MIDDLEBURY, Vt.—Two members of the Middlebury College faculty have been promoted from assistant professor to the rank of associate professor without limit of tenure: Kateri Carmola of the Department of Political Science and Michael Sheridan of the Sociology & Anthropology Department.

The board of trustees, at its meeting on December 10, accepted the recommendations of President Ronald D. Liebowitz and the board’s educational affairs committee in promoting the two faculty members. Their promotions take effect July 1, 2010.

Michael Sheridan joined the Middlebury faculty in 2006 as an assistant professor. His teaching and research focus on African studies, human ecology, anthropological theory, and linguistic anthropology. He received his bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Harvard in 1988, and a Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology from Boston University in 2001. Before arriving at Middlebury, he taught at the University of Vermont. His international experience includes field work in Tanzania and a stint as a Peace Corps volunteer in Kenya. In 2009, he took part in a Fulbright Hays Seminar at the West African Research Center in Senegal.

Sheridan has taught a wide range of courses at Middlebury, including “Human Ecology,” “Language, Culture, and Society,” and “Swahili and East African Culture.” He also oversees a weekly Swahili language table for interested students.

Sheridan’s research on sacred ecologies has established a strong reputation among scholars in environmental anthropology, environmental history, and African studies, and his articles have appeared in African Studies Review, the International Journal of African Historical Studies, and the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture, among other journals. He also has a book manuscript in preparation: Cooling the Land: Scale, Power, and Political Ecology in North Pare, Tanzania. Sheridan has served on a number of important college committees, including Environmental Council and the 2007-08 Task Force on the Status of Women at Middlebury.

Kateri Carmola joined the Middlebury faculty in 2001, and is currently assistant professor of political science and a Christian A. Johnson Fellow in Political Philosophy. She earned her B.A. from the University of Chicago in tutorial studies (history and philosophy) in 1988, and both an M.A.. (1991) and Ph.D. (1999) in political science from the University of California, Berkeley. Courses she teaches at Middlebury include “Introduction to Political Philosophy,” “Power and Powerlessness,” and “War, Law, and Ethics.”

Carmola’s scholarly work is an innovative combination of political philosophy, her primary area of training, and security studies, a newer area of interest. She has a book, Private Security Contractors in the Age of New Wars: Risk, Law, and Ethics, forthcoming in 2010 from Routledge Press, and has published several book chapters, including “Abu Ghraib and the Complications of Institutional Responsibility,” in the collection Responding to Delinquent Institutions (2009), ed. Toni Erskine, and “The Concept of Proportionality: Old Questions and New Ambiguities” in Just War Theory Revisited (2004), ed. Mark Evans. She has also written a chapter, “Contractors and Risk,” for the book Contractors and War, coming in 2010 from Stanford University Press. She has published reviews and articles the International Journal of Politics and Ethics, the Brown Journal of World Affairs, Political Theory,and Perspectives on Politics, among other journals.

She has served on a number of college-wide committees at Middlebury, including Faculty Council and the search committee for the dean of Library and Information Services (LIS). She has also given presentations on her work to numerous Middlebury alumni chapters, including those in New York, Boston, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.