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Trinity Computer Scientist Named Fulbright Scholar

Associate Professor of Computer Science Ewa Syta has received a prestigious Fulbright U.S. Scholar award for 2024-25 to conduct research in her native country of Poland. In collaboration with researchers at Poland’s National Research Institute (NASK) under the supervision of the Ministry of Digital Affairs, Syta plans to develop a long-term strategy for the implementation of a digital identity wallet for Poland.

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Professor to Lead National Academic Freedom Center

Isaac Kamola, associate professor of political science at Trinity College, has been appointed director of the American Association of University Professors’ new Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom. Funded by a two-and-a-half-year $1.5 Million Mellon Foundation grant to the AAUP, Isaac will be responsible for collaborating with AAUP staff and outside experts to research and write a “threat assessment” and disseminate the research to varied audiences.

Current Academic Year

David Sterling Brown
Associate Professor of English

  • “Querying the White Other,” Shakespeare Lecture Series, Hobart and William Smith Colleges (October 2024)
  • “Page to Stage in the Digital Age,” Digital Theatre+ and Shakespeare Association of America Webinar (September 2024)
  • Shakespeare’s White Others and Black Shakespeare,” Contours: The Cambridge Literary Studies Hour Webinar (September 2024)
  • “Hood Pedagogy: Exploring Shakespeare from Within,” International Shakespeare Conference, Stratford-Upon-Avon, England (July 2024)
  • “Tempests of the Mind: Exploring Climate Change, Shakespeare, and the Human Experience,” New Haven Arts and Ideas Festival, New Haven, Conn. (June 2024)
  • “Creating Space for Innovation in the Arts,” Yale University Innovation Summit, New Haven, Conn. (May 2024)
  • DEI Faculty Fellow, Trinity College, Hartford (2024-2025)
  • Community Learning Faculty Fellowship, Trinity College, Hartford (2024-2025)

Stefanie Chambers
John R. Reitemeyer Term Professor of Political Science

Tasmin Jones
Ellsworth Morton Tracy Lecturer and Associate Professor of Religious Studies

  • “Facing Climate Crisis: Attention as Method,” plenary lecture presented at International Network in Philosophy of Religion, Perugia, Italy (June 2024).
  • “Erotic Responsibility: Phenomenology, Ethics, and the Study of Religion,” keynote address at the Northeast Philosophy of Religion Colloquium, Huntington, N.Y. (September 2024)

Robert Kirschbaum
Professor of Art

  • Recipient of a 2024-25 Fellowship Grant in art from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. These grants are designed to assist Jewish individuals and organizations in carrying out independent, scholarly, literary, or art projects in a field of Jewish specialization, and contribute to the ongoing preservation and creation of global Jewish culture.

Tim Landry
Associate Professor of Anthropology and Religious Studies

  • Named editor with anthropologist Alma Gottlieb) for the University of Pennsylvania Press’s Contemporary Ethnography Series. Founded in 1989, the series encourages ethnographic writing that gives voice to the people whose lives it records, to recreate those lives rather than merely describe them, and to encompass in this recreation the complexity, ambiguity, and emotion that are central to human experience.

 

Academic Year 2023-24

Professional Leadership

Susan DiVietro,
Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology

Lucy Ferris
Writer-in-Residence, Emerita

  • Named the president of Afghan Female Student Outreach, an international collective of 70 professors teaching remote, synchronous classes to approximately 400 university women within Afghanistan who were expelled from university by the Taliban.

Scott Gac
Professor of History and American Studies

Francisco Goldman
Allan K. Smith Professor of English Language and Literature

Susan A. Masino
Vernon D. Roosa Professor of Applied Science

  • Received the 2023 Louise Hanson Marshall Special Recognition Award, honoring an individual who has significantly promoted the professional development of women in neuroscience through teaching, organizational leadership, public advocacy, or other efforts that are not necessarily research-related.

Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre
Professor of History

  • Elected president of the Northeast Conference on British Studies.
  • Completed a two-year term as a member of the Board of Education in Wethersfield, Conn., in November 2023.

Craig W. Schneider
Charles A. Dana Professor of Biology, Emeritus

 

Grants & Awards

(To view a comprehensive list of external grants awarded to Trinity faculty, visit the Grants Office website.)

