Carleton College Announces Faculty Appointments to Endowed Chairs

The Carleton College Board of Trustees recently approved the appointments of six professors to endowed chair positions at the College. Deborah Ann Appleman was named the Hollis L. Caswell Professor of Educational Studies; Becky Boling was named the Stephen R. Lewis Jr. Professor of Spanish and the Liberal Arts; Jack Goldfeather was named the William H. Laird Professor of Mathematics, Computer Science and the Liberal Arts; Fred Hagstrom was named the Rae Schupack Nathan Professor of Art; Roger Reid Jackson was named the John W. Nason Professor of Asian Studies and Religion; and Adeeb Khalid was named the Jane and Raphael Bernstein Professor of Asian Studies and History.

Deborah Ann Appleman taught high school English for nine years before receiving her doctorate in 1986 from the University of Minnesota, where she also earned her MA in 1981 and her BA and teaching certificate in secondary English in 1973. She was awarded the Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Minnesota’s College of Education in 2001. She has also been a Visiting Professor at Syracuse University and at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to teaching at Carleton, Appleman works closely with students who wish to earn Minnesota teaching licensure. Her primary research interests include adolescent response to literature, teaching literary theory to secondary students, and the socio-cultural contexts of literacy. Her most recent book, to be published in July, is a second edition of Critical Encounters in High School English: Teaching Literary Theory to Adolescents, published jointly by Teachers College Press and the National Council of Teachers of English and used widely in English methods courses. She is a frequent national keynote speaker and consultant and has worked with teachers across the country.

Hollis L. Caswell, president of Teacher College at Columbia University from 1954 to 1962 and a specialist in curriculum development, was a distinguished and respected educator who inspired and mentored many others in the field. To encourage that same inspiration and leadership in Carleton students bound for careers in teaching, his son Hollis Caswell III, Class of 1953, established this professorship in 1998. His founding gift ensures Carleton’s continuing dedication to excellence in educating teachers by recognizing and rewarding outstanding faculty members whose personal qualities and exceptional teaching talents enrich the learning experience for Carleton students both in and beyond the classroom.

Becky Boling joined Carleton’s faculty in 1983. She graduated from Indiana State University, Evansville in 1975 with a major in Spanish and minor in English, completed her MA from Indiana State University in 1976, and earned her PhD in Spanish from Northwestern University in 1982. At Carleton, Boling teaches a variety of courses in Spanish language and Latin American literature. Her literature courses serve several other departments and interdisciplinary programs including Latin American studies, women’s and gender studies, theater, and environmental studies. Whether part of the language sequence or an advanced seminar on literature, the classes she teaches are speaking-rich and involve students actively in cooperative learning. Boling has taken students to Mexico on Carleton’s Off-Campus Studies program on eight separate occasions (1984-87; 1989-90, 1995, 2002). An active scholar in her field, Boling has written and published articles on a variety of well-known authors—Gabriel García Márquez, Griselda Gambaro, Mayra Montero, Carlos Fuentes, Sylvia Molloy, Luisa Valenzuela, Jorge Díaz, and Manuel Puig. Boling is on the editorial board of Latin American Theatre Review and serves as a reader for Gestos and Letras Femeninas.

The Stephen R. Lewis Jr. Endowed Professorship in the Liberal Arts was established in 2002 through the generosity of numerous alumni, trustees, friends, and faculty and staff members, and through a gift from the Class of 1952 on the occasion of their 50th Reunion. From 1987 to 2002, Stephen R. Lewis Jr. provided consistently strong, clear leadership for Carleton as its president. His commitment to quality in all areas was relentless—as was his energy in fulfilling his duties. This fund was created to recognize his exceptional leadership and to express the gratitude of the Carleton community for his stewardship of the College. The professorship is given to an outstanding faculty member whose teaching and service to Carleton helps students discover a passion for their field of study.

Jack Goldfeather graduated cum laude from Rutgers University in 1969 with a major in mathematics. He received his MS in 1971 and PhD in 1975 in mathematics from Purdue University and came to Carleton in 1977. He was a Visiting Research Professor in 1984-1985 and 1992-1993 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and in 2000-2001 and 2007-2008 at the University of Minnesota. He was the Principal Investigator in two National Science Foundation Grants funded in 1987 and 1994, and in 1992 won a National Science Foundation Research Opportunity Award. Goldfeather has taught more than 25 different courses in his 32 years at Carleton, including advanced courses in both mathematics and computer science. He developed and taught one of the first undergraduate computer graphics courses in the country in 1986 and has taught various computer science courses in six different computer languages. Goldfeather has delivered talks on his research at national meetings of the American Mathematical Society, the Mathematics Association of America, and the computer graphics section of the Association of Computing Machinery.

The Laird Professorship honors William H. Laird, lumberman, philanthropist, and member of the Carleton Board of Trustees from 1883 to 1910, serving the last ten years as its chair. Established in 1962, the professorship marks four generations of devotion and service to the College by the Laird and Bell families. Frederic S. Bell, William H. Laird’s son-in-law, served on the Carleton Board of Trustees from 1913 to 1938, including eleven years as chair. Bell’s son, Laird, was a board member from 1938 to 1955, and his granddaughter, Margaret Bell Cameron, served as a Carleton trustee from 1955 to 1991. There are currently three Laird Professorships at Carleton.

