Hamilton College President Joan Hinde Stewart, in consultation with Vice-President for Academic Affairs and Dean of Faculty David Paris, announced the following faculty appointments to endowed chairs.
Stephen Harper Kirner Professor of Geology Barbara Tewksbury will become the William R. Kenan Chair of Geology for a three-year term. Tewksbury was recognized as the CASE Teacher of the Year for New York State in 1997. She has been a leader in the scholarship of pedagogy: her introductory course on Geology and Development in Modern Africa was one of four recognized nationally by the American Association of Colleges and Universities SENCER Program, and last year she received, along with three co-investigators, a five-year, $4.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation for faculty development for geoscience faculty.
The Kenan Chair was created by a $700,000 grant from the William R. Kenan, Jr. Charitable Trust in 1976. It is awarded to a faculty member "to support and encourage a scholar-teacher whose enthusiasm for learning, commitment to teaching and sincere personal interests in students will broaden the learning process."
Assistant Professor of Women's Studies Vivyan Adair will become the inaugural holder of the Elihu Root Peace Fund Chair. An endowed fund was created in 1909 by Andrew Carnegie in honor of Elihu Root and the Root family's historic relationship with Hamilton College, and the income from the fund will be used to support this new Chair.
Adair, who is being appointed to a five-year term, studies representations of women on welfare, and analyzes the impact of welfare reform. She is a nationally recognized scholar and program developer whose work has been published in the Harvard Educational Review, Signs, and other distinguished journals, and who is co-editor of Reclaiming Class: Women, Poverty, and the Promise of Higher Education in America. Adair is founder of the ACCESS Project at Hamilton, a welfare to work program that has received extensive national attention and secured generous funding from the State of New York and private foundations.
Professor Stuart Hirshfield is now the Stephen Harper Kirner Chair of Computer Science. The Kirner Chair is a rotating five-year appointment honoring a faculty member in the sciences. It was established in 1973 by Dr. Walter Kirner and Mrs. Lillie Harper in honor of Stephen Harper Kirner.
Hirshfield served as an original member of the Liberal Arts Computer Science consortium which developed and published what is today the accepted model curriculum for a bachelor's degree in computer science. Along with his colleague, Richard W. Decker, he has authored The Analytical Engine: An Introduction to Computer Science Using the Internet, a nationally recognized text and software package, widely used for more than a decade and now in its third edition. Their most recent project, programming.java, is an amalgamation of all of their previous texts, teaching about computer science programming using both object-oriented programming language and hands-on web-based laboratory materials. Hirshfield is also the recipient of several grants for the study of artificial intelligence, most recently from the Air Force Research Laboratory in Rome.
Hamilton College, a liberal arts college with an emphasis on individualized instruction and independent research, is a national leader in teaching effective writing and persuasive speaking.
