Four at Williams College Named to Endowed Professorships

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

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., July 16, 2001 — Williams College has announced the award of named chairs to four faculty: Robert H. Bell as William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English; Gail M. Newman as Lissack Professor for Social Responsibility and Personal Ethics; Christopher L. Pye as Class of 1924 Professor of English; and Christopher Waters as Hans W. Gatzke ’38 Professor of Modern European History.

Bell, whose fields of expertise are 18th-Century British Literature and James Joyce has been at Williams since 1972. His teaching has earned numerous awards for excellence in teaching, including the national Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teachers in 1998. He is the founder of the Williams College Project for Effective Teaching, which provides support and teacher instruction for faculty new to the college. In addition to being the author of “Jocoserious Joyce: The Fate of Folly in ‘Ulysses'” and “Critical Essays on Kingsley Amis,” he has published widely in academic and literary periodicals, including the American Scholar, Modern Language Quarterly, English Literary History, and the Milton Quarterly. Bell has received a number of distinguished national fellowships, including Danforth, Woodrow Wilson, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. From 1981-85, he was editor-in-chief of the Berkshire Review. He received his B.A. from Dartmouth in 1967 and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1972.

A member of the Williams faculty since 1983, Newman specializes in German romanticism, psychoanalytic theory, and 20th-century Austria, and has published widely on these subjects. In addition to teaching German language, literature, and culture, she teaches comparative literature courses on narrative and psychoanalytic theory. Her research has appeared in German Life and Letters, Colluquia Germanica, and Germany Quarterly, among others. She is the author of “Locating the Romantic Subject: Novalis with Winnicott.” Newman has been a writing consultant for Theodore Roosevelt High School in the Bronx, N.Y. since 1995, and inaugurated Winter Study and summer programs bringing together Williams College and Roosevelt students in writing workshops. She was chair of the German and Russian department in 2000-01 and 1990-94 and chair of the Faculty Steering Committee in 1993-94. She has recently begun a term as director of the Williams College Multicultural Center. Before coming to Williams, she taught at the American Institute of Music Studies in Graz, Austria. Newman received her B.A. from Northwestern University in 1976 and her Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1985.

Pye, whose research interests include Renaissance literature and culture, literary theory, and psychoanalysis, came to Williams in 1984. His work has appeared in Representations, English Literary History, and the Journal of the Lacan School, Paris, among other scholarly publications. He also is the author of “The Regal Phantasm: Shakespeare and the Politics of Spectacle,” and “The Vanishing: Shakespeare, the Subject, and Early Modern Culture.” He has been a fellow at the Society for the Humanities and Social Sciences at Cornell University. He served as chair of the English department from 1998-2000, of the Faculty Compensation Committee in 1992-93, and chair of the Winter Study Committee in 1994-95. Pye received his B.A. from Oberlin College in 1975, his M.Phil. from University College, London, in 1977, and his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1984. The Class of 1924 Professorship was established under the will of H. Schuyler Cole ’24 in honor of his classmates.

Waters has been a member of the Williams faculty since 1989. A historian, he teaches courses on modern British and European history, the history of gender and sexuality, the philosophy of history, and the politics of nostalgia and collective memory. Waters is the author of “British Socialists and the Politics of Popular Culture, 1884-1914” and co-editor of “Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain, 1945-1964.” He is also the author of numerous articles on 19th and 20th century British history and was a 1996-97 fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. He is a member of the Royal Historical Society and recently served for five years as national program chair for the annual conference. From 1997-2000, he was director of the tutorial program at Williams and from 1998-2000, was Faculty Secretary. He has recently begun a term as director of the Williams-Oxford Programme in England. He received his B.A. from California State University at Long Beach in1977 and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1985.

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Published July 16, 2001