New Assignments for Five Women Scholars at Major Universities

Thelma Hurd was appointed director of medical education at the University of California, Merced. In this role she will also teach undergraduate and graduate courses in surgery on the Fresno campus of the University of California San Francisco. For the past four years, Hurd has served on the Cutler-Orosi Joint Unified School District’s Health Science Academy Executive Board. Earlier, she served on the faculty at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, the Breast Surgery Department at Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York, and the department of surgery at the University at Buffalo.

Dr. Hurd is a graduate of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. She earned her medical degree at Rutgers University.

Monica Brown was appointed the inaugural Mary T. Hill Director of Data Analysis in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Sciences at St. Catherine University in St. Paul, Minnesota. Brown has been a member of the St. Catherine University faculty since 2008. She recently served as chair of the mathematics department.

Brown earned a master’s degree in applied mathematics with an emphasis in statistics from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. She is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in leadership.

Joni Adamson was named a President Professor at Arizona State University. She is a professor of environmental humanities in the department of English and director of the Environmental Humanities Initiative at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability at the university. Professor Adamson joined the Arizona State University faculty in 2006.

Dr. Adamson is a past president of the Association for the Study Literature and Environment. She is a graduate of Idaho State University and holds a master’s degree in English from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Arizona.

Alice Kaplan, a leading scholar of 20th- and 21st-century French and Francophone literature and history, has been named the next director of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University. Her three-year term will begin July 1. Dr. Kaplan is the John M. Musser Professor of French at Yale.

Professor Kaplan, who joined the faculty in 2008, holds a Ph.D. in French and philosophy from Yale University. Her latest book is Looking for the Stranger: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic (University of Chicago Press, 2016).

Johnnie Hamilton-Mason was appointed the E.W. White Professor in the School of Social Work at Simmons University in Boston. Her current research focuses on African immigrants involved in human service work. From 2004-2007, Dr. Hamilton-Mason served as director of the doctoral program at the School of Social Work.

Dr. Hamilton-Mason, who holds a master of social work degree and a Ph.D., is the co-author of Systemic Racism in the United States: Scaffolding as Social Construction (Springer, 2018).