May 11, 2011

Contact:   Bill Giduz

The Davidson College Board of Trustees has awarded Onita Vaz-Hooper and Thomas Pegelow Kaplan tenure and promotion to the rank of associate professor. Vaz-Hooper teaches in the English department, and Pegelow Kaplan teaches in the history department.

In addition, four faculty members have been awarded named professorships. They are Assistant Professor of English Maria F. Fackler, Assistant Professor of Arabic Rebecca Joubin, Professor of History and department chair Jonathan Berkey, and Professor of Political Science Peter Ahrensdorf.

Onita Vaz-Hooper

Onita Vaz-Hooper

A native of Sri Lanka and only child, Vaz-Hooper grew up as an enthusiastic reader. She gained a love specifically of poetry taking courses in elocution in addition to her regular schooling. The terrorist turmoil in her homeland led her to seek a college education at the University of Southern California. She studied English literature and earned all three of her academic degrees there. Her dissertation, titled Dissolve, Diffuse, Dissipate: Coleridge's Practice of Revision, concerned that Romantic poet's obsessive practice of continual rewriting of his work even after its publication.

During her decade in southern California she was not aware of Davidson. But it rose to the top of her wish list as she learned about it during her search for a tenure-track position. Her scholarship in 18th- and 19th-century British literature met the Davidson English department's curricular needs, and the graciousness and warmth of her colleagues-to-be led her to gratefully accept an offer to join its faculty and begin teaching here in 2005.

She has published articles about Coleridge, and is currently working to shape her dissertation about him into a book. She has taught courses here in "Romanticism," "Restoration and 18th Century Literature," "Colonial and Post Colonial Literature" and "Literature and Medicine." She has also been active as a presenter and organizer of panel discussions at meetings of professional organizations, and served as thesis director for students.
 
Thomas Pegelow Kaplan

Thomas Pegelow Kaplan

Pegelow Kaplan specializes in modern European history with an emphasis on German history, Jewish history, and Holocaust and genocide studies. He teaches survey courses on modern European and Russian history, and upper division classes in German, the Holocaust, and genocide studies. His research focuses on violence, mass media and constructions of selfhood in Nazi and postwar Germany. He also examines histories of comparative genocide in the modern world.

Cambridge University Press recently published his first book, The Language of Nazi Genocide: Linguistic Violence and the Struggle of Germans of Jewish Ancestry. He is currently working on a study of how leftist protest movements in West Germany and the United States in the 1960s and 1970s interacted in remaking imageries of mass murder and altering national and transnational memory.

In addition, he is putting together an extensively annotated primary source collection for a new book series by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., that will highlight the importance of petitions by European Jews in their struggles against the Nazi onslaught. 

In 2001, he was this museum's Miles Lerman Center for the Study of Jewish Resistance Fellow, and he has led students on research expeditions in its archives. In 2009-10 he conducted research in Germany as an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellow at the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung in Potsdam.

Maria Fackler

Maria Fackler

Fackler is the new holder of the pre-tenure John D. and Catherine McArthur Professorship, a two-year title intended to reward promising young scholars and encourage their continued work at Davidson. This professorship was previously held by Associate Professor Samuel Sanchez-y-Sanchez. Fackler said, "Davidson has been such a welcoming place from my very first days here. This is a tremendous honor, and I am excited to join the company of the previous McArthur chairs."

Clark Ross, vice president of academic affairs and dean of the faculty, said of Fackler, "Students flock to her classes and return predictably for other courses, advice, or simply the warmth of her personage. Faculty and administration turn repeatedly to her for committees and other tasks, knowing that her work will be done well and congenially."

Fackler specializes in 20th- and 21st-century British literature and the history of the novel. Her current research expands on her Ph.D. dissertation in exploring the role of the artist manqué in the development of postwar British fiction. Fackler's recent work on literature and gossip, which appears in a special issue of the journal Modern Drama, emerged from discussions she enjoyed with students in her seminar devoted to the topic. Fackler earned her undergraduate degree in English literature summa cum laude from Duke University, and did her graduate work at Yale University, earning her Ph.D. there in 2007. She began teaching at Davidson in 2007.

Rebecca Joubin

Rebecca Joubin

Joubin was selected for the pre-tenure Malcolm Overstreet Partin Professorship, whose inaugural holder was Associate Professor of History Jane Mangan. Joubin is a Middle East studies scholar who has built Davidson's program in that area since she joined the faculty in 2009. In making the announcement, Clark Ross said, "Our progress with Arabic language and Middle East studies has taken a quantum leap with her presence and commitment."

Joubin teaches courses in all levels of Arabic language, as well as cultural courses with special interest in gender studies, Iraqi culture in exile, and Middle Eastern film. Her current field of research is gender dynamics in contemporary Syrian television drama. Her publications include the 2004 book Two Grandmothers from Baghdad, and articles in both Arabic and English on orientalism, film, and women's issues in the Middle East. Her new book, Last Stones of Mesopotamia, will be published in fall 2011.

