7 Faculty Promoted, Awarded Tenure

In its most recent meeting, the Board of Trustees promoted seven faculty members.

The BOT conferred tenure on Lauren Caldwell, associate professor of classical studies; Stephen Collins, associate professor of film studies; Paul Erickson, associate professor of history; Matthew Garrett, associate professor of English; Brian Northrop, associate professor of chemistry; Julia Randall, associate professor of art; and Seth Redfield, associate professor of astronomy.

The promotions are effective July 1, 2015.

Brief descriptions of their areas of research and teaching appear below.

Lauren Caldwell
Caldwell’s research focuses on Roman social history, Roman law, and Greco-Roman medicine. Her recent book, Roman Girlhood and the Fashioning of Femininity (Cambridge University Press, 2014) investigates the social pressures that encouraged early marriage for daughters in elite families in the early Roman Empire. Her new research project is on Roman imperial intellectual life. She offers courses on Roman law, Greek and Roman medicine, the Roman family and Latin and Greek.

Steve Collins
Collins is a writer and film director who has produced several award-winning shorts that have been screened at the Tribeca, Seattle, SXSW, Clermont-Ferrand, New York Short Film Expo, and Boston Independent film festivals. His most recent work, The True Secret Life of Girls (2014) is a free-form documentary that follows a year in the life of two sisters. He wrote and directed the feature film You Hurt my Feelings, a New York Times and New York Magazine critics’ pick, and his first feature, Gretchen, won Best Narrative Feature at the Los Angeles Film Festival in 2006. He teaches courses on screenwriting, filmmaking, and sight and sound in the College of Film and the Moving Image.

Paul Erickson
Erickson is a historian of science who offers courses on science and technology policy, the history of rationality, and the economy of nature and nations. He is a co-author of How Reason Almost Lost its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality (University of Chicago Press, 2013). He was awarded the Prize for Young Scholars from the International Union for the History and Philosophy of Science in 2009 for his significant scholarly contribution to the history of science in western civilization.

Matthew Garrett
Garrett’s research focuses on the relationship between literary form and social history. He is the author of Episodic Poetics: Politics and Literary Form after the Constitution (Oxford University Press, 2014), which examines how episodic forms gave shape to the social, political, and economic conflicts that defined the moment of U.S. national formation. He teaches courses on American literature, literary history and literary theory.

Brian Northrop
Northrop’s research blends experimental and theoretical methods to design and synthesize new organic materials. In 2014 he received the prestigious National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development award with a five-year grant for his study titled “Selective Thiol-Ene and Thiol-Yne Chemistry, From First Principles to Organic Materials.” His research has also been supported by the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund and he is a 2015 recipient of the Thieme Chemistry Journal Award. He offers courses on organic and general chemistry, materials chemistry and nanoscience.

Julia Randall
Randall offers courses on drawing. Her own drawings challenge assumptions about corporeality, desire and the natural world. Her work has been exhibited widely and has featured in solo exhibitions at Garvey/Simon Art Access and Jeff Bailey Gallery in New York City and at Esa Jaske Gallery in Sydney, Australia, and has been included in numerous group exhibitions, most recently at the Tang Museum at Skidmore College and The National Academy in New York. Her most recent work, Oral Fixations, was featured at Handwerker Gallery in Ithaca, New York, as well as the Davison Art Center on campus.

Seth Redfield
Redfield’s research uses high-resolution spectroscopy to study the three-dimensional structure of the Local Interstellar Medium (LISM) and its influence on the heliosphere; and exoplanets and their atmospheres. He has received numerous research grants from National Science Foundation, NASA and the Hubble Space Telescope, including a current four-year NSF research grant on “Accessing Atmospheric Properties of Terrestrial Exoplanets: Ground-Based Observations of Rayleigh Scattering and Extended Atmospheres.” He teaches courses on astronomical pedagogy, stellar structure and evolution, exoplanets and galactic astronomy.