Douglas Ambrose and Sharon Rivera were both awarded the Sidney Wertimer Professorship for Excellence in Advising and Mentoring; Mark Bailey was named the Robert and Pamela (Craig) Delaney Professor in Computer Science; Shoshana Keller was appointed the William R. Kenan Professor; Jamie King was named the Jerome Gottlieb ’64 Fellow for Exemplary Coaching; Craig Latrell was awarded the Upson Chair for Public Discourse; and Jane Springer was named the James L. Ferguson Professor.
The Faculty Handbook states that the appointment to a named chair or professorship “is an honor reflecting the special distinction that the holder of the chair brings to the College and his or her profession. Many chairs serve specific functions stipulated in the endowment or will of the donor, but several are without restriction. Appointments are normally for a fixed term, but they may be renewed.”
Douglas Ambrose
Professor of History Douglas Ambrose’s teaching and research interests include early America, the Old South and American religious history. His publications include the books Henry Hughes and Proslavery Thought in the Old South (LSU 1996) and The Many Faces of Alexander Hamilton: The Life and Legacy of America’s Most Elusive Founding Father (NYU 2006), a volume he co-edited with Hamilton colleague Robert W. T. Martin.
Ambrose has also written numerous articles, book reviews, and encyclopedia entries about Southern slavery and Southern intellectual life. Having joined the faculty in 1990, he received the Class of 1963 Excellence in Teaching Award and Student Assembly’s Sidney Wertimer Award for Excellence in Teaching. He holds a doctorate in history from the State University of New York at Binghamton.
Mark Bailey
Professor of Computer Science Mark Bailey was appointed to the faculty in 1997 and has chaired the Computer Science Department since 2011. His introductory computer security course, Secrets, Lies, and Digital Threats, pairs teams of Hamilton students with local high school classes to teach teens about the dangers of life in the digital world.
Bailey has received fellowships from the National Research Council and the Air Force Research Laboratory and grants from the National Science Foundation and Microsoft Research. He’s been a consultant with the Air Force Research Laboratory and Assured Information Security, and his work is widely published in journals and at conferences. Bailey received his doctorate in computer science from the University of Virginia.
Shoshana Keller
Professor of History Shoshana Keller is director of the Russian Studies Program and teaches Russian, Soviet, Eurasian, and modern Middle Eastern history. She has published the books Russia and Central Asia: Coexistence, Conquest, Convergence (Toronto, 2020) and To Moscow, Not Mecca (Praeger, 2001), a study of Stalin’s attempt to destroy Islam. In June, she published a review essay in the latest issue of Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History titled “Central Asia, Russia, and the Deficiencies of European Models.
Keller has also written articles on women, creating historical narrative, and the economics of manual labor in Uzbekistan. Having joined the faculty in 1995, she is working on a book about the creation of modern childhood as a tool of nation building in Soviet Central Asia and an experimental mapping project on the many nations of Kazakhstan.
Jamie King
Jamie King is in his 21st season as head men’s squash coach and director of racquet sports and has coached the women’s squash team for 17 seasons. King was selected the NESCAC women’s squash coach of the year in 2011 and 2014, and received the men’s coach of the year award in 2012.The women have won 169 matches and the men have 178 victories under his guidance.
Prior to his arrival at Hamilton, he served as assistant coach for men’s and women’s squash and was the men’s tennis coach at Vassar College. He also coached tennis at Marist College and was racquets director at Poughkeepsie Tennis Club. King graduated from Williams with a degree in political science and American studies, and later earned a master’s degree in sociology of sport from Skidmore College. He played varsity squash, tennis, and soccer at Williams where he was the squash team captain for two seasons.
Craig Latrell
Professor of Theatre Craig Latrell joined the faculty in 2000. He has published work in TDR, Asian Theatre Journal, Journal of Modern Drama, and Converging Interests: Traders, Travelers and Tourists in Southeast Asia (University of California, Berkeley, 1999), and elsewhere. He holds bachelor’s degrees in psychology and theatre from Reed College, and a master’s degree and doctorate of fine arts from Yale University School of Drama. Besides Hamilton, Latrell has taught at the National University of Singapore, University of Denver, and Cornish College of the Arts.
Latrell served on the advisory board of and contributed entries to the Encyclopedia of Asian Theatre (Greenwood Press, 2007) and is president emeritus of the Association for Asian Performance. A two-time Fulbright Award recipient to Indonesia, he also received a National Endowment for the Arts Director Fellowship. He earned the Dietrich Inchworm Grant for 2019-21 and the Christian A. Johnson Teaching Enhancement Award in 2019-20.
Sharon Werning Rivera
Professor of Government Sharon Werning Rivera, who earned a doctorate at the University of Michigan, specializes in the post-communist countries of Eurasia with a focus on Russia. Her research and teaching interests are in the field of comparative politics with emphases on democratization, elite political culture, elites in post-communist Russia, and survey research. She was appointed to the faculty in 1999. Her articles have appeared in Perspectives on Politics, Post-Soviet Affairs, Party Politics, and Demokratizatsiya, among others.
In 2012-13, Rivera was a Fulbright U.S. Scholar to the Russian Federation. In 2017, she was awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to support her project on the foreign policy attitudes of Russian elites. She is currently principal investigator of the Survey of Russian Elites, a project spanning more than two decades that is on deposit with the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research at the University of Michigan.
Jane Springer
Professor of Literature and Creative Writing Jane Springer is the author of three prize-winning poetry collections: Dear Blackbird, Murder Ballad, and Moth. Dear Blackbird, won the Agha Shahid Ali prize for poetry (University of Utah Press, 2007), and Murder Ballad, won the Beatrice Hawley Award (Alice James Press, 2012). Her work’s been featured in The Best American Poetry and Pushcart anthologies, and she’s received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Artists’ Residency, and the Whiting Foundation.
She is currently working on a hybrid collection of essays/poems on the evolution of fire.
Springer's academic interests include poetry, poetics, nonfiction, and Southern literature. She received her doctorate in creative writing from Florida State University and was appointed to Hamilton’s faculty in 2006.
