Media contact: Noelle Lemoine, communications assistant; tele: (413) 597-4277; email: [email protected]
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., Feb. 4, 2009 — Williams College as announced the promotion of 12 assistant professors to the rank of associate professor with tenure, effective July 1. They are Lois M. Banta, biology; Melissa J. Barry, philosophy; Christopher Bolton, comparative and Japanese literature; Amy Gehring, chemistry; Edward Gollin, music; Gretchen Long, history; Nicole Mellow, political science; Allison Pacelli, mathematics; Katarzyna Pieprzak, French and comparative literature; Ashok S. Rai, economics; Eiko Maruko Siniawer, history; and David Tucker-Smith, physics.
Lois M. Banta
Banta’s focus is on microbiology and her teaching interests extend to human genetics, agricultural technology, and public health. She has recently taught courses on integrative bioinformatics, genomics, and proteomics, as well as microbiology. Her research is centered on interactions between soil bacteria and their plant hosts, plant defense responses, and bacterial genomics.
Banta’s research has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Journal of Bacteriology, Molecular and Cellular Biology, and the Journal of Cell Biology, among others. She served as a member of the National Research Council committee charged with reviewing the National Plant Genome Initiatives, and is program director on a multi-college grant from the Teagle Foundation for genomics curriculum development. The National Science Foundation, National Bioethics Institute, and National Institutes of Health have supported her research; she was a Fulbright Fellow at Leiden University in 2000. Before coming to Williams, she taught at Haverford College.
Banta received her B.A. from Johns Hopkins University and her Ph.D. from California Institute of Technology.
Melissa J. Barry
Barry’s research interests are in moral philosophy and its history (especially Hume), moral psychology, and practical reason. She has recently completed a book project, “The Normativity of Reason,” in which she develops a realist theory of ethics. Her work has appeared in the Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, and elsewhere.
At Williams, Barry teaches courses in contemporary ethical theory, free will and responsibility, metaethics, the philosophy of religion, and the ethics of Hume and Kant. Before coming to Williams, Barry taught at Harvard, where she received both the Phi Beta Kappa Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Roslyn Abramson Award for Excellence in Teaching. She recently spent a year back at Harvard on a Mellon Research Fellowship.
Barry received her B.A. from Wheaton College and her Ph.D. in philosophy from University of Notre Dame.
Christopher Bolton
Bolton’s research interests center on modern Japanese literature, particularly postwar and contemporary fiction, and animation. At Williams, his classes include Japanese Literature and the End of the World, Confession and Deception in Japanese Literature, and Love and Death in Modern Japanese Fiction. He also teaches comparative literature courses, including a tutorial on postmodernism and a seminar titled Sublime Confusion: A Survey of Critical Theory.
His forthcoming book, “Sublime Voices: The Fictional Science and Scientific Fiction of Abe Kobo” focuses on the interplay of science and literature in the work of the Japanese avant-garde writer Abe Kobo. He co-edited “Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams: Japanese Science Fiction from Origins to Anime,” a critical introduction to Japanese science fiction. He is also an associate editor of “Mechademia,” an annual series for academic work on Japanese animation, comics, and related arts. Before coming to Williams, he taught at the University of California, Riverside.
Bolton received his A.B. from Harvard University and his Ph.D. in Japanese with a focus on modern fiction from Stanford University.
Amy Gehring
Gehring’s research focuses on the unusual and complicated life cycle of the streptomycetes, soil bacteria that manufacture the majority of known antibiotics. Her lab is working to understand the regulation of this developmental process. Currently, Gehring is investigating the biochemical function for a particular protein that is essential to the sporulation of the aerial filamentous cells. This protein may serve as a regulator of sporulation, controlling and coordinating other molecular events in this process.
Gehring’s research has appeared in a number of scientific journals, including the Journal of Bacteriology, Chemistry & Biology, and Biochemistry. She has received a number of awards and honors, including a National Institutes of Health Academic Research Enhancement Award. She is the co-inventor on U.S. Patent number 6,579,695: Phosphopantetheinyl transferases and uses thereof.
Gehring received her B.A. from Williams in 1994 and her Ph.D. in biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology from Harvard in 1998. At Williams, she teaches courses in biochemistry and molecular biology.
Edward Gollin
Gollin’s interests include the analysis of twentieth-century music, in particular, the music of Bela Bartok. His research, exploring the development of Bartok’s harmonic language in the early twentieth century, received the support of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. His articles, on topics including Bartok studies, historical music theories, and mathematical models of musical structure, have appeared in numerous music theory journals. He is working on a book, “Bela Bartok and the Transformation of Tonality,” and is co-editor of the forthcoming “Oxford Handbook for Riemannian and Neo-Riemannian Music Theories.”
At Williams, he teaches courses in music theory and analysis.
Gollin received his B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, his M.A. from Queens College, CUNY, and his Ph.D. in music theory from Harvard University.
Gretchen Long
Long’s research interests include African American history, American women’s history, American medical history, African American literature, and emancipation. Her book, “Doctoring Freedom: The Politics of African American Medical Care” is under contract at University of North Carolina Press. She has written for the Journal of American History, and her review of “Intensely Human: The Health of the Black Soldier in the American Civil War” will be published in the forthcoming Journal of Southern History.
