Bowdoin faculty appointments honor 4 Black alumni
Courtesy / Bowdoin College
Jamella Gow, Allison Guess, Michele Reid-Vazquez and Bianca Williams have been named to new endowed faculty professorships at Bowdoin College honoring distinguished Black alumni of the Brunswick educational institution.
To honor distinguished Black alumni of Bowdoin College, the Brunswick liberal arts institution has appointed four accomplished scholars to newly endowed professorships.
The new positions, which are fully funded by donors, will focus on the interdisciplinary study of race, racism and racial justice and across themes of environmental justice and belonging, citizenship and freedom.
“Our new colleagues in these important professorships will benefit the College in several critical ways,” said Clayton Rose, the school’s outgoing president. “They are poised to bring new and dynamic intellectual insights to campus and enhance our students’ understanding of crucial issues as we prepare them to become leaders.
The announcement comes weeks before Rose's last day as Bowdoin's president on June 30, wrapping up an eight-year tenure. He will be succeeded by Safa Zaki, who is due to take the reins on July 1.
The idea for the four new chairs emerged from conversations that took place across campus in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, and a sense of the need for a public reckoning with the nation's history of racial injustice, said Jennifer Scanlon, Bowdoin's dean for academic affairs.
"We felt an urgency to do all we could to do to help our students develop the tools to think through complex problems of race, racism and racial justice,” Scanlon said. “Although the college had been engaged in this work for some time, we recognized the need for a renewed, purposeful and deliberate commitment to the role of higher education in imagining, exploring, and fostering change.”
The four new appointments follow a nationwide search. They include Jamella Gow as the Rasuli Lewis Assistant Professor of Sociology; Allison Guess as the Iris W. Davis Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies; Michele Reid-Vazquez as the E. Frederic Morrow Associate Professor of Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies and Africana Studies; and Bianca Williams as the Matthew D. Branche Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Anthropology.
The four new chairs are in memory of Matthew D. Branche, the first Black student to serve as class president at Bowdoin and to be pledged by a chapter of a national fraternity with a membership policy of racial exclusion; Iris W. Davis, a student leader in the early days of coeducation at Bowdoin; Rasuli Lewis, a founder and leader of the Harlem Children’s Zone, and one of the creators of the Peace March and a leader of the Peacemakers program; and E. Frederic Morrow, the first Black person to hold an executive position in the White House.
More information
Full biographies of the newly appointed faculty members and the alumni honored by their appointments are available here.
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