April 8, 2005
Eight Approved
for Tenure & Promotion
The
Mount Holyoke College Board of Trustees, which met February 25–26,
approved eight faculty members for tenure and promotion, effective
July 1. President Joanne V. Creighton gave the following descriptions
at the
February 2 faculty meeting when she announced her intention to
recommend these
faculty
members to the trustees:
 Sarah
Bacon ’87, assistant professor of biological sciences, is
one of our own, with her undergraduate degree with high honors from Mount
Holyoke
and her Ph.D. in biology and anatomy from the University of Chicago.
Her current research focuses on the relationship of the mother and fetus
in pregnancy,
using the rat as her laboratory subject. Her work is supported by an
Academic Research Enhancement Award from the National Institutes of Health.
This work
has resulted in a number of well-received publications, and Sarah is
exemplary in the numbers of undergraduates that have been in her lab—24
so far. She is a very successful and popular teacher with wide-ranging
interests and
versatility, and she is an active and engaged College citizen.
 Nieves
Romero-Diaz, assistant professor of Spanish, studied first at the
University of Cordoba in Spain, and then earned a master’s degree and Ph.D. in
Romance languages and literature from the University of Oregon. Her scholarship
includes seven refereed articles and a book published in 2002. This work
is focused largely on early modern Spain, particularly the Baroque period
from 1580 to 1700, a period, she says, rather like our own, a period of “paradoxes
and contradictions, a period of political, social, and economic conflicts,
a period of cultural identity crises; a period of sexual and gender transgressions.” Her
work is exceedingly well received by outside reviewers for its groundbreaking
scholarship with a sophisticated command of the subject. She has
taught a wide range of courses, and is a resourceful teacher deeply appreciated
by
students as well as by her colleagues for her service to the department
and the College.
 Darby
Dyar, associate professor of astronomy and geology, received
a B.A. in geology and art history from Wellesley College and
a
Ph.D. in geochemistry from MIT. She has been an extraordinarily
prolific scholar, with 95 papers published or in press and counting,
doing important
work across a number of disciplines, often using complex techniques
in her analyses of extraterrestrial terrains of Mars and the
moon. Her work
is very well funded and has attracted a great deal of attention
in the scholarly world and popular press. She attracts many students
to her courses
and labs and has directed a number of theses. She’s taught a wide
range of well-received courses and been an active participant in
the College community, and brought good publicity to the College as well.
 Janice
Hudgings, assistant professor of physics, has a B.S. in engineering
and a B.A. in mathematics from Swarthmore College, and an M.S.
and Ph.D.
in electrical engineering from University of California at Berkeley.
She has a well-functioning research laboratory in electro-optics
supported by two National Science Foundation grants—including
a prestigious CAREER development award—and has published
a number of articles in leading journals in her field. She is
uniformly praised by
outside reviewers and colleagues alike for superb scientific
research. She is
also a very effective teacher who has vitalized physics on this
campus in the classroom, in the department, and in her laboratory,
where she
has had a number of student researchers. She is also involved
in a number of ways in the life of the department and the College.
 Becky
Wai-Ling Packard, assistant professor of psychology and education,
has an undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan
and a Ph.D. from Michigan State. She is a scholar interested
in the
intersection
of identity and motivation, in particular the powerful role
of mentors helping to facilitate the transition from possibility
to actuality.
She’s written a number of articles and given a host of conference
papers. Validation of this work comes from a prestigious five-year
National Science Foundation CAREER grant to support a study
of low-income youth as they transition from high school. Becky is
passionate,
a highly
appreciated teacher, and a deeply engaged citizen of the College
and community.
 Joshua
Roth, assistant professor of anthropology, received his B.A.
in anthropology from Columbia and an M.A. and Ph.
D. from Cornell. His book Brokered Homeland, published by
Cornell University Press, is highly praised for the depth of
its ethnographic
research in two distinctive contexts and languages, linked
by the migration stream of Brazilians of Japanese descent who
seek their
livelihood in Japan. This book is recognized as a major achievement,
and he is uniformly praised by reviewers as a rising star
in anthropology and Japanese studies. He is a dedicated teacher,
particularly good
with mentoring individual students, and he has adopted new
teaching strategies such as community-based learning effectively.
He is highly
valued by his colleagues in the department, in Asian and
Asian American studies, in the College, and in the Five College
community.
 Michelle
Stephens, assistant professor of English, received her B.A. in
English from Stony Brook and her master’s
degree and Ph.D. in American studies from Yale. She is a scholar
of great range and insight, “straddling a number of disciplinary
borders (among them literature, history, politics, feminist and
critical theory in general), complicating in original ways received
notions about nation and empire, race and identity.” She’s
given a number of talks and published a number of articles, and
forthcoming is her impressive book Black Empire: The Masculine
Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States,
1914 to 1962, from Duke University Press. Outside reviewers are
unequivocal about the strength and importance of her work. She
is also an outstanding teacher, highly sought after, who gets
hyperbolic teaching evaluations, and she’s deeply engaged
in the life of the department, of programs, and of the College.
 Ying
Wang, assistant professor of Asian studies, is equally impressive.
She has a B.A. from Beijing Normal University,
an M.E.D. from
the University of South Carolina, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from
the University of Toronto. She has two distinct fields: Chinese
language and pedagogy and literature of the Ming and Qing
periods, and she is going full speed ahead both with a prolific
publication
and professional activity record. She is very highly praised
by outside reviewers for her scholarly contributions, and
she is an extremely effective teacher as well. Most impressive
is the way that she has single-handedly built up the Chinese
language
program, the retention rates she’s engendered, and how
valued she is by her students. And on the service side there’s
one word to describe her: entrepreneur. She is active on
the Asian studies committee, and busy with a number of
projects, including her recent shepherding of an exchange
program with
Beijing Language University. Clearly, this is just the
beginning of a stronghold of Chinese studies at Mount Holyoke.
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