Fred Hagstrom graduated from Hamline University with honors as a studio art major in 1977. He completed his graduate study at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, where he received his MFA in 1982. As a graduate student, Hagstrom worked at Atelier 17 in Paris, studying with Stanly William Hayter. He also taught at the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1982 before joining the Carleton faculty in 1984. Hagstrom teaches drawing, printmaking, and book art as well as doing work in art that addresses social issues. He taught for many years in Carleton’s summer institutes for high school teachers, and received the honor of being named the 2000-2001 Higher Education Art Educator of the year from the Art Educators of Minnesota. Hagstrom’s experiences leading off-campus programs to the South Pacific since 1996 have had the strongest influence on his work and teaching, citing the most important concepts coming from this experience are an examination of art’s relationship with the natural world and learning from the examples of indigenous people of the region. Hagstrom’s work is included in a number of collections, including the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Walker Art Center, and the Weisman Museum at the University of Minnesota and his art books are in a number of libraries that have special collections, including the libraries of the University of Southern California, Stanford University, the University of Iowa, the University of Colorado, and the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne Australia.

The Nathan Professorship was made possible by a generous gift from the estate of Rae Schupack Nathan, a graduate of the Carleton Class of 1970. Many of Rae’s friends and her husband Robert “Gib” Nathan also contributed to this fund in her memory. Rae’s gratitude to Carleton and love of learning turned into a strong personal and financial commitment to the College. She supported Carleton so that future generations would have the opportunity to experience the same benefits she had been privileged to enjoy. The professorship honors and recognizes an outstanding faculty member whose teaching and service help students discover and develop their passion and talent in the arts.

Roger Reid Jackson has taught at Carleton since 1989, following stints at the University of Michigan and Fairfield University, which were preceded by his first job out of graduate school, as a visiting professor of Asian religions at Carleton in 1983. He received a BA in religion from Wesleyan University in 1972, an MA in South Asian studies from the University of Wisconsin in 1975, and a PhD in Buddhist studies from Wisconsin in 1983. Jackson’s teaching focuses on the religions of South Asia, especially classical Buddhist and Hindu traditions, but he also has offered courses on Tibetan Buddhism, mysticism, religious poetry, and theories of religion and of cross-cultural studies. In addition, he occasionally teaches introductory and intermediate classes on Islam, as well as directed reading courses on the Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Pali languages. Jackson’s publications include dozens of book reviews and articles in edited volumes and refereed journals. He has written or edited six books on topics in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism. He also has edited two international Buddhist studies journals, presented regularly at national and international academic conferences, been elected to leadership positions in Buddhism-related units at the American Academy of Religion, served on numerous dissertation committees, and spoken on Buddhism at meditation centers, churches, and colleges. He has received grant or fellowship support from the American Institute of Indian Studies, National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, Fulbright Foundation, and Freeman Foundation.

The Nason Professorship was established in 1972 by friends and colleagues to honor John W. Nason, who retired in 1970 after eight years as president of Carleton. A 1926 Carleton alumnus, the Rhodes Scholar and former head of the Foreign Policy Association developed a keen interest in foreign affairs and international education. As president of Swarthmore College from 1940 to 1953 and later at Carleton, Nason worked to broaden curricula to include studies of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. His efforts resulted in establishing Carleton’s Asian Studies Program, with concentrations on South and East Asia.

Adeeb Khalid arrived at Carleton 1993, having earned a BA with first class honors at McGill University in Montreal and a PhD from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Central Asia was a new field of inquiry at the time and he was awarded one of the first doctorates in Central Asian history and is part of the first cohort of specialists in Central Asia in the post-Cold War era. Khalid has published widely on questions of the transformations of the cultural and political life of Muslim societies under Russian and Soviet rule, on Russian and Soviet history, and on Islam in the modern world. He also maintains a strong interest in Muslim societies under Chinese rule and with his substantial linguistic requirements, Khalid is one of the leading scholars in this little studied part of world. He is the author of two highly regarded books, the second of which won the 2008 Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize for “the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences published in English” in 2007. His research has won a number of external grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Carnegie Corporation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Khalid’s work has been translated into Russian, Turkish, Persian, and French. He lectures widely, to audiences both scholarly and lay, including teaching junior faculty from Central Asia itself. He serves on the editorial boards of several scholarly journals, and in 2004, was elected president of the Central Eurasian Studies Society.

Building upon the College’s strength of involvement in Asia, Jane and Raphael Bernstein established the Bernstein Chair in 1993 to better prepare Carleton graduates and future leaders to understand the language, culture, and traditions of our East Asian neighbors. The chair is awarded to an accomplished scholar exceptionally engaged in the pursuit of scholarly work and further achievement in academic fields related to Asian Studies, preferably Northeast Asia, China, Japan, or Korea. The Bernstein’s son, John, graduated from Carleton in 1986. Raphael Bernstein served as a Carleton trustee from 1987 to 1999.