College Awards Tenure to Three Faculty
MIDDLEBURY, Vt. – Three members of the Middlebury College faculty have been promoted to the rank of associate professor without limit of tenure.
In December the Middlebury Board of Trustees accepted the recommendations of President Ronald D. Liebowitz and the College Board of Overseers in promoting: Svea Closser (sociology/anthropology), Florence Feiereisen (German), and Rebecca Tiger (sociology/anthropology).
The promotions from assistant professor to associate professor will take effect July 1, 2015.
Svea Closser is an anthropologist who exemplifies the ideal of the scholar-teacher. Her research in the field of polio eradication in Pakistan, India, and other countries has been widely recognized as groundbreaking, while in the classroom she is known to push her students to defy easy answers and think critically about how to engage the problems they will face as global citizens. In 2011 she was the principal investigator on a major research project funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to study how the global polio-eradication initiative has strengthened primary health care in eight Asian and African nations.
Closser, who published the book Chasing Polio in Pakistan: Why the World’s Largest Public Health Initiative Might Fail (Vanderbilt University Press: 2010), is currently working with her students on a National Science Foundation project concerning health volunteers in rural Ethiopia. A member of the Middlebury faculty since 2008, she has a bachelor’s degree from Pomona College, and a master’s degree in public health and a Ph.D. in medical anthropology, both from Emory University.
Florence Feiereisen of the Department of German engages her students by employing high-energy approaches to facilitate their learning of language and their comprehension of cultural and linguistic concepts. Students commend Feiereisen for infusing all of her classes, from introductory language courses to technical upper-level linguistics seminars, with “a joyful energy.” As a scholar she is equally adept at writing about linguistics, linguistic history, and cultural studies, and her book published in German about the modern author and musician Thomas Meinecke was received as an original and nuanced analysis of his work.
Feiereisen earned her B.A-equivalent and M.A. from Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg in Germany, and her Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. She joined the Middlebury faculty in 2007, and is the co-editor of two books in English: “From Weimar to Christiania: German and Scandinavian Studies in Context (Cambridge Scholars Press: 2007) and Germany in the Loud Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press: 2012).
Rebecca Tiger is an innovative scholar whose work on punishment, crime, and deviance brings theoretical insights and impeccable analytic skills to bear on complex sociological questions. The author of Judging Addicts: Drug Courts and Coercion in the Justice System (New York University Press: 2013), Tiger’s current research project on heroin abuse in Rutland, Vt., is poised to demonstrate the power of public sociology by engaging theory and data to explain how a social problem is evolving in a specific community near Middlebury.
In the classroom, where she teaches such courses as the Social Control of Problem Youth and Theorizing Celebrity, Tiger challenges her students to articulate and defend difficult theoretical positions. She has a bachelor’s degree in interdisciplinary history from Carnegie Mellon University, a master’s in urban studies from University of New Orleans, and a Ph.D. in sociology from the Graduate Center of City University of New York. She has been a member of the faculty since 2008.
In addition to granting tenure to three members of the faculty, the board of trustees in December promoted Susan Burch from associate professor to full professor. The founding director of the College’s Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity, Burch teaches within the program in American Studies, and is an expert on disabilities in America and deaf culture. She joined the faculty as an associate professor after teaching for 11 years at Gallaudet University. Her appointment to full professor will take effect July 1, 2015.