The Dartmouth Board of Trustees approved promotions for faculty across the Arts and Sciences on June 12.
This year, 14 faculty members were promoted to full professor, and 14 were promoted to associate professor and granted tenure.
“I’m delighted to congratulate these exceptional colleagues on this well-deserved achievement,” says John Carey, interim dean of the Faculty of the Arts and Sciences. “Promotion and tenure recognize years of rigorous scholarship and creative work, devoted teaching, and generous service to Dartmouth. They have shaped our community and advanced their fields, and I look forward to all they will do in the years ahead.”
Dartmouth evaluates faculty for promotion and tenure through a rigorous review in three areas: research, teaching, and service. The promotions take effect on July 1.
The following faculty were promoted to full professor:
Asher Auel, Professor of Mathematics
Auel is a theoretical mathematician whose work spans number theory, algebra, and geometry, much of it concerned with the rationality of algebraic varieties, the theory of quadratic forms, and K3 surfaces. He is the author of numerous scholarly articles and has co-edited the book Brauer Groups and Obstruction Problems. He has been awarded multiple grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Security Agency, and the Simons Foundation. At Dartmouth, he led the effort to join the Northeastern Algebraic Geometry Research Consortium and was the founding faculty advisor to the mathematics department’s Directed Reading Program. He mentors many award-winning undergraduate researchers and doctoral students.
Laurie Churba, Professor of Theater
Churba is a costume designer who works at the intersection of design and devised theater. Over more than 30 years, her costumes have appeared on Broadway, Off-Broadway, and regional stages nationwide, and from 1997 to 2008 she was part of the costume design team at Saturday Night Live. Lately she has folded design into live performance: with New York’s Strike Anywhere Performance Ensemble, she takes the stage with a sewing machine and improvises costumes in real time, stitching and sculpting alongside the music and movement around her. She brings that collaborative, experimental spirit into her work with students.
Jeffrey Friedman, Professor of Government
Friedman is a political scientist who studies international security, foreign policy decision making, and public opinion on foreign policy. His 2023 book, The Commander-in-Chief Test: Public Opinion and the Politics of Image-Making in US Foreign Policy, draws on decades of polling, survey experiments, and historical cases to argue that voters often reward leaders for projecting toughness, even when they disagree with the position the leader is taking. He hosts a podcast for International Security, the field’s leading journal, and directs Dartmouth’s Rosenwald Postdoctoral Fellows Program in U.S. Foreign Policy and International Security.
Feng Fu, Professor of Mathematics
Fu is an applied mathematician and one of the world’s experts on evolutionary game theory, which uses mathematics to address complex social and system dynamics, such as the spread of misinformation, disease and vaccine resistance, and the way competing AI agents learn to cooperate. His work has produced numerous papers with undergraduate and graduate mentees and conference talks. Much of his energy goes to undergraduates: he created and teaches an undergraduate game theory course that recently drew more than 330 students, and has worked on research projects with dozens of undergraduates.
Ash Fure, Professor of Music
Fure is a composer and performer who has become a major figure in contemporary music, working between musical composition, art installation, and spatial design, often building new instruments and using architecture so that audiences become participants in the piece. Ensembles including the New York Philharmonic, the International Contemporary Ensemble, and the BBC Scottish Symphony have performed Fure’s compositions across the U.S. and Europe. A Pulitzer Prize finalist for Bound to the Bow, Fure has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rome Prize, and, more recently, a Creative Capital Award. Fure directs Dartmouth’s MFA in Sonic Practice program.
Justin Mankin, Professor of Geography
Mankin is a climate scientist and earth-system geographer whose research connects the physical causes of climate change to its concrete human costs, from crop losses to violent conflict to the economic damages traceable to the largest carbon emitters. His work combines observations with climate models and econometrics to answer both fundamental and applied questions, and regularly appears in journals such as Nature Science and PNAS. In 2024 he received the American Geophysical Union’s Global Environmental Change Early Career Award. His funded projects have brought more than $2 million to Dartmouth. He regularly provides public and legislative testimony and contributes to NASA, NOAA, and National Academies assessments on drought and the water cycle.