She was a fellow at Harvard University’s W.E.B. Dubois Center for African and African American Studies. At Williams, Long has taught courses on African American history from 1619 to the present, Washington and DuBois, American women’s history, and a tutorial on fictions of African American history.
She received her B.A. from Wesleyan University and her Ph.D. in history from the
University of Chicago.
Nicole Mellow
At Williams, Mellow teaches courses on American politics, including: The American Presidency, American Political Parties, Continuity and Change in American Politics, Interpretations of American Politics, The Politics of Place, and Power, Politics and Democracy in America.
She is the author of the book, “The State of Disunion: Regional Sources of Modern American Partisanship.” She has also published numerous articles and book chapters on such topics as elections, bipartisanship, political loss, the presidency, education policy, and gender and politics. Mellow most recently completed a chapter on the 2008 election titled, “A Blue Nation?” in the forthcoming book “The Elections of 2008.”
She received her B.A. from Vassar College and her Ph.D. in political science from The University of Texas at Austin.
Allison M. Pacelli
Pacelli’s research interests lie in the area of algebraic number theory, specifically class groups and class numbers, and global function fields. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Number Theory, Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society, Journal of Pure and Applied Algebra, and Acta Arithmetica.
At Williams, she has taught courses on algebraic number theory, abstract algebra, Galois theory, and a tutorial on mathematical proof and argumentation. She has also developed two new courses in the area of mathematics and politics. Her book, “Mathematics and Politics: Strategy, Voting, Power, and Proof, second edition” (with Alan Taylor) was recently published by Springer, and she directed a professional enhancement workshop on the same topic for the Mathematical Association of America last summer. She has also taught for the Summer Program for Women in Mathematics at George Washington University and worked at the Harriet W. Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning at Brown University.
She received her B.S. from Union College and her Ph.D. in mathematics from
Brown University.
Katarzyna Pieprzak
Pieprzak’s interests encompass contemporary literature from North Africa, clandestine migration in literature and art, museums in Africa and the Middle East, contemporary art from North Africa, and postcolonial theory from the Francophone world. She teaches French language, and courses on contemporary fiction from North Africa, the writing of islands in French and Francophone literature, representations of Algeria, landscapes of migration in the Francophone world and museum studies.
Her forthcoming book, “Imagined Museums: Art and Modernity in Post-Colonial Morocco,” will be published by the University of Minnesota Press. She is the co-editor of “Land and Landscape in Francographic Literature: Remapping Uncertain Territories” and a special issue of the journal “Critical Interventions” on Africanity in North African visual culture. Her research has appeared in the journals Research in African Literatures, Journal of North African Studies, Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literatures, and in the collected volumes of “Land and Landscape in Francographic Literature” and “Nation, Society and Culture in North Africa: Essays on Contemporary History, Culture and Politics.” In 2006, she received the Getty Foundation’s Summer Institute Fellowship in Istanbul, where she worked on the topic “Memory and the City in the Middle East.”
She received her B.A. from Rice University and her Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of Michigan.
Ashok S. Rai
Rai is a development economist. His research is on how microfinance programs can reduce poverty by extending loans to people traditionally excluded from the financial sector. He has conducted fieldwork in Bangladesh, India, and Kenya. His research has been published in the Journal of Development Economics and the Review of Economic Studies. Before coming to Williams, Rai taught at Yale and Harvard.
At Williams, Rai teaches courses on microeconomics, game theory, and microfinance. During 2006-07 he visited the Indian School of Business and the University of Frankfurt. His current research is funded in part by the Harry F. Guggenheim Foundation.
He received his B.A. from Stanford University and his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago.
Eiko Maruko Siniawer
Siniawer’s research centers on the modern history of political violence, the history of organized crime and politics, and modern Japanese political and social history. She is the author of the recently published book, “Ruffians, Yakuza, Nationalists: the Violent Politics of Modern Japan, 1860-1960.” She has also written for Modern Asian Studies, the “Oxford Encyclopedia of the
Modern World,” and “Organized Crime and the Challenge to Democracy.” Among her many fellowship awards are those from the American Historical Association, National Endowment for the Humanities, Japan Foundation, and Social Science Research Council.
She was a visiting scholar at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University in 2006-07 and is presently an associate in research there. At Williams, she teaches Early Modern Japan, Modern Japan, The Japanese Empire, Approaching the Past: Practices of Modern History, History of U.S.-Japan Relations, Comparative History of Organized Crime, and
Historical Memory of the Pacific War.
She received her B.A. from Williams College and her Ph.D. in history from Harvard University.
David Tucker-Smith
Tucker-Smith’s research interests probe the standard model of particle physics, which describes the electromagnetic, weak, and strong interactions of quarks and leptons, but remain an incomplete theory. He studies how various extensions of the standard model can be tested experimentally, for example at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
At Williams, he has taught courses on Newtonian mechanics, mathematical methods for scientists, general relativity, and quantum mechanics. His research has been published in Physical Review D, Physical Review Letters, the Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Science, and Nuclear Physics B. He is the recipient of grants from the National Science Foundation and Research Corporation.
He received his B.A. from Amherst College and his Ph.D. in physics from University of California at Berkeley.
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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.
To visit the college on the Internet:www.williams.edu
News: Hillary Batchelder
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Published February 4, 2009
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