The Board of Trustees approved the promotion of 10 assistant professors to associate professors with tenure at its January 2024 meeting on Jan 19 and 20: Daniel Barowy, computer science; Mari Rodríguez Binnie, art; Xizhen Cai, statistics; Amal Eqeiq, Arabic studies; Galen Jackson ’09, political science; Katharine Jensen, physics; Murad Khan Mumtaz, art; Anna Plantinga, statistics; Robert Rawle, chemistry; and Saadia Yacoob, religion. The promotions will go into effect on July 1.
Achieving tenure at the College is often a seven-year-long process: After a professor teaches for three years at the College, the Committee on Appointments and Promotions (CAP) considers whether they should be retained for a second term of up to four years. If retained, the CAP evaluates the faculty member again, making provisional tenure decisions that must then be approved by the Board of Trustees. According to the Faculty Handbook, CAP evaluates professors based on the quality of their teaching and scholarship, taking into consideration student feedback, peer reviews, committee members’ impressions from class visits, and the quality of the candidate’s scholarly research.
Daniel Barowy, computer science
In what he describes as a “meandering” path, Barowy completed his undergraduate education at University of Massachusetts Amherst with a degree in philosophy and legal studies. After hiking the Appalachian Trail with LSAT test preparation books, which he later discarded, he found his love for computers and computer science in the Information Technology office at Bedford/St. Martin’s, a publishing company for college textbooks. Barowy took night classes at Boston University to obtain a bachelor’s degree in computer science and received his doctorate in computer science from University of Massachusetts Amherst shortly after.
After a stint as a visiting professor at Mount Holyoke, where he discovered his affection for liberal arts education, Barowy was hired by the College in 2017.
Barowy’s area of research is programming languages. He recently finished a project that focuses on improving the tools used to study social science. “I think social science is one of the next frontiers in science,” Barowy said in an interview with the Record. The programming language that he designed will help prevent confounding variables from creating faulty results in a myriad of social science experiments.
After six years of teaching at the College, Barowy said that his biggest advice to students is to take risks. “I think that risk-taking is important in life, because you could stumble across something that you’re like, ‘Wow, this is what I want to do,’” he said. “If you’re not trying those things, how are you going to know?”
Mari Rodríguez Binnie, art
Although she arrived at the University of Texas, Austin, intending to become a curator, Binnie said she fell in love with research during her master’s program in art history and soon realized she wanted to be a professor. After earning her doctorate in art history from the same university, Binnie was hired by the College as a professor of art in 2017.
Binnie’s ongoing research focuses on Latin American artists. “I look at the intersection between artistic experimentation and political critique,” she told the Record. Currently, Binnie is examining the work of Puerto Rican painter and printmaker Myrna Baez as a window into Cold War tensions between the United States and Latin America.
Binnie and her husband run an artist residency program at MassMOCA for Puerto Rican artists. Originally launched in the wake of Hurricane Maria, the residency has become a fixture of MassMOCA’s Assets for Artists fellowship program. Beyond the classroom, Binnie and her husband often travel to New York to keep current with developments in the art world. “We’ve found that that is a really nice balance [between New York and Williamstown] because after being in New York for a few days, I’m ready to go back to the forest,” she said.
The students are the highlight of the College for Binnie. “That Williams has such engaged students and students that are such deep thinkers is really my absolute favorite thing about it,” she said. “Any material that I bring in, in any of my classes at any level, the students have really digested it with their own ideas and opinions and thoughts.”
Xizhen Cai, statistics
While completing an undergraduate degree in mathematics and applied mathematics at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, Cai realized her appreciation for statistics during the last two years of her studies. After she arrived to the United States in 2008, Cai received her doctorate in statistics from Pennsylvania State University.
Following her doctorate, Cai worked as an assistant teaching professor at Carnegie Mellon and as a postdoctoral researcher at Temple University, each for two years. She was hired at the College in 2017.
Cai’s ongoing academic research is called mediation analysis, which involves studying the relationship between two variables while also considering the multitude of middle variables that can exist, and finding a subset of middle variables that are most helpful to understanding the initial relationship. Cai said she hopes to also work on a repository where researchers and students can store interactive applications for introductory statistical modeling, in conjunction with a professor at Wellesley College.
