant at the Writing Center and co-chair of the Vassar Working Student Coalition, an organization of student workers and allies dedicated to the improvement of student labor conditions on campus. After graduating, Buck hopes to pursue a PhD in anthropology or geography.

The Beinecke Scholarship received 93 nominations this year, and with this newest cohort, 759 students have been named Beinecke Scholars since the first awards were given out in 1975. Buck is the 13th Beinecke Scholar to hail from Vassar and the first since 2021.

Portrait of Professor Catherine Tan.

Lucas Pollet

Spaces on the Spectrum: How Autism Movements Resist Experts and Create Knowledge (Columbia University Press, 2024) by Catherine Tan, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Vassar, was awarded the Robert K. Merton Book Award by the Science, Knowledge, and Technology section of the American Sociological Association. The work also earned the 2024 American Sociological Association’s Outstanding Publication in the Sociology of Disability Award, as well as co-winning its Donald W. Light Award for Applied Medical Sociology.

According to the publication website, “Spaces on the Spectrum examines the autistic rights and alternative biomedical movements, which reimagine autism in different and conflicting ways: as a difference to be accepted or as a sickness to treat. Both, however, provide a window into how ideas that conflict with dominant beliefs develop, take hold, and persist . . . Spaces on the Spectrum offers timely insights into the roles of shared identity and communal networks in movements that question scientific and medical authority.”

Portrait of Professor David Means.

Buck Lewis

David Means, Visiting Associate Professor of English at Vassar, is the 2025 recipient of the PEN/Bernard and Ann Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. This prize, awarded by the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, distinguishes authors who, according to its website, have displayed “exceptional achievement in the short story form.”

Means is the author of several short-story collections, including Two Nurses, Smoking; Instructions for a Funeral; The Spot, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; Assorted Fire Events, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and The Secret Goldfish. His novel Hystopia was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. A Guggenheim Fellow and three-time winner of the O. Henry Prize, Means has had stories published in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, and many other publications.

Means will be honored at the annual PEN/Malamud Award Ceremony, held in partnership with American University, in December.

—Section written and compiled by Nina Sandman ’26

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