Seven new tenure-track faculty

Reed has seven new tenure-track faculty members this fall, teaching physics, history, art, mathematics, creative writing, and French: Danielle Braje, Benjamin Lazier, Akihiko Miyoshi, Irena Swanson ’87, Catherine Witt, Luc Monnin, and Peter Rock.

Danielle Braje, assistant professor of physics, specializes in non- linear optics and atomic physics. Previously, Braje was a post- doctoral fellow at Stanford and a research assistant at Lund University in Sweden. Outside of the classroom, she has worked at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center as a research intern and for Stanford’s chapter of the Optical Society of America. Recipient of the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation Fellow-ship, a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, and a National Physical Science Consortium Graduate Fellowship, Braje received her B.S. in physics from the University of Arizona and her Ph.D. in applied physics from Stanford.

Benjamin Lazier, assistant professor of history and humanities, studies modern Europe and intellectual history. Previously a collegiate assistant professor of social science and a fellow of the society of fellows at the University of Chicago, he received a Charlotte W. Newcome Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. Lazier is a graduate of the University of Virginia who studied in Israel and Germany before earning his M.A., C.Phil., and Ph.D. at Berkeley.

Akihiko Miyoshi, assistant professor of art, is a working artist who will teach photography, digital media, and drawing. He has taught at the Rochester Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon University, and has been an Alfred & Ruby Davis Scholar and a Kilian J. & Carolyn F. Schmitt Scholar. His photography has been exhibited in galleries throughout Japan and the United States, and he is the author of Introduction to Digital Cameras. Miyoshi received his B.A. from Keio University, Japan, his M.S. from Carnegie Mellon, and his M.F.A. from R.I.T.

Irena Swanson ’87 has joined the faculty as professor of mathematics. She will teach courses on calculus and real analysis. She has previously taught at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, the University of Kansas, New Mexico State University, Universita di L’Aquila in Italy, and the University of Michigan. Swanson is a widely published author and has received multiple National Science Foundation (NSF) grants and a Professional Opportunities for Women in Research and Education grant. After receiving her B.A. in mathematics from Reed, she earned master’s and doctoral degrees in mathematics at Purdue.

Catherine Witt, assistant professor of French, has recently been a lecturer and instructor in Princeton’s department of French and Italian. Her academic interests include contemporary French poetry, literary theory, French drama, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century French literature. Witt received her B.A. and M.A. in modern history from Merton College, Oxford, and went on to study at Princeton, where she received her Ph.D. in French literature this year.

In addition to the above-mentioned new arrivals on the Reed campus, the following faculty members previously taught at the college and have taken tenure-track positions this fall.

Luc Monnin, assistant professor of French, studies eighteenth- century French literature and culture and the history and theory of language, as well as the history of ideas, computer theory, and visual arts. He received his M.A. from the University of Geneva and his Ph.D. from the department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Johns Hopkins University. He taught French and French literature at the University of California–Santa Barbara, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Geneva, before joining the Reed faculty in 2004.

Peter Rock, assistant professor of creative writing, is the author of the novels The Bewildered, The Ambidextrist, This is the Place, and Carnival Wolves. His story collection, The Unsettling, will be published in spring 2006. Rock received a B.A. in English from Yale, and held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford. He has taught fiction at the University of Pennsylvania, Yale, Deep Springs College, and in the M.F.A. program at San Francisco State University. His stories and freelance writing have appeared widely. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship.