Four Faculty Members Receive Tenure at Recent Board Meeting

Four Hamilton College faculty members were approved for tenure by the college's board of trustees during their recent meeting. Faculty receiving tenure are Seth A. Major, physics; Lisa Trivedi, history; Stephen Wu, economics; and Steven G. Yao, English.

The granting of tenure is based on recommendations of the vice president for academic affairs and dean of faculty, and the committee on appointments, with the president of the college presenting final recommendations to the board of trustees. All will receive the title of associate professor on July 1.

Seth Major works in quantum gravity, a field devoted to finding the structure of spacetime on the smallest possible scales. Currently, his research focuses on finding observable consequences of quantum gravity and constraining the theory using current astrophysical observations. Prior to taking a position at Hamilton he was a Lise Meitner Fellow at the Institute for Theoretical Physics of the University of Vienna and a visiting assistant professor at Swarthmore College. He earned a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Pennsylvania State University. He has published articles in professional journals including American Journal of Physics, Classical and Quantum Gravity, the New Journal of Physics, and Physical Review D. In 2005 Major was awarded a renewal grant from the Research Corporation, America's first foundation for the advancement of science, for his project  "Discrete Geometry Phenomenology and an Inner Product for Cosmology."

Lisa Trivedi is a cultural and social historian of modern South Asia, specializing in the history of nationalism, colonialism and women. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California at Davis in 1999. In 2004 Trivedi was a Visiting Fellow at Oxford University's Pembroke College, where she began research on her next book. She was awarded a Senior Research Fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies (2004-05) for this project, "Bound By Cloth: women textile workers in Bombay and Lancashire, 1860-1940." Trivedi was also awarded a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship to India for 2004-2005, where she conducted research on the same project in Bombay, Ahmedabad and New Delhi. She is a member of Hamilton's Committee on Asian Studies and of the coordinating committee for The Kirkland Project at Hamilton.

Stephen Wu received his Ph.D. and master's degree from Princeton University and his bachelor's degree from Brown University. He has published papers in the areas of health economics and labor economics, with a particular emphasis on the interaction between psychology and economics. Some of the topics of his current research include the relationship between health and socioeconomic status, determinants of savings and consumption decisions, and academic labor markets. His papers have appeared in professional journals such as the Journal of Financial Economics, The Journal of Health Economics, The Journal of Human Resources and The Journal of Economic Education. Wu regularly teaches courses in microeconomics, statistics, health economics,and labor economics and is currently writing an introductory economics textbook. 

 

Steven Yao earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley. He taught at Ohio State University from 1997 to 2002. Yao is the author of Translation and the Languages of Modernism (Palgrave/St. Martins, 2002) and is also co-editor of a collection of essays, Sinographies: Writing China, forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press.  In 2005 he was awarded a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) for his project "Foreign Accents: Chinese American Poetry and the Language of Ethnicity." This year he is serving as an external faculty fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. Yao's academic interests include literary translation, poetry, Asian-American literature and cross-cultural poetics. He was elected to the board of directors of the American Comparative Literature Association in 2005