Alumni Notes
Art, Art History & Visual Studies
Erica James (Ph.D. ’08) has been appointed assistant professor, tenure track, Departments of the History of Art and African American Studies, Yale University.
Marco Deyasi (Ph.D. ’07) has been appointed assistant professor, tenure track, Department of Art and Design, University of Idaho.
English
Christopher Armitage (Ph.D. English '67; Bowman and Gordon Gray Professor, Department of English and Comparative Literature, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill). The UNC Board of Governors has selected Professor Christopher Armitage to receive the prestigious Excellence in Teaching award. This distinction recognizes excellence in undergraduate teaching, and is presented to just one faculty member on each UNC campus. Professor Armitage specializes in seventeenth- and twentieth-century English and Canadian literature, and has garnered numerous accolades for his exceptional teaching, including the Tanner Award (2003) and the Bowman and Gordon Gray chair for excellence in undergraduate instruction (2005-2010).
Townsend Ludington Jr. (Ph.D. ’68), Boshamer Professor of English and American Studies, UNC-Chapel Hill has been elected chair of the North Carolina Humanities Council, a statewide nonprofit and affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
History
Christopher S. Celenza (Ph.D. ’95) has been selected as the 21st director of the American Academy in Rome, a leading overseas center for independent study and advanced research in the fine arts and humanities. His three-year term begins in July.
Literature
Christian Thorne (Ph.D. ’01) published The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment, a history, critique, and challenge of anti-foundationalist thought. He is an assistant professor of English at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass.
Master of Arts in Teaching
Mika J. Hunter (M.A.T. ’08) has been selected as one of four participants in the “Voices from the Field” Panel at the 2010 NSF Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program Conference in Washington, DC.
Virginia (Ginger)Schoenly Wilson (’62,MAT ’63, Ph.D ’75) retired at the end of the 2009-2010 academic year from her position as Dean of Humanities and history instructor at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics. In 2008 she was the reciepient of the School’s first Excellence in Teaching Award and in 2009 received the University of North Carolina Board of Governors’ Excellence in Teaching Award, the University’s highest honor for teaching.
Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science
Meredith Spiker (Ph.D. ’08) won a GE Aviation VP Level Growth Trait Award.
Psychology & Neuroscience
John C. Lefebvre (Ph.D. ’78), Professor and Chair of Psychology, Wofford College, received the Roger Milliken Award for Excellence in the Teaching of the Sciences. Dr. Lefebvre is an internationally recognized expert in chronic pain assessment and management. He has written extensively on the subject in journal articles, textbook chapters and presentations. Under his leadership, Wofford’s psychology department continues to receive high marks for the performance of its graduating seniors, with students consistently performing in the top five percent nationally on the discipline’s major field test given across the country each year.
Julie Paquette MacEvoy (Ph.D. ’07) has been appointed Assistant Professor (tenure-track), Boston College; Department of Counseling, Developmental, and Educational Psychology.
Religion
M. Brett Wilson (Ph.D. ’09) is an assistant professor in the religious studies department at Macalester College. His specialties include Qur’anic studies and Islam in the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and contemporary Turkey, where he has conducted field research.
Statistical Science
Laura H. Gunn (Ph.D. ’04) has been awarded tenure and promotion to Associate Professor of Biostatistics in the Jiann-Ping Hsu College of Public Health at Georgia Southern University. Dr. Gunn is also the College’s first recipient of the Award for Excellence in Teaching and Mentoring for 2009-2010
Natesh Pillai (Ph.D. ’08) has been appointed as Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics at Harvard University, beginning in fall 2010.
Fabrizio Ruggeri (Ph.D. ’94) has been elected as Fellow of the American Statistical Association, and will be honored at the Fellow’s presentation ceremony at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Vancouver in August.