February 12, 2014
At its regular winter meeting in January, the Amherst College Board of Trustees voted to approve the recommendations of President Martin and the Committee of Six that each of these five faculty members be awarded tenure at the rank of associate professor, beginning July 1.
Brenneis has devoted her research to the blending of history and fiction in contemporary Spanish literature and film, and how this relationship is bound up with questions of memory, historical accuracy and narrative. She is the author of the forthcoming Genre Fusion: A New Approach to History, Fiction, and Memory in Contemporary Spain (Purdue University Press, 2014), and was recently awarded a $50,000 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to complete a project about Spanish non-Jews who were deported to Austria’s Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp during World War II. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in Hispanic languages and literatures. The courses she offers at Amherst have included “Violence, Art, and Memory of the Spanish Civil War” and “Strange Girls: Spanish Women’s Voices.”
Engelhardt arrived at Amherst in 2005, shortly after receiving his Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from the University of Chicago. He has developed such courses as “Pioneer Valley Soundscapes,” “Writing Through Popular Music” and “Sacred Sound,” as well as seminars on the anthropology of music. His research deals broadly with music, religion, European identity and new media. His first book, Singing the Right Way: Orthodox Christians and Secular Enchantment in Estonia,and a co-edited volume, Resounding Transcendence: Transitions in Music, Religion, and Ritual,will both be published by Oxford University Press.
Leah Schmalzbauer, Anthropology & Sociology and American Studies (joint appointment)
Schmalzbauer specializes in ethnographic research on immigration to “new destinations” and transnational families. In addition, her areas of interest include Latino migration; race, class and gender; globalization; rural sociology and qualitative methods. She recently completed a six-year ethnographic study of gender and family formation among Mexican migrants in the Rural Mountain West. Her first book, Striving and Surviving: A Daily Life Analysis of Honduran Transnational Families, was published by Routledge in 2005. Another book, The Last Best Place? Gender, Family and Migration in the New West will be published by Stanford University Press at the end of 2014. She earned her Ph.D. in sociology from Boston College and will begin teaching at Amherst this fall.
Adam Sitze, Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought
Sitze earned a Ph.D. in cultural studies and comparative literature from the University of Minnesota, where he was a MacArthur Scholar from 1996 to 2003. Since his hiring at Amherst in 2005, his courses have included “The Crisis of Neoliberal Legal Theory,” “Psychoanalysis and Law” and “Law Between Plato and the Poets.” Last year, he published The Impossible Machine: A Genealogy of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (University of Michigan Press), the research for which was supported by a prestigious International and Area Studies Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, Social Science Research Council and National Endowment for the Humanities. Sitze is also co-editor, with Timothy Campbell, of Biopolitics (Duke University Press, 2013).
Wolfson has taught courses on Russian/Soviet language, culture, literature, theater and film at Amherst since 2008 and was awarded the college’s annual Max and Etta Lazerowitz Lectureship in 2011. Once a vice president of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages, he is now a series editor for Academic Studies Press. Earlier in his career, Wolfson taught at the University of Southern California and at Middlebury College’s Kathryn Wasserman Davis School of Russian. His scholarly work has appeared in The Russian Review, Toronto Slavic Quarterly and collections published by Indiana and Cambridge University Presses. His monograph Self and Theater in Stalinist Society is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press. He holds a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley.