{"id":20798,"date":"2017-04-26T09:32:54","date_gmt":"2017-04-26T13:32:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bu.edu\/systems\/?p=20798"},"modified":"2021-09-07T11:28:03","modified_gmt":"2021-09-07T15:28:03","slug":"azer-bestavros-bonnie-costello-latest-warren-distinguished-professors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/azer-bestavros-bonnie-costello-latest-warren-distinguished-professors\/","title":{"rendered":"Azer Bestavros, Bonnie Costello Latest Warren Distinguished Professors"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Azer
Azer Bestavros, a CAS professor of computer science, and Bonnie Costello, a CAS professor of English, have been honored with William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professorships. Photos by Jackie Ricciardi<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

BU\u2019s highest faculty honor goes to computer networking expert, poetry scholar<\/h3>\n

Azer Bestavros and Bonnie Costello are the newest William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professors<\/a>. Both College of Arts & Sciences professors, Bestavros, in computer science, and Costello, in English, are recipients of the highest honor bestowed by the University on senior faculty members actively involved in research, scholarship, teaching, and University civic life. The appointments were announced Tuesday by President Robert A. Brown, who notified Bestavros and Costello personally.
\n\u201cProfessors Bestavros and Costello have followed different paths, but both have arrived at the same place: they are renowned in their academic fields and they are also wonderful citizens of our University. They bring honor to Boston University and we are proud to call them Warren Professors,\u201d Brown says.
\nThe Warren Professorships, which faculty hold as long as they are at BU and retain as emeriti upon retirement, were established in 2008 to recognize the University\u2019s most accomplished faculty members and are named in honor of BU\u2019s first president. Those chosen must have held a full-time faculty appointment at the rank of professor for a period of years, have demonstrated extraordinary achievements in research, scholarship, and\/or artistic production or performance, be recognized by peers and students as outstanding teachers and be actively engaged in teaching, research, scholarship, and the life of the University, and have demonstrated significant service to BU. The professorship comes with an annual scholarly allowance of $20,000 and funding for a month of summer salary.
\n\u201cWe are delighted and incredibly proud to be conferring Professors Costello and Bestavros with BU\u2019s highest distinction for senior faculty,\u201d says Jean Morrison, University provost and chief academic officer. \u201cBoth have devoted their careers to producing original research and scholarship of enormous consequence, pushing the fields of poetry and computer science in exciting and important new directions. The Warren Professorship was created to recognize the very best that our academic community has to offer, and we could not imagine two more accomplished or deserving recipients.\u201d
\nKnown for his expertise in computer networking, distributed computing, and high-assurance systems, Bestavros<\/a> is the founding director of the Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering<\/a>, established in 2010 to create a community of scholars believing in the transformative potential of computational perspectives in research and education. He has led numerous initiatives on cloud computing, big data, and cybersecurity, including the Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC) Exchange Project<\/a>, and has collaborated on data science research with faculty University-wide. He has led numerous interdisciplinary University initiatives, such as the Data Science Initiative<\/a>, the BU Computing Alumni Network<\/a>, and the Council on Educational Technology & Learning Innovation<\/a>.
\nBestavros is a leading researcher with a reputation as an effective relationship builder: with other researchers, with policymakers by helping analyze data to address issues like gender-pay inequity in Boston<\/a>, and with generations of computer science students during his 25 years at BU. He stays connected through a Facebook group with hundreds of students who have taken his Fundamentals of Computing Systems course over the past 20 years. \u201cI can see where these students go,\u201d he says, \u201cand they can relate what they are doing now, in many ways, to how I introduced them to computer science.\u201d
\nHe says he was notified about the Warren Distinguished Professorship a few days after attending a moving reception honoring University employees for a quarter-century of service. \u201cThis award could not have come at a more meaningful time,\u201d he says. \u201cIf you look at what I have been doing for the last 25 years, it has really evolved, just like our field has evolved, from sort of inner-looking research\u2014trying to make computers better, cheaper, faster, and more accessible. About halfway into my tenure at BU, computer scientists started looking outward, toward society and how we can change the world. We realized what we work on can make a difference, and that was reflected in my work.\u201d
\nBestavros\u2019 research ranks him in the top one percent of the most cited authors in computer science and has led to multiple patent applications, the formation of a start-up company, and more than $20 million in externally funded research projects. Among his numerous honors are the ACM Sigmetrics Test of Time Award<\/a> and the United Methodist Church Teacher\/Scholar of the Year<\/a>, in 2010.<\/p>\n

