Women Promoted to the Rank of Distinguished Professor

Joan Richardson was named Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York. She teaches in the doctoral program in English and comparative literature. Professor Richardson is the author of A Natural History of Pragmatism: The Fact of Feeling From Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and a two-volume biography Wallace Stevens, A Biography: The Early Years, 1879-1923 (Beech Tree Books, 1986) and Wallace Stevens: A Biography: The Later Years, 1923-1955 (Beech Tree Books, 1988).

Professor Richardson is a graduate of Queens College of the City University of New York. She earned a Ph.D. at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Sandra Harbert Petrulionis was appointed Distinguished Professor of English and American Studies at the Altoona campus of Pennsylvania State University. She is the first faculty member at the Altoona campus to be honored with the title of Distinguished Professor. Professor Petrulionis is the author of To Set This World Right: The Antislavery Movement in Thoreau’s Concord (Cornell University Press, 2006).

Professor Petrulionis has been on the faculty at Penn State Altoona since 1996. She is a graduate of what is now Armstrong Atlantic State University in Savannah, Georgia, and holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in English from Georgia State University in Atlanta.

Cynthia Bejarano was named Regents Professor at New Mexico State University. She holds the Stan Fulton Endowed Chair in the university’s criminal justice program. She joined the faculty at New Mexico State in 2001. Professor Bejarano is the author of Que Onda? Urban Youth Culture and Border Identity (University of Arizona Press, 2005)  and is the co-editor of Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Americas (Duke University Press, 2010).

Dr. Bejarano holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from New Mexico State University and earned a Ph.D. in justice and social inquiry from Arizona State University.