2025 Faculty Tenure and Promotion Announced

It is with great pleasure that we announce the promotions of seven faculty members. The following faculty were conferred tenure effective July 1, 2025, by the Board of Trustees at its most recent meeting:

• Royette T. Dubar, Associate Professor of Psychology
• Kyungmi Kim, Associate Professor of Psychology
• Valeria López Fadul, Associate Professor of History
• Alexis May, Associate Professor of Psychology
• Courtney J. Patterson-Faye, Associate Professor of Sociology
• Katie Pearl, Associate Professor of Theater
• Justin Craig Peck, Associate Professor of Government

Please join us in congratulating all of them! Brief descriptions of their areas of research and teaching appear below:

Royette T. Dubar, Associate Professor of Psychology
Professor Dubar is a developmental psychologist whose scholarship focuses on examining the direction of effects between sleep and psychosocial functioning among emerging adults. A secondary line of work examines identity and wellbeing among diverse groups of emerging adults within and outside the United States. She uses sophisticated and diverse methodology, and is credited with being one of the first researchers to demonstrate that troubled sleep may precede social media use (and not vice versa). She has over 20 publications in prestigious journals including Sleep Health, Emerging Adulthood, Developmental Psychology, and Psychology of Popular Media. Her courses include Research Methods in Sleep Research, Adolescence and Emerging Adulthood, and Sleep and Psychosocial Functioning in Youth.

Kyungmi Kim, Associate Professor of Psychology
Professor Kim is a cognitive psychologist whose main research program in the field of memory focuses on the self-reference effect, or the tendency for people to remember information that relates to themselves better than information that relates to other entities. Her work also examines how prior experience influences subsequent learning and memory. She has published papers in prestigious journals including Psychological Science, Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, Memory and Cognition, and Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. Professor Kim teaches Cognitive Psychology, Psychology of Human Memory, Research Methods in Cognition, and Advanced Research in Learning and Memory.

Valeria López Fadul, Associate Professor of History
Professor López Fadul is a scholar of the intellectual and cultural history of colonial Latin America and early modern Spain, with a particular focus on the philosophy of language and the history of science. Her recent book, The Cradle of Words: Language and Knowledge in the Spanish Empire (Johns Hopkins Press, 2025), explores how Spanish scholars and missionaries learned about the empire’s territories and people by researching the local languages. Professor López Fadul offers a wide range of original courses on colonial and modern Latin America, the history of the Amazon, the Spanish Inquisition, urban histories of Latin America, and issues in contemporary historiography.

Alexis May, Associate Professor of Psychology
Professor May is a clinical psychologist whose research seeks to understand the cause of suicidal thoughts and behaviors with the ultimate goal of improving prevention and treatment. She has published 50 peer-reviewed articles in journals such as Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety, Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, Preventative Medicine, and World Psychiatry. She developed the Inventory of Motivations for Suicide Attempts, which has been cited more than 100 times. She received a $1.4 million grant from the Military Suicide Research Consortium of the Department of Defense to support her research on couples’ crisis response planning to reduce post-discharge suicide risk. She offers courses on research methods, clinical psychology and the science of suicide risk and prevention.

Courtney J. Patterson-Faye, Associate Professor of Sociology
Professor Patterson-Faye is a sociologist and Black Studies scholar whose research is situated at the intersection of Black feminism, fat studies, and cultural studies. Her work has been published in Fat Studies, The New Black Sociologists, Sexualities, Contemporary Black Female Sexualities, and the Du Bois Review, among other books and journals.  Her book, The Body Contract: Black Women, Culture, and the Impossibilities of Fatness, explores the politics of the size of Black women’s bodies and is forthcoming from NYU Press. In addition to Introductory Sociology, Patterson-Faye teaches courses such as the Sociology of Nina Simone; Baby Got Back: Embodiment, Sexuality & Gender in Black Musical Expression; and Hot Mamas: Black Women, Sexuality & Body Size.

Katie Pearl, Associate Professor of Theater
Professor Pearl’s work as a director, playwright, producer, and co-artistic director of the Obie-winning theater company, PearlDamour, crosses boundaries between theater, installation art, and community activism. Her play, Ocean Filibuster, commissioned by the Harvard University Center for Environment and the American Repertory Theater, has been performed in many prestigious venues, including New York’s Abron Center for the Arts, Harvard’s Repertory Theater, the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans, Duke University, and Wesleyan University. She directs department productions and teaches courses on directing, devising, and creating live performances that do not fit into traditional theater models.

Justin Craig Peck, Associate Professor of Government
Professor Peck’s scholarship focuses on American political development, Congress, and the presidency. He co-authored a book, Congress and the First Civil Rights Era, 1861-1918 (University of Chicago Press, 2021), with Jeffrey A. Jenkins, which received the V.O. Key Prize for Best Book on Southern Politics. His second book, Congress and the Second Civil Rights Era, is under advanced contract with University of Chicago Press. He has also published two book chapters, two editor-reviewed articles, and six peer-reviewed articles in prestigious journals, including Studies in American Political Development. Peck offers courses on American government and politics, the American presidency, the national security state, and American political development and thought.