Catina Bacote
Assistant Professor of English

  • Recipient of a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration (RITM) Mellon Arts & Practitioner Fellows program to develop new work while sharing expertise and learning from the university community.

Stefanie Chambers
John R. Reitemeyer Term Professor of Political Science

  • Fellowship with the Africana Studies Summer Institute to Advance Equity through Research on Women and Girls of Color, University of Connecticut, August 2024.

Dang Do
Assistant Professor of Political Science

  • Recipient of a $20,00 grant from The Hartford Foundation for Public Giving under their 2024 Civic Engagement and Get Out the Vote initiative for his project, A Civically-Engaged Approach to Social Network GOTV in the Hartford Community.

Kent Dunlap
Professor of Biology

  • Faculty Research Grant, Trinity College: Predator Effects on the Brain, Spring 2024.

Claire Fournier
Senior Lecturer and Laboratory Coordinator in Biology

  • Faculty Research Grant, Trinity College: Exploring the Causes of Dyskinetic Syndrome in Spiders, Fall 2023.

Hebe Guardiola-Diaz
Associate Professor of Biology and Neuroscience

  • Faculty Research Grant, Trinity College: Uncoupling of Structure-Function Relationship within Fibroblast Growth Factor Subfamilies, Fall 2023.

Amanda Guzmán
Assistant Professor of Anthropology

  • Recipient of the Young Scholars Grant, from the International Council of Museums, International Committee for Museology, Transnational Island Museologies Conference, St. Andrews, Scotland, 2024.

Christopher Hager
Hobart Professor of the Humanities and Professor of English

  • Recipient of the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend for research and writing leading to the publication of The Public Library and the Unfinished Civil War, a book on how the ascendancy of U.S. public libraries during the Reconstruction Era (1863–1877) has shaped their subsequent history.

Britney Jones
Visiting Assistant Professor of Educational Studies

  • Recipient of a $63,154 grant from the Connecticut State Department of Education/University of Connecticut for her work on Equity in Academic Recovery. This grant is part of the Center for Connecticut Education Research Collaboration (CCERC).

Eureka Joshi
Thomas McKenna Meredith ’48 Postdoctoral Fellow in Environmental Science

  • Faculty Research Grant, Trinity College: Biosolids Land Application: Effects on Soil Health and Nutrient Cycling in Agroecosystems in New Hampshire, Fall 2023.

Kirsti A. Kuenzel
Assistant Professor of Mathematics

  • Faculty Research Grant, Trinity College: An Attack on Vizing’s Conjecture, Fall 2023.

Timothy Landry
Associate Professor of Anthropology and Religious Studies

  • Faculty Research Grant, Trinity College: Willful Things: Encountering Sorcery and the Ontological Alive in West Africa, Fall 2023.

Rebecca Pappas
Assistant Professor of Theater and Dance

  • Faculty Research Grant, Trinity College: We Are Destroying Ourselves: A Dance Wrecking, Spring 2024.

Dan Román
Associate Professor of Music

  • Faculty Research Grant, Trinity College: “DVXNS,” Fall 2023.

James Staples
Visiting Assistant Professor of English

  • Faculty Research Grant, Trinity College: Radical Reflections: The Revolutionary Influence of The Mirror of Simple Souls in Late-Medieval Europe, Spring 2024.

Christopher Swist
Visiting Lecturer in Music and Director of Recording Arts

  • Faculty Research Grant, Trinity College: “Equal Simplicity,” Spring 2024.

Ewa Syta
Associate Professor of Computer Science

  • Recipient of a grant supplement from the National Science Foundation to fund research experiences for two students for her NSF-funded project, Applied Cryptographic Protocols with Provably-Secure Foundations.

Johnny E. Williams
Professor of Sociology

  • Recipient of the 2024 Lee Founders Award, the highest award presented by Society for Study of Social Problems.

Jenny Wu
Visiting Assistant Professor of Fine Arts

  • Faculty Research Grant, Trinity College: Hexagon Shaped Sculptural Painting, Fall 2023.

