Alden, Imai, Starr Awarded Tenure

The Wesleyan University Board of Trustees affirmed the promotion with tenure, effective July 1, 2009, of the following members of the faculty:

Jane Alden, associate professor of music, was appointed assistant professor of music at Wesleyan in 2001. Prior, she was an acting assistant professor at Stanford University, and an instructor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Alden was awarded a Wesleyan Center for the Humanities Fellowship and was a visiting research associate at Harvard University. She has been the recipient of a Mellon Center Mini-Grant, a Wesleyan University seed grant, and Wesleyan University Snowdon funding for a symposium.

Her research and teaching interest include manuscript production and music books in the 15th century; historiography of chanson in the late 19th and 20th centuries; The “New York School” of American experimental composers; the influence of early music on post-war British composers; music notation and visual culture; and intertextuality of 15th-century poetry and song.

Alden earned a B.Mus with honors from the University of Manchester, M.Mus in historical musicology at Kings College, London, and Ph.D. in musicology from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Masami Imai, associate professor of economics, was appointed an assistant professor of economics at Wesleyan in 2002. In 2005 he was also a visiting researcher at the World Bank. In 2008 he was named a Fellow at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) Center for Financial Research and received an FDIC Center for Financial Research grant. He is also the recipient of a Mellon Summer Stipend, a Carol A. Baker Memorial Prize for Junior Faculty teaching and research, a Mellon Faculty Development Mini-Grant, and five Wesleyan University project grants. He has published a number of important papers and has given several presentations at national and international conferences, and is affiliated with such professional organizations as the American Economic Association, the American Finance Association, and the International Society for New Institutional Economics.

Imai’s research interests include money, banking and financial markets; the economy of Japan; economies of East Asia; and political economy.

He earned his B.A. in economics from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and his Ph.D. from the University of California-Davis.

Francis Starr, associate professor of physics, was appointed an assistant professor at Wesleyan in 2003. He came to Wesleyan from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (N.I.S.T.) where he was deputy director at the Center for Theoretical and Computational Materials Science. He was also a N.R.C. postdoctoral associate at N.I.S.T. Prior to that he was a research assistant in the Physics Department at Boston University, a lecturer for the College on Computational Physics at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, and a research assistant at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He is the recipient of funding from the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Information Technology Research (ITR) program; the NSF’s Major Research Instrumentation Program; and a Wesleyan Fund for Innovation grant. He is also the author of several dozen peer-reviewed research articles, conference proceedings and over 30 invited talks.

Starr’s research interests involve computational studies of soft condensed matter, including complex liquids, nanocomposites, water, glass formation, gelation and polymeric materials.

Starr earned his B.S. with honors in physics from Carnegie Mellon University, and his M.A. in physics and Ph.D. in physics from Boston University.

“Please congratulate these faculty members on this important occasion and express your appreciation to them for their scholarship and teaching, their fine colleagueship and their commitment to the students who attend Wesleyan to receive a very fine liberal arts education,” says Wesleyan President Michael Roth.