CLAS appoints three faculty to named positions

Linda Maxson, University of Iowa Alumni Association Dean’s Chair in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS), has announced appointments of two named professors and a named fellow in the college. Lan Samantha Chang, professor and director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, is the May Brodbeck Professor in the Liberal Arts & Sciences. Judith Pascoe, professor of English, is the M. F. Carpenter Professor in English. Cameron Thies, professor and chair of political science, is the Harlan E. McGregor Faculty Fellow.

“It gives me great pleasure to recognize these exceptional faculty members,” Maxson says. “Each one is an exemplary teacher and academic leader, each has been prolific in presenting innovative scholarly or creative work, and each is highly regarded in her or his respective field. They represent the achievement that continuously renews our curriculum and offers exciting academic opportunities for our students.”

Lan Samantha Chang is an acclaimed writer of fiction whose award-winning short stories and novels have been translated into many languages. Her most recent novel, All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost (2010), was an Editor’s Choice in the New York Times and in the Chicago Tribune and was named one of the top five books of the year by GQ Magazine. Her novel Inheritance (2004) received the PEN Beyond the Margins Award for the Novel and was a finalist for the Independent Publisher Book Award and the John Gardner Book Award, among other honors. Her short story collection, Hunger (1998), received a California Book Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award.

Among the many research fellowships and residencies she has been awarded are a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Chang, who joined the faculty in 2006, is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

The Brodbeck Professorship was established by the college and the university to honor the late UI professor of philosophy and vice president for academic affairs May Brodbeck.

Judith Pascoe is a prolific, creative, and influential scholar of English Romanticism whose works have changed the ways in which nineteenth-century theatricality and performance, historical consciousness, and women’s writing are discussed and understood. She has published three books on nineteenth-century literary and cultural history: The Sarah Siddons Audio Files: Romanticism and the Lost Voice (2011), The Hummingbird Cabinet: A Rare and Curious History of Romantic Collectors (2006), and Romantic Theatricality: Gender, Poetry, Spectatorship. She has also contributed scholarly editions of works by poet Maria Jane Jewsbury, poet and novelist Charlotte Smith, and poet Mary Robinson. Her essays have appeared in The Hudson Review and The American Scholar.

Pascoe has been awarded research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies. She was a Fulbright Lecturer in Japan in 2010. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and joined the UI Department of English in 1993.

The Carpenter Professorship was established with funds donated to the UI Foundation by the late Millington F. Carpenter, professor of English.

Cameron Thies is an innovative and highly visible scholar of political economy. His studies of interstate conflict and state building in the developing world are broadly interdisciplinary, drawing on research in sociology, psychology, trade theory, and political geography. He has published nearly 40 scholarly articles in the top journals in his field. His book, Rulers, Rebels, and Revenue: How Rivalries Shape State Building Efforts in the Developing World, will be published next year by University of Chicago Press. He has also published on pedagogy in political science and is writing a textbook on global political economy. He is a reviewer for more than 30 scholarly journals, including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, and World Politics.

Thies received his Ph.D. from Arizona State University in 1999. He held faculty positions at Louisiana State University and the University of Missouri–Columbia before joining the UI faculty in 2008.

The McGregor Faculty Fellowship is supported by an endowment established at the UI Foundation by the Harlan E. McGregor Trust.