The board of trustees of Williams College, the highly rated liberal arts institution in Williamstown, Massachusetts, voted to promote eight faculty members to the position of associate professor with tenure. Promotions will take effect July 1, 2021. Four of the promotions went to women faculty: Christine DeLucia in history; Lama Nassif in comparative literature; Christina Simko in sociology; and Emily Vasiliauskas in English.
Historian Christine DeLucia focuses her research on American history, Native American and Indigenous studies, and material culture. She is the author of Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast (Yale University Press, 2018). Before coming to Williams College, Dr. DeLucia taught at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. She is a graduate of Harvard University and holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in American studies from Yale University.
Lama Nassif is an applied linguist who specializes in sociolinguistics and language pedagogy. Her research addresses how attention and anxiety play a role in the learning of a second language, specifically Arabic. At Williams since 2016, she teaches Arabic language courses as well as courses on Arabic cinema and media. Before coming to Williams, she taught at Middlebury College in Vermont and the University of Texas at Austin. She is a graduate of Damascus University in Syria and earned a Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin.
Christina Simko is a sociologist whose interests include cultural, historical, and political sociology, as well as collective memory and social theory. She is the author of The Politics of Consolation: Memory and the Meaning of September 11 (Oxford University Press, 2015). Dr. Simko joined the Williams College faculty in 2015. She is a graduate of Bridgewater College in Virginia and holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia.
Emily Vasiliauskas teaches courses in the English Department that range from Shakespeare to the English Renaissance to modern poetry. She joined the faculty at Williams College in 2015. Dr. Vasiliauskas is currently working on a manuscript titled The Skull in the Mirror: Aesthetics in the Age of Shakespeare. Dr. Vasiliauskas is a summa cum laude graduate of Harvard University, where she majored in literature. She earned master’s degrees at the Warburg Institute in London and the University of Cambridge as a Marshall Scholar. She holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University in New Jersey.