Six Hamilton College faculty members were approved for tenure by the college's board of trustees during their recent meeting. 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.
Faculty receiving tenure, effective July 1, are Julie Dunsmore, psychology; Todd Franklin, philosophy; Naomi Guttman, English; Catherine Kaha, rhetoric and communication; Ann Owen, economics; and Kirk Pillow, philosophy.
Julie Dunsmore
A developmental psychologist, Dunsmore was the 1994-1996 recipient of a Postdoctoral National Research Scientist Award from the National Institute of Mental Health. She focuses her research on parental emotional socialization, particularly in relation to children's development of the self, children's affective social competence, and parents' beliefs about emotions. Dunsmore's research has been published in New Directions in Child Development: Communication and Emotion, Social Development, and Early Education and Development. She has presented her work at the Society for Research in Child Development and the Conference on Human Development. Dunsmore was the 2000-2001 recipient of Hamilton's Class of 1963 Excellence in Teaching Award.
Recently Dunsmore, in collaboration with colleagues in North Carolina, has worked to develop a comprehensive, non-ethnocentric instrument assessing parents' beliefs about children's emotion. Other recent work includes a study of emotion talk in parents' conversations with their children about the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, both immediately following the attack and at the one-year anniversary.
Todd Franklin
Franklin teaches courses on existentialism, Nietzsche, and critical cultural studies. His research interests include 19th century continental philosophy, conceptions of the self, and the broad ranging significances of race, gender, and culture. He is the author of several scholarly works on the social and political import of various forms of existential enlightenment and his latest work is a co-edited volume titled Critical Affinities: Reflections on the Convergence between Nietzsche and African American Thought (SUNY Press, forthcoming). Franklin earned his doctorate from Stanford University and joined the faculty in 1997. In 2000 Franklin received the Class of 1963 Excellence in Teaching Award, awarded each year to a Hamilton faculty member "who demonstrates extraordinary commitment to teaching."
Naomi Guttman
A member of the Hamilton faculty since 1996, Guttman holds a MFA degree from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Southern California. Her book, Reasons for Winter, (Brick Books, 1991), won the A.M. Klein Award for Poetry in Quebec. She has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts and an Artist's Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Malahat Review, River Styx, Southern Poetry Review and Connecticut Review.
Catherine Kaha
Catherine W. Kaha earned a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, with an interdisciplinary degree in communication and philosophy. Drawing on the work of Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan, her scholarship exhibits an enduring interest in how words and images differ. Recent publications address a theory of video that challenges current assumptions regarding the role of television. She has published articles in Critical Studies in Mass Communication, Cultural Studies, Symbolic Interaction, and Proteus, among others. She is currently working on a manuscript that details changes in the social domain, titled Mediation and the Communication Matrix. Kaha's teaching activities include courses that examine topics related to technology and society.
Ann Owen
Owen, formerly a Federal Reserve economist, earned a Ph.D. from Brown University and an M.B.A. from Babson College. She has diverse research interests and has published several papers on long-run growth and income distribution as well as teaching economics to undergraduates. As a former banker, Owen also has an interest in electronic currency (e-cash) and the presence of banks on the Internet. Her current research projects include an investigation into the determinants of growth in China, a look at how financial development affects the severity of business cycles, and an examination of the interaction between a country's ideology and its long-run growth. She teaches courses in economic growth, monetary policy, macroeconomic theory, and statistics.
Kirk Pillow
Pillow teaches courses on aesthetics, modern philosophy, and Kant. His areas of specialization also include Hegel and hermeneutics, and his interests focus on contemporary debates about the aesthetic dimension of human understanding and interpretation. He is the author of Sublime Understanding: Aesthetic Reflection in Kant and Hegel (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), as well as articles on Kant's views on metaphor and Hegel's theory of imagination which have appeared in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism and the Owl of Minerva. Pillow earned his doctoral degree from Northwestern University in 1995 and has taught at Hamilton since 1996. In 2002 Pillow received the Class of 1963 Excellence in Teaching Award, awarded each year to a Hamilton faculty member "who demonstrates extraordinary commitment to teaching."
