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2009-2010 Faculty Promotions and Appointments

Wesleyan has announced the following promotions of faculty, effective July 1, 2010.

Promotion

B. Balasubrahmaniyan, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Music, was appointed Adjunct Instructor in 2003. He specializes in South Indian vocal music, which he performs throughout the United States and internationally. His musical recordings have been featured in Indian and Canadian television and in documentary films produced by the Indira Gandhi National Center for the Arts (New Delhi). He has delivered 10 papers and lectures and is author, with Joseph Getter, of "Tamil Film Music: Sound and Significance" in Global Soundtracks, edited by Mark Slobin (Wesleyan University Press, 2008). He holds a B.A., M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. from the University of Madras.

Holly Wheeler, Adjunct Associate Professor of Physical Education, was appointed Adjunct Assistant Professor in 2000. She is head coach of women’s lacrosse as well as assistant coach of women’s soccer. Wheeler is a well-respected lacrosse clinician who has been active in promoting the game at college, high school, and club levels. She has been involved in organizing the Connecticut Lacrosse Super Juniors, she is a member of the coaches’ council to the Intercollegiate Women’s Coaches Lacrosse Association, the Regional All-American Selection Committee, and she is the Wesleyan representative to US Lacrosse. She also is the director of the Lacrosse School, a camp for middle school and high school girls. She holds a B.A. from Princeton University and an M.A.L.S. from Wesleyan University.
 

Promotion with Tenure

During the academic year, the Wesleyan Board of Trustees maintains an ongoing process of tenure case consideration. During its most recent review, the Board awarded tenure to two faculty effective July 1, 2010.

Matthew Kurtz, associate professor of psychology, was appointed assistant professor of psychology at Wesleyan in 2007. Previously, he has held appointments at the Institute for Living in Hartford, Trinity College, Hartford Hospital, the University of Pennsylvania, the Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation and Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. He has been awarded numerous grants from the National Institute of Mental Health, Hartford Hospital and NARSAD.

His research focuses on schizophrenia, specifically the neurocognitive and psychosocial deficits of individuals diagnosed with the disease. His work has important clinical applications through the development of rehabilitation and treatment strategies that can enhance the success of those individuals in everyday life. Significantly, his research approach isolates the different ways in which the range of learning potentials among schizophrenic patients are affected so that treatments can be more effectively targeted. Kurtz has published 29 articles in peer-reviewed journals.

Kurtz earned his B.A. in psychology at Reed College; his M.A. and Ph.D. are from Princeton University, in psychology and neuroscience.

Typhaine Leservot, associate professor in the College of Letters and of Romance Languages and Literatures, was appointed instructor in the College of Letters and of Romance Languages and Literatures in 2003 before becoming assistant professor of both a semester later. She previously served as a teaching fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Her research addresses issues of globalization, gender, and the post-colonial experience within the large framework of French-language literary fiction. Her book, Le Corps mondialisé: Marie Redonnet, Maryse Condé, Assia Djebar (Paris, Harmattan, 2007), analyzes the fiction of three authors from France, North Africa, and the Caribbean, engaging them together as a way of bridging French studies and francophone studies in the context of globalization. She is also author of several articles and book chapters.

Leservot completed her undergraduate studies in English literature at Caen University (France), and earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Michael Singer, Associate Professor of Biology, was appointed Assistant Professor at Wesleyan in 2004. Previously he was postdoctoral fellow at the University of Arizona’s Center for Insect Science, in Tucson.

Singer’s research examines the evolutionary ecology of tri-trophic interactions between plants, herbivores and carnivores. In considering how herbivores can adjust their diet both for nutrition and also in response to predators and parasites, he has demonstrated self-medication behavior in woolly bear caterpillars in response to their lethal parasites. His work seeks to elucidate the mechanisms for this behavior as well as ecological and evolutionary consequences of a broader array of tri-trophic interactions within and across forest ecosystems. He has authored or coauthored 30 peer-reviewed journal articles.

He holds a Ph.D. from the Center for Insect Science at the University of Arizona, Tucson, and a B.S. from the University of Southern California.

Promotion to Full Professor

Ann Burke, Professor of Biology, came to Wesleyan in 1999. Burke is a prominent researcher in the field of evolutionary developmental biology (EvoDevo). Her work on the EvoDevo of the musculoskeletal system in vertebrates, especially how changes in expression of Hox genes leads to morphological evolution and the identification of the lateral somitic frontier in embryos, is now incorporated into basic texts of developmental biology. She has been awarded several major research grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. She has authored or coauthored more than 35 publications, serves or has served on the editorial boards of seven journals, has organized six symposia in her areas of research, and has delivered papers and given talks at more than 30 national and international conferences in her field. She earned her B.A. from New York University, and her A.M. and Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Andrew Curran, Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, came to Wesleyan in 1998. Curran's research focuses on a variety of topics related to the early-modern era, including the history of human monstrosity and the history of race in the eighteenth-century life sciences. He is the recipient of the Paul Klemperer Fellowship in the History of Medicine at the New York Academy of Medicine (2009-10) and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (2002). He is author of The Anatomy of Blackness: Theories of the African in Enlightenment Thought (forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press) and Sublime Disorder: Physical Monstrosity in Diderot’s Universe (Voltaire Foundation: University of Oxford, 2001). He also edited a collection of essays, Faces of Monstrosity in Eighteenth-Century Thought (Eighteenth-Century Life, Johns Hopkins University Press), and has published more than 10 articles and essays. He earned his B.A. from Hamilton College, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from New York University.

Natasha Korda, Professor of English and current Chair of the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program, has taught at Wesleyan since 1995. Her scholarship centers on Renaissance drama, particularly, the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, with a focus on the subjects of labor and property, especially women’s labor and property, in Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic literature and theater history. She was awarded the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship at the Huntington Library in 2002, and was a fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library in 1996 and 2002. She is author of Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), co-editor with Michelle Dowd of Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama (forthcoming from Ashgate Press), co-editor with Jonathan Gil Harris of Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2002), and author of more than 20 essays and articles. Her most recent book, Labors Lost: Women’s Work and the Early Modern English Stage (forthcoming), argues that the purportedly "all-male" stage of Shakespeare's time relied on the labor, capital and ingenuity of women behind the scenes of theatrical production. She received her B.A. from Barnard College, and her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University.

Ellen Nerenberg, Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, has been at Wesleyan since 1994. She is a specialist in twentieth century Italian literature and contemporary Italian cultural studies. She was awarded the Millicent McIntosh Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation (2005-06), and received the 2001 Howard R. Marraro prize, awarded biannually by the Modern Languages Association for the best book published in North America on an Italian subject, given for her book Prison Terms: Representing Confinement During and After Italian Fascism (University of Toronto Press, 2001). In addition to this award-winning book, Nerenberg is editor, with Carole Gallucci, of Writing beyond Fascism: Cultural Resistance in the life and Works of Alba de Céspedes (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000), and author of Making a Killing: Murder, Media, and Contemporary Italian Culture (Indiana University Press, forthcoming). She has published more than 20 articles and book chapters and delivered more than 50 conference papers and talks. She earned her B.A. from Stanford University, and her A.M. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

Appointment to Endowed Professorships

Mark Slobin, the Richard K. Winslow Professor of Music, is an ethnomusicologist whose research interests span the music of Afghanistan and central Asia, the music of eastern European Jews in Europe and North America, general theory of ethnomusicology, and ethnomusicology of film. He has served as President of the Society for Ethnomusicology, as President of the Society for Asian Music, as Editor of Asian Music, and as Series Editor of American Musicspheres (Oxford University Press). His awards include the the Seeger Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology (1969), the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award (1983 and 2001), Lifetime Achievement in Jewish Studies from the Foundation for Jewish Culture (2006), and Honorable Mention (with Chana Mlotek)—the Curt Leviant Award in Yiddish Studies from the Modern Languages Association (2008). He has been awarded grants from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lucius Littauer Foundation, and the International Research and Exchanges Board. He is author of more than 40 articles and author or editor of 18 books, most recently Music at Wesleyan: From Glee Club to Gamelan (forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press); Folk Music: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2010); Global Soundtracks: Worlds of Film Music (Wesleyan University Press, 2008); American Klezmer: Its Roots and Offshoots (University of California Press, 2002); and Fiddler on the Move: Exploring the Klezmer World (Oxford University Press, 2000). He received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.

Magda Teter, the Jeremy Zwelling Associate Professor of Jewish Studies, a scholar of Jewish history and early modern Europe, focuses on the multifaceted topic of Jewish-Christian relations, especially in the religious and cultural history of Poland. Her work has been supported by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, YIVO Institute, and the Yad Ha-Nadiv Foundation (Israel), among others. In 2002, she was a Harry Starr Fellow in Jewish Studies at Harvard University, and in 2007-2008, an Emeline Bigelow Conland Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies also at Harvard University. Her first book, Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland: A Beleaguered Church in the Post-Reformation Era (Cambridge University Press, 2006) was awarded the Jewish Studies Publication Prize by the Koret Foundation. She is also author of From Bread to Blood, from Sin to Crime: Sacrilege and Jews after the Reformation (Harvard University Press, forthcoming) and editor, with Adam Teller, of Early Modern Poland: Borders and Boundaries, in Polin, v. 22 (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2009). She is author of more than 15 articles in English, Hebrew, and Polish, and has delivered more than 35 conference papers. She serves on the editorial board of The AJS Review, the Sixteenth Century Journal, and Polin. She received an M.A. from the School of Oriental Studies at the University of Warsaw, Poland, and her M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. from Columbia University.