Holy Cross Announces New Tenure-Track Faculty Hires

WORCESTER, Mass. – The Office of the Dean at the College of the Holy Cross announces the hiring of seven new faculty members in tenure-track positions this academic year. They are:

Melissa Ann Boyle (assistant professor, economics), earned her Ph.D. from MIT and A.B. from the College of the Holy Cross. Her teaching interests include the economics of health care and aging, public finance, health economics, labor economics and applied econometrics. Boyle, who is the recipient of half a dozen honors, scholarships and fellowships, has written or co-written several papers on economics. She has taught at MIT.

Leon P. Claessens (assistant professor, biology), earned his Ph.D. and M.A. from Harvard University and B.Sc. and M.Sc. from Utrecht University (Netherlands). His teaching interests include vertebrate surgery, human functional anatomy, veterinary anatomy and the biology and evolution of dinosaurs. Earlier this year, Claessens received international media attention after he co-published a study in Nature suggesting that the breathing systems of Tyrannosaurus rex is similar to that of living birds.

Cynthia V. Hooper (assistant professor, history), earned her Ph.D. and M.A. from Princeton University and her B.A. from Harvard College. Her teaching interests include Russian and Soviet history, the politics of memory, and the practice of dictatorship. The recipient of several fellowships, she has taught at New York University and Princeton University. Her dissertation on Stalin-era repression recently won an international award for the best work by a junior scholar in 20th century history.

Paola Marconi (assistant professor, modern languages and literatures), earned her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, her D.E.A. (Diplôme d’Etudes Avancées) from Université de Genève, her M.A. from the University of Virginia and her B.A. from the Università degli Studi di Bologna. She has years of experience teaching undergraduate literature and language courses in Italian and English, also in conjunction with cinema. She has expertise in Medieval and Early Renaissance Italian literature and published articles on Dante, Boccaccio, Della Casa and Manzoni.

Paul Oxley (assistant professor, physics), earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University and his B.A. from Oxford University. His teaching interests include quantum mechanics, atomic physics, plasma physics, particle and nuclear physics, laser physics and experimental methods in physics. The co-author of 16 papers and publications, he has taught at University of Minnesota, Harvard University and Oxford University.

Ann Sheehy (assistant professor, biology), earned her Ph.D. from John Hopkins School of Medicine and her B.A. in Kalamazoo College. She earned her postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania and Kings College. She has conducted extensive research on HIV and has published articles on the subject as well as others in the field of biology. Her big contribution to science so far has been the discovery of an anti-HIV gene.

Susan Crawford Sullivan (assistant professor, sociology and anthropology), earned her Ph.D. from Harvard University, her M.P.A. from Princeton University and her B.A. from Duke University. Her research and teaching interests include religion; poverty and social policy; gender; non-profit organizations; service-based learning; research methods; and applications of sociological research. Sullivan has taught at Harvard University and Princeton University.

The following two professors have taught at Holy Cross previously, and now hold tenure-track positions:

Sylvia Schmitz-Burgard (modern languages and literatures), earned her Ph.D. and M.A. from the University of Virginia. She also attended Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn and Albertus-Magnus-Universität Köln. Her research and teaching interests include 18th-, 19th- and 20th-century German literature; Austrian and German cultural history; women writers and feminist theory, 18th-century European novels; literary theory; as well as law and literature. She has taught at Harvard University, Princeton University, MIT, and the University of Virginia. In 2000, she published a book on novels by Richardson, Rousseau, and Goethe, titled Das Schreiben des anderen Geschlechts.

Diana V. Cruz (English), earned her Ph.D. and M.A. from Boston College and her B.A. from Providence College. She teaches and writes in the fields of American and African-American literature. She has especially focused on the poetry of Rita Dove. In addition to Dove, she has delivered lectures at various colleges on Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, and Grace Nichols. The recipient of several academic fellowships, she has taught at Bryant University and Boston College.