Four Women Who Have Been Appointed to Endowed Positions at Colleges and Universities

Elizabeth Gregory is the inaugural holder of the Taylor Endowed Professorship in Gender & Sexuality Studies in the Institute for Research on Women, Gender & Sexuality at the University of Houston. Dr. Gregory is director of the Institute for Research on Women, Gender & Sexuality and director of the Women’s, Gender & Sexuality studies program at the university. She has been on the faculty at the university since 1989.

Dr. Gregory is a graduate of Barnard College in New York City, where she majored in English literature. She holds a master’s degree from the University of Kentucky and a Ph.D. from Yale University.

Karida Brown is the inaugural Diane Nash Descendants of the Emancipation Chair at the John Lewis Center for Social Justice at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. Dr. Brown has been serving as an assistant professor in the departments of sociology and African American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Dr. Brown is a graduate of Temple University in Philadelphia. She holds a master of public administration degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a master’s degree and a PhD. in sociology from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

Janet Loebach was named the Evalyn Edwards Milman Assistant Professor in Child Development in the College of Human Ecology at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Her recent research has focused on outdoor and/or neighborhood-based play and mobility, and the assessment of outdoor and natural play spaces.

Dr. Loebach received a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from McMaster University in  Hamilton, Ontario. She earned a master’s degree in environmental design from the School of Architecture and Planning at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and a Ph.D. in children’s, urban, and health geographies from the department of geography at Western University in London, Ontario.

Valerie Hotchkiss is the new Azariah Smith Root Director of Libraries at Oberlin College in Ohio. For the past five years, she has been university librarian at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Earlier, Dr. Hotchkiss was the Andrew S.G. Turyn Endowed Professor and director of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois. She is the author or co-author of several books including Clothes Make the Man: Female Cross Dressing in Medieval Europe (Routledge, 1996).

Dr. Hotchkiss holds a bachelor’s degree in classics, a master of library and information sciences degree, and a Ph.D. in medieval studies, all from Yale University.