Two 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 Vivyan Adair, the Elihu Root Assistant Professor of Women's Studies, and Kevin Grant, assistant professor of history. Both will receive the title of associate professor on July 1.
Adair came to Hamilton College in 1998. She earned a Ph.D. and master's degree from the University of Washington, Seattle. Her research interests are studying representations of women on welfare and analyzing the impact of welfare reform. Adair is director of the ACCESS Project, a pilot project that assists low-income parents in Oneida, Madison and Herkimer Counties in obtaining a higher education.
She is the author of From Good Ma to Welfare Queen, A Genealogy of the Poor Woman in American Literature, Photography and Culture, a study that explores literary, photographic and cultural representations of poor American women and offers a view of the interlocking systems of race, gender and class oppression (2000). Adair is also co-editor of Reclaiming Class: Women, Poverty and the Promise of Education in America, (Temple University Press, 2003).
Grant is a historian of the British Empire, with expertise in humanitarian politics. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1997, and he has received fellowships from the Fulbright Commission, the Mellon Foundation, and the American Historical Association. He received the John R. Hatch Class of 1925 Excellence in Teaching Award at Hamilton in 2003.
Grant has published articles in leading scholarly journals, including the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History and the Journal of British Studies, as well as essays in edited collections. His article, "Bones of Contention: The Repatriation of the Remains of Roger Casement" (Journal of British Studies, July 2002), received honorable mention in the 2003 competition for the Walter D. Love Essay Prize, which is commissioned by the North American Conference on British Studies to recognize the best article in any field of British studies each year. Recently, Grant served as historical consultant to a documentary film, "Congo: White King, Black Death, Red Rubber," which aired in February in Britain on the BBC.
His first book, A Civilised Savagery: Britain and the New Slaveries in Africa, 1884-1926, will be published later in 2004 by Routledge. He is now working on his next major research project, a comparative history of hunger strikes in the British Empire between 1900 and 1950.
