Bowdoin College, a private liberal arts institution in Brunswick, Maine, has recently selected five faculty members for endowed chair appointments. Three of these appointments went to women.
Connie Chiang has been named the Rusack Professor of History and Environmental Studies. A scholar of modern U.S. history, she focuses her work on environmental history, the history of the American West, social history, and Asian American history. Her latest book, Nature Behind Barbed Wire: An Environmental History of the Japanese American Incarceration (Oxford University Press, 2018), explores how the environment shaped the confinement of over 110,000 people of Japanese descent during World War II.
Dr. Chiang is a graduate of the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she double-majored in history and environmental studies. She holds a master’s degree and Ph.D. in history from the University of Washington.
Pamela Fletcher has been named the Edith Cleaves Barry Professor of History and the Criticism of Art. Her academic expertise centers on Victorian and Edwardian painting with a focus on questions of narrative, sentiment, and play in the context of nineteenth-century exhibition culture. She recently published The Victorian Painting of Modern Life (Routledge, 2024), which focuses on the emergence of British modern-life paintings in the mid-nineteenth-century.
An alumna of Bowdoin College, Dr. Fletcher holds a master’s degree in feminist theory and a Ph.D. in art history from Columbia University.
Paige Herrlinger has been named the Frank A. Munsey Professor of History. A Bowdoin faculty member since 1998, she currently serves as chair of the department of Russian, East European, and Eurasian studies. Her most recent book, Holy Sobriety in Modern Russia: A Faith Healer and His Followers (Northern Illinois University Press, 2023), tells the story of “Brother Ioann” Churikov and the thousands of Russians who found salvation through his teachings and prayers.
Dr. Herrlinger received her bachelor’s degree from Yale University. She earned her master’s degree and Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Berkeley.