Wesleyan Confers Tenure to 8 Faculty, 1 Promoted

Wesleyan’s Board of Trustees conferred tenure to eight faculty members, effective July 1. They include:

· David Constantine, associate professor of mathematics
· Megan Glick, associate professor of American studies
· Kerwin Kaye, associate professor of sociology
· Jeffers Lennox, associate professor of history
· Maria Ospina, associate professor of Spanish
· Justine Quijada, associate professor of religion
· Lily Saint, associate professor of English

In addition, one faculty member was promoted to full professor:
· Nicole Stanton, professor of dance

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

David Constantine’s research examines the relationship between dynamics and geometry – what the geometry of an object can reveal about its dynamics, and what the dynamics of an object can reveal about its geometry. While his work focuses on the areas of geodesic flows, rigidity theory, and singular geometric structures, it also has broad connections that extend into group theory, probability theory, and number theory. Recent publications include “A Quantitative Shrinking Target Result on Sturmian Sequences for Rotations” (with Jon Chaika in Discrete and Continuous Dynamical Systems, 2018) and “Everywhere Divergence of the One-sided Ergodic Hilbert Transform for Circle Rotations by Liouville Numbers” (with Joanna Furno in New York Journal of Mathematics, 2017). He teaches a wide variety of courses, including Vectors and Matrices, Fundamentals of Analysis, Differential Geometry, Mathematical Statistics, and Differential Equations.

Megan Glick’s interdisciplinary scholarship weaves together American studies; the history of medicine, science, and technology; and critical animal studies to explore representations of difference along lines of race, gender, disability, and speciation, from cultural and scientific perspectives. Her recent book, Infrahumanisms: Science, Culture, and the Making of Modern Non/personhood (Duke University Press, 2018) examines 20th- and 21st-century conversations around certain scientific advances to demonstrate the ways in which the category of “human” has led to various forms of hierarchy and disenfranchisement. She teaches courses in cultural studies and the medical humanities, including Popular Culture and Social Justice: An Introduction to American Studies; Visual Culture Studies and Violence; Race and Medicine in America; Disability, Embodiment, and Technology; Health, Illness, and Power; and Biopolitics/Animality/Posthumanism.

Kerwin Kaye is a sociologist and social theorist whose ethnographic research focuses on the connections between social marginality and social control. His forthcoming book, Enforcing Freedom: Drug Courts, Therapeutic Communities, and the Intimacies of the State (Columbia University Press, 2019), examines the medical and legal responses to drug addiction; it argues that while today’s court-mandated drug rehabilitation programs are framed as less unjust than older models of criminal justice, in fact, these new programs reflect old paradigms and are just as punitive. He also recently authored a chapter on “The Gender of Trafficking, Or Why Can’t Men Be Sex Slaves?” in Understanding Sex for Sale: Meanings and Moralities of Sexual Commerce (Routledge Press, 2018). Professor Kaye offers courses on Introductory Sociology; Sociology of Sexualities; Sex Work & Sex Trafficking; and Drugs, Culture, and Society.

Jeffers Lennox’sresearch explores the cultural, military, and economic interactions between the British, French, and indigenous populations in northeastern North America in the 17th and 18th centuries. His recent book, Homelands and Empires: Indigenous Spaces, Imperial Fictions, and Competition for Territory in Northeastern North America, 1690–1763 (University of Toronto Press, 2017) uses archival evidence and historical cartography to make the case that certain territories generally understood as colonies, such as Acadia and Nova Scotia, were often simply “imperial fictions” in which the French and British declared a sovereignty that did not necessarily exist. In 2018 he received the Canadian Historical Association’s Clio Award for Atlantic History, and he was shortlisted for the John A. Macdonald Prize. He teaches courses on Early North America; Liberty and Loyalism; Homelands and First Nations; and Imaginary Empires.

Maria Ospina is an interdisciplinary scholar of contemporary Latin American culture, with a focus on Colombian culture and South American literature and film. Her research examines the role that cultural artifacts play in public understandings of violence, history, and natural space. Her book El rompecabezas de la memoria: Literatura, cine y testimonio de comienzos de siglo en Colombia coming out next month (Iberoamericana), examines how contemporary film, literature, and testimony contribute to public discussions of violence and trauma. She is also a fiction writer who has published a collection of short stories (Azares del cuerpo, Laguna Libros, 2017) coming out in English (Coffee House Press) and Italian (Edicola) later this year, and has other creative works forthcoming. Her courses include Violence and Representation in Contemporary Latin American Culture, Screening Youth in Latin American Film, Narratives of the Jungle, and Spanish American Literature and Civilization.

Justine Quijada is an anthropologist of religion whose ethnographic research focuses on ritual studies, post-Soviet religious practices, nationality politics, and comparative secularisms in Siberia and New Age shamanism. Her fieldwork in Ulan-Ude, the capital city of the Republic of Buryatia in central Siberia, examines relationships between indigenous religious practices and secularism. Her monograph, Buddhists, Shamans and Soviets: Rituals of History in Post-Soviet Buryatia, just released by Oxford University Press, compares Buddhist, shamanic, and civic rituals to make the argument that ritual became a place where Buryats could grapple with questions of who they were in the post-Soviet era. She teaches courses on Secularism; Ritual; Modern Shamanism: Ancestors and Ecstasy in the New Age; National Religions and Political Rituals; and Anthropology of Religion.

Lily Saint’s scholarship focuses on South African literary and cultural production. Her recent book, Black Cultural Life in South Africa: Reception, Apartheid, and Ethics, published in 2018 as part of University of Michigan Press’s African Perspectives Series, explores the relationship between literature, popular culture, and ethical life in South Africa under apartheid. She co-edited a special issue of The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry (2017) and has published numerous articles, most recently “From a Distance: Teju Cole, World Literature, and the Limits of Connection” in NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction (2018), which forms part of her next book project. Professor Saint offers courses on global and postcolonial literature and theory, contemporary and canonical African novels, and ethical theory, including: After Achebe: The African Novel II; Empire Writes Back: Postcolonial Literature and Film; and Rethinking World Literature.

Nicole Stanton is a dance artist working in the mediums of choreography and performance. Her work explores intersections between personal, cultural, political, and physical experiences with an eye towards celebrating the complexities of black cultures. Stanton’s choreography has been presented at venues across the country and abroad, including the Center for Performance Research, Gowanus Artist Gallery, The Wexner Center for the Arts, Triskelion Arts, The Minnesota Dance Alliance, Pro Danza Italia, and the 92 Street Y. She is the recent recipient of a Connecticut Office of the Arts Artistic Fellowship, an Albers Foundation Interdisciplinary Artist Fellowship, and a New England Foundation for the Arts New England Choreographers Award. She teaches courses on Dance Composition; Contemporary Dance Techniques; and Dance History, as well as specialized interdisciplinary courses such as Perspectives on Dance as Culture: Body, Community Environment; and Perspectives on Dance as Culture: Dancing the African Diaspora.