Five Women Scholars Appointed to Endowed Professorships at Major Universities

Maria del Guadalupe “Lupe” Davidson has been named the Woodburn Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and the director and academic coordinator for social justice affairs at West Virginia University. She currently serves as associate professor, chair of women’s and gender studies, and co-director for the Center for Social Justice at the University of Oklahoma.

Dr. Davidson holds a Ph.D. in rhetoric from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh.

Yelena Baraz has been named the Kennedy Foundation Professor of Latin Language and Literature at Princeton University in New Jersey. She has been a Princeton faculty member since 2007. As an academic, she specializes in Latin literature, Roman cultural history, and the history of ideas.

Dr. Baraz is a summa cum laude graduate of Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, where she majored in Latin. She holds a master’s degree in Greek and a Ph.D. in classics both from the University of California, Berkeley.

Susanne Fusso has been named the Marcus L. Taft Professor of Modern Languages at Wesleyan University in Middletown Connecticut. She is a specialist in 19th century Russian prose who has authored three books including Designing Dead Souls: An Anatomy of Disorder in Gogol (Stanford University Press, 1993), and Editing Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy: Mikhail Katkow and the Great Russian Novel (Northern Illinois Press, 2017).

Dr. Fusso is a graduate of Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. She holds a master’s degree and Ph.D. both from Yale University.

Katharine Knowlton has been reappointed as the Colonel Horace E. Alphin Professor in Diary Science at Virginia Tech. She has been a faculty member at Virginia Tech since 2000.

Dr. Knowlton is a graduate of Cornell University. She holds a master’s degree from Michigan State University and a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland.

Tina M. Harris has been named to the Manship-Maynard Chair in Race, Media, and Cultural Literacy in the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University. She currently serves as a professor in the department of communication studies at the University of Georgia. She is the co-author of Interracial Communication: Theory Into Practice (Sage Publications, 2013).

Dr. Harris holds a bachelor’s degree and master’s degree in speech communication from the University of Georgia and a Ph.D. in speech communication from the University of Kentucky.