People, papers and presentations

John Boles, Rice’s William Pettus Hobby Professor of History, was elected president of the Southern Historical Association, an organization formed in 1934 to promote an “investigative rather than a memorial approach” to Southern history. Boles, who joined Rice in 1981 and became an ambassador for Rice to the Houston community, is the author of “University Builder: Edgar Odell Lovett and the Founding of the Rice Institute” and a number of books on Southern history. He retired as editor of the Journal of Southern History in 2013 after 30 years, but he is still teaching full-time. He recently finished a comprehensive biography of Thomas Jefferson to be published in April.

Stephan Link, an associate professor of chemistry and of electrical and computer engineering at Rice, is the first author of a 1999 paper named this month as one of the 25 most-cited articles in the history of the American Chemical Society’s Journal of Physical Chemistry. A virtual issue of the magazine, which is celebrating its 120th anniversary, includes “Spectral Properties and Relaxation Dynamics of Surface Plasmon Electronic Oscillations in Gold and Silver Nanodots and Nanorods,” written while he was a graduate student at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Also among the top 25 is a 1973 paper, “Thermodynamics of Electrolytes,” by Kenneth Pitzer, the third president of Rice University.