News about faculty

Faculty involvement in Williams off-campus programs.   Bob Jackall and Jim Nolan continue to serve Williams in important ways by running the college's programs in Oxford and New York City--the latter a new experiment that will run for at least two years. Contributing to the Williams in New York program will be Professor Philip Kasinitz, who some of you will remember taught at Williams in the late 1980s-early 1990s.

Books & articles.   Bob Jackall's most recent book on detective work in New York, Street Stories, was the focus of an article in the LA Times . . . Jim Nolan continues his comparative work on alternative courts, which in the summer of 2005 included a visit to an indigenous court run by the Canada's Tsuu Tina people . . . Olga Shevchenko continues to write about the post-Soviet world, most recently in the journal Ab Imperio . . .

Michael Brown and Peter Just continue to be involved in the development of the Stetson-Sawyer project, which is expected to break ground late in 2006. It will lead to the construction of two new office/classroom buildings (including the one below, shown in a preliminary sketch), the renovation of Stetson Hall, the

construction of a new, modern library immediately behind Stetson, and the razing of Sawyer Library. When Sawyer is demolished, Williams will have an east-west green that visually connects Stetson with the new Student Center buidling currently under construction.

New faculty. The department is delighted to welcome two new faculty to the department. Nicole Castor, a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago, will be a Bolin Predoctoral Fellow for 2005-2006. Ms. Castor's work focuses on the cultural production of identity in public space through festival and ritual events. Her dissertation assesses Orisha public rituals, Emancipation celebrations and Carnival fetes in Trinidad. She will be teaching the course "Cultural Politics in the Caribbean" in Fall 2005 . . . Arafaat A. Valiani joins us as Assistant Professor of Sociology after completing his PhD at Columbia. His interests include religious militancy, violence, historical memory, and urban spaces. His 2005-2006 sociology courses include "Violence, 'Militancy," and Collective Recovery" and "Space and Place."