Four Women Scholars Who Have Been Appointed to Endowed Professorships

Stephanie Martin has been selected as the next Frank and Bethine Church Endowed Chair of Public Affairs in the School of Public Service at Boise State University in Idaho. She was a professor of communication and public affairs at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Professor Martin is the author of Decoding the Digital Church: Megachurch Storytelling and the Election of Donald J. Trump (University of Alabama Press, 2021).

Dr. Martin is a graduate of Boise State University. She earned a master’s degree in journalism at Syracuse University in New York and a Ph.D. in communication from the University of California, San Diego.

Louise Meintjes was named the Marcello Lotti Professor at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.  She is a professor of music and a professor of cultural anthropology at the university. Professor Meintjes has been teaching at Duke since 1997. She is the author of Sound of Africa! Making Music Zulu in a South African Studio (Duke University Press, 2003).

Dr. Meintjes is a graduate of the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa, where she majored in music. She holds a master’s degree in music and a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin.

Regina Stevens-Truss was appointed to the Dorothy H. Heyl Senior Endowed Chair in Chemistry at Kalamazoo College in Michigan. She has taught at Kalamazoo College since 2000. Research in her lab focuses on testing a variety of compounds (peptides and small molecules) for antimicrobial activity.

Professor Stevens-Truss earned a bachelor’s degree from Rutgers University in New Jersey. She holds a Ph.D. in medicinal chemistry from the University of Toledo in Ohio.

Hala Auji was named to the Hamad bin Khalifa Endowed Chair for Islamic Art at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. She has been serving as an associate professor of art history at the American University of Beirut. She has also taught at Binghamton University in New York and the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Printing Arab Modernity: Book Culture and The American Press in Nineteenth-Century Beirut (Brill, 2016).

Dr. Auji is a graduate of the American University of Beirut, where she majored in graphic design. She holds a master’s degree in criticism and theory from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, and a Ph.D. in art history from Binghamton University.