Five Women Join the Faculty at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota

Macalester College, the highly rated liberal arts educational institution in St. Paul, Minnesota, has announced the hiring of six new tenure-track faculty members for the fall semester. Five of the six new hires are women.

Amy Elkins is an assistant professor of English. She is an expert on British art and literature. Dr. Elkins is working on a book entitled Crafting Modernity. Dr. Elkins is a graduate of Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas. She holds a master’s degree from the University of Virginia and a Ph.D. from Emory University in Atlanta.

Crystal Moten is a new member of the history department faculty. She was an assistant professor of history at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. She is the author of the forthcoming book, This Woman’s Work: Black Women’s Economic Activism in Postwar Milwaukee. Dr. Moten is a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin.

Jessica Pearson-Patel is a new assistant professor of history. She was an assistant professor of European studies at the University of Oklahoma. Her research focuses on imperialism in Francophone Africa during the 1940s and 1950s. Dr. Pearson-Patel is magna cum laude of Kalamazoo College in Michigan. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from New York University.

Katrina Phillips was also hired as an assistant professor of history, with a specialization in American Indian history. For the past two years, she was a Consortium for Faculty Diversity Fellow at the college. Dr. Phillips holds a bachelor’s degree and a Ph.D. in history from the University of Minnesota.

Leah Witus was appointed assistant professor of chemistry. During the past academic year, she was a visiting assistant professor at Macalester College. Dr. Witus is a magna cum laude graduate of Rice University in Houston, Texas. She earned a Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley and was an NIH postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.