Holy Cross Announces Tenure-Track Faculty Hires

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

Rosa E. Carrasquillo (assistant professor, history), earned her Ph.D. and M.A. in Latin American History from the University of Connecticut and her B.A. from the University of Puerto Rico. Formerly, she taught history courses at Assumption College and the University of Connecticut. Among her honors, she is the recipient of a faculty development grant at Assumption College, and The Ann Plato Fellowship, a pre-doctoral fellowship for minority scholars, from Trinity College. She is the author of Our Landless Patria: Marginal Citizenship and Race in Caguas, Puerto Rico, 1880-1910 (University of Nebraska Press, 2006).

Debra Gettelman (assistant professor, English), earned her Ph.D., Ed.M., and A.B. from Harvard University. Her teaching interests encompass 19th-century British literature and culture, Romanticism, Modernism and 20th-century British fiction. She received the Bowdoin Graduate English Prize from Harvard University for her article, “Reading Ahead in George Eliot” in the fall 2005 issue of Novel: A Forum on Fiction, a literary critical journal.

Jack Mitchell (assistant professor, classics), earned his Ph.D. from Stanford University and his B.A. from McGill University. Author of The Roman Conspiracy (Tundra Books, 2005), his professional interests include archaic Greek poetry, ancient criticism, performance theory, intertextual theory and translation theory.

Sara Gran Mitchell (assistant professor, biology), is a geologist who earned her Ph.D. from the University of Washington, her M.Sc. from the University of Vermont, and her B.A. from Carleton College. Specializing in the evolution of landscapes, she has conducted field research in the Cascade Range of Washington State and in Israel, among other locations, and was awarded the Howard A. Coombs Fellowship for Teaching Excellence in 2005. Additionally, she has contributed to a number of articles published in scientific journals including Nature, Geology, and Quaternary Research.

Sarah A. Petty (assistant professor, chemistry), earned her Ph.D. and M.S. in chemistry from the University of Liverpool (UK). She has written several articles concerning her research on peptides associated with diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which have been published in journals including Journal of the American Chemical Society, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (USA). Previously, she was a post-doctoral research fellow at Mount Holyoke College.

Bianca R. Sculimbrene (assistant professor, chemistry), earned her Ph.D. from Boston College, and her B.S. from Xavier University. Most recently she was a postdoctoral associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, funded by the National Institutes of Health Postdoctoral Fellowship, awarded to her in 2004. Her research interests include catalysts for phosphorylation and the development of other chemical tools for studying biological systems, on which she has published various articles.

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

Caroline E. Johnson Hodge (assistant professor, religious studies), earned her Ph.D. from Brown University, her M.T.S. from Harvard Divinity School, and her B.A. from Pomona College. She is the author of the forthcoming If Sons, Then Heirs: A Study of Kinship and Ethnicity in the Paul’s Letters (Oxford University Press, 2007), and a range of articles in other religious journals. She has most recently taught as a visiting professor at Holy Cross, prior to which she was the Kraft-Hiatt Postdoctoral Fellow and lecturer at Brandeis University. Her teaching interests include the history of early Christianity.

Debra J. O’Connor (assistant professor, economics), earned her Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, her M.S. in taxation from Bentley College, and her B.A. from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Last academic year she was a visiting instructor at Holy Cross. She previously taught at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Her research interests include supply chain management, multi-criteria decision making, and nonlinear programming. She is a certified public accountant.