Tenure Awarded to Huge, Juhasz, Stemler, Weiss, Wu

The Wesleyan Board of Trustees reviews tenure cases three times each year during its meetings on campus, scheduled as the cases arise. At the most recent meeting in March, the Board awarded tenure — effective July 1, 2013 — to these faculty members:

Elijah Huge, associate professor of art, has taught at Wesleyan since 2006.  A licensed architect, his work includes private commissions and award-winning competition entries for the High Line (New York, N.Y.), the Bourne Bridge|Park (Bourne, Mass.), and the Tangshan Earthquake Memorial (Tangshan, China).  His writing and design work have been featured in Praxis, Thresholds, Perspecta, Architectural Record, Landscape Architecture, Dwell, Journal of Architectural Education, and Competitions.  His current scholarly research examines the historical emergence of architectural emergency devices, from the automatic sprinkler to the Vonduprin panic bar. He founded the atelier North Studio as part of the architecture curriculum within the Department of Art and Art History. Through it, students work in collaboration with each other and Huge to develop and produce research-driven and conceptually-driven projects with real-world clients. The work of the studio has been published widely and received awards from the American Institute of Architects, the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection, and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture. His B.A. and M.Arch. are from Yale University, where he received the AIA Henry Adams Medal and was editor of Perspecta 35: Building Codes.

Barbara Juhasz, associate professor of psychology, associate professor of neuroscience and behavior, came to Wesleyan in 2006. She studies the cognitive processes involved in word recognition during reading. In particular, she is interested in the interpretation of the visual input of written language. She is author or co-author of more than 35 articles and book chapters, eight of which include Wesleyan students as co-authors, as well as more than 40 conference presentations. She holds a B.A. from Binghamton University; her M.S. and Ph.D. are from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Steven Stemler, associate professor of psychology, came to Wesleyan in 2005. His research spans the intersecting fields of psychology, education, and assessment. His work has focused on innovation and effectiveness in the design and implementation of standardized tests that can be used to assess fundamental skills and attributes such as teaching effectiveness, learning, intelligence, creativity, ethical reasoning and intercultural competence. He is author or co-author of more than 45 articles, essays, and reports, has given more than 60 conference presentations and invited talks, and he serves on the editorial board of Learning and Individual Differences. His research has been funded through grants from the National Science Foundation, the Army Research Institute, and the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Prior to teaching at Wesleyan, he was associate research scientist and assistant director at the Yale Center for the Psychology of Abilities, Competencies and Expertise. His bachelor’s degree is from the University of Washington; his M.Ed. and Ph.D. are from Boston College.

Margot Weiss, associate professor of American studies and anthropology, came to Wesleyan in 2008. A cultural anthropologist, Weiss brings ethnographic methodology informed by feminist and queer theory to the study of sexuality. Her book Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality (Duke University Press, 2011) was awarded the 2012 Ruth Benedict Book Prize in queer anthropology and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Studies. She is the author of several articles and book chapters, and she co-edited a forum on academia and activism in American Quarterly. Her current book project, “Visions of Sexual Justice,” explores radical political desire at a time of economic crisis; her research has been supported by grants from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CUNY). She has delivered more than 25 invited lectures and conference presentations, and has served on the executive committees of the Association for Queer Anthropology and the Association for Feminist Anthropology sections of the American Anthropological Association. Before coming to Wesleyan, she taught at the College of William and Mary, Sweet Briar College and Duke University. Weiss earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago; her M.A. and Ph.D. are from Duke University.

Shengqing Wu, associate professor of Asian languages and literatures, has taught at Wesleyan since 2006. Her scholarship focuses on the literary and intellectual history of late 19th century and early 20th century China. Her book, Modern Archaics: Continuity and Innovation in the Chinese Lyric Tradition 1900-1937 (Harvard University Asia Center Press, 2013), examines the transformation of Chinese classical-style poetry and its complex relationship with the development of modern culture. She has co-edited a scholarly collection in Chinese, Lyricism and the Reformist Era, and a special issue of the Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese, and is the co-organizer of two workshops held at Harvard University and National Taiwan University. A recipient of the An Wang Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard in 2005 and the Junior Scholar Grant from the Chiang Ching-kuo Cultural Foundation in 2009, she has recently been awarded the American Research in the Humanities in China fellowship in support of her second book project that deals with the relationship between image and text. Her bachelor’s and master’s degrees are from Fudan University, Shanghai, and her Ph.D. is from the University of California, Los Angeles.