Four faculty members have been awarded endowed professorship positions.
“These donor-funded professorships are a vital resource for supporting faculty research and teaching excellence, and appointments are made to recognize exemplary scholarship and service to the College,” says Brent Carbajal, interim vice president for academic affairs and dean of the College.
The Pomona College Board of Trustees voted to support these appointments during their meeting in May.
Amanda L. Hollis-Brusky, professor of politics, was appointed the Charles and Henrietta Johnson Detoy Professorship in American Government, formerly held by Lorn S. Foster, emeritus professor of politics. Hollis-Brusky teaches courses on American politics, constitutional law, and legal institutions. Her research examines the dynamics of constitutional change and the role “support structures” play in that process. A go-to expert on Supreme Court politics and advocate for public-facing political science, Hollis-Brusky has written and spoken about the Supreme Court and the conservative legal movement in various media outlets, including NPR, BBC World News, the LA Times and many more.
Jane M. Liu, professor of chemistry, was appointed the Osler-Loucks Memorial Endowed Professorship in Science, serving as the inaugural holder. Liu teaches courses ranging from general chemistry to chemical biology to analysis of scientific literature. Her research projects focus on gene regulation in bacteria and mechanisms that contribute to the persistence of the bacterial pathogen that causes cholera disease. The Liu Lab is also interested in applying knowledge about how genes are regulated in nature to create novel genetic systems in the lab. Liu’s research has been funded by the NIH, the NSF and the Dreyfus Foundation.
Daniel Martínez, professor of biology, was appointed the Blanche and Frank R. Seaver Professor of Science, formerly held by Cynthia Selassie, emerita professor of chemistry. Martínez is one of the world’s leading scholars on hydroids, specializing in evolutionary developmental biology and the evolution of aging. His long-term work suggesting the theoretical “immortality” of the freshwater hydra has brought him national attention. In 2010, he received a $1.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health for research on “Mechanisms underlying lack of senescence in members of the genus Hydra,” and in 2013, he received a grant from The Immortality Project at UC Riverside to study the implications of hydra’s unlimited lifespan on medicine and increasing human longevity.
Colleen Rosenfeld, professor of English, was appointed the Phebe Estelle Spalding English Professorship, formerly held by Valorie Thomas, emerita professor of English. Rosenfeld specializes in the study of early modern poetry and poetics. Her first book, Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics (Fordham University Press, 2018), is a defense of eloquence, not as a sign of the aesthetic but as the source of a particular kind of knowledge closely aligned with the emergent field of vernacular poesie. Rosenfeld’s essays have appeared in ELH, English Literary Renaissance, Modern Philology and the edited collection Othello: State of Play. She is currently at work on a second book titled Seeing Things Otherwise: Variations on Form in Shakespeare and Picasso. Rosenfeld recently served for two years as interim director of College Writing.