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14 Conn faculty members awarded promotions, tenure

At its most recent meeting, the Connecticut College Board of Trustees approved three faculty promotions to full professor, eight promotions to associate professor with tenure and three promotions to teaching professor. The promoted faculty represent a wide range of disciplines and have demonstrated distinction in teaching, research and service to the College.

Promoted to full professor:

Sheetal Chhabria, History

Chhabria is a historian of South Asia whose research and teaching focus on the production of poverty and inequality. Her current research focus is on the imbrications of caste and capital in the subcontinent’s long history and the failures of India’s decolonization. Her book, Making the Modern Slum: The Power of Capital in Colonial Bombay, won the American Historical Association’s 2020 John F. Richards Prize for South Asian History. She has written for The Nation, Jacobin and The India Forum.

Sheetal Chhabria

Anthony Graesch, Anthropology

Graesch is an anthropologist whose scholarship and analytic sensibilities are shaped by archaeological method and theory. As Conn’s official college archaeologist, Graesch collaborates with the Mohegan Tribe, Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation and Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation to provide oversight on the conservation, management and study of cultural heritage resources within the 750 acres the College stewards, including numerous archaeological sites and features.

Anthony Graesch

S. James Lee, Computer Science

Lee’s research interests are concentrated on avatars and computer graphics and visualization for interactive applications such as computer games, virtual reality environments, autonomous interactive characters and museum installations. In 2019, he was awarded $325,295 from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for a research collaboration with the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health to develop an avatar-based mobile phone application to promote HIV care.

Sangyoon Lee

Promoted to associate professor with tenure:

Timothy Becker, Computer Science

Becker’s research involves mining, modeling and transforming data into functional instruments. He develops open-source software that incorporates machine learning, generative modeling and visualization methods. He specializes in genomics but pursues other collaborative research in ecology, transportation and video/sound synthesis. He has many interdisciplinary collaborators and enjoys constructing interactive tutorials to encourage persistent learning.

Timothy Becker

Hubert Cook, English

Cook’s research focuses on affect, emotion and performativity in late 19th- and early 20th-century African American and Caribbean literature. He is completing his book project, Empathy’s Dark Labor: Feeling, Fact, and the Black Subject in Late Nineteenth Century Black Narrative. Cook’s work has been supported by the Mellon Mays Foundation, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars’ Career Enhancement Fellowship and the University of Pennsylvania Provost’s Fellowship.

Hubert Cook

Rae Gaubinger, English

Gaubinger brings together the fields of Victorian and modernist studies, focusing her research on questions of genealogy, affect and narrative form in British literature of the 19th and 20th centuries. Her current book manuscript, Sibling Plots: Form and Family in British Modernism, looks at the ways modernist fiction invokes and reworks the family plots of Victorian realism. An article derived from this project recently appeared in The Journal of Modern Literature.

Rachel Gaubinger

Rashelle Litchmore, Human Development

Litchmore is a critical cultural and applied social psychologist whose research spans the United States and Canada. She studies race, culture and social policy and how these shape child and adolescent development. She has conducted research on Black-Canadian adolescent identity negotiation, on Black-Canadian girls’ navigation of racist and sexist school environments, and on the socio-emotional impacts of school consolidation for racial and socioeconomic balance.

Rashelle Litchmore

Daniel Maser, Physics

Maser’s research focuses on low-cost construction and stabilization of fiber-based optical frequency combs and their usage to precisely measure near-infrared molecular rovibrational transitions. His doctoral dissertation involved modeling and developing broadband mid-infrared laser sources based on fiber lasers used for telecommunications and using them to measure trace gas concentrations in the atmosphere. He is a member of Optica and the American Physical Society.

Daniel Maser

E. Carla Parker-Athill, Biology

Parker-Athill is interested in understanding the developmental impact of early life environment on behavioral, neurological and immunological outcomes. Her research focuses on understanding the molecular basis of stress and how hormones produced during stress regulate lineage specification in neural stem cells, synapse formation, and behavior and learning. She is a member of the Society for Neuroscience and SACNAS.

E. Carla Parker-Athill

Sadia Priyanka, Economics

Priyanka is an applied microeconomist who conducts research in the fields of development and labor economics with a specific focus on issues of gender and human capital development. Her research explores the causes and consequences of women’s economic and political empowerment and how household decisions interact with public policies in determining human capital formation. Her work has been published in Labour Economics and Review of Development Economics.

Sadia Priyanka

William Tarimo ’12, Computer Science

Tarimo’s research investigates how technology and agile methodologies can enhance academic outcomes by optimizing the processes of learning and teaching. A significant portion of his research involves the design and development of EdTech tools, such as the Discovery Teaching platform. Tarimo has also contributed to various research projects in the field of applied robotics, specifically on the design, control and deployment of robotic systems in real-world environments.

William Tarimo

Promoted to teaching professor:

Jennifer Gorman, Psychology

Gorman’s primary area of research is women’s reproductive health. She has published more than a dozen journal articles and given more than 50 presentations with her colleagues and students. She has also served as an ad hoc reviewer for Women’s Reproductive Health and Sex Roles: A Journal of Research. Gorman is a member of the Association for Women in Psychology and has served as the treasurer for the Society for Menstrual Cycle Research.

Jennifer Gorman

Tek-wah King, East Asian Languages and Cultures

King is devoted to improving student language learning. He stresses the importance of solid technicalities and regularly brings innovative pedagogical designs to the classroom. He appeals to etymological findings and pen-calligraphic principles to inform the teaching of Chinese characters and has created modules utilizing the formats of on-site language practicum and technology-aided presentation. As a Ph.D. student in the Department of Linguistics at Yale, his research centers on clausal syntax of Mandarin Chinese.

Tek-wah King

Hisae Kobayashi, East Asian Languages and Cultures

Kobayashi seeks to help students learn the way to communicate effectively with native Japanese speakers in a socially and culturally appropriate manner while also meeting the various needs of students’ interests. In 2014, she was named the Connecticut Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) in recognition of her rigorous methods of teaching and dedication to undergraduate education.

Hisae Kobayashi

July 29, 2026