Barnard College Faculty Tenured in 2024
Four Barnard professors joined the tenured faculty in 2024, including Rebecca Walkowitz, who became Provost and Dean of the Faculty of Barnard College on June 1, 2024. Tenure is a distinction that recognizes scholarly excellence, demonstrated capacity for imaginative, original work, and great promise for continued contributions at the forefront of their fields.
Rebecca Walkowitz
Provost and Dean of the Faculty, Barnard College; Claire Tow Professor of English
Rebecca Walkowitz is a leading scholar in the field of modernist studies and contemporary British and global Anglophone literature, focusing on the exploration of how modernist and contemporary fiction have evolved within a transnational context and are increasingly written for global audiences.
Her influential first book, Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism beyond the Nation (2006), argues that early twentieth-century modernist writers such as Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce need to be understood alongside writers such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, and W.G. Sebald. Her second book, Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in the Age of the World Literature (2015), which is widely cited and taught across many disciplines, demonstrates how the history of translation has shaped the production of the contemporary novel. With these works and numerous other publications, she has shown how world languages are critical to the understanding of national literatures. She also argues that the multilingual reading and translational nature of modernist literature requires us to reconceptualize literary history. Dr. Walkowitz is helping set the agenda for what is known as “new modernist studies,” moving away from the field's focus on individual modernist works in European contexts toward the examination of the cosmopolitan nature of modernism. Her honors are numerous, including a Walter Jackson Bate Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and a Senior Research Fellowship at the Freie Universität Berlin.
Dr. Walkowitz earned her PhD from Harvard University. She served on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin Madison and Rutgers University before joining the Barnard faculty in 2024.
Rebecca Walkowitz' Faculty Profile
Gale Kenny
Associate Professor of Religion
Gale Kenny is a leader in the field of religious history, focusing on nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century progressive Protestant movements, especially in the Caribbean.
Her first book, Contentious Liberties: American Abolitionists in Post-Emancipation Jamaica, 1834-1866, demonstrates how the American Missionary Association sought to “civilize” formerly enslaved individuals by turning them into hardworking Christians, and how this mission failed as they embarked on the endeavor without grasping the indigenous, and often politically charged, cultures of Afro-Jamaican and Native Baptist churches. Professor Kenny’s second book, Christian Imperial Feminism: White Protestant Women and the Consecration of Empire, casts light on “Protestant femininity,” showing how white liberal Protestant women’s groups were able to bolster their Christian “feminist” authority in their missionary work but in doing so, ultimately reinforced the racist logic of empire. She also has published several influential articles, including “Race, Sympathy, and Missionary Sensibility in the New England Colonization Movement, 1817-1833,” which examines the “limits of sympathy” in evangelical humanitarian discourse.
Dr. Kenny earned her PhD from Rice University, where she also served on the faculty before joining the Barnard faculty in 2010.
Smaranda Muresan
Associate Professor of Computer Science
Smaranda Muresan’s research focuses on human-centric natural language processing for social good and responsible computing. She develops theory-guided and knowledge-aware computational models for understanding and generating language in context, with applications to computational social science, education, and public health.
Dr. Muresan’s research topics have included argument mining and generation, misinformation detection, multimodal figurative language understanding and generation, and multilingual language processing for low-resource languages. Recently, her research has focused on explainable models and human-AI collaboration frameworks for high-quality datasets creation, helping humans solve tasks, and aligning AI systems with human values. She is a recipient of the Distinguished Achievements in Research Award from Rutgers University, where she co-founded the Laboratory for the Study of Applied Language Technologies and Society. She served as a board member for the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) 2020-2021, as a co-founder of the New York Academy of Sciences’ Annual Symposium on NLP/Dialog/Speech and as a Program Co-Chair for ACL 2022.
Dr. Muresan earned her PhD from Columbia University. She served on the faculty at Rutgers University and as research scientist at the Data Science Institute at Columbia University before joining the Barnard College faculty in 2024.
Smaranda Muresan's Faculty Profile
Christina Vizcarra
Associate Professor of Chemistry
Christina Vizcarra’s research lies at the intersection of biochemistry and cellular biology with a focus on cytoskeletal proteins in the cell and the assembly of the actin protein into filaments, which give cells their shape and contributes to a number of functions including cell division and motility.
Her lines of research include examining how small molecules inhibit formins and the biochemistry of deafness-associated formin proteins called Daiphonous 1. For her work, she has received grant support from the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation (NSF), including an NSF instrument grant. She was granted Barnard’s Presidential Research Award in 2021 and the Cottrell Scholars Award from 2019–2023.
Dr. Vizcarra earned her PhD from the California Institute of Technology. She joined the Barnard faculty in 2015.