Five Women Scholars Taking on New Teaching Roles

Heather Williams was named the sixth Presidential Term Professor and professor of Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her appointment is effective July 1. Since 2004, Dr. Williams has been a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a former assistant attorney general for the State of New York and a former trial lawyer for the civil rights division of the U.S. Department of Justice.

Professor Williams is the author of Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom (University of North Carolina Press, 2005) and Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery (University of North Carolina Press, 2012). Williams is a graduate of Harvard University and Harvard Law School and holds a Ph.D. in American studies from Yale University.

Nazli Kibria has been appointed chair of the department of sociology at Boston University. She joined the Boston University faculty in 1994 and was promoted to full professor in 2012. She is the author of Muslims in Motion: Islam and National Identity in the Bangladeshi Diaspora (Rutgers University Press, 2011).

Dr. Kibria is a graduate of Wellesley College in Massachusetts, where she double majored in political science and sociology. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania.

Jennifer Finney Boylan was named the inaugural Anna Quindlen Writer-in-Residence at Barnard College in New York City. She has been a member of the English department faculty and director of the creative writing program at Colby College in Maine. She will teach two creative writing courses at Barnard each year.

Professor Boylan is the author of 13 books including She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders (Random House, 2003) and Stuck in the Middle With You: A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders (Random House, 2014).

Monica Kraft was named the Charles Johnson, M.D. Professor of Medicine at the Duke Translational Medical Institute. She serves as the chief of the Division of Pulmonary, Allergy, and Critical Care and is the director of the Duke Asthma, Allergy, and Airway Center. She has been on the faculty at Duke since 2004 and previously taught at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.

Dr. Kraft is a graduate of the University of California, Davis and the medical school at the University of California, San Francisco.

Hazel Wetzstein was appointed professor and chair of the department of horticulture and landscape architecture at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. She has been serving as a professor of horticulture at the University of Georgia. She joined the faculty at the University of Georgia in 1980 and was promoted to full professor in 1995.

A graduate of California State University, Dr. Wetzstein earned a Ph.D. in botany at the University of California, Davis.