2008-2009 Faculty Promotions and Appointments

Promotion to Full Professor

Wesleyan University has announced the promotion to full professor, effective July 1, 2009, of the following members of the faculty.

Stephen Angle

Stephen Angle, Professor of Philosophy, came to Wesleyan in 1994. He has served as director of the Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies, co-directed the NEH summer seminar "Traditions into Dialogue: Confucianism and Contemporary Virtue Ethics" at Wesleyan in 2008, was a Fulbright Research Scholar at Beijing University in 2006-2007, and was awarded Wesleyan's Binswanger prize for excellence in teaching in 2006. His research focuses on neo-Confucian philosophy, and his books include Sagehood: The Contemporary Significance of Neo-Confucian Philosophy (forthcoming from Oxford University Press) and Human Rights and Chinese Thought: A Cross-Cultural Inquiry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

He holds a B.A. in East Asian Studies from Yale University, and a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Michigan.

Giulio Gallarotti

Giulio Gallarotti, Professor of Government, came to Wesleyan in 1987. His research and teaching focus on international relations, political economy, international organization, and diplomacy. He is author of numerous articles; his most recent book, The Power Curse: Real Influence and Illusion in International Relations, on "hard power," is forthcoming from Lynne Rienner Press; and his book, The Power Balance, on "soft power" is in progress. He is also author of The Anatomy of an International Monetary Regime: The Classical Gold Standard 1880-1914 (Oxford University Press, 1995) as well as numerous articles and essays.

He earned his B.A., Phi Beta Kappa, from Hunter College; his M.I.A. and Ph.D. are from Columbia University.

Peter Gottschalk

Peter Gottschalk, Professor of Religion, has taught at Wesleyan since 2002. He was awarded the Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad Fellowship grant in 2004, and the Mellon New Initiative grant for 2004-2006. His books include: Classifying Religion: British Scientism and the Discovery of Hindu and Muslim Indias (forthcoming from Oxford University Press), Islamophobia: Making Muslims the Enemy, co-authored with Gabriel Greenberg (Rowen & Littlefield, 2007), and Beyond Hindu and Muslim: Multiple Identity in Narratives from Village India (New York and Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000 and 2001).

He earned his B.A. in history, cum laude with honors, from College of the Holy Cross, his M.A. in South Asian Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and his Ph.D. in history of religions from the University of Chicago.

Appointment to an Endowed Professorship

Wesleyan University has announced an appointment to an endowed professorship.

Elizabeth Willis

Elizabeth Willis, Associate Professor of English, has been appointed Shapiro-Silverberg Associate Professor of Creative Writing. Her books of poetry include Meteoric Flowers (Wesleyan 2006), Turneresque (Burning Deck, 2003), and The Human Abstract (Penguin 1995). Her most recent collection was released this spring in French translation. Her work has received awards and fellowships from the National Poetry Series, the Walter Thayer Foundation, the Howard Foundation, and the California Council for the Arts, along with residencies at Brown University, the MacDowell Colony, and the Centre Internationale de Poesie in Marseille. Her work appears in numerous anthologies, most recently American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology (2009). Her critical writing on poetry and visual culture focuses on the intersections of public and private life, the effects of political and technological developments on aesthetic production, and the relation of poets to their sources. An edited volume of essays entitled Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place was published last year by University of Iowa Press. Before coming to Wesleyan in 2002, she was Distinguished Writer in Residence in the MFA program at Mills College. This summer she is completing her fifth book of poems.

The Shapiro-Silverberg Chair in Creative Writing was endowed by John Shapiro '74 and Shonni Silverberg '76.

Promotion with Tenure

Wesleyan University has announced the promotion with tenure, effective July 1, 2009, of the following members of the faculty.

Jane Alden

Jane Alden, associate professor of music, was appointed assistant professor of music at Wesleyan in 2001. Prior, she was an acting assistant professor at Stanford University, and an instructor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Alden was awarded a Wesleyan Center for the Humanities Fellowship and was a visiting research associate at Harvard University. She has been the recipient of a Mellon Center Mini-Grant, a Wesleyan University seed grant, and Wesleyan University Snowdon funding for a symposium.

Her research and teaching interest include manuscript production and music books in the 15th century; historiography of chanson in the late 19th and 20th centuries; The "New York School" of American experimental composers; the influence of early music on post-war British composers; music notation and visual culture; and intertextuality of 15th-century poetry and song.

