New
Joint Faculty Appointments Announced
Excerpted from Five College Ink NewsBreaks
Recent searches carried out this year have resulted in the
appointment of four new joint faculty positions in the following
fields: Architectural Studies, Middle Eastern History, Art
and Technology, and Theater. All the positions begin in the
fall of 2007.
The initial three years of the appointments in Architectural
Studies, Middle Eastern History, and Art and Technology are
being funded by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
The fourth, a visiting position in theater for sound design,
will be supported by a combination of funding from Five Colleges
and the hosting institution, the University of Massachusetts
Amherst.
These shared positions enable departments to plan for impending
retirements or to introduce specialized or emerging areas
of study into the curriculum. The joint appointment was among
the earliest forms of cooperation developed through the consortium.
Three of the new appointments are being shared by two or
three institutions; the fourth, in theater, is for a three-year
visiting lecturer.
Joint appointments are normally proposed by Five College
departments or programs that commit to collaborative planning.
Additional positions are expected to be made over the next
several years.
Middle Eastern Studies
Nadya Sbaiti has been appointed Five College Assistant Professor
of History to teach the social and cultural history of
the modern Middle East. This is a tenure-track position,
based at Smith, to be shared primarily between Smith and
Mount Holyoke in collaboration with the history departments
of the other campuses. She currently serves as coeditor
of the peer-reviewed Arab Studies Journal and
helped produce the documentary film About Baghdad.
Art and Technology
John Slepian has been appointed to a shared position between
Hampshire and Smith colleges to further collaboration between
their respective arts and science programs and those of
the Five Colleges in general. This is a full-time, continuing
appointment at the assistant professor level, for which
Hampshire College will serve as the home institution with
Slepian teaching at Hampshire and Smith. Those serving
on the search committee comprised representatives from
studio art, engineering, computer science, and cognitive
science. Slepian received a BFA in film and television
from New York University in 1988 and worked for many years
in commercial television and new media before returning
to school in fine art. For the past two years, he has served
as the Luther Gregg Sullivan Visiting Artist in Digital
Media at Wesleyan University in Connecticut.
Theater—Sound
Design
Robert Kaplowitz has been appointed Five College Visiting
Lecturer in Sound Design for a period of three years, beginning
this fall. In this position, shared by all five institutions,
he will be based in the university’s Department of
Theater. While the position serves the needs chiefly of
theater, it has implications and benefits for other performance
arts, such as music and dance, in which sound design plays
a crucial role.
Prior to accepting this
appointment, he had been teaching introductory and advanced
courses in sound design for both New York University’s
Undergraduate Drama Production and Design Track and the
Playwrights Horizons Direction and Design programs. His
courses will be open to students in any discipline, including
theater, dance, music, and film.
Architecture
Thom Long has been named Five College Assistant Professor
of Architectural Studies. The position will be based at
Hampshire College and shared among three campuses: Hampshire,
Amherst, and Mount Holyoke colleges. A practicing designer
and architect in Northampton, Long is the founder and creative
director of Vision Laboratory, a small, decade-old interdisciplinary
design practice.
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