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Joana Sabadell-Nieto, Katherine Terrell, Chris Vasantkumar
Joana Sabadell-Nieto, Katherine Terrell, Chris Vasantkumar

Three Hamilton College faculty members were approved for tenure by the college’s board of trustees during a recent meeting. The board granted tenure to Joana Sabadell-Nieto (Hispanic Studies), Katherine Terrell (English) and Christopher Vasantkumar (anthropology).

The granting of tenure is based on recommendations of the vice president for academic affairs and dean of faculty, and the committee on appointments, with the president of the college presenting final recommendations to the board of trustees. The tenures were effective July 1. Sabadell-Nieto received the title of professor and Terrell and Vasantkumar were promoted to associate professor.

Joana Sabadell-Nieto specializes in the recent literatures of Spain with an emphasis on feminist and gender theory and on women's writing. She is a researcher at the UNESCO-funded Women and Literature Center of the University of Barcelona where she is studying community representations in postmodern women writers and filmmakers.

Sabadell-Nieto has published several collections of essays; the most recent, Mujeres y naciones (Women and Nations), focuses on the uneasy relations between feminisms and nationhood, presents transnational approaches to politics and communities, and links political, anthropological and philosophical theories with literary productions by Spanish women writers. 

She has also authored two books. Fragmentos de sentido. La identidad transgresora de Jaime Gil de Biedma examines the successful homographesis during the dictatorship of one of Spain's most famous poets; Desbordamientos/ Overflowings, is an in-depth analysis of feminist interventions today's culture.  Sabadell-Nieto has a master’s degree and  Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the Universidad de Navarra.

This spring she presented papers at the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference at the University of Kentucky and at Syracuse University.


Katherine H. Terrell received her Ph.D. from Cornell University in 2005, after earning graduate degrees from the University of Toronto and Oxford University. She specializes in Middle English and Middle Scots literature, and her work has appeared in The Chaucer Review, Studies in Philology and Romance Quarterly and in Cultural Diversity in Medieval Britain.

Terrell is the co-editor of Scotland and the Shaping of Identity in Medieval Britain (Palgrave, 2012). She was recently a visiting research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. Terrell’s current project examines how the poetic and historical discourses of medieval Scotland create a nationalist discourse through their responses to English writings. Her teaching interests include Old English, Chaucer, women’s writing and medieval Christian depictions of Muslims and Jews.

In February she published an article, “‘Kyndness of blude’: Kinship, Patronage, and Politics in Gavin Douglas,” in “Northern Book Cultures in the Later Middle Ages,” a special issue of the journal Textual Cultures: Texts, Contexts and Interpretation.  An essay collection titled The Anglo-Scottish Border and the Shaping of Identity 1300-1600 which she co-edited was published in September 2012.


Christopher Vasantkumar joined the Hamilton faculty in 2006. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Princeton and a master’s degree and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

Since 2002, he has conducted ethnographic field research in multiethnic communities in northwest China as well as among the Tibetan populations of Himachal Pradesh, India. His research interests center on the place of Tibetans and other ethnic minorities in national and trans-national envisionings of China and Chineseness as well as on the intersection between Chinese discourses of minzu (“ethnicity”) and global imaginings of race, nation and indigeneity. Vasantkumar teaches courses on the politics of difference, transnationalism and globalization and the anthropology of money.

Vasantkumar authored an essay titled “Unmade in China: Reassembling the Ethnic on the Gansu-Tibetan Frontier” that was published in March by Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology. Also in March he was an invited participant in a two-day workshop on “Himalayan Connections: Disciplines, Geographies, Trajectories” convened under the auspices of the Yale University Himalaya Initiative in New Haven.

In 2012 Vasantkumar wrote an essay titled “Tibetan Peregri-nations: Mobility, Incommensurable Nationalisms and (Un)belonging Athwart the Himalayas” that was published in a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies on “Regimes of Mobility” co-edited by Nina Glick Schiller and Noel B. Salazar.

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