At its summer meeting, the University of the South Board of Regents formally approved promotion and tenure decisions for eleven faculty members.

Eight newly tenured faculty members now hold the title of associate professor, effective July 1, 2022. Three faculty members have been promoted to full professor. Congratulations to all.

Tenured and promoted to associate professor

Husnain Fateh Ahmad - Economics

Dr. Ahmad is an applied microeconomist whose research leverages tools from micro-theory and experimental economics to study individual behavior in various settings. His recent work focuses on issues of access to healthcare, contraceptive take-up, air pollution mitigation strategies, and energy use and conservation. He enjoys using insights from his work to highlight the applicability of economic theory in his classes, using them as a bridge to connect abstract mathematical models to everyday choices.

Emmanuel Asiedu-Acquah - International and Global Studies

A member of the International and Global Studies Program since 2015, Dr. Asiedu- Acquah teaches courses on globalization theory, African youth cultures, Atlantic Africa, West African popular culture and politics, and Africa-focused international summitry. His research examines student and youth politics, and media in West Africa with a particular focus on Ghana. He is a recipient of the Kennedy Endowed Faculty Fellowship (2017-2019). His work has appeared and is forthcoming in the Journal of Asian and African Studies, Journal of African Foreign Affairs, Journal of West African History, Safundi: Journal of South African and American Studies, and Dictionary of African Biography.

Kate Cammack - Psychology/Neuroscience

Dr. Cammack is a behavioral neuroscientist interested in exploring the brain circuits that contribute to motivation and reward-related behaviors. Her research program explores why and how individuals respond differently to drugs of abuse, with particular attention to females. She teaches a range of neuroscience & psychology courses at Sewanee, serves as Program Director for the Neuroscience Program, and contributes to efforts promoting belonging and inclusion in STEM fields on campus and the larger scientific community.

Evan Joslin - Chemistry

Dr. Joslin started at Sewanee in the Fall of 2016 after completing a postdoctoral fellowship in bioinorganic chemistry from The Johns Hopkins University. Prior to her postdoctoral fellowship, she was a visiting assistant professor for a year at Haverford College in PA. Her Ph.D. was obtained from the University of Virginia in organometallic research. Her research focuses on the synthesis of organometallic catalysis for the production of small organic molecules.

Kenneth Miller - Church Music and Organist and Choirmaster of the Chapel of the Apostles

Dr. Miller is the School of Theology instructor in church music and serves as organist and director of choirs for the School of Theology's Chapel of the Apostles. Before coming to Sewanee, he worked as associate organist-choirmaster at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Columbia, South Carolina, and as instructor of organ at the University of South Carolina. He studied organ and church music at Lenoir-Rhyne University, where his principal teachers were Florence Jowers and Paul Weber, and the Yale School of Music and Institute of Sacred Music, with Martin Jean and Thomas Murray.

Alison J. Miller - Art History

Dr. Miller specializes in modern and contemporary Japanese art, prints and photography, and the intersections of gender studies and visual culture. Dr. Miller's research has been funded by a Fulbright Fellowship, Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship, and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, among others. She has published in the Journal of Japanese Studies, TransAsia Photography Review, Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas (ADVA), contributed to various public humanities projects and museum catalogues, and is co-editor and contributing author for The Visual Culture of Meiji Japan: Negotiating the Transition to Modernity (Routledge, 2021). Dr. Miller teaches the survey of Asian art history, as well as courses in Japanese and Chinese art, Buddhist art, contemporary Asian art, and museum studies.

Lucía García-Santana - Spanish

Lucía García-Santana earned her Ph.D. in Spanish and Latin American Studies from the University of Connecticut, Storrs. She specializes in transnational cultural production, displacement and social exclusion, peripheral cultures and coloniality in the Global South, and women and gender production in the Americas and Spain.

Clint Smith - Biology

Dr. Smith came to Sewanee in 2016 after a five-year postdoctoral fellowship at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in the Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases. His collaborative, student-centered research program focuses on understanding fundamental aspects of coronavirus replication in hopes of better informing future therapeutics.

Promoted to full professor

Jim Crawford - Theatre

James Crawford is an award-winning actor who’s appeared on stages across the country, from Off-Broadway to regional theatres such as the La Jolla Playhouse, Nashville Rep, and fifteen productions at the Dallas Theater Center. He joined Sewanee’s Department of Theatre & Dance in 2016 after sixteen years at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, where he was the Head of Acting for their BFA and MFA programs. Since coming to Sewanee, he has directed productions of Hamlet, Cabaret, The Crucible, Our Country’s Good, Good Kids, and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time at the Tennessee Williams Center.

Nicholas E. Roberts - History /International and Global Studies

Dr. Roberts teaches classes on the Middle East, Islam, and imperialism in the History Department and the International and Global Studies Program. He received his B.A. in Religion from Carleton College, an M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies/History from New York University. His research focuses on the history of European imperialism in the Middle East, the history of Israel/Palestine, modern Islamic movements, and the intersection between Islam and nationalism in Arab politics. He has received several awards including a James D. Kennedy III Fellowship from Sewanee and a Fulbright Fellowship to Israel.

Lauryl Tucker - English

Lauryl Tucker published a book last year called Unexpected Pleasures: Parody, Queerness, and Genre in 20th-C. British Fiction and has a chapter about teaching Virginia Woolf's difficult humor in the forthcoming volume #MeToo and Modernism. Her child (10) can already defeat her in all sports except one, which she has forbidden him to learn. She is on the Advisory Board of the Center for Teaching and is currently serving as an interim Co-Director this fall until Emily Puckette's return. She maintains that there's no such thing as 'air frying.’