Professors Bestavros and Costello have followed different paths, but both have arrived at the same place: they are renowned in their academic fields and they are also wonderful citizens of our University. They bring honor to Boston University and we are proud to call them Warren Professors. \u2014President Robert A. Brown<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

An internationally recognized literary critic and authority on modern American poetry, Costello<\/a> has written widely about poets Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, and John Ashbery. Much of her scholarship has focused on the relationship between poetry and the visual arts. She has written about landscape and environmental poetry (Shifting Ground<\/em>, Harvard University Press, 2003) and the interplay of private and public spheres in still life motifs (Planets on Tables: Poetry, Still Life and the Turning World<\/em>, Cornell University Press, 2008). Her latest book, The Plural of Us: Poetry and Community in Auden and Others<\/em>, will be published by Princeton University Press this fall.
\nA member of the English department since 1977 and a full professor since 1992, Costello has served in numerous administrative posts, including director of the CAS Honors Program, director of graduate studies in English, interim chair of the English department, and interim director of the BU Center for the Humanities<\/a>. She has earned several teaching accolades, including the Metcalf Award for Excellence in Teaching<\/a> (1994) and the United Methodist Church Teacher\/Scholar of the Year (2004). Costello is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences<\/a> and has received Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Mellon, and National Endowment for the Humanities research fellowships. She has served as jury chair for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, as well as holding editorial and advisory board positions with several academic journals, among them Modernism\/Modernity<\/em><\/a>, the Wallace Stevens Journal<\/em><\/a>, Literary Imagination,<\/em> and Twentieth Century Literature<\/em>.
\nShe says receiving the Warren Professorship was unexpected. \u201cI was totally surprised. I was summoned by President Brown and thought I was going to be asked to be on a committee\u2026I am very pleased to have the recognition. I have made BU my only professional home.\u201d
\nCostello\u2019s passion for teaching is apparent. \u201cIt is such a joy that I get to teach contemporary writing as well as classic works,\u201d she says. \u201cI love introducing students to new writers. The canon isn\u2019t formed yet, so it is liberating for students\u201d to be able to analyze works that are new to them and express what they see as meaningful and why.
\nShe sees herself as a scholar and teacher who doesn\u2019t treat poets as objects of worship, but rather promotes the power of their work to make a difference in people\u2019s lives. \u201cLiterature draws attention to language. It can be a way of playing ourselves back to ourselves, heightening our awareness of the way we speak,\u201d she says. \u201cEven when our poets say things that are troubling, that is a very beneficial kind of awareness to have.
\n\u201cWallace Stevens said that he was an \u2018exponent of the imagination\u2019 of his society,\u201d Costello says. \u201cMy work certainly touches on ethical, psychological, and even political ideas, and I draw from them in my thinking about literature. But my purpose is not to use literature to promote ideas in those realms. Rather, I see the imagination as a fundamental part of human thriving, and literature as a way that humans not only reflect, but inflect their worlds. Whether I am thinking about poems, paintings, or pronouns, I am an \u2018exponent of the imagination.\u2019\u201d
\nThe 11 previously named Warren Professors <\/a>are George Annas, a School of Public Health professor of health law, policy, and management and a School of Medicine and School of Law professor (2009); Laurence Kotlikoff, a CAS professor of economics (2009); James Winn, a CAS professor of English (2009); Nancy Kopell, a CAS professor of mathematics and statistics (2009); H. Eugene Stanley, a CAS professor of physics (2011); Wendy Gordon, a LAW professor of law (2011); Thomas Kunz, a CAS professor emeritus of biology (2011); Catherine Costello, a MED professor of biochemistry, physiology, and biophysics, and chemistry (2013); Keith N. Hylton, a LAW professor of law and economics (2013); Howard Eichenbaum, a CAS professor of psychological and brain sciences (2015); and Robert Pinsky, a CAS professor of English and creative writing (2015).
\nThe University now has 13 William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professors. Once 15 faculty have been appointed, the honor will be bestowed only when a vacancy arises.
\nMichael Goldberg can be reached at michaelscottgoldberg@gmail.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BU\u2019s highest faculty honor goes to computer networking expert, poetry scholar Azer Bestavros and Bonnie Costello are the newest William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professors. Both College of Arts & Sciences professors, Bestavros, in computer science, and Costello, in English, are recipients of the highest honor bestowed by the University on senior faculty members actively involved […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1500,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[26],"tags":[156,169],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20798"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1500"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20798"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20798\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33974,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20798\/revisions\/33974"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}