Yale University Appoints Four Women to Endowed Professorships

Margaret Homans was named the Bird White Housum Professor of English. Her research and teaching focus on literature that explores questions of gender, sexuality, power, and identity. She began her academic career as an assistant professor of English at Yale, and since 1998 she has served as a professor of English and of Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies. Dr. Homans is the author of several books including Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing (University of Chicago Press, 1986). Professor Homans is a 1974 graduate of Yale College and earned her Ph.D. at the university in 1978.

Lauren Benton was appointed the Barton M. Biggs Professor of History, effective July 1. Currently, she is the Nelson O. Tyrone Jr. Professor of History and professor of law at Vanderbilt University. Professor Benton is a comparative and world historian whose research focuses on law in European empires, the history of international law, and Atlantic world history. Dr. Benton is the author of four books, including Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400-1900 (Cambridge University Press, 2001). She is the current president of the American Society for Legal History. A graduate of Harvard University, Professor Benton earned her Ph.D. in anthropology and history from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Susan J. Baserga recently was appointed the William H. Fleming, M.D. Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry. Professor Baserga studies fundamental aspects of ribosome biogenesis, the nucleolus, human diseases of making ribosomes (ribosomopathies), and the impact of ribosome biogenesis on cell growth, cell division, and cancer. She began her academic career as an assistant professor of therapeutic radiology and of genetics at the Yale School of Medicine. In 2007, she was appointed full professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry, of genetics, and of therapeutic radiology. Dr. Basera holds a bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree, a medical degree, and a Ph.D., all from Yale Univerity.

Regina Grace Kunzel was named the Larned Professor of History and of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, effective January 1, 2021. Dr. Kunzel is currently the Doris Stevens Chair and Professor of History and Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton University in New Jersey. Earlier in her career, she held an endowed chair at the University of Minnesota. She is a historian of gender and sexuality in the 20th-century United States. Professor Kunzel’s is the author of Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality (University of Chicago Press, 2008) and Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890 to 1945 (Yale University Press, 1993). A graduate of Stanford University, Professor Kunzel earned her Ph.D. from Yale in 1990.