New Appointments for Six Women Faculty Members

Marty Brock has been promoted to associate vice president for academic affairs at Mississippi University for Women. She has been with the university since 2006, most recently serving as a professor of management information systems and dean of the College of Business and Professional Studies. She previously served as chair of the business department and coordinator for the Center for Teaching Excellence.

Dr. Brock holds a bachelor’s degree in history, a master’s degree in business administration and information systems, and a Ph.D. in instructional systems and workforce development from Mississippi State University.

Kirby Tyrrell has joined the faculty of the School of Law at Washburn University in Kansas as an associate professor and director of the Family Justice and Immigration Clinic. She most recently served as a Robert M. Cover Clinical Teaching Fellow at Yale Law School.

Tyrrell is a two-time Ivy League graduate, holding a bachelor’s degree in history from Harvard University and a juris doctorate from Columbia Law School.

Catherine Patterson has been appointed chair of the department of history at the University of Houston. She has taught at the university for the past three decades. Her work in the study of early modern British history led her to authoring two books, Urban Patronage in Early Modern England (Stanford University Press, 1999) and Urban Government and the Early Stuart State (Boydell Press, 2022).

Dr. Patterson is a magna cum laude graduate of the College of William and Mary in Virginia, where she majored in history. She holds a master’s degree and Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago.

Edda Fields-Black has been appointed director of the Humanities Center at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She has served as a faculty member within the university’s department of history for over two decades. Earlier this year, she published her third book, COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 2024).

Dr. Fields-Black holds a bachelor’s degree in English and history from Emory University in Atlanta and a master’s degree in history from the University of Florida. She earned a second master’s degree and Ph.D. in history from the University of Pennsylvania.

Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw has been named the inaugural faculty director of the Arthur Ross Gallery at the University of Pennsylvania. A member of the university’s faculty for nearly 20 years, she currently serves as the Class of 1940 Bicentennial Term Professor in the department of art history in the School of Arts and Sciences. She has authored numerous publications on American art, including her recent book The Art of Remembering: Essays on African American Art and History (Duke University Press, 2024).

Dr. Shaw holds a bachelor’s degree in art history from the University of California, Santa Barbara and a master’s degree in art history from Stanford University, where she was the university’s first African American student to graduate with a doctorate in art history.

Neveen Shafeek Amin has been selected to serve as interim co-director of the School of Human Inquiry at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. She has been with the university for nearly 10 years, currently serving as an associate professor of sociology, coordinator of the sociology program, and co-director of the Academy for Teaching and Learning Excellence.

Dr. Amin holds a master’s degree and Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Texas.