Media contact: Noelle Lemoine, communications assistant; tele: (413) 597-4277; email: [email protected]
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., January 25, 2010 — On Saturday, Williams College announced the award of tenure to 10 assistant professors: Leslie Brown, history; MarÃa Elena Cepeda, Latina/o Studies; Alexandra Garbarini, history; Bernhard Klingenberg, statistics; David Love, economics; Brian Martin, French; Christopher Nugent, Chinese; Mérida M. Rúa, Latina/o Studies and American Studies; Olga Shevchenko, sociology; and Christian Thorne, English.
Leslie Brown
Brown’s research interests focus on American history, with specializations in African American and American women’s history and documentary studies. She is the author of “Upbuilding Black Durham: Gender, Class, and Black Community Development in the Jim Crow South,” which was awarded the Frederick Jackson Turner Award for the best book published on an aspect of U.S. history by a first time author. Her research has been published in a number of other books and she is currently researching black women’s migration from the South to the North.
Brown received her B.A. from Tufts University and her Ph.D. in history from Duke University. Before to coming to Williams, Brown taught in St. Louis at the University of Missouri and Washington University. At Williams, she teaches courses on civil rights and the history of racial segregation in America.
MarÃa Elena Cepeda
Cepeda’s studies focus on U.S. Latina/o and Latin American popular cultures. Her areas of interest extend to media studies, language politics, transnationalism, and community-based pedagogies. She has taught classes on Latina/o media, Latina/o language and literature, theoretical approaches to popular culture, and Spanish for heritage speakers.
Cepeda’s research has been published in a number of journals, including Popular Music and Society, Discourse, and Latino Studies. Her latest project, a book titled “Musical ImagiNation: U.S.-Colombian Transnational Identity and the Latin Music Boom,” has just been published by New York University Press.
She received her B.A. from Kenyon College and her Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of Michigan. Before coming to Williams in 2005, Cepeda was an assistant professor of Hispanic and Latin American Studies at Macalester College.Â
Alexandra Garbarini
Garbarini’s research interests include modern Jewish history, modern European cultural and intellectual history, and studies of the Holocaust and genocide. Her book on the role that European Jewish diaries play in contemporary understandings of the Holocaust, titled “Numbered Days: Diaries and the Holocaust,” was a finalist for the 2006 National Jewish Book Award.Â
Her current research delves into European cultural and legal responses to political violence and atrocities, as well as their implications for human rights and international law. She is at work on a book titled “The Justice of Violence: Mass Atrocities, Testimonies, and European Public Opinion before the Holocaust.”
Garbarini graduated from Williams in 1994 with a B.A. in history with a concentration in Women’s Studies, and received her Ph.D. in history from the University of California in Los Angeles. Since her arrival in 2003, Garbarini has taught a range of courses in modern European history, including Before the Deluge: Paris and Berlin in the Interwar Years, Europe in the Twentieth Century, Modern European Jewish History, and The History of the Holocaust.
Bernhard Klingenberg
Klingenberg’s research interests center on categorical data analysis, in particular multivariate binary and ordinal data, simultaneous inference, dose finding in Phase II clinical trials and statistical computing. His work has appeared in numerous publications such as “Biometrics,” “The Journal of the Royal Statistical Society,” “Statistics in Medicine,” and “Computational Statistics and Data Analysis.”
Since 2004, Klingenberg has been a member of the Williams Math and Stats department, teaching Categorical Data Analysis, Biostatistics, Generalized Linear Models, Regression and Forecasting, Introduction to Statistics, and Experimental Design.
Klingenberg received his B.A. from Technical University Graz in Austria and, as a Fulbright scholar, his Ph.D. in statistics from the University of Florida.
David Love
Love’s research interests focus on household savings, pension finance, and portfolio choice. His research has been published in journals such as the Journal of Monetary Economics, the Review of Financial Studies, and the Journal of Public Economics. In current work, he and his coauthors are examining the role of household leverage heading into the recent financial crisis.
