Five Women in New Teaching Roles at American Universities

María del Carmen Caña Jiménez has been appointed an assistant professor in the department of foreign languages and literatures at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg. She is teaching courses on Spanish language and Hispanic culture and literature.

Dr. Caña Jiménez is a graduate of the University of Seville in Spain. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in romance languages and literatures from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Megan Vaughn was appointed Distinguished Professor of History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She has been serving as the Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History and director of the Centre of African Studies at the University of Cambridge.

Dr. Vaughn holds a Ph.D. from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. She is the author of five books including Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius (Duke University Press, 2005).

Christine Jacobs-Wagner, professor of molecular, cellular, and developmental biology at Yale University, was named director of the Microbial Diversity Institute at Yale. Her laboratory studies the molecular mechanisms underlying bacterial multiplication.

Professor Jacobs-Wagner holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from the University of Liege in Belgium.

Bernice Hausman, professor of English at Virginia Tech, was appointed the Edward S. Diggs Professor in Humanities at the university. Professor Hausman has been on the Virginia Tech faculty since 1995. She is the author of Changing Sex: Transexualism, Technology, and the Idea of Gender (Duke University Press, 1995) and Mother’s Milk: Breastfeeding Controversies in American Culture (Routledge, 2003).

Professor Hausman is a graduate of Yale University and holds master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Iowa.

Nereem Arastu was named a clinical law professor and supervising attorney for the Immigrant and Non-Citizen Rights Clinic of the City University of New York School of Law. She was an associate at the law firm of Simpson Thacher & Bartlett and a staff attorney for the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund.

Arastu is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Pennsylvania Law School.