Jackie Orr, from the Department of Sociology, has received a Townsend Fellowship for work on a dissertation entitled Panic Diaries: Psychiatry, Cybernetics, and the Technoscientific Control of Social Dis-Ease. Through an examination of post-World War II developments in cybernetics and systems theory, Orr studies the recent emergence of “panic disorder” as both an historicallyspecific, gendered experience and a socially-constructed discourse symptomatic of recent transformations in the epistemology and practice of psychiatric knowledge. Complementing her techno-corporate model, she will present a sociological and historical reading of panic that is based in part on interviews with women diagnosed with the disorder.