Three Women Academics Who Have Been Appointed to Endowed Chairs

Penelope Andrews was appointed the John Marshall Harlan II Professor of Law at New York Law School. Professor Andrews joined New York Law School in January 2019 and teaches constitutional law, torts, professional responsibility, and race and the law. She is also the director of the law school’s Racial Justice Project. Professor Andrews began her teaching career at Australia’s La Trobe University, where she taught for eight years, before moving to the City University of New York School of Law, where she taught for 15 years.

Professor Andrews is a graduate of the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. She holds a law degree from Columbia University.

Anca Parvulescu, a professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis, was installed as the university’s Liselotte Dieckmann Professor in Comparative Literature. Dr. Parvulescu’s research fields include international modernism, affect theory, Eastern Europe. and the history of comparatism. A faculty member since 2006, she is the author or co-author of four books, most recently the award-winning Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania Across Empires (Cornell University Press, 2022).

Professor Parvulescu is a graduate of the University of Timisoara in Romania, where she majored in English literature. She holds a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Minnesota.

Melissa R. Kerin, associate professor of art history at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, has been selected as the next Roger Mudd Professor of Ethics and director of the university’s Roger Mudd Center for Ethics, effective July 1, 2024. Dr. Kerin, who is on sabbatical for the 2023-2024 academic year, first arrived at Washington and Lee University in 2011 as an assistant professor of art history. She is the author of Art and Devotion at a Buddhist Temple in the Indian Himalaya (Indiana University Press, 2015).

Dr. Kerin is a graduate of Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, where she majored in women’s studies. She holds a master’s degree from Harvard Divinity School and a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Pennsylvania.