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Finalists named in CAS dean search
McCombe is one of four to interview on campus for arts and sciences job
By SUE WUETCHER
Reporter Editor
The interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and a former chair of the UB Department of English have emerged as two of the four finalists in the search for a new dean of the college.
The candidates are Stephanie L. Barczewski, professor of history, associate dean of research and graduate studies, and director of off-campus programs for the College of Architecture, Arts and Humanities at Clemson University; Robert R. Edwards, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and former director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies at Pennsylvania State University who was chair of the UB English department in the late 1980s; J. Scott Whitaker, professor of physics and associate dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Boston University; and Bruce D. McCombe, SUNY Distinguished Professor in the UB Department of Physics who has served as interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences since last summer.
The candidates will visit campus to meet with representative faculty, staff, students, members of the university's senior leadership team and selected community partners and individuals.
Edwards will be on campus Monday and Tuesday, Barczewski will visit March 5 and March 6, and Whitaker will be here March 7 and March 8. McCombe's interviews are scheduled for Feb. 22 and Feb. 23.
The search committee, chaired by Robert Daly, SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Department of English, also plans to hold open meetings with the candidates for members of the general university community. The dates and times of those meetings, as well as curricula vitae for the candidates, are available at http://www.buffalo.edu /cas-search/.
Daly said the committee welcomes input from the university community, which can be sent to cas-dean@vpsa.buffalo.edu.
Barczewski joined the Clemson faculty as an assistant professor of history in 1996. She previously was a research assistant with the British Broadcasting Corp. in London.
A specialist in modern British cultural history, she is the author of numerous publications, among them "Titanic: A Night Remembered" (Palgrave Macmillan/Hambledon and London, 2004), "Myth and National Identity: The Legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood in 19th-century Britain" (Oxford University Press, 2000) and "We Took Risks: The Evolving Reