Four Women Faculty Members Who Are Taking on New Assignments

Dorothy Y. Ko, professor of history at Barnard College in New York City, has been selected to hold the Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the North at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. She will spend three months in Washington in 2022 working on her research proposal “Ecological History of China, 1400-2020.”

Professor Ko has taught at Barnard College since 2001. She holds bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees, all from Stanford University.

Erica Cooper was named assistant provost for faculty diversity in the Office for Inclusion and Diversity at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, effective June 8. She currently serves as the co-director of the African and African American studies program and is an instructor in the department of communications at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina. Earlier, she was a tenured professor at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia.

Dr. Cooper holds a Ph.D. in communications from Indiana University-Bloomington.

Suzannah Clark, the Morton B. Knafel Professor of Music at Harvard University, has been named the next director of the Mahindra Humanities Center at the university, effective July 1. Professor Clark is a musicologist and music theorist who specializes in the works of Franz Schubert, the history of tonal music theory, and medieval vernacular music of the 12th and 13th centuries. She served as chair of the university’s music department from 2016 to 2019. Before coming to Harvard in 2008, Dr. Clark taught at the University of Oxford in England.

Professor Clark holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from King’s College in London. She earned a master of fine arts degree and a Ph.D. from Princeton University in New Jersey.

Rebecca Cunningham, a professor of emergency medicine and a professor of health behavior and health education, has been appointed vice president for research at the University of Michigan. Dr. Cunningham joined the university as a lecturer in 1999. She was appointed associate vice president for research-health sciences in 2017.

Dr. Cunningham is a graduate of Fairfield University in Connecticut. She earned her medical degree at what is now Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia.