Four Women Scholars Have Been Selected for Endowed Professorships at Pomona College in California

Pomona College, the highly rated liberal arts educational institution in Claremont, California, has announced the appointment of nine scholars to endowed professorships. Four of these appointments went to women.

Cherene Sherrard Johnson was appointed the E. Wilson Lyon Professor of the Humanities. For 20 years, she taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was the Sally Mead Hands-Bascom Professor of English. Her research is primarily focused on Black female representation in mid-nineteenth to early twentieth-century American literature and visual culture. She is the author of Portraits of the New Negro Woman: Visual and Literary Culture in the Harlem Renaissance (Rutgers University Press, 2007). Professor Sherrard-Johnson is a graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles. She earned a master’s degree and a Ph.D. at Cornell Univerity in Ithaca, New York.

Ami E. Radunskaya was appointed the Lingurn H. Burkhead Professor of Mathematics. Among Dr. Radunskaya’s areas of expertise are mathematical modeling of tumor growth and treatment, dynamical systems, and analysis of non-linear models of power systems. She is co-director of EDGE, a national program designed to increase the number of women students successfully completing graduate programs in the mathematical sciences. Professor Radunskaya is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley. She earned a Ph.D. at Stanford University.

Erin M. Runions was appointed the Nancy J. Lyon Professor of Biblical History and Literature. Her research focuses on the Hebrew Bible. Her publications include The Babylon Complex: Theopolitical Fantasies of War, Sex, and Sovereignty (Fordham University Press, 2014); How Hysterical: Identification and Resistance in the Bible and Film (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); and Changing Subjects: Gender, Nation, Future in Micah (Bloomsbury, 2002). Professor Runions joined the faculty at Pomona College in 2005. She is a graduate of the University of British Columbia and holds a Ph.D. from McGill University in Montreal.

G. Gabrielle Starr, president of Pomona College since 2017 and professor of English and neuroscience, has been appointed the McConnell Professor of Human Relations. Dr. Starr’s research centers on aesthetics: how human beings engage with not just the content of artworks but how artworks affect us physically, emotionally, intellectually, and socially. Her most recent book is Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience (MIT Press, 2013). Before coming to Pomona, she was dean of the College of Arts and Science at New York University. Dr. Starr enrolled at Emory University at the age of 15. She earned a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree at Emory before going on to earn a Ph.D. at Harvard University.