Hamilton College Dean of Faculty Patrick Reynolds announced the promotion of four Hamilton faculty members to the rank of professor. Brian Collett, physics; Heather Merrill, Africana studies; Cheryl Morgan, French; and Lisa Trivedi, history, were promoted effective Oct. 3.
Brian Collett
Before coming to Hamilton in 1986, Brian Collett was a staff fellow at the National Institutes of Health and a visiting assistant professor of physics at Mt. Holyoke College. He received a doctorate from Princeton University. Since 2000 Collett has been collaborating with Gordon Jones on projects in nuclear physics. Their work has included the development of compact 3He neutron spin filters for use in neutron scattering, and they are participants in the aCORN experiment, studying neutron decay at the National Institutes of Standards and Technologies. They are responsible for the magnetic and electric fields in the experiment and have contributed extensively to the data collection and analysis.
Collett’s areas of expertise are computational and electronic projects and the development of programs to help teach aspects of physics.
Heather Merrill
Heather Merrill came to Hamilton from Dickinson College, where she taught and was executive director of the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues. Merrill completed her doctoral work in human geography at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research examines place, race, identity and the social transformation of Europe in relation to the African Diaspora. She is a critical human geographer whose theoretical work is grounded in ethnography of African Diaspora in Italy.
Merrill is completing a book on anti-blackness and Blackness in Italy and the emergence of Black Spaces. Her book publications are: Spaces of Danger: Culture and Power in the Everyday (co-edited); and An Alliance of Women: Immigration and the Politics of Race. Last year she published an article titled "Post-Colonial Borderlands: Black Life-Worlds and Relational Place in Turin, Italy" in Acme: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies.
Cheryl Morgan
Cheryl Morgan earned her doctorate from Columbia University. She is a specialist in 19th-century literature with particular interest in French women writers, literary humor and urban literature. Morgan has contributed articles about Delphine Gay de Girardin to Symposium, Romantisme and Modernity and the Mass Press in Nineteenth-Century France. She wrote an article on Stendahl's "Le Rouge et le noir" for the MLA Approaches to Teaching World Literature, among other scholarly work. Morgan is working on a cultural critical biography of Gay de Girardin and editing a collection of articles devoted to French women's humor post-1789.
Last fall she presented a paper titled “The ‘Pornographe’s Fight and Flight to Fiction: Marc de Montifaud” at the 40th Annual Nineteenth-Century French Studies Colloquium hosted by the University of Puerto Rico.
Lisa Trivedi
Lisa Trivedi, a cultural and social historian of modern South Asia, received her doctorate from the University of California at Davis. Her first monograph, Clothing Gandhi’s Nation: Homespun and Modern India (Indiana, 2007) was supported by a Fulbright Scholarship to India in 1996. Trivedi was a Visiting Fellow at Oxford University’s Pembroke College, where she began research on her second monograph, Bound By Cloth: women textile workers in Bombay and Lancashire, 1890-1940.
Trivedi oversaw a project of 70 photographs of ordinary women at work in Ahmedabad, India, taken by Pranlal Patel, in 1937. She oversaw the first-time publication of the photos and curated their exhibition at Hamilton's Wellin Museum of Art.
In August she traveled to Kyoto, Japan, to present a paper at the 17th World Economic History Congress. Her paper "A Swadeshi Economy: catalogues, shops, and depots" addressed the various ways in which a movement often characterized as anti-capitalist and anti-modern made effective use of new technologies and innovative marketing strategies to promote khadi, or handspun hand-woven cloth.
