Congratulations to Four Newly Promoted CAS Faculty

Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Dean Suttmeier

“Rather than individually highlighting their (many) leadership contributions, let me simply emphasize that all four colleagues have lent their time, energy, and talents in ways central to the work of the College,” Suttmeier said.

Below are Suttmeiers congratulatory remarks from the October “Dean’s Report” to faculty:

Associate Professor of History Andrew Bernstein

Andy’s work since tenure has increasingly engaged with environmental history, a focus that has informed various areas of his work at the College. We see it in his popular HIST 261 Global Environmental History course. It led to his Mount Fuji summer study-abroad offering, co-created and led with Liz Safran in 2014 and 2017. And it is at the heart of his forthcoming book, Fuji: A Mountain in the Making (Princeton, 2025), a sweeping “biography” of Japan’s most famous mountain, from its geological origins to today. As much as it’s possible to say that Asian Studies publishing builds ‘buzz,’ Andy’s book is being heralded by many in the field, generating great word-of-mouth and pre-publication excitement.

Dr. Robert B. Pamplin Jr. Professor of Government Todd Lochner

Todd teaches several classes on the law, from civil liberties to his cross-listed class with the law school on legal regulation of American democracy. His Constitutional Law class is the stuff of legend, with its moot-court project and its doorstop of a textbook. His scholarship since tenure, in both journals and law reviews, focuses on campaign finance regulation and on federal prosecutorial discretion in public law. Several of his recent articles have undergraduates as co-authors, including one with my favorite journal title of recent years, “I Know What You Did Last Cycle: Improving the Detection of State Campaign Finance Violations,” which also included his department colleague Ellen Seljan as co-author.

Professor of Art History Dawn Odell

Dawn teaches widely in the art history curriculum, both the large Art 100 (European art) and Art 150 (Chinese art) introductory courses, as well as innovative upper-level courses such as her recent class co-taught with a Reed colleague (featuring students from both schools) on Nonextant Art. Her interests in Japanese and Korean art informs her upcoming summer ’25 study-abroad program (co-developed and co-led with Jessie Starling) on the art and religion of those two countries. Over seven weeks, Dawn and Jessie will take students from Seoul and Geyongju to Fukuoka and Kyoto, offering classes alongside visits to museums, temples, art galleries, and various culturally important sites. Dawn’s research explores the movement, display, and reception of Chinese art in early-modern European contexts, work that has been awarded six fellowships to support an upcoming monograph on the 18th century Dutch born collector of Chinese art, Andreas Everardus van Braam Houckgeest (van Braam, for short). In addition to working on this monograph, she has published separate works on portraiture, Dutch book arts, Indonesian screens, and Chinese porcelain, a testament to the range of her expertise and the global contexts in which she is able to situate her work.

Professor of Biology and Department Chair Tamily Weissman

I was struck in reading Tamily’s teaching materials, the clear, thoughtful scaffolding she builds into her classes, both in the assignments and in the supportive, community-building opportunities for her students to connect with her and with each other. Whether in her “Numbers are Human” CORE course, her Bio Core Concepts “Mechanisms,” or her BIO 490 Science & Society class – all developed posttenure – Tamily excels at conveying complex ideas in ways that enable students to see themselves capable of high-level science. Her work as a cellular neurobiologist has been recognized by extensive external funding and numerous awards (most recently, a NIH award running through 2026 developing a new in vivo zebrafish research model). She has mentored dozens of students in her lab, publishing with several of them and sending 85% of them to careers in the sciences. When this Japanese literature scholar can read through her research materials and (delusionally) believe he understands zebrafish brain development, you know her prowess as a scientist and scientific communicator is beyond reproach.