The ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾ College Board of Trustees has granted tenure to five faculty members.
The promotions had been recommended by the board’s Academic Affairs Committee. The following faculty members were promoted from assistant professor to associate professor with tenure, effective July 1, 2025.
Sarah Harmon, Computer Science
Harmon is an interdisciplinary scientist and director of the ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾ Computational Creativity Lab—a research program exploring how human-computer interaction can enhance our daily lives and help the common good. Her research specialties include computational creativity, health technology, narrative intelligence, and playable media (in particular, building purposeful systems that invite play). Her scholarly projects and exhibitions aim to enhance daily life and often incorporate techniques from artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, machine learning, and natural language processing. In 2022, Harmon was honored with the Sydney B. Karofsky Prize for Junior Faculty for her "ability to impart knowledge, inspire enthusiasm, and stimulate intellectual curiosity" in her teaching. She welcomes collaborations with ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾ students and finding new ways to advance computing to make a meaningful difference.
Patricia Jones
Patricia Jones, Biology
Jones, who directs the ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾ College Scientific Station on Kent Island, is a behavioral ecologist. Her research examines the factors that influence animal decision-making. She studies how bees decide what flowers to visit using experiments with commercial bumblebees in the lab on campus and wild bees in the field on Kent Island. She is focused on how floral color, plant community, and cognitive abilities interact to influence bee choices. On the island, Jones also works with Leach’s storm-petrels, seabirds that are part of a long-standing historical dataset from the field station. Her current grant with collaborators from Kenyon College and Bucknell University uses novel technology to investigate individual investment in reproduction by measuring the proportion of food individuals collect that they decide to feed to their chicks versus keep for their own maintenance.
William Lempert, Anthropology
With years of ethnographic fieldwork experience in northwestern Australia, Lempert has focused much of his research on the issues facing Aboriginal communities and the implications of how they are represented. His forthcoming book, Dreaming Down the Track: Awakenings in Aboriginal Cinema (University of Minnesota Press, 2025), traces the social life of filmmaking as a critical mode of political transformation. Lempert’s emerging research engages relationships between contemporary outer space projects and the ongoing process of colonization on Earth. His work analyzes the deeper motivations for traveling beyond our planet and attempting to be in contact with extraterrestrial beings. Lempert has engaged with scientists at the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute), Indigenous studies scholars, Native science fiction filmmakers, and visual artists, learning about the tradition of Polynesian wayfinding and studying a group ethnography of the International Space Station, as he delves into this increasingly relevant topic.
Angel Daniel Matos, Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies
An interdisciplinary scholar who teaches and writes in the fields of youth cultures and queer studies, Matos has a particular interest in queer young adult literature, teen cinema, video games, Latinx cultures, and theorizations of time and space. His recent book, The Reparative Impulse of Queer Young Adult Literature (Routledge, 2024), is a nuanced exploration of the queer imagination in texts and media created for teen audiences. Matos explores how queer teen literature and media connect to broader histories of cultural hurt and oppression that have haunted queer lives, representations, and practices. Matos, who won the 2023 Sydney B. Karofsky Award for Junior Faculty, says his identity as a writer, teacher, and researcher is informed significantly by his experiences as a queer Puerto Rican and first-generation student and scholar.
As a historian and ethnographer of South Asian religions, Robison focuses on Hindu and Islamic traditions. Her research examines transformations of religion in urban India in relation to changing norms of family, gender, and class. Her work also traces the influence of transnational religious networks on lived religion, raising questions about how religious authority is mediated in new urban environments. Her recent book, Bringing Krishna Back to India: Global and Local Networks in a Hare Krishna Temple in Mumbai (Oxford University Press, 2024), examines the evolution of a group long associated with Western hippie culture. She traces the way in which many prominent Indian communities now regard the movement as being grounded in Hindu traditionalism. Her next project examines the role of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture in curating spaces for Muslim heritage in contemporary India.