Alden earned a B.Mus with honors from the University of Manchester, M.Mus in historical musicology at Kings College, London, and Ph.D. in musicology from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Norman Danner

Norman Danner, associate professor of computer science, was appointed assistant professor of computer Science in August 2002. Before coming to Wesleyan he was the VIGRE assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the recipient of a National Science Foundation (NSF) CPATH CB Collaborative Grant, a Mellon Foundation Grant and a Wesleyan University Ethical Reasoning Course Grant.

Danner's teaching interests focus on open-source software development. His research interests are primarily focused on the development of practical programming languages with guaranteed resource usage and low-latency networks for anonymous web-browsing.

Danner earned a B.A. in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Indiana University.

Fernando Degiovanni

Fernando Degiovanni, associate professor of romance languages and literatures, was appointed an assistant professor of romance languages and literatures at Wesleyan in 2002 and has been a member of the Latin American Studies Program. He came to Wesleyan from the University of Maryland, College Park, where he was a teaching assistant while a Ph.D. candidate. He has received a Council for Scientific Research Fellowship, a Wesleyan University Project Grant and a Center for the Humanities Grant. He is the author of the book Los textos de la patria: nacionalismo, políticas culturales y canon en Argentina, as well as several scholarly articles and reviews.

He specializes in issues of nationalism, cultural politics and canon formation in Argentina, focusing on the first popular series of national "classic" authors in early 20th century. His research explores the ways in which opposing intellectual projects attempted to build and impose contrasting versions of the Argentine cultural tradition in times of massive immigration and democratic institutionalization.

Degiovanni received his Profesor en Letras Modernas and a Licenciado en Letras Modernas from the University of Cordoba in Argentina, and M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, College Park.

Masami Imai

Masami Imai, associate professor of economics, was appointed an assistant professor of economics at Wesleyan in 2002. In 2005 he was also a visiting researcher at the World Bank. In 2008 he was named a Fellow at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) Center for Financial Research and received an FDIC Center for Financial Research grant. He is also the recipient of a Mellon Summer Stipend, a Carol A. Baker Memorial Prize for Junior Faculty teaching and research, a Mellon Faculty Development Mini-Grant, and five Wesleyan University project grants. He has published a number of important papers and has given several presentations at national and international conferences, and is affiliated with such professional organizations as the American Economic Association, the American Finance Association, and the International Society for New Institutional Economics.

Imai's research interests include money, banking and financial markets; the economy of Japan; economies of East Asia; and political economy.

He earned his B.A. in economics from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and his Ph.D. from the University of California-Davis.

Yuriy Kordonskiy

Yuriy Kordonskiy, associate professor of theater, was appointed assistant professor at Wesleyan in 2002.

Previously he was visiting assistant professor at George Washington University. He has served as head of directing in the Theatermakers program at the O'Neill Theater Center, and was visiting artist at Columbia University in Spring 2007.

He teaches acting and directing, and has performed and directed internationally. His recent directed productions include Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, Galin's Sorry, and Gogol's The Marriage.

He holds an M.S. from Odessa State University, Ukraine, an M.F.A. in acting, and an additional M.F.A. in directing, both from the State Academy of Theatre Arts, St. Petersburg, Russia.

Timothy Ku

Timothy Ku, associate professor of earth and environmental sciences, was appointed assistant professor at Wesleyan in 2003. Before coming to Wesleyan, he was a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan. He has received grants from the Keck Geology Consortium and the Connecticut Institute for Water Resources.

His research area is biogeochemistry. As a low-temperature geochemist, he applies chemical methods, particularly the examination of the elemental and isotopic composition of gases, waters, and sediments, to better understand the biogeochemical process. His research is based in the field as well as the laboratory, with a primary interest in sedimentary geochemistry across soil, groundwater, lakes and coastal marine sediment. He has authored or co-authored several papers. His work is revising the field's understanding of ion cycling in oceans and, more broadly, of oceanic sediments in the geological record.

He earned his B.S. cum laude in geology from the University of Rochester; his M.S. and Ph.D. are in geology from the University of Michigan.

Katherine Kuenzli

Katherine Kuenzli, associate professor of art history, was appointed assistant professor at Wesleyan in 2002. She has worked in the department of prints at the Museum of Modern Art, at the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology, and in the department of prints, photographs and drawings at the Yale University Art Gallery.

She specializes in modern European art history of the 19th and 20th centuries, concentrating on the Nabis, a group of French Symbolist painters most active and influential from 1890 to 1905, which included artists such as Maurice Denis, Édouard Villard, Pierre Bonnard and Paul Ranson. Her book, The Nabis and Intimate Modernism: Painting and the Decorative at the Fin-de-Siécle, is forthcoming from Ashgate, and her current project, Dionysian Modernism, 1900-1914, is a book-length study of how classicism became a vital and unorthodox idiom for modernist artists working in Germany in the first decades of the 20th century.

