Ten Earn Tenure
The granting of tenure is based on recommendations of the vice president for academic affairs and dean of faculty, and the committee on appointments, with the College president presenting final recommendations to the board. With the awarding of tenure comes the title of associate professor. All will be effective July 1, 2026.
Nadya Bair
Ph.D., M.A., University of Southern California; B.A., Barnard College
Nadya Bair is a historian of photography, mass media, and global visual culture. Her first book, The Decisive Network: Magnum Photos and the Postwar Image Market (University of California Press, 2020), received the 2021 PROSE Award in Media and Cultural Studies. By reconstructing the daily operations of the international picture agency Magnum, Bair reframes photojournalism as a collaborative profession while showing how news images became integral to visual culture in the two decades after World War II.
Her second book project, focused on New York’s International Center of Photography and its founder Cornell Capa, was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for 2023-24. Myth Maker: Cornell Capa and the Reinvention of Documentary at the International Center of Photography (ICP) uncovers the volatile history of making, marketing, and historicizing documentary photography from the 1960s into the digital era. Bair is one of 15 scholars awarded a 2025-26 fellowship by the Frankel Institute of Jewish Studies at the University of Michigan. She is using her residency to complete the book.
Charlotte Botha
D.M.A., University of North Texas; M.Mus., Nelson Mandela University; B.Mus., University of Pretoria
In addition to teaching courses in music theory and cultural musicology, Charlotte Botha serves as director of choral activities and conducts Hamilton Voices and the College Choir. Her research interests include foreign-language choral diction, multimedia choral performance, and equitable practices for including the music of and by marginalized communities in choral programs.
In March, Botha conducted the College Choir in concerts at New York City’s Carnegie Hall. Other recent guest conducting invitations include the Twin Ports Choral Project (Minn.), the University of Johannesburg, Ball State University (Ind.), and All-State choirs in Alabama, Missouri, and Texas. Her Choral Ubuntu and Nguni diction research was recently featured at the NY-ACDA, Westminster Choir College, and Chorus America conferences.
Clark Bowman
Ph.D., M.S., Brown University; B.S., University of Rochester
Clark Bowman’s favorite courses to teach have been in computational probability and statistics, and he strives to bring a “big data” flavor to the statistics curriculum at Hamilton. He especially enjoys using statistical tools to connect mathematical models with real data, and he is currently working on large-scale data analytics and modeling of biomarkers from wearable devices (e.g., Fitbits) in collaboration with a research group at the University of Michigan Medical School.
Bowman’s dissertation for his doctorate in applied mathematics focused on applied statistics — especially uncertainty quantification — and high-performance modeling in cellular biology. He taught for one year as a postdoctoral fellow in the Mathematics Department at the University of Michigan.
Anna Huff
M.F.A., California Institute of the Arts; M.F.A., B.A., The Evergreen State College
Anna Huff’s work spans performance, sound, technology, mixed media, and interactivity, and frequently engages intersections of body, object, and ritual to reveal social and technological structures that tie individuals to communities. She is a founding member of media performance collective Cloud Eye Control, creating interactive and time-based work that addresses speculative futures and the impact of technology on the human psyche.
Huff created the live performance The Shapes We Leave Behind with New York City artist Fawn Krieger. In it, they use digitized and tactile sculptural objects, along with sound and multimedia performance, to explore how live bodies and voice engage with physical forms, from screens to stage and back again.
Huff was a recent performance fellow at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Previous performances and presentations include the College Art Association; New Museum; Redcat, Los Angeles; MoMA PS1; and Festival A Mil, Chile. Huff previously taught at Cornell University’s Department of Art and the CalArts Center for Integrated Media.
Amy Koenig
Ph.D., Harvard University; M.St., University of Oxford; B.A., Yale University
Amy Koenig’s research concentrates on Greek and Latin literature of the Roman Empire. She is the author of The Fractured Voice: Silence and Power in Imperial Roman Literature (University of Wisconsin Press, 2024), a study of literary depictions of muteness and silencing in the Roman Empire, illuminating ways in which voicelessness enables a paradoxical kind of liberation in these texts.
She has also published on the ancient novel and the poetry of Ovid, completed a number of dictionary entries in Latin, and edited Greek papyrus texts from the Oxyrhynchus collection at the University of Oxford.
In 2024, Koenig received a research fellowship through the University of Cincinnati’s Margo Tytus Visiting Scholars Program. She used the university’s classics library to build connections with its faculty as she embarked on her sabbatical project, “Romans Writing Greek: The ‘Romanitas’ of Imperial Greek Literature.”
