Trustees Award Brown, Leidy with Tenure

The Wesleyan Board of Trustees recently awarded tenure to two faculty members. They are:

Lois Brown, professor of African American studies, professor of English, came to Wesleyan last fall from Mount Holyoke College where she was Elizabeth Small Professor of English. At Mount Holyoke, where she began teaching in 1998, she was awarded the Distinguished Teaching Award in 2004, and was director of the Weissman Center for Leadership and the Liberal Arts for five years. A literary historian, she focuses on culture, identity, race and gender in 18th and 19th century African American writing. She is author of three books and numerous articles, essays, reviews, exhibition guides, and has curated several exhibitions. She earned her B.A. from Duke University and her Ph.D. from Boston College.

Constance Leidy, associate professor of mathematics, has taught at Wesleyan since 2007. She specializes in knot theory, which is a field of low dimensional topology. She has been awarded two NSF grants, organized an NSF funded conference on “knot concordance and homology cobordism” held at Wesleyan in 2010, and has organized three other conferences. She is co-author of nine articles, has delivered 10 invited conference addresses, given 20 colloquia and seminar talks, and 15 research talks. Before coming to Wesleyan she was the Rademacher Instructor at the University of Pennsylvania. Her bachelor’s degree is from Tulane University and her Ph.D. is from Rice University.