Williams Announces Tenure for Four Faculty Members

Media contact: Noelle Lemoine, communications assistant; tele: (413) 597-4277; email: [email protected]

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., December 15, 2015—Following the recommendation of the Committee on Appointments and Promotions, the Williams College Board of Trustees Executive Committee has voted to promote four faculty to the position of associate professor with tenure. The vote will be ratified by the full board in January, and the promotions will take effect July 1, 2016, for Jacqueline Hidalgo, Latina/o studies and religion; Sarah Jacobson, economics; Luana Maroja, biology; and Will Olney, economics. Hidalgo came to Williams in 2008 as a Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow; she was named an assistant professor in 2010, the same year Jacobson, Maroja, and Olney joined the faculty.

Jacqueline Hidalgo, Latina/o studies and religion

Hidalgo earned an A.B. from Columbia University, an M.A. from Union Theological Seminary in New York, and a Ph.D. from Claremont Graduate University. Her research focuses on U.S. Latina/o scriptural and religious traditions as loci for shaping relations of race and gender in the American West. Her book Revelation in Aztlán: Scriptures, Utopias, and the Chicano Movement, will be published with Palgrave Macmillan in 2016. Another book, Latina/o Religious Pluralism and Religious Hybridity is under contract with Fortress Press.

Hidalgo teaches courses including Latina/o Identities: Constructions, Contestations, and Expressions; U.S. Latina/o Religions; Revolt and Revelation in the Twentieth-Century Americas; Utopias and Americas; Reel Jesus: Reading the Christian Bible and Film in the U.S.; Scriptures and Race; California: Myths, Peoples, Places; Racial and Religious Mixture; and Queer Temporalities. She currently serves on the Committee on Educational Affairs.

Sarah Jacobson, economics

Jacobson’s research focuses on voluntary cooperation, reciprocity, risk preferences, and punishment. Her work has been funded by the Russell Sage Foundation and the National Science Foundation, and her articles have appeared or are forthcoming in various journals, including Experimental Economics, the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Environmental and Resource Economics, and the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics.

Jacobson teaches courses on microeconomics and environmental and resource economics, both at the undergraduate level and in the master’s program at Williams’ Center for Development Economics. She currently serves on the Campus Environmental Advisory Committee. She earned her B.S. in engineering from Harvey Mudd College and her M.A. and Ph.D. in economics from Georgia State University.

Luana Maroja, biology

Maroja earned her B.S. and M.S. from the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and her Ph.D. from Cornell University, and she conducted her postdoctoral work at the University of Cambridge, U.K., and at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. She teaches courses on evolution and genetics and is affiliated with the program in Bioinformatics, Genomics and Proteomics and the program in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. She currently serves on the ad-hoc Committee on Student Course Survey Scores.

An evolutionary biologist, Maroja studies the evolution of barriers to gene exchange. Her research asks how reproductive isolation evolves and how lineages eventually become distinct. Her focus on recently diverged species endeavors to understand the genetic changes behind barriers to gene exchange and speciation. Her work has been published in BMC Evolutionary Biology; Genes, Genomes, Genetics; Nature; and PLoS One, among others. She was a recent recipient of a grant from the Hellman Family Foundation.

Will Olney, economics

Olney is an international and labor economist whose research examines the causes and consequences of globalization. His work focuses on how global forces such as immigration, offshoring, trade, and foreign direct investment affect domestic labor markets. His articles have been published or are forthcoming in various journals including the Journal of International Economics, the Journal of Human Resources, the Canadian Journal of Economics, and Economic Inquiry.

Olney teaches courses on macroeconomics and international economics at both the undergraduate level and in the master’s program at the Center for Development Economics. He earned his B.A. from Wesleyan University and his Ph.D. from the University of Colorado, and he has held visiting positions at the University of California Santa Cruz and the University of Pompeu Fabra. At Williams, he has served on the Athletics Committee, the Schapiro-Hollander Users Committee, and as the economics department’s library liaison.

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Founded in 1793, Williams College is the second-oldest institution of higher learning in Massachusetts. The college’s 2,000 students are taught by a faculty noted for the quality of their teaching and research, and the achievement of academic goals includes active participation of students with faculty in their research. Students’ educational experience is enriched by the residential campus environment in Williamstown, Mass., which provides a host of opportunities for interaction with one another and with faculty beyond the classroom. Admission decisions on U.S. applicants are made regardless of a student’s financial ability, and the college provides grants and other assistance to meet the demonstrated needs of all who are admitted.

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Published December 15, 2015