Bowdoin College in Maine Appoints Three Women to Endowed Chairs

Bowdoin College, the highly rated liberal arts educational institution in Brunswick, Maine, has announced the appointment of seven faculty members to endowed chairs. Three of the appointments went to women.

Judith Casselberry has been named to the Geoffrey Canada Chair in Africana Studies. A scholar in African American religious and cultural studies, with particular attention to gender, Dr. Casselberry came to Bowdoin College in 2009 from Princeton University, where she was an inaugural postdoctoral fellow at the Center for African American Studies. Dr. Cassleberry is the author of The Labor of Faith: Gender and Power in Black Apostolic Pentecostalism (Duke University Press, 2017). Professor Casselberry earned her bachelor’s degree in music production and engineering from Berklee College of Music in Boston. She holds a master’s degree in ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, and a Ph.D. in African American studies and anthropology from Yale University.

Barbara Elias has been named the Sarah and James Bowdoin Associate Professor of Government and Legal Studies. Dr. Elias, who joined the faculty at Bowdoin in 2013, specializes in international relations, insurgency warfare, national security, U.S. foreign policy, military interventions, proxy wars, and alliance politics. She is the author of Why Allies Rebel: Defiant Local Partners in Counterinsurgency Wars (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Dr. Elias is a graduate of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Pennsylvania.

Zorina Khan has been named the William D. Shipman Professor in Economics. Professor Khan joined the Bowdoin faculty in 1996, and was promoted to full professor of economics in 2010. Her research in law and economics has helped to pioneer an entirely new field, the cliometrics (or quantitative economic history) of intellectual property and technological change. Professor Khan’s latest book is Inventing Ideas: Patents, Prizes, and the Knowledge Economy (Oxford University Press, 2020). Dr. Kahn earned a bachelor’s degree with first-class honors at the University of Surrey in England. She holds a master’s degree in economics  from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles.