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Promotions Recognize Faculty Across the Disciplines

At the February meeting of the Board of Managers, nine faculty members were approved for promotion. 

Five faculty members received tenure and were promoted from assistant to associate professor:

Ayse Kaya

Ayse KayaPolitical scientist Ayse Kaya's research and teaching focuses on globalization and international political economy. She is particularly focused on multilateral economic institutions such as the International Monetary Fund & the World Bank, the impact of the large emerging economies on the multilateral system, global inequality & poverty, and the international political ramifications of the 2008 global financial crisis. She is the author of the new book Power and Global Economic Institutions.


Lara Langer Cohen

Lara Langer CohenLara Langer Cohen's teaching and research focuses on early American literature. Her current book project, Before Subculture, examines emergent ideas of the underground in the 19th-century U.S., asking what alternatives they pose to more familiar understandings of power and resistance. 


Jeremy Lefkowitz

Classicist Jeremy Lefkowitz’s teaching and research focus on Latin and Greek language and literature, especially comic and satirical genres such as Greek and Roman Comedy, Iambography, Roman Satire, and Aesopic Fable. In 2015-2016, he is on leave at the American Academy in Rome as a Rome Prize winner.


K. Elizabeth Stevens

K. Elizabeth StevensK. Elizabeth Stevens has taught acting, directing, and performance theory classes at the College since 2007. She has directed Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Witold Gombrowicz’s Ivona Princess of Burgundia, Jonathan Franzen’s new translation of Wedekind’s Spring Awakening, Franz Xaver Kroetz's Through the Leaves, and an original opera for children by Professor of Music Thomas Whitman '82 and Professor of English Literature Nathalie Anderson entitled The Royal Singer


Matt Zucker

Engineer Matt Zucker’s research is focused on generating behaviors for complex robotic platforms by leveraging techniques from motion planning, numerical optimization, and machine learning. His past research efforts have examined footstep planning for a quadrupedal robot as well as cooperative teleoperation of a humanoid robot in the recent DARPA Robotics Challenge. He and his students are currently developing behaviors for the human-scale Fetch mobile manipulator robot.


The Board approved the promotion of four faculty members from associate to full professorship:

Alan Baker

Alan BakerPhilosopher Alan Baker’s research interests lie at the intersection between philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of science. By focusing on how mathematics is applied in science, he gains insights both into traditional metaphysical and epistemological questions concerning the nature of mathematics, and into methodological questions about science.


K. David Harrison

K. David HarrisonK. David Harrison is a linguist and advocate for the documentation and preservation of minority languages. He has done field research in Siberia Mongolia, India, Micronesia, Paraguay, Chile, and Papua New Guinea, and has created Talking Dictionaries for over 100 languages. He specializes in the study of language extinction and revitalization, and serves as director of research for the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages. He is a fellow of the National Geographic Society and the Explorers’ Club.


Steve C. Wang

Steve C. WangStatistician Steve C. Wang develops statistical methods to address questions in paleontology and evolutionary biology. Wang's research areas include mass extinctions, macroevolutionary trends, and the incompleteness of the fossil record. He is also interested in statistical graphics and visualization, and statistical methods in baseball research.


Richard Wicentowski

Rich WicentowskiComputer scientist Richard Wicentowski’s area of research is natural language processing and computational linguistics. His work is focused in two major areas: semantic disambiguation and medical informatics. Wicentowski also serves as the College’s associate provost for educational programs.

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