Janice McCabe, Professor of Sociology
McCabe is a sociologist who studies how college shapes students’ friendships, their sense of belonging, and where they end up later in life. Her 2025 book, Making, Keeping, and Losing Friends: How Campuses Shape College Students’ Networks, draws on in-depth interviews with students at Dartmouth, the University of New Hampshire, and Manchester Community College to show how a school’s structures shape the friendships formed inside it. The work has made her one of the leading authorities on college friendships, and she was recently elected president of the Sociology of Education Association. McCabe served as Allen House professor from 2017 to 2026.
Paul Novosad, Professor of Economics
Novosad is an economist mobilizing digital data to answer policy research questions in the Global South. Using satellite imagery, administrative data from governments and app platforms, and—via LLMs—text from legal and historical documents, his work tackles questions like how well courts deliver justice, who gets access to economic opportunity, and how cities sort by class and identity. A core part of his work is dedicated to open science infrastructure: his team builds public data platforms so researchers everywhere can work on these questions. His lab is currently building a new open platform to enable better research on cities in low- and middle-income countries. More than 30 undergraduates have worked in his lab.
Roopika Risam, Professor of Film and Media Studies
Risam helped found the field of postcolonial digital humanities, and her work traces how race, empire, and technology shape the modern world. Her first book, New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy, has been taught in over 100 courses worldwide. Her scholarship often takes digital form, such as Torn Apart/Separados, which built visualizations that helped locate children separated from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border. Her first trade book, Data Empire: The Power of Information to Organize, Control, and Dominate, was an NPR Summer Reading pick. She holds a joint appointment with the Comparative Literature Program and is part of the Digital Humanities and Social Engagement Cluster.
Robert St. Clair, Professor of French
St. Clair studies 19th-century French literature and culture, using theory to open up historical questions. He is one of the leading scholars of Arthur Rimbaud. His recent book, Counter-Modernities in Nineteenth-Century French Literature: Constellations of Loss in Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Flaubert, his second monograph with Oxford University Press, shows how those writers dwell on loss and defeat, while making a case for reading as an act of hope, a way of imagining a future that stays open. His work on France’s 19th-century political upheavals includes his reassessments on the 150th anniversary of the Paris Commune.
Zaneta Thayer ’08, Professor of Anthropology
Thayer is a biological anthropologist who studies how early-life and prenatal environments, from poverty to discrimination, shape human biology and health across a lifetime. She has examined the effects of maternal exposure to genocidal violence in Rwanda and links between cesarean delivery and child cortisol levels in Brazil. She is currently working on a book project about how evolution and culture shape pregnancy and birth experiences. Dartmouth recognized her with the Jerome Goldstein Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2025. Several of her undergraduates have co-authored her research.
Emily Walton, Professor of Sociology
Walton brings a racial lens to enduring questions about community, health, and inequality. As expanded immigration and desegregation policies have encouraged racial integration in many of our nation’s communities, her mixed methods research has pushed scholars in both sociology and public health to rethink old assumptions about racial integration and assimilation. Walton’s recent book, Homesick: Race and Exclusion in Rural New England, examines the consequences of the demographic transition happening in the Upper Valley. Her work has drawn support from the National Institutes of Health and the Russell Sage Foundation, and she serves as faculty director of Dartmouth’s Society of Fellows.
D.G. Webster, Professor of Environmental Studies
Webster studies why governments and citizens respond, or fail to respond, to environmental problems such as deep sea mining, water pollution, and climate change. Much of her work focuses on what she calls the precursors to governance: how processes like learning, innovation, and institutionalization can advance or hinder our collective ability to design and carry out effective environmental policy. She is the author of two books and many peer-reviewed articles. She also edits the journal Global Environmental Politics. A Fulbright Distinguished Fellowship in Oceans Governance took her to the University of São Paulo in 2024 and 2025.
