Four Women Scholars Selected for New Endowed Faculty Appointments

Shola Lynch has been named the Diana King Endowed Professor in Film, Filmmaking, Television, and Related Media and director of the documentary film program at Spelman College, a women’s college in Atlanta, Georgia. She comes to her new role from the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, where she served as curator of the Moving Image and Recorded Sound Division.

Professor Lynch holds a master’s degree in American history and public history management from the University of California, Riverside and a second master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University in New York.

Karla Neugebauer has been appointed as the R. Selden Rose Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University. A Yale faculty member since 2013, she currently serves as director of the Yale Center for RNA Science and Medicine. She holds a secondary faculty appointment in the department of cell biology.

Dr. Neugebauer received her bachelor’s degree in biology from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and her Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of California, San Francisco.

Vikki Katz has been named the inaugural Fletcher Jones Foundation Endowed Chair in Free Speech at Chapman University in Orange, California. She has been a professor of communication studies at the university for the past two years. Previously, she was a professor of communication at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

Dr. Katz earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Los Angeles. She holds a master’s degree and Ph.D. from the University of Southern California.

Judith Anne Garretson Folse has been named to the Walmart Chair in Marketing in the Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas. A faculty member with the university for two years, she currently holds the titles of Distinguished Professor, Robert A. and Vivian Young Endowed Chair, and chair of the department of marketing. She previously taught at Louisiana State University for over two decades.

Dr. Folse is an alumna of the Walton College at the University of Arkansas, where she earned her Ph.D. in marketing.