Cai told the Record she encourages all students, especially first-semester first-years to take advantage of the College’s low student-to-faculty ratio. “All the questions are good questions,” she said.
Amal Eqeiq, Arabic studies
Eqeiq holds a bachelor’s degree from Hebrew University, master’s degrees from Tel Aviv University and University of Oregon, and a doctorate in comparative literature from University of Washington.
Eqeiq began teaching at the College in 2018. Her research interests include modern Arab literature, popular culture, Palestine studies, feminist studies, and critical border studies. Her latest monograph, Indigenous Affinities: Comparative Study in Mayan and Palestinian Narratives, was recently published.
Eqeiq teaches in both the Arabic studies department and the comparative literature department. She has taught classes on postcolonial narratives, Arab women’s memoirs, and Indigenous narratives.
Galen Jackson ’09, political science
Before returning to his alma mater to teach, Jackson received a master’s degree in international relations from the University of Chicago and a doctorate in political science from UCLA. While at the College, Jackson received an undergraduate degree in history and political science. “I always found it very appealing to combine political science conceptual insights with historical evidence,” Jackson told the Record.
Jackson’s studies started with a focus on the Middle East. While he still teaches courses on the region, including his popular tutorial on the Arab-Israeli conflict, Jackson has shifted his academic focus to the increasingly significant role that cybersecurity plays within the changing international climate. In the last year, Jackson published his book A Lost Peace: Great Power Politics and the Arab-Israeli Dispute, 1967-1979, which investigates the actions and motivations of the United States and the Soviet Union during a critical period of Middle Eastern history, with insights relevant to today’s international conflicts. His edited addition of The 1973 Arab-Israeli War also came out in 2023. Last November, Jackson published a policy piece about recent developments in the Israel-Hamas war in the foreign policy and national security publication War on the Rocks. Next, he hopes to write about the effect of Israel’s nuclear arsenal on Middle East politics, he told the Record.
Jackson reflected on his love of teaching and the unique environment that the College fosters. “I really enjoy the intellectual tension and debate of the classroom,” he said. “I especially enjoy seeing student improvement and student success and how much students will engage with the material.”
“When I think about the most valuable part of the experience here, it was meeting new people from different backgrounds and getting to interact with people with different perspectives,” Jackson said. He said he would advise students to take their academics seriously, but not miss out on the opportunity to engage with people from a variety of backgrounds.
Katharine Jensen, physics
Jensen studies materials physics, a field of physics that she describes as the “physics in between” questions of the cosmos and those of subatomic particles — “right at the scale where we live.” After studying physics as an undergraduate at Princeton, Jensen worked at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory for two years before matriculating to Harvard to pursue her doctorate in physics. She then conducted experimental research at the University of Amsterdam and ETH Zurich.
Before moving to Zurich for 14 months, Jensen learned German at the Middlebury Language Schools. “I always feel like I’m so often asking people professionally to come meet me where I am [in English], and as my native language, it’s very easy for me, but it also feels a little too easy,” she explained. “I like being able to at least try to some extent to meet people where they are linguistically.” Jensen arrived at the College in 2017.
Jensen’s student-staffed lab studies “the mechanics of very, very soft surfaces,” she explained. Her lab is currently researching soft adhesion, fluid surface instabilities, and plant biophysics. “I love working in this interdisciplinary space, because I feel like there’’s just so many good ideas to pull from, and to apply in different places,” she said.
Jensen said her favorite part of working at the College is the people — both her students and colleagues. “It makes the day when you have good interactions with people and you can bounce ideas off of them and or solve a problem together or teach somebody how to solve gma problem and watch them have that moment where they’re like, ‘I get it!’” she said. Outside of the classroom, Jensen said she never turns off her physics mind. “I think I like living that way,” she said. “It’s just like, everything’s a puzzle when everything’s interesting and beautiful in a nuanced way.”
