When most students think of fall semester, herds of new first-year faces come to mind. It is easy to forget, however, that the College also experiences a flood of new faculty members.
“We’re having excellent success in our recruitment, with top quality candidates,” Dean of Arts and Sciences Clayton Koppes said. However, despite the large number of new hirings, the search for new faculty is by no means over. Many departments still have vacant positions to fill.
The history department is hiring Daryl Maeda as assistant professor of Asian American and 20th century U.S. history.
“We were very fortunate to get Daryl Maeda,” History Department Chair Steven Volk said. “There are not a huge number of people who are trained in Asian American history.” With universities across the country increasing the demand for programs that include Asian American history, the competition is among the universities, rather than the qualified professors.
The history department is still looking to fill two positions for the fall. The first is a jointly held position with the African American Studies department for African history. “Negotiations are still underway for the new position in African history,” Koppes said. The second position is for early modern European history, and is being offered in the form of a Mellon Fellowship, a two-year grant that enables scholars who have recently finished their dissertations to complete their first books while teaching a light course load.
The English department is gaining Richard Juang as a Minority Scholar in Residence, a one-year position modeled after the Mellon Fellowship that gives visiting instructors the chance to do post-doctorate work as well as some supervised teaching. As a member of the Consortium for a Strong Minority Presence in Liberal Arts Colleges, Oberlin College looks to offer positions in departments for which there is a need for a more diverse faculty.
“Because Wendy Motooka will be on leave again next year, we have a need for an 18th century person. That’s [Richard Juang’s] field,” English Department Chair David Walker said.
The geology department has added two new permanent positions for the fall, one of which is being filled by a new professor, Laura Moore, and the other by Visiting Associate Professor Dennis Hubbard, who joined the Oberlin geology faculty in 1998 in a temporary position.
“I came here mostly to write and I ended up teaching a few courses, and it reminded me how much I missed it,” Hubbard said. “[To be a good geology instructor at Oberlin], you need the willingness to step outside of the area you are most comfortable with…that’s the challenge, and once you accept it, at least for me, that’s what makes it most enjoyable.”
After years of student and faculty pressure, a Middle East and North African Studies position has been added in the Humanities Division. The position was advertised to applicants from the history, politics, sociology or anthropology fields. Of the initial response of about 80 applicants, the search has been narrowed down to four candidates. Two of them, both historians, gave talks this week. The other two, who specialize in political science, will speak next week. Whichever of the four the interdisciplinary committee picks, with the approval of the relevant department, will join that department as a full-time professor.
The politics department has created a new tenure track position in International Relations/Latin America. However, because the search was begun late last year, the department decided to offer a one-year position for the fall and conduct a new search starting this summer for the permanent position.
Other departments that are gaining new faculty this fall include psychology, environmental studies, Hispanic studies, theatre, and anthropology.
Despite the large influx of new faculty, many other departments continue to search. Sociology is still looking to fill the Asian American and micro-sociology position, biology searches for two new tenure-track positions, and throughtout college departments, many other one-year and one-semester replacement positions are still open.