Two Assistant Profs Win Feliks Gross Award for Outstanding Research

Two Hunter faculty members have received the Feliks Gross Endowment Award, a coveted prize awarded each year by the CUNY Academy for the Humanities and Sciences.

The new awardees are Philip Ewell of the Department of Music and Christopher Gilbert of the Department of Anthropology. The award is presented to assistant professors in recognition of outstanding research, or the potential for outstanding research, in the humanities or sciences.

Ewell's specialties include Russian music and music theory, Schenkerian analysis (a method of analyzing tonal music), 20^th-century music, and rap and hip-hop music. He has published in Germano-Slavic, Indiana Theory Review, Journal of Schenkerian Studies, and Popular Music, among other journals; has given papers in North America, South America, and Europe; is the former editor of Gamut, the online journal of the Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic; and is the chair of the Committee on Diversity of the Society for Music Theory. Both a classical and a contemporary musician, playing either his acoustic or his electric cello, he has played under such classical luminaries as Gustav Meier and Pierre Boulez, and in backup bands for artists such as Johnny Mathis and Stan Getz.

Gilbert's main focus is primate evolution during the past 65 million years, with research projects spanning the Eocene to the present. He has played a major role in work that recently made headlines, the discovery of a new species of African monkey, Cercopithecus lomamiensis. Known locally as the Lesula, the new species was found in the remote lowland rain forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and is only the second species of African monkey discovered in the last 28 years. Gilbert, who conducted the anatomical analysis of Cercopithecus lomamiensis, noted that the discovery was significant because "it highlights the fact that there are still remote places left in the world that we don't know much about."