The board of trustees of Williams College, the highly-rated liberal arts educational institution in Williamstown, Massachusetts, recently voted to promote eight faculty members to the rank of associate professor with tenure. The promotions will take effect July 1, 2026
Four of the promotions went to women.
Allison Gill was named an associate professor of biology. A faculty member since 2020, Dr. Gill is a biogeochemist who studies how plants and microorganisms influence the flow of carbon and nutrients through ecosystems, work that climate change and environmental pollution render increasingly vital. Dr. Gill is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. She earned a Ph.D. in biology from Boston University and served as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Minnesota.
Cynthia K. Holland was promoted to associate professor of biology. She joined the faculty in 2020 after serving as a postodcotral fellow at the Boyce Thompson Institute at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Dr. Holland’s research focuses on how plants synthesize small molecules to grow, develop, and defend themselves from predators. A native of Little Rock, Arkansas, she graduated from the Honors College at Henderson State University, a public liberal arts college in Arkansas, where she majored in biology and minored in chemistry. Dr. Holland earned a Ph.D. in plant and microbial biosciences at Washington University in St. Louis.
Munjulika R. Tarah was named an associate professor of dance. Her research focuses on dance and identity politics in Bangladesh and more broadly in South Asia. Dr. Tarah joined the Williams College faculty in 2018. Earlier she taught at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, and Northwestern University in Qatar. She is completing work on a book – Dancing Ritiniti: Aesthetic Morality and Femininity in Bangladesh – which is under contract with Oxford University Press. Dr. Tarah is a graduate of what is now Randolph College in Lynchburg, Virginia. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in performance studies from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
Elizabeth Upton was promoted to associate professor in the mathematics and statistics department. She joined the college’s faculty in 2019 and has served as the faculty affiliate for the women’s hockey team. Dr. Upton’s research involves the employment of network-indexed data analysis strategies to shed new light on important, real-world questions. Dr. Upton is a graduate of the University of New Hampshire, where she majored in mathematics and statistics and minored in business administration. She holds a master’s degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a Ph.D. in statistics from Boston University.