She earned her B.A. in the history of art cum laude with distinction in the major from Yale University; her M.A. and Ph.D. are in the history of art from the University of California, Berkeley.

Robert Lane

Robert Lane, associate professor of molecular biology and biochemistry, was appointed assistant professor at Wesleyan in 2002. Previously he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington's Department of Molecular Biotechnology and at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center's human biology division in Seattle. He has received a National Institute of Health training grant postdoctoral award, and an NIH grant to study pheromone receptor genomic evolution and gene regulation.

His research specializes in the evolutionary development and regulation of olfactory and vomeronasal (pheromone sensitive) receptors in mammals. In particular, he addresses the question of how differentiation occurs in the expression and regulation of large numbers of possible receptors and how this influences speciation in evolution. He is co-author of several peer-reviewed research articles.

He earned his B.A. in biology at Colgate University, and his Ph.D. in molecular biology at the California Institute of Technology.

Francis Starr

Francis Starr, associate professor of physics, was appointed an assistant professor at Wesleyan in 2003. He came to Wesleyan from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (N.I.S.T.) where he was deputy director at the Center for Theoretical and Computational Materials Science. He was also a N.R.C. postdoctoral associate at N.I.S.T. Prior to that he was a research assistant in the Physics Department at Boston University, a lecturer for the College on Computational Physics at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, and a research assistant at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He is the recipient of funding from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Information Technology Research (ITR) program; the NSF's Major Research Instrumentation Program; and a Wesleyan Fund for Innovation grant. He is also the author of several dozen peer-reviewed research articles, conference proceedings and over 30 invited talks.

Starr's research interests involve computational studies of soft condensed matter, including complex liquids, nanocomposites, water, glass formation, gelation and polymeric materials.

Starr earned his B.S. with honors in physics from Carnegie Mellon University, and his M.A. in physics and Ph.D. in physics from Boston University.

Greg Voth

Greg Voth, associate professor of physics, was appointed an assistant professor of physics at Wesleyan in July 2002. Prior, he was a visiting assistant professor and postdoctoral research associate at Haverford College. He received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Career Award in 2006, a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2005, and the Andres Acrivos Dissertation Award in 2001 from the American Physical Society. He is the co-author of the article "Fluid particle accelerations in fully developed turbulence" published in Nature, as well as primary or co-author of several other scholarly papers. He also has a patent pending on an "Apparatus and Method for Real Time Image Compression for Particle Tracking."

Voth's research involves experimental studies of the dynamics of soft-condensed matter and fluid systems. Current experiments include those that use high-speed video imaging to measure particle trajectories in granular and turbulent flows.

He earned a B.S. with honors from Wheaton College, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in physics from Cornell University.

Tenured appointments

Wesleyan University has announced the appointment with tenure, effective July 1, 2009, of the following members of the faculty.

Ruth Nisse

Ruth Nisse, associate professor of English, was previously associate professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and has taught at Duke University and Stanford University. She has been awarded the National Humanities Center Fellowship, the Stanford Humanities Center Fellowship, and the Huntington Library Fellowship, among many other honors.

Her teaching and research specializes in medieval literature, especially theater and exegesis, with a focus on relations among Jews, Muslims and Christians in the Middle Ages. She is author of Jacob's Shipwreck: Diaspora in the Postbiblical Literature of the Jewish and Christian Middle Ages (forthcoming from Notre Dame University Press) and Defining Acts: Drama and the Politics of Interpretation in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame University Press, 2005).

She earned her B.A. magna cum laude from Columbia University, and her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

Michael S. Roth '78

Michael Roth '78, University Professor, became Wesleyan's 16th president in 2007. Formerly, he was president of California College of the Arts, associate director of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, and Director of European Studies at Claremont Graduate University. He was also H.B. Professor of Humanities at Scripps College, where he founded and directed the Scripps College Humanities Institute.

Roth describes his scholarly interests as centered on "how people make sense of the past." He has edited many volumes in intellectual and cultural history and is the author of four books: Psycho-Analysis as History: Negation and Freedom in Freud (Cornell University Press, 1987, 1995); Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth Century France (Cornell, 1988); The Ironist's Cage: Trauma, Memory and the Construction of History (Columbia University Press, 1995), and Irresistible Decay: Ruins Reclaimed, with Clare Lyons and Charles Merewether (Getty Research Institute, 1997). His current book, Living with the Past, is in preparation for Columbia University Press.

He earned his B.A. from Wesleyan University, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University.