Three Women Scholars Appointed to Endowed Chairs at High-Ranking Colleges and Universities

Donna Ebenstein, a professor of bioengineering at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, was named to the William C. and Gertrude B. Emmitt Memorial Chair in Biomedical Engineering at the university. Dr. Ebenstein’s research focuses on micro- and nanoindenters, which measure the mechanical properties of small and irregularly shaped biological materials.

Professor Ebenstein is a graduate of the California Institute of Technology, where she majored in engineering and applied science and biology. She earned a Ph.D. in bioengineering in the joint program of the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, San Francisco.

Michelle Wright was named the Augustus Baldwin Longstreet Professor of English at Emory University in Atlanta. She is the former professor of African American studies and comparative literary studies at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on the problem of identity in the literature and philosophy of the Black and African Diasporas. Dr. Wright is the author of Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology (University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

Professor Wright is a graduate of Oberlin College in Ohio. She earned a Ph.D. in comparative literature at the University of Michigan.

Mara Benjamin was named to the Irene Kaplan Leiwant Chair in Jewish Studies at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. She will also chair the Jewish studies program at the college. Professor Benjamin was a professor at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. She is the author of Rosenzweig’s Bible: Reinventing Scripture for Jewish Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 2009).

Dr. Benjamin is a graduate of Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. She holds a Ph.D. in modern Jewish thought from Stanford University.