Jacqueline Wernimont, Professor of Film and Media Studies
Wernimont is a scholar of how human life becomes data, tracing across history and into the present the ways the dead get counted and bodies become numbers. Her first book, Numbered Lives: Life and Death in Quantum Media, charts that history from the 16th century to today, through technologies from body counts to wearable devices. She also works on “data visceralization,” using everyday tools to turn data into something you can take in with all five senses. The co-editor of Bodies of Information: Feminist Debates in Digital Humanities, she chairs Dartmouth’s Digital Humanities and Social Engagement Cluster.
The following faculty were promoted to associate professor, with tenure:
César Alvarez, Associate Professor of Music
Alvarez is a composer, lyricist, playwright, and performance maker. They create large experimental musicals as non-normative possibility spaces for embodiment, inter-dimensionality, socio-political transformation, kinship, and coexistence. With a background as a jazz saxophonist, band leader, and sound artist, Alvarez works in the space between theater, music, performance art, and social practice. Alvarez was a 2018-20 Princeton Arts Fellow and has received the Jonathan Larson Award, the Edward Kleban Prize in Musical Theatre for lyrics, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Amanda Amodeo, Associate Professor of Biological Sciences
Amodeo is a biologist who studies how cells know their size as an organism develops. She works in the early embryo of the fruit fly Drosophila, where the usual rules are reversed: rather than growing before it divides, a single giant cell divides again and again without growing, until its cells reach a normal size. One of her key discoveries is the role maternal histones play in tracking cell size. Her lab pairs genetics, biochemistry, and sophisticated imaging with mathematical modeling. She has raised significant federal research funding and teaches in the Molecular and Cell Biology graduate program.
Hsien-Chih Chang, Associate Professor of Computer Science
Chang is a theoretical computer scientist who studies the shapes behind computing: the visible ones, like networks and maps, and the hidden ones that surface in seemingly unrelated problems. He uses abstract mathematics to prove how efficiently such problems can be solved. His results have appeared at the ACM Symposium on Theory and Computing, a top conference in theoretical computer science, including a way to compress a sprawling network into a compact “sketch” that preserves the distances within it. His work has earned a National Science Foundation CAREER award, and both graduate and undergraduate students have co-authored his papers.
Maron Greenleaf, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Greenleaf is a cultural anthropologist who studies green capitalism, environmental restoration, forests, and energy transitions across Brazil, the United States, and the UK. Her 2024 book, Forest Lost: Producing Green Capitalism in the Brazilian Amazon, grew out of more than 16 months of fieldwork in Acre, Brazil, and gives a close account of carbon offsets in the Amazon. Her current research turns to tree planting and environmental restoration in postindustrial England. She co-founded Dartmouth’s Energy Justice Clinic.
Matt Hooley, Associate Professor of Native American and Indigenous Studies
Hooley writes about the cultural histories of colonialism and anticolonialism, with particular attention to Indigenous literary and visual-arts modernisms, poetics, and the environmental humanities. His first book, Against Extraction: Indigenous Modernism in the Twin Cities, traces a tradition of Ojibwe anticolonial writing that took shape both alongside and against the extractive colonial infrastructure of Minneapolis and St. Paul. He is at work on two new books, one about Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead and another about the cultural histories of colonial water seizure across Turtle Island and Palestine.
Mingwei Huang, Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Huang is an interdisciplinary scholar of race and migration, trained in American studies and gender and sexuality studies. Her first book, Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism: South Africa in the Chinese Century, draws on fieldwork among Chinese migrants and businesses in Johannesburg, showing how race, money, and the exploitation of workers shape life there as China’s global power rises, much as European and American empires shaped earlier eras. The book received an honorable mention for the 2025 African Studies Association Best Book Prize. Her new research follows global race and migration, the afterlives of gold, and new forms of extraction, all from the vantage of South Africa.
C. Brenhin Keller, Associate Professor of Earth Sciences
Keller studies how Earth’s layers have interacted and been shaped by outside events over hundreds of millions of years. He pairs computational modeling with data from public repositories and his own fieldwork, and shares his software as open source. His research ranges from the formation of the moon to the volcanic eruptions behind mass extinctions, and it has earned two of his field’s top early-career honors: the American Geophysical Union’s James B. Macelwane Medal and the Geological Society of America’s Donath Medal, both in 2024.
Sunmin Kim, Associate Professor of Sociology
Kim is a sociologist who studies race, immigration, and national belonging through the lens of knowledge production, examining how supposedly self-evident categories like race and citizenship are in fact built by social scientists, officials, and activists. His book The Unruly Facts of Race: The Politics of Knowledge Production in the Early Twentieth-Century Immigration Debate turns to the Dillingham Commission, which Congress created in 1907 to study immigration, and argues that the new social science it relied on reshaped racial thinking rather than simply discrediting it. His second book will examine the role of social science research in the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans.
Iyabo Kwayana, Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies
Kwayana is a filmmaker whose work experiments with themes of diaspora across African and Asian communities. She is a multiple jury award–winning filmmaker whose work spans fiction and nonfiction. Trained as a director and cinematographer, she also works as a producer, sound designer, and editor. Her films are distinguished by embodied camera movement and inventive soundscapes that create immersive sensory experiences. She has directed 12 films, with work screened at the Sundance Film Festival and at international festivals from Korea to Serbia and Finland. Supported by grants from the LEF Foundation and the Wyncote Foundation, she was recently honored with Dartmouth’s Jerome Goldstein Award for Distinguished Teaching.
Elisabeth Newton, Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy
Newton is an observational astronomer who studies the synergy between stars, their planets, and the galaxy around them. Much of her work centers on small, magnetically active M-dwarf stars, how they spin and generate magnetic fields, and how planets form around young, active stars. As co-PI of the THYME collaboration, she has helped find roughly a third of all known planets younger than 500 million years, among them three planets circling a star just 120 million years old. A recent NASA grant supports her work connecting stellar flares to gravitational microlensing.
Theresa Ong, Associate Professor of Environmental Studies
Ong is an agroecologist who pairs theory with fieldwork to understand how the interactions among people, organisms, and the environment shape food production and the stability of ecosystems. Her research traces how the diversity of a system, across space, time, and species, builds its resilience to ecological and political shocks, and how small shifts can cascade into large, sometimes irreversible change. Agroforestry and urban gardens are among the buffers she studies. She has published numerous peer-reviewed articles and led USDA-funded projects totaling more than $10 million.
David Petruccelli, Associate Professor of History
Petruccelli is a historian of Europe who studies the legal and political institutions that emerged after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His book A Scourge of Humanity: The Origins of Interpol and the End of Empire in Central and Eastern Europe traces the organization that became INTERPOL back to efforts to manage crime, migration, and political threats after World War I. Built on multilingual archival research, it has drawn praise for its scholarship and storytelling. His second book will trace the rise and fall of the global prohibition of pornography in the 20th century.
Jonathan Phillips, Associate Professor of Cognitive Science
Phillips studies high-level human cognition, in particular how people make decisions among an enormous number of possible options without weighing each one in turn. He argues that humans have an implicit capacity to reason about possibilities, a finding that reaches into decision making, moral psychology, causal reasoning, theory of mind, and formal semantics. His work draws at once on psychology, philosophy, computer science, linguistics, and neuroscience, and he has published 32 peer-reviewed articles and given more than three dozen invited talks.
Paul Robustelli, Associate Professor of Chemistry
Robustelli is a computational chemist who studies intrinsically disordered proteins, molecules that matter in the chemistry of the cell yet have no fixed structure to tie to their function. His detailed simulations have been at the leading edge of showing how these proteins behave when they meet small molecules, which points toward ways to either boost or block what they do inside living cells. His findings are already informing industry, and he consults for companies working to design therapeutics from this research. He is affiliated with Dartmouth’s Neukom Cluster of Computational Science.