Joubin helped arrange for eight Davidson students to study abroad in Syria in summer 2010, and is one of the founders of a semi-annual spring semester study abroad program in Damascus, Syria, between Davidson and Morehouse College. That program is scheduled to begin in spring 2012.

Joubin completed her undergraduate studies at the College of William and Mary, and received her master's degree from Georgetown University. She earned her Ph.D. in Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Culture at Columbia University in 2004, and lived in Syria for six years. She has also studied Arabic at the American University in Cairo, Middlebury College, and the Arabic Language Institute in Fez, Morocco.

Jonathan Berkey

Jonathan Berkey (r) pictured with (l) previous Duke Professorship holder Professor Emeritus of Economics Dennis Appleyard, and Gene Cochrane (c), President of the Duke Endowment.

Berkey is Davidson's new James B. Duke Professor. Ross said, "This flagship professorship came to us from The Duke Endowment in connection with its gift to found the Dean Rusk International Studies Program, and there's no more worthy international scholar to hold it now than Jonathan Berkey."

Berkey teaches the full range of Middle Eastern history since the rise of Islam, and has been a steadfast teacher in Davidson's Humanities Program. He was instrumental in developing the non-western cultural and civilizations tract of that program.

During his distinguished 18-year Davidson career, he has also held the title of E. Craig Wall Jr. Distinguished Professor of the Humanities, and the title of McArthur Professor. He holds membership in the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and served as a visiting professorship at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.

His research and writing focus on Islamic religious culture and medieval Egypt and Syria. He is the author of the books The Transmission of Knowledge in Medieval Cairo: A Social History of Islamic Education and Popular Preaching and Religious Authority in the Medieval Islamic Near East. His 2003 book, The Formation of Islam: Religion and Society in the Near East, 600-1800, received the top annual book prize from the Middle East Studies Association. He is currently working on a book titled Shattered Mosaic: The Middle East Since the Rise of Islam.

Berkey was an undergraduate at Williams College, and earned his master's and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton University. He has led Davidson's semester in India program, helped develop the college's program in Arabic, and frequently shares his insights on Arab history and culture with area media, church groups, civic organizations and school classes.

Peter Ahrensdorf

Peter Ahrensdorf

Ahrensdorf was named to the James Sprunt Professorship. Clark Ross said, "He's an exceptional scholar whose work has been very well received in the profession. He's a model of scholarship, teaching, and college service."

Ahrensdorf specializes in classical political theory. He has published articles on Plato, Thucydides, Hobbes, and Sophocles. In 2009 he published Greek Tragedy and Political Philosophy: Rationalism and Religion in Sophocles' Theban Plays, a book that analyzes the three Theban plays of Sophocles with special attention to the age-old question of whether human beings should seek guidance from human reason or religious faith.

Ahrensdorf wrote two previous books --The Death of Socrates and the Life of Philosophy, and Justice Among Nations: On the Moral Basis of Power and Peace, which he co-authored with University of Texas professor Thomas L. Pangle.  Ahrensdorf has received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities.  He has also been a recipient of the prestigious Boswell Faculty Fellowship from Davidson College to work on his fourth book, provisionally titled Homer's Education of the Greeks: the Political and Moral Teaching of the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Ahrensdorf's teaching and research interests include classical, medieval, and modern political theory, contemporary political ideologies, American political thought, religion and politics, and theories of international relations.

His personal experiences also led him to develop an interest in Latin American liberalism. He was born in the Philippines, lived two years as a youth in Paraguay, and studied in Spain during high school. His wife, Alejandra, is a native of Bolivia. He received a Fulbright Fellowship to spend a semester in 2000 teaching at the University of CEMA in Buenos Aires, Argentina and later published an article on Domingo Sarmiento, one of the theoretical founders of Latin American liberalism. He has also participated in two conferences on liberalism in Argentina.

Ahrensdorf is a summa cum laude graduate of Yale University and earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, writing a dissertation on Socrates' Defense of the Philosophic Life in Plato's Phaedo. He joined the Davidson faculty in 1989.

In addition to his scholarship, Ahrensdorf, as the college's Truman Scholarship faculty representative, serves as mentor for Davidson students applying for that award. Three Davidson students have won Truman Scholarships during the past four years.

Davidson is a highly selective independent liberal arts college for 1,900 students located 20 minutes north of Charlotte in Davidson, N.C. Since its establishment in 1837 by Presbyterians, the college has graduated 23 Rhodes Scholars and is consistently regarded as one of the top liberal arts colleges in the country. Through The Davidson Trust, the college became the first liberal arts institution in the nation to replace loans with grants in all financial aid packages, giving all students the opportunity to graduate debt-free. Davidson competes in NCAA athletics at the Division I level, and a longstanding Honor Code is central to student life at the college.
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