Murad Khan Mumtaz, art
Mumtaz studied studio art in Lahore, Pakistan. After moving to the United States, Mumtaz received his master of fine arts at Columbia University, which shifted his perspective on art and art-making. “Along the way, things changed,” he told the Record. “I got a little disillusioned by the art world, especially contemporary art, and realized that I needed to know more about my practice by delving into a deeper history about South Asia.” In 2018, Mumtaz received his doctorate in art and architectural history from the University of Virginia.
Mumtaz’s research focuses on Muslim culture in South Asia, specifically on the culture of spiritual and religious devotion in Muslim image-making. He recently published the book Faces of God: Images of Devotion in Indo-Muslim Painting, 1500–1800. “I also make a lot of translations of early modern Persian literature, biographies, ethnographies, as well as looking at them and comparing them with the visual archive of manuscripts, illustrations, and paintings,” he said.
Mumtaz teaches a survey of South Asian art and classes on Islamic art. His favorite class to teach is AAST 273: The Arts of the Book in Asia. In addition to teaching, Mumtaz is involved with the South Asia Students Association (SASA) and the Muslim Student Union (MSU).
In a word of advice to Williams students, “Don’’t follow the script all the time. Be a little bold. Don’t be so scared and at times timid,” Mumtaz said.
Anna Plantinga, statistics
The child of two liberal arts college professors, Plantinga said she was in high school before she realized there were jobs other than teaching at liberal arts schools. After studying mathematics and biology at Calvin College in her home state of Michigan, Plantinga received a doctorate in biostatistics at the University of Washington in St. Louis. Her research focuses on the statistics of the human microbiome, which consists of the trillions of bacteria in the human body, and more recently on developing metrics and models to measure how changes in the total number of bacteria in the microbiome affect health, with an eye on interventions.
Plantinga said her favorite part of working at the College is collaborating with her fellow professors. “This is one of the only liberal arts colleges that has a really robust group of statisticians, and it’s fun to have people to talk about teaching with,” she said.
In a word of advice to students, Plantinga emphasized academic courage. “Ask more questions and be less afraid of being wrong,” she said. “The sooner you can get over that, and the better you can get over that, the more you’ll learn and the more fun you’ll have.” Plantinga lives in North Adams with her husband, their dog, and many chickens.
Robert Rawle, chemistry
While studying chemistry at Pomona College, Rawle quickly realized that he wanted to teach at a liberal arts college. “I did my [doctorate] at Stanford and got exposed to a much larger school’s education program, and I much preferred the smaller connectedness with students,” he said. At the College, Rawle teaches introductory chemistry and biophysical chemistry, one of his areas of expertise.
Rawle’s lab studies the Sendai virus, cholesterol in the lipid membrane, and the fusion mechanism of flaviviruses such as West Nile, Zika, and Dengue. As much of his research is concerned with viral infections, Rawle emphasized the importance of biosafety in his lab. The Sendai virus does not infect humans, and his lab receives Dengue virus particles without genetic material from a partner lab at Stanford with which they can model fusion without risk of infection. “We published a paper on our computational model, we’ve been collecting some data, hopefully building up towards a publication with these Dengue virus-like particles, and maybe more to come,” he said.
Rawle ends every class with a reminder to “be kind to others.” He also advises that students try to manage anxiety. “It’s easy to say this as an outsider, but I think my general advice to people is to not worry as much,” he said. “It’s not particular to Williams, I think we live in a time and age where anxiety is rampant, and partly for some good reasons, but it causes all of us to really hone in on small problems and turn them into big problems. I think if people worried a little bit less and relaxed in their education, they would probably learn more and even do better.”
Saadia Yacoob, religion
Yacoob holds a bachelor’s degree from American University, a master’s degree from the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University, and a doctorate in Islamic studies from Duke University. She arrived at the College in 2017. Her research focuses primarily on gender, childhood, and enslavement in Islamic law. Yacoob’s forthcoming book, Beyond the Binary: Gender and Legal Personhood in Islamic Law, examines the role of gender in Hanafi legal thought. At the College, Yacoob has taught courses on Islam, Islamic law, and gender and sexuality in religion.
