Kamm and Mashek Earn Tenure.  Two department members have been awarded tenure over the last several months.  In the summer, Charles Kamm, now Associate Professor of Music at Scripps and in the Joint Music Program, was tenured.  Late this fall, our psychologist, Debra Mashek, was awarded tenure and promotion to Associate Professor Psychology.  Both joined the faculty in 2005.  The department enthusiastically congratulates Professors Mashek and Kamm!

Cubek Begins Joint Music Appointment.  After the retirement of Michael Deane Lamkin at the end of last year, the department has been very pleased to welcome David Cubek to our ranks as Assistant Professor of Music (Scripps and Joint Music) and Director of the Claremont Concert Orchestra.  For further information on Professor Cubek’s teaching and research interests, see our current profile on him in the Faculty Spotlight section.

New Tenure-Track Appointment in History.  Throughout the fall semester, the department focused its efforts on a search for a new tenure-track faculty member in the history of science and/or technology.  Chaired by Professor of History Hal Barron, the search committee traveled to Montreal for preliminary interviews at the History of Science Society’s annual meeting, and the department then invited a series of candidates for campus visits.  Having concluded the search successfully, we are extremely pleased to announce the appointment of Vivien Hamilton as Assistant Professor of History.  Ms. Hamilton received her bachelors degree at Dalhousie University and is now in the last stages of dissertation work at the University of Toronto.  Her dissertation, “Establishing Authority: The Role of Physics in Radiology in Britain and North America, 1896-1930,” explores collaboration between different cultural communities within science.  “I focus,” she explains, “on moments of interaction between physicists and doctors in the early history of medical x-rays. This allows me to examine the ways in which expertise has been awarded and negotiated between individuals from very different disciplinary cultures.”  Ms. Hamilton will join the department in the fall of 2011.   

Mayeri Receives Grant From Wellcome Trust.  Associate Professor Media Studies Rachel Mayeri has received a major grant from the Wellcome Trust, which supports scientific and humanistic researched aimed at improving human and animal health.  As Professor Mayeri reports, “It's an 80,000 GBP grant for me to work with a primatologist at the Edinburgh Zoo to make videos for chimpanzees, and a documentary about chimpanzee cognition.”  The department congratulates Professor Mayeri on this award, which will enable her to continue her highly regarded work on primates. 

Faculty Publications.  Paul Steinberg’s book, Comparative Environmental Politics, co-edited with Stacy VanDeveer of the University of New Hampshire, is forthcoming from MIT Press.  With the goal of bridging the fields of environmental studies and comparative politics, fourteen authors look a look at how different societies around the globe respond politically to environmental problems.  Richard Olson’s article “A Dynamic Model for "Science and Religion": Interacting Subcultures” appears in the January 2011 issue of Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science.  Darryl Wright’s “Reasoning About Ends: Life as a Value in Ayn Rand’s Ethics” is included in Metaethics, Egoism, and Virtue: Studies in Ayn Rand’s Normative Theory (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010).  Erika Dyson’s article “Gentleman Mounebanks and Spiritualists: Legal, Stage and Media Contests Between Magicians and Spirit Mediums” will be included in the forthcoming Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth- Century Spiritualism.