Four members of the Bowdoin faculty have earned the rank of full professor, a distinction bestowed upon those who have held the rank of associate professor for at least six years while demonstrating continued excellence in their teaching and scholarly endeavors.

“The strength of the Bowdoin faculty rests in the scholar-teacher model and the opportunity it provides for our students to work with extraordinarily gifted teachers who are shaping their fields of inquiry,” said Dean for Academic Affairs Cristle Collins Judd in announcing the promotions.

Novelist and Professor of English Brock Clarke came to Bowdoin in 2010 having taught creative writing and literature at the University of Cincinnati for nearly a decade. Previously, he taught at Clemson University. Clarke is the author of several novels, including Exley (Algonquin Press, 2010) and the national bestseller An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England (Algonquin Books, 2007). His short stories and essays have appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, the Believer, New England Review, Georgia Review, Southern Review, Missouri Review, Agni, New Stories from the South, and many other publications. He won a Pushcart Prize for Fiction in 2009.

 

Professor of Art History Pamela Fletcher has expertise on subjects ranging from Victorian to Contemporary Art — with a particular emphasis on questions of modernism and gender. She has been teaching at the College since 2001. Fletcher often uses the rich holdings of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art to share her breadth and depth of knowledge with her students, and curated or co-curated exhibitions and created a number of courses which engage students with the riches of Bowdoin’s art collection. A highly respected scholar in her field, she has shared her insights and observations in several journal articles and chapters, and most recently co-edited (with Anne Helmreich) The Rise of the Modern Art Market in London, 1850-1939 (Manchester University Press, 2011). She has led a number of curricular initiatives at the College and presently serves on the steering committee of the Digital and Computational Studies initiative and will co-teach a new course at Bowdoin in Fall 2013 entitled “Gateway to the Digital Humanities.”

 Professor of Anthropology Susan Kaplan, director of the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum and Arctic Studies Center, has shared her passion for the anthropology and archaeology of the North American eastern Arctic with Bowdoin students since 1985. She is a leading researcher on arctic anthropology and museum anthropology. Kaplan delves into her specialty in an interdisciplinary context, examining how paleo-environmental and historical factors affected Inuit culture. She has been awarded several grants including a National Science Foundation grant for her fieldwork on tree ring dating. She also works with ethnohistoric still photographs and films of the Arctic, and conducts research into the history of exploration of the region. She served as editor of the journal Arctic Anthropology from 2000 through 2012. As the Arctic Museum’s director, Kaplan has organized major exhibitions including Northward Over the Great Ice: Robert E. Peary and the Quest for the North Pole, an exhibition celebrating the centennial of the explorer’s attainment of the North Pole.

Professor of Natural Sciences John Lichter, with his expertise in community and ecosystem biology, biogeochemistry and global change, has been teaching in Bowdoin’s biology department and environmental studies program since 2000. Lichter’s research into his immediate environment has served well the community around him. Involved with the Merrymeeting Bay/Kennebec Estuary Research Program, Lichter is amid a long-term study of the ecological and economic recovery, and sustainability, of the Kennebec and Androscoggin rivers and their common estuary and nearshore marine environment. Working with a National Science Foundation research grant, Lichter has examined soil carbon chemistry and dynamics under elevated carbon dioxide levels, and working with a NASA Earth Science Division grant, is currently in the throes of researching historical and projected changes in carbon export to the Gulf of Maine from land use and climate change.