Nearly two dozen scholars to join Brown faculty this fall

Additions include poet Creeley, critical theorist Smith in English Department

by Mark Nickel

Two prominent leaders of American letters – poet Robert Creeley and critical theorist Barbara Herrnstein Smith – will join the Brown faculty for the 2003-04 academic year as distinguished professors of English.

They will be among nearly four dozen new faculty next fall, including the first half-dozen tenure-track faculty to be hired into positions created through the Initiatives for Academic Enrichment.

At press time, 22 candidates had accepted offers from Brown, “and we are receiving responses daily from candidates in more than 20 other searches,” said William Crossgrove, associate dean of the faculty. “We anticipate that all our searches will be settled by the end of this month.”

Response to the current searches has been remarkable, Crossgrove said, perhaps reflecting the University’s sustained commitment to its goals for academic enrichment. In every search concluded this spring, the University has successfully recruited the faculty’s first-choice candidate.

Creeley, a native of Arlington, Mass., has published more than 60 books of poetry in the United States and abroad and more than a dozen books of prose, essays and interviews. Among his honors, the Academy of American Poets lists the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, the Frost Medal, the Shelley Memorial Award, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Rockefeller Foundation grant, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation. He served as New York State Poet from 1989 to 1991 and, since 1989, has been the Samuel P. Capen Professor of Poetry and Humanities at SUNY–Buffalo. He was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 1999.

Smith married her early interests in biology, philosophy and experimental psychology with her interest in English and American literature. She is the Braxton Craven Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Duke University and director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Science and Cultural Theory. Her current teaching and research focus on 20^th-century critical theory and contemporary accounts of language, science and cognition. Smith is an honorary fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. During her five-year appointment as distinguished professor at Brown, Smith will maintain her tenure at Duke and teach one semester a year in Providence.

In addition to Creeley and Smith, the faculty searches concluded at press time include 20 national and international scholars:

• Anna Aizer, assistant professor of economics, currently at the Center for Research on Child Well-Being at Princeton;

• Scott. W. Allard, assistant professor of political science and public policy, currently at the Center for Policy Research, Syracuse University;

• Nomy Arpaly, assistant professor of philosophy, joins Brown from the Department of Philosophy at Rice University;

• Jeffrey F. Brock, professor of mathematics (with tenure), currently assistant professor of mathematics at the University of Chicago, has accepted Brown’s offer but will defer his arrival until fall of 2004 in order to complete a fellowship;

• Brian Evenson, assistant professor of English (creative writing), will join Brown from the University of Denver;

• Jean Feerick, assistant professor of English, earned her Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in December 2002;

• Dmitri Feldman, assistant professor of physics, is completing postdoctoral work at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois;

• Matthew Garcia, associate professor of American civilization and ethnic studies, currently assistant professor of ethnic studies and history at the University of Oregon;

• Kenneth Haynes, assistant professor of comparative literature, joins Brown from the Department of Classical Studies at Boston University;

• Frank R. Kleibergen, professor of economics (with tenure), currently in the Department of Quantitative Economics, University of Amsterdam;

• Jennifer L. Lawless, assistant professor of political science, will receive her Ph.D. in political science from Stanford in June;

• Vesna F. Mitrovic, assistant professor of physics, is concluding her postdoctoral fellowship at the Grenoble High Magnetic Field Laboratory in France;

• Brian Moulton, assistant professor of chemistry, will join Brown from the University of South Florida;

• Ravit D. Reichman, assistant professor of English, spent a year at Tel Aviv University as a Fulbright scholar and will receive her Ph.D. this month from Yale;

• Thais Salazar-Mather, assistant professor of medical science (molecular microbiology and immunology);

• Roberto Simanowski, assistant professor of German studies, has taught cultural studies in digital media at the University of Jena, Germany, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1996;

• Richard O. Snyder, associate professor of political science (with tenure), currently an assistant professor at the University of Illinois–Champaign;

• Mark Swislocki, assistant professor of history, is a Mellon Fellow and lecturer in history for the Society of Fellows in the Humanities of Columbia University;

• Gabriel Taubin, associate professor of engineering (with tenure), comes to Brown from IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y.;

• Nicolás Wey-Gómez, assistant professor of Hispanic studies, currently teaches Hispanic studies at MIT.