Three Women in Important New Teaching Roles at Major Universities

Barbara Klinger was named a Provost’s Professor in film and media studies at Indiana University in Bloomington. The honor of being named a Provost Professor is reserved for faculty members who have achieved local, national and international distinction in both teaching and research.

Professor Klinger is the author of Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk (Indiana University Press, 1994). She is a graduate of Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, and holds a master’s degree from Ohio State University and a Ph.D. in communication studies from the University of Iowa.

Sonia Ryang was appointed the T.T. and W.F. Chao Professor of Asian Studies at Rice University in Houston, Texas. She will also serve as the director of the T.T. and W.F. Chao Center for Asian Studies at the university. She has been serving as the C. Maxwell and Elizabeth M. Stanley Family and Korea Foundation Chair of Korean Studies at the University of Iowa. Before joining the faculty at the University of Iowa in 2006, she taught at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Professor Ryang is the author of six books including her most recent work, Reading North Korea: An Ethnological Inquiry (Harvard University Press, 2011). She holds a Ph.D. in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge in England.

Joan Feigenbaum, the Grace Murray Hopper Professor of Computer Science at Yale University, has been appointed chair of the department of computer science at the university. She will become chair of the department on July 1.

Professor Feigenbaum is a graduate of Harvard University, where she majored in mathematics. She holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University.