11 Faculty Promoted, 3 Receive Tenure

In its most recent meeting, the Board of Trustees conferred tenure to three faculty members, effective July 1: Roger Grant, associate professor of music; Clara Wilkins, associate professor of psychology; and Marcela Oteíza, associate professor of theater. They join eight other faculty members who were awarded tenure earlier this spring.

In addition, eight faculty members are being promoted: Kim Diver, associate professor of the practice in earth and environmental sciences; Erik Grimmer-Solem, professor of history; Katherine Kuenzli, professor of art history; Joyce Ann Powzyk, associate professor of the practice in biology; Patricia Rodriguez Mosquera, professor of psychology; Charles Sanislow, professor of psychology; Patrick Tynan, adjunct professor of physical education; and Tiphanie Yanique, professor of English.

Brief descriptions of their research and teaching appear below:

Kim Diver
Diver is an expert in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) whose research focuses on island biogeography. She promotes the use of GIS and other geospatial data analysis and visualization across the curriculum by providing GIS consulting to faculty, as well as a WesGIS workshop series. She has partnered with many local community groups to offer a GIS Service-Learning Laboratory course that allows students to apply GIS concepts and skills to solve tangible problems in the surrounding community. In addition to this service-learning lab, she offers courses on Introduction to (Geo)Spatial Data Analysis and Visualization; Introduction to GIS; and Advanced GIS and Spatial Analysis.

Roger Grant
Grant’s scholarship focuses on the history of music and music theory in early modern and Enlightenment Europe. His first book, Beating Time and Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era (Oxford University Press, 2014), which combines music theory, music analysis, and philosophy to trace the history of meter from the 1500s to the 1800s, received the Emerging Scholar Award from the Society for Music Theory. He has a second book, Peculiar Attachments: The Musical Origins of Affect Theory, currently under contract with Fordham University Press. He offers courses on Musical Materials and Design, Music Theory and Analysis, Post-Tonal Music Theory, Baroque and Classical Music, and Queer Opera.

Erik Grimmer-Solem
Grimmer-Solem is a scholar of modern German history, with specializations in economic and social history. His upcoming second book, Learning Empire: Globalization and the German Quest for World Status 1875–1918, under contract with Cambridge University Press, reinterprets the full arc of Imperial Germany’s history and offers a new perspective on the origins of the First World War and National Socialism. His scholarship on the Holocaust made headlines in Germany and was the subject of parliamentary discussions that led to the renaming of a military base in 2015. He offers courses on a wide range of topics in German history, the history of the welfare state, economic history, and historiography. He received a Binswanger Prize for his teaching in 2013.

Katherine Kuenzli
Kuenzli’s scholarship focuses on European modernism. Her second book, Henry van de Velde: Designing Modernism (Yale University Press, forthcoming 2019) presents the work of one of the most influential practitioners and theorists of design and architecture of the early 20th century. Working in Belgium, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, van de Velde played a crucial role in expanding modernist painterly aesthetics beyond Paris and beyond painting. Opposing increasingly militant nationalism around 1900, he made advanced painting the basis of an international aesthetic that transcended boundaries between the visual media. Kuenzli offers courses on van Gogh, 19^th-century French Painting, the European Avant-Garde, and the Total Work of Art.

Marcela Oteíza
Oteíza is a multidisciplinary visual artist and scenic designer whose research focuses on scenographic design for dance and theater. She has produced scenic designs in many professional venues and was recently the scenic designer on La Canción, which appeared at the prestigious Repertorio Español Theater and received many awards, including the Hispanic Organization of Latin Actors (HOLA) award for best overall musical production in 2016. She has also directed a documentary film Santiago(en)Vivo about street theater in Chile, showing how theatrical practices reveal the social and political histories of the city. She teaches courses on Text and Visual Imagination, Performance Art, Design and Performative Space, and Media for Performance.

Joyce Ann Powzyk
Powzyk is a biologist whose area of expertise is animal behavior and animal reproduction. She advises and mentors students who are interested in field studies of animal behavior, and she is currently serving as the faculty mentor for Posse IV Veteran Scholars. Her courses are immensely popular with students, and she teaches an average of 228 students each year. She offers traditional and First Year Seminar courses on Primate Behavior: The Real Monkey Business; Classic Studies in Animal Behavior; Biology of Sex; as well as Graduate Liberal Studies courses on The Human Animal and Animal Reproduction.

Patricia Rodriguez Mosquera
Rodriguez Mosquera’s research examines culture, reputation, and emotion, with a particular emphasis on the emotional experience of being (de)valued by others. She is a pioneer in the psychological study of honor and recently reviewed her two decades of research in an article titled, “Cultural concerns. How valuing social-image shapes social emotion,” in the European Review of Social Psychology. Other recent articles have appeared in Cognition and Emotion, Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, and Social and Personality Psychology Compass. She is currently associate editor of Frontiers: Cultural Psychology and was associate editor of European Journal of Social Psychology. She offers the courses Culture in Psychology, Research Methods on Emotion, and Seminar on Emotion.

Charles Sanislow
Sanislow is a clinical psychologist. His research aims to improve the way that diagnoses of mental disorders are made by moving away from diagnosis using clinical description based on expert consensus to using empirical understanding of core mechanisms. In collaboration with a team at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), he is currently developing an innovative new framework to guide future psychopathology research. His recent publications include “Connecting Psychopathology Meta-structure and Mechanisms” in Journal of Abnormal Psychology, “Updating the Research Domain Criteria” in World Psychiatry, and “Rumination is Associated with Diminished Performance Monitoring” in Emotion. He teaches courses on Psychopathology, Neural Costs of War, and Behavioral Methods in Affective Neuroscience

Patrick Tynan
Tynan is the head coach of women’s crew. His team has competed in four of the last five NCAA Rowing Championships and, in spring 2016, he led the Cardinals’ Varsity 8 to earn bronze at the NCAAs. This was the first at-large selected crew to claim a medal in the history of NCAA DIII women’s rowing. His team recently won back-to-back Little Three titles and numerous medals at the New England and National Invitational Rowing Championships. The Cardinals have also won races at the Riverfront Recapture, Head of the Charles, and Head of the Fish, and Wesleyan’s women’s rowing program is now among the top of the NESCAC and is competing with the most elite Division III programs in the country. He teaches physical education courses in Beginning Swimming and Swimming for Fitness.

Clara Wilkins
Wilkins is a social psychologist whose scholarship examines intergroup relations, prejudice, social identity, stereotyping, and the self. Her research seeks to understand social inequities in order to minimize their negative effects on individuals, groups, and society. Her recent publications include “When Men Perceive Anti-Male Bias: Status-Legitimizing Beliefs Increase Discrimination Against Women” in Psychology of Men and Masculinity and “The Threat of Racial Progress and the Self-Protective Nature of Perceiving Anti-White Bias” in Group Processes and Intergroup Relations. She offers courses on Social Psychology, Social Stigma, Research Methods in Social Psychology, and Advanced Research in Prejudice and Stereotyping.

Tiphanie Yanique
Yanique is an award-winning fiction writer, essayist, and poet. She has published two novels, one children’s book, and a collection of poems. Her forthcoming novel, Monster in the Middle: Fictions, which will be published by Penguin/Random House in fall 2018, explores the dilemmas of a young black man and woman living in a so-called post-racial America. She has received numerous prizes including a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, a Rosenthal Family Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Boston Review Prize in Fiction. She offers courses on Creative Writing: Focus on Race and Gender in Character Development and Girls: The Girl Child in Contemporary Narratives.