Seven Professors Granted Tenure

Congrats to Professors Bashir, Cerveny, Cohen, Duffly, Khan, Szwarcberg Daby, and Zornik.

The board of trustees has granted tenure to seven outstanding Reed professors in creative writing, biology, art history, theatre, linguistics, and political science.

Prof. Samiya Bashir [creative writing 2012–] holds a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, where she served as Poet Laureate, and an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she received two Hopwood Poetry Awards. In 2017 she was awarded the Regional Arts & Culture Council’s Individual Artist Fellowship in Literature in recognition of individual artistic achievement and excellence. She has been the recipient of numerous other awards, grants, fellowships, and residencies, and is a founding organizer of Fire & Ink, an advocacy organization and writer’s festival for LGBT writers of African descent.

Prof. Kara Cerveny [biology 2012–] earned her PhD in biochemistry, cellular, and molecular biology from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where she explored the molecular mechanisms of mitochondrial division and inheritance. She expanded her research interests with a Damon Runyon Post-Doctoral Fellowship investigating how neuronal tissues grow at University College London and was also full-time scientific editor of Cell. Since joining the faculty at Reed, she has won more than $1 million in grants, most of it from the NIH, and has published papers with 11 of her students.

Prof. Kris Cohen [art history and humanities 2011–] is trained as a media theorist and an art historian. These two fields come together in his work on the technological mediation of social life. His first large-scale research project, Never Alone, Except for Now: Art, Networks, Populations (Duke University Press, 2017), takes up this history near the end, with the advent of electronic networks and the building of new collective forms in networked environments. Future projects will extend this history back in time as a way to better understand the present. One will consider the relationship between art practices and changes to the intellectual property laws that govern creative labor and the commons. Another seeks to write a history for the bitmap as a mid-century screen technology that significantly transformed techniques of visual representation. His PhD is in art history from the University of Chicago. He has written for the journals Afterall, New Media and Society, Continuum, caa.reviews, and a number of exhibition catalogues. He has also recently been involved in starting a new online journal, Open-Set. At Reed, he's taught "Video, Media, Politics (1968-Present)," "Figuring Relation," "The Art of Capitalism," "Theories of Forms," and Humanities 110.

Prof. Catherine Ming T’ien Duffly [theatre 2012–] is a scholar-director and community-based theatre artist with a PhD in performance studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Her teaching and research interests include socially engaged and community-based theatre, 20th and 21st century American theatre, race theory and performance, acting, and directing. She has published articles in TDR, Theatre Topics, Theatre Survey, and Theatre Annual and is currently working on an edited collection that examines a broad array of performance practices rooted in community and explicitly engaged in negotiating difference and disruption. In addition to her own directorial and devised performance work, she has worked with Cornerstone Theater, Lunatique Fantastique, Touchable Stories, and Wise Fool Community Arts. In 2016, she received a grant from the Regional Arts and Culture Council to create a community-based theatre project with community organization Western States Center and collaborator Roberta Hunte about reproductive justice, titled We Are BRAVE. She is a board member for the August Wilson Red Door Project, which seeks to change the racial ecology of Portland through the arts; and Theatre Diaspora, Oregon’s only professional Asian American/Pacific Islander theatre company. Before Reed, she taught as lecturer at UC Berkeley and California College of Arts.

Prof. Sameer ud Dowla Khan [linguistics 2012–] is co-editor of the Journal of South Asian Linguistics (JSAL). He focuses on phonetics and phonology—the physical attributes of speech sounds, the complex patterns they form, and the abstract representations they embody in our mental grammars. His primary research specializations are intonation (prosody) and voice quality (phonation), and he also works on dissimilarity, reduplication, and infant-directed speech. You can learn about his model of Bengali intonation, which he is currently expanding to cover the prosodically diverse languages of South Asia. At Reed he teaches intro linguistics, phonetics, phonology, intonation, phonological knowledge, field methods, methods of design and analysis, and South Asian languages. He also serves as the director of Reed’s Lab of Linguistics, where faculty and students conduct research on diverse languages and their varieties.

Prof. Mariela Szwarcberg Daby [political science 2012–] studies the incentives that contribute to the persistence of clientelism in consolidated democracies in Latin America. She is also interested in questions of political participation, voter turnout, and gender and development in new democracies. She is the author of Mobilizing Poor Voters: Machine Politics, Clientelism, and Social Networks in Argentina. Her research has been published in the Journal of Comparative Politics, Latin American Research Review, Social Networks, Latin American Politics and Society, Nueva Sociedad, and Women's Policy Journal of Harvard. Before Reed, she taught at the University of Chicago and the University of Notre Dame. She earned her PhD from the University of Chicago.

Prof. Erik Zornik [biology 2012–] is a neuroscientist with a broad interest in understanding how brains generate behaviors. He studied cell and molecular biology at the University of Michigan, trained in neurobiology as a graduate student at Columbia University, and was a postdoc at Boston University and the University of Utah. His research primarily investigates how neurons and neural circuits generate vocal behaviors of the African clawed frog, Xenopus laevis. Much of his research employs electrical recordings of vocal neurons. Since arriving at Reed, he has also been collaborating with students to use molecular tools to identify genes that are critical for the production, development, and evolution of frog vocalizations. His courses focus on understanding how neurons work, and how nervous systems control physiologically critical functions such sensory processing, movement, and metabolism. He has also authored 12 articles and won more than $500,000 in grant funding, most of it from the NIH.

Tags: Academics, Institutional, Professors