Tiffany Ana Lopez was appointed to the Tomas Rivera Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at the University of California at Riverside. The chair is named for the fourth chancellor of the university who served from 1979 until his death in 1984 from a heart attack. Professor Lopez is the second scholar to hold the chair, which was established in 2005.
Professor Lopez joined the English department faculty at the university in 1995 and has been teaching in the theater department. A graduate of Sacramento State University, Professor Lopez earned a master’s degree and a Ph.D. at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Atiya Kai Stokes-Brown was promoted to associate professor of political science at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. She has been teaching at Bucknell since 2008 and previously was on the faculty at Florida State University. Dr. Stokes-Brown is the author of The Politics of Race in Latino Communities: Walking the Color Line (Routledge, 2012).
Dr. Stokes-Brown is a graduate of Randolph Macon College in Ashland, Virginia. She earned a master’s degree at Temple University in Philadelphia and a Ph.D. in political science at the University of Maryland.
Birgitta J. Johnson is a new assistant professor of ethnomusicology in the School of Music at the University of South Carolina. She is currently working on converting her doctoral dissertation on music ministry in mega-churches in Los Angeles into a book.
Dr. Johnson is a graduate of Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia. She holds a master’s degree and a doctorate in ethnomusicology from the University of California at Los Angeles.