Heather Kropp
Ph.D., Arizona State University; B.S., Evergreen State College
Heather Kropp’s research investigates the impacts of climate change on plants and the subsequent consequences for energy and water cycling. Her work spans desert, boreal, and Arctic ecosystems.
Last year she published the paper “Heterogeneous long-term changes in larch forest and shrubland cover in the Kolyma lowland are not captured by coarser-scale greening trends” in Environmental Research: Ecology. In 2024, she received a Top Cited Paper Award for North America from IOP Publishing for her paper “Shallow soils are warmer under trees and tall shrubs across Arctic and Boreal ecosystems” in Environmental Research Letters. That paper was in the top 10 most cited IOP articles from 2021 to 2023 in the field of environmental science.
Kropp applies big datasets and statistical computing approaches to examine the impact of climate change from leaf to global scales. She teaches on topics related to high latitude ecosystems, geospatial analysis, and environmental data science. She was previously a postdoctoral research associate and visiting faculty member at Colgate University.
Jack Martínez Arias
Ph.D., Northwestern University; B.A., Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos
Jack Martínez Arias specializes in Indigenous and Andean studies. Growing up in the mining city of La Oroya, Peru, inspired him to examine the impacts of extractive activities on culture and the environment through Peruvian and Bolivian cultural productions. He is author of Literatura y minería en los Andes (1880-1930) [Literature and Mining in the Andes (1880-1930)]. Martínez Arias has published his research in more than a dozen peer-reviewed journals. In 2024, his article “Medioambiente y transculturación en El abrazo de la serpiente (2015)” [“Environmentalism and Transculturation in Embrace of the Serpent (2015)”] appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Brújula: revista interdisciplinaria de estudios latinoamericanos.
As a fiction writer, Martínez Arias has published three novels: Bajo la sombra (Animal de invierno, 2014), Sustitución (Planeta/Emecé, 2017), and Te he seguido (Dendro, 2024). His short stories have appeared in anthologies in the United States and Italy. At Hamilton, he serves on the Wellin Museum Advisory Committee and Latin American Studies Committee.
Arathi Menon
Ph.D., M.Phil., M.A., Columbia University; B.A., University of California, San Diego
Arathi Menon is a specialist in the histories of South Asian art. Her research focuses on the material culture of the premodern Indian Ocean World, from the ancient through to the early modern periods.
Her current book project, Building Cosmopolitanism: Hipped & Gabled Malabar, examines the art histories of the Malabar coast of southwestern India, where a particular convergence of sociocultural, economic, and political factors shaped the development of the region’s distinctive hipped and gabled architectural style. The book offers a new framework for understanding the medieval art and architectural history of Malabar’s churches, mosques, synagogues, and temples.
In 2023, Getty and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) named Menon as one of only 10 recipients of the Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Art. The fellowship honors outstanding early-career art historians from around the world whose innovative scholarship stands to make substantial and original contributions to the understanding of art and its history. Menon teaches in the Art History Department and the Asian Studies and Middle East/Islamicate Worlds Studies programs.
Mahala Stewart
Ph.D., M.A., University of Massachusetts, Amherst; B.A., University of Maine, Orono
Mahala Dyer Stewart’s research and teaching explore connections among gender, race, and class inequalities in families and schools. Her current book project compares the schooling decisions of Black and white class-advantaged families.
In 2023, Stewart published The Color of Homeschooling: How Inequality Shapes School Choice (New York University Press), which exposes racial differences in homeschooling and what that might mean for the nation’s education system. The book was selected as a finalist for The Society for the Study of Social Problems’ C. Wright Mills Book Award. Her other projects include an interview study examining interracial couples’ residential decisions and research with child-free adults.
Michael Welsh
Ph.D., University of Wisconsin, Madison; B.S., Washington and Lee University
Michael Welsh’s research lies at the interface of chemistry and microbiology, and he is broadly interested in the biosynthesis of polymers that decorate the cell surface of bacteria. At Hamilton, he studies enzymes that build the bacterial cell wall with the goal of aiding the development of new antibiotics. He previously served as a National Institute of Health postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School.
In 2024, Welsh was awarded the Cottrell Scholar Award, a $120,000 grant for research and education from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, to fund his proposed project, Characterization of Enzymes that Build and Degrade Spore Cortex Peptidoglycan. His research focuses on the bacterial cell wall, a polymer that coats the outside of a bacteria and protects it from damage. Undermining the cell wall kills the bacteria, so understanding its properties and structure is key in developing antibiotics. Specifically, he is investigating the function and purpose of the chemical reactions that affect the enzymes that alter the cell wall during sporulation and germination.
