Four Women Scholars Who Have Been Selected for Endowed Professorships

Cynthia E. Rogers has been named the new Blanche F. Ittleson Professor of Psychiatry and director of the William Greenleaf Eliot Division of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Her research has focused on studies of the social determinants of health on brain development in infants.

Dr. Rogers earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology in 1998 from Harvard College. She worked as a research assistant in a post-traumatic stress disorder program in San Francisco before enrolling at Washington University School of Medicine, where she earned her medical degree in 2005.

Jane Springer, a professor of literature and creative writing was named the James L. Ferguson Professor at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. Professor Springer is the author of three books of poetry including Dear Blackbird (University of Utah Press, 2007), which won the Agha Shahid Ali prize for poetry.

Professor Springer joined the faculty at Hamilton College in 2006. She holds a doctorate in creative writing from Florida State University.

Joya Misra, professor of sociology and public policy and director of the Institute for Social Science Research at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has been appointed to the Roy J. Zuckerberg Endowed Leadership Chair. Professor Misra’s work primarily falls into the subfields of race/gender/class, political sociology, work & labor, family, and welfare states. She is co-author of the book Walking Mannequins How Race and Gender Inequalities Shape Retail Clothing Work (University of California Press, 2022) and recently was elected president of the American Sociological Association.

Professor Misra is a graduate of Centenary College in Shreveport, Louisiana, where she majored in religion. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in sociology from Emory University in Atlanta.

Kish Parella, professor of law at the Washington and Lee University School of Law in Lexington, Virginia, has been appointed the Class of 1960 Professor of Ethics and Law. Professor Parella has written extensively on corporate accountability and ethics, particularly as those issues apply to global value chains. She joined the faculty at the law school in 2013.

Professor Parella is a graduate of the University of Western Ontario. She earned a master’s degree at the University of Cambridge in England and a master of law degree and a juris doctorate at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.