Six Hamilton College faculty members will be promoted to the rank of professor, effective July 1. Associate professors Douglas Ambrose, history; Paul Hagstrom, economics; Lydia Hamessley, music, Stephenson Humphries-Brooks, religious studies; Catherine Kodat, English; and Onno Oerlemans, English, will receive the title of professor.
Doug Ambrose |
Ambrose earned his bachelor's degree from Rutgers University, his master's degree from the University of Rochester, and Ph.D. in history from the State University of New York at Binghamton. He joined the Hamilton faculty in 1990, where he specializes in early America, the Old South, and American religious history. His published works include
The Many Faces of Alexander Hamilton: The Life and Legacy of America's Most Elusive Founding Father (NYU 2006), which he co-edited with Hamilton colleague Robert W. T. Martin, and
Henry Hughes and Proslavery Thought in the Old South (LSU 1996). Ambrose has also written numerous articles, book reviews and encyclopedia entries about Southern slavery and Southern intellectual life. In 1992, he received a Mellon Research Fellowship from the Virginia Historical Society, and he has also been a recipient of the Class of 1963 Excellence in Teaching Award at Hamilton.
Paul Hagstrom |
Hagstrom's field of study is the economics of poverty. Since he arrived at Hamilton in 1991, he has published many papers on the subject, and his current research focuses on the economic impact of refugee resettlement in the Central New York region, as well as labor supply effects of public assistance and precautionary savings behavior and social insurance. His research was cited in a
Reader's Digest article, "Second Chance City - A wave of refugees is bringing new life to a dying American town." The former director of the Arthur Levitt Public Affairs Center at Hamilton, he is currently involved with the Alumni Council, Committee on Information Technology, and Human Subjects Institutional Review Board. In 2001 Hagstrom received a grant from the Institute for Research on Poverty for his research project titled "Food Stamp and Program Participation of Refugees and Immigrants: Measurement Error Correction for Immigrant Status."
Lydia Hamessley |
Hamessley came to Hamilton in 1991, where she teaches courses in Medieval and Renaissance music history, world music, American folk and traditional music and opera. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota. In 2007 she contributed a chapter, "Peggy Seeger: From Traditional Folksinger to Contemporary Songwriter," to Ruth Crawford Seeger's
Worlds: Innovation and Tradition in Twentieth-Century American Music (University of Rochester Press). She has published articles in Queering The Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, Menacing Virgins: Images of Virginity in the Middle Ages and Renaissance and Women & Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture. Hamessley also co-edited
Audible Traces: Gender, Identity, and Music with Elaine Barkin (2000). Her current area of research is in old-time and bluegrass music, with a particular focus on Southern Appalachian music and women.
Steve Humphries-Brooks |
Humphries-Brooks joined the faculty in 1983 as a visiting instructor of religion. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in religion from Columbia University/Union Theological Seminary. At Hamilton, his areas of interest include portrayals of Jesus in film, literary and social-historical criticism of the Gospels, early Christian literature and paganism. In 2006, he examined how the life of Jesus has been portrayed in major films in the book
Cinematic Savior: Hollywood's Making of the American Christ (Praeger). Humphries-Brooks teaches "The Celluloid Savior," a course that explores the depiction of Jesus Christ in modern media and was featured in The New York Times and on NPR's "All Things Considered." He has also published "How to View a Jesus Movie," a useful guide to viewing Mel Gibson's movie "The Passion of the Christ."
Catherine Kodat |
Kodat is the current chair of the English Department and director of the American Studies Program. She earned her Ph.D. at Boston University and came to Hamilton in 1995. In 2007 she contributed a chapter to the anthology,
Companion to Narrative Theory, titled "I'm Spartacus!," and a chapter about William Faulkner to Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel. She has written reviews and essays on 20th century literature and culture for publications such as
American Literary History, American Quarterly, Salmagundi Boston Review and
Mosaic, and is currently working on a book about the uses of culture during the Cold War. Kodat has been a research fellow at the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford and Fulbright lecturer in American Studies at Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem (ELTE) in Budapest. An inaugural recipient of a Millicent C. McIntosh Flexible Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, she recently received the 2008 Class of 1963 Excellence in Teaching Award, which recognizes one Hamilton faculty member each year who demonstrates extraordinary commitment to and skill in teaching.
Onno Oerlemans |
Oerlemans received his Ph.D. from Yale University. In 2007 he published two essays, "A Defense of Anthropomorphism: Comparing Coetzee and Gowdy" in
Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, and "Romanticism and the City: Toward a Green Architecture" in
Coming into Contact: Explorations in Ecocritical Theory and Practice (University of Georgia Press). His previously published work includes articles on the form and function of lyric in Whitman, Milton, and Wordsworth, on literary theory and Henry James, and on animal rights and taxonomy in romanticism. Oerlemans has also published articles on the romantic origins of environmentalism, and architecture in romantic period writing, as well as a book titled
Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature (University of Toronto Press, 2002), which examines the many ways in which romantic-period authors explore and represent the physical presence of the natural world. His current research is on the representation of animals in 20th century literature.