He received his B.A. from the University of Michigan and his Ph.D. in economics from Yale University. He has also taught as a visiting professor at Columbia Business School and worked as an economist at the Federal Reserve Board.
At Williams, he has taught Principles of Macroeconomics, Intermediate Macroeconomics, Open Economy Macroeconomics, and a senior seminar covering advanced topics in macroeconomics.
Brian Martin
Martin’s research centers on gender and sexuality in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century French literature and film, as well as on Nordic literature and cinem from Scandinavia to Québec.
Martin’s publications include articles and reviews in a number of journals and edited volumes, including “The Comparatist,” “South Central Review,” “Contemporary French Civilization,” the “Journal of GLB Identity,” “Queer Exoticism,” and “The Future of Beauty.” His forthcoming book is titled “Napoleonic Friendship: Military Manhood and Masculine Affection in France.”
At Williams, Martin’s courses include: “War and Resistance: Two Centuries of War Literature in France,” “Sexuality and Seduction in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century France,” “Paris on Fire: Incendiary Voices from the City of Light,” and “Nordic Lights: Literary and Cultural Diversity in Modern Scandinavia.”
Martin received an M.A. from UCLA, and his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Harvard.
Christopher Nugent
Nugent’s research deals with medieval Chinese literary culture, with a particular focus on textual and oral circulation of poetry and methods of learning, organizing, and circulating knowledge. His book titled “Manifest in Words, Written on Paper: Producing and Circulating Poetry in Tang Dynasty China” will be published later this year. He has also published his work in The University of Toronto Quarterly, T’oung Pao, and Asia Major.
At Williams, Nugent has taught Basic Written Chinese, Introduction to Classical Chinese, Cultural Foundations: The Literature and History of Early China, China on Screen, and Crises and Critiques: The Literature and Intellectual History of Early 20th Century China.
He received his B.A. in Religious Studies from Brown University and his Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University.
Mérida M. Rúa
Rúa’s fields of interest encompass Latina/o studies, urban ethnography, community building and identity formation, ethnoracial relations, and theories of space, race, and citizenship.
Her articles have appeared in Latino Studies and Centro: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, among others. She has contributed encyclopedia entries to “Oxford Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in the United States” and is editor of “Latino Urban Ethnography and the Work of Elena Padilla.” She is currently working on a book titled “A Grounded Identidad: Places of Memory and Personhood in Chicago’s Puerto Rican Neighborhoods.”
At Williams, she has taught Latino Cityscapes: Mapping Place, Community, and Latinidad in U.S. Urban Centers, Latinos and Education: The Politics of Schooling, Language, and Latino Studies, and Home and Belonging: Comparative Explorations of Displacements, Relocations, and Place-Making.
Olga Shevchenko
Much of Shevchenko’s research has focused on the sociology of culture and everyday life. Her major interests include socialism and post-socialism, visual images, consumption and social memory.
Shevchenko’s work has been published in numerous journals including Social Psychology Quarterly, Social Identities, Journal of Consumer Culture, and Europe-Asia Studies. Her book “Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow” was published last year, and won a Heldt Prize for Best Book by a woman in any area of Slavic/East European/Eurasian studies.
She has offered courses at Williams on Images and Society, Memory and Identity, Culture, Consumption, and Modernity, and Communism and Its Aftermath.
She received her B.A. from Moscow State University and her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania.
Christian Thorne
Thorne’s research interests include literature and empire, the long eighteenth century, the history and theory of the novel, global cinema, and the Frankfurt School and critical Marxism.
In 2009, Thorne’s book “The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment” was published. Thorne is at work on “The Sea is Not a Place: Novels, Epics, and the Missing Stories of Globalization,” “Imperialisms Queer and Otherwise: Critical Theory and the Temptations of Empire,” and “The Black Hegelians.”
Since coming to Williams in 2004, Thorne has taught classes such as The Novel and Globalization, Magical Realism, A Political History of the Epic, and Introduction to Cultural Theory.
He received his B.A. from Wesleyan University and his Ph.D. in literature from Duke University.
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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 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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News: Laura Corona
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Published January 25, 2010
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