 

Keynotes & Invited Talks

Barbara Benedict
Charles A. Dana Professor of English

  • “Jane Austen Panel on ‘The Collected Works of Jane Austen’ play,” The Playhouse on Park, West Hartford, Conn., October 1, 2023.
  • “Jane Austen” for The College Club of Hartford, The Hartford Golf Club, West Hartford, Conn., September 29, 2023.

Hasan Cömert
Maloney Family Distinguished Associate Professor of Economics

  • “‘Dilemma’ in Action in Turkey,” Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) Conference, University of Massachusetts Amherst, September 22, 2023.
  • Workshops: “Understanding the Turkish Economy in the Aftermath of Recent Earthquakes from a Macroeconomic Perspective” and “The Transformation of Politics and Economics Under the Justice and Development Party,” Izmir, Turkey, June 16-23, 2023.

Scott Gac
Professor of History and American Studies

  • “The Post-Civil War Global Gun Market” (for the panel “18th and 19th century Gun Manufacturing in New England”), 2023 Arsenals of History Symposium, Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Springfield Armory National Historic Site, Springfield, Mass., August 25, 2023.

Kifah Hanna
Associate Professor of Language and Culture Studies

  • “Reimagining Gender: Arabic Language and the Evolution of Inclusivity,” New England Arabic Teachers Council Conference, Deerfield Academy, Deerfield, Mass., Spring 2024.

Laura Holt
Professor of Psychology

  • “Understanding and preventing prescription stimulant misuse in college,” Southern Connecticut State University, New Haven, Conn., February 2024.

Tasmin Jones
Ellsworth Morton Tracy Lecturer and Associate Professor of Religious Studies

  • Plenary Address: “Revelation and Practices of Reception,” Phenomenology and Revelation Conference 2023, Huntington, New York, August 16, 2024. Publication forthcoming in the Journal of Continental Philosophy of Religion.

Timothy Landry
Associate Professor of Anthropology and Religious Studies

  • Keynote: “Willful Things: Encountering Sorcery and the Ontological Alive in West Africa,” Conference on Methods and Media of the Absent/Present: Visual Approaches to Vodun and Vodou, University of Zürich, Switzerland, September 14-15, 2023.

Seth Markle, Associate Professor of History and International Studies

  • Moderator: “Creative Hustle: Blaze Your Own Path and Make Work That Matters by Olatunde Sobohehin and sam seidel,” Academic Innovation for Public Good: A Series of Book Conversations Over Zoom, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif., August 2023.

Priscilla Meléndez
Professor of Language and Culture Studies

  • “Ser y no ser es la respuesta’: La máscara del humor en el teatro de Sabina Berman,” Feria Internacional del Libro de Monterrey, Monterrey, México, October 11, 2023.

Garth Myers
Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of Urban International Studies and Director of the Center for Urban and Global Studies

  • Keynote: “Urbanization Trends in Africa,” U.N. Economic Commission for Africa, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, October 30, 2023.

Diana R. Paulin
Charles A. Dana Research Associate Professor of English and American Studies

Amber Pitt
Associate Professor of Environmental Science

  • “Effects of climatic variation on growth rate and sex ratio of freshwater turtles,” 31st International Congress for Conservation Biology, Kigali, Rwanda, July 23-27, 2023.
  • “Ecology at a turtle’s pace: Insights into the effects of exploitation, habitat degradation, & climate change,” Fall 2023 Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Seminar Series, Department of Biology, San Diego State University.

Sarah Raskin
Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Charles A. Dana Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience

  • “Cultural Considerations in Assessment of Brain Injury after Interpersonal Violence,” a talk comparing women who speak Spanish to those who speak English in terms of memory, attention, and problem-solving after experiencing interpersonal violence, International Neuropsychological Society, New York, February 16, 2024. Co-authored with current and former Trinity students.*

Mary Sandoval
Seabury Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy

  • “Can the Hodge Spectra Distinguish Manifolds from Orbifolds?,” Algebra and Geometry Seminar, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, N.M., March 28, 2024.

Craig W. Schneider
Charles A. Dana Professor of Biology, Emeritus

  • “On the application of European binomials for western Atlantic marine macroalgae by 19th century taxonomists,” with G.W. Saunders, 8th European Phycological Congress, Brest, France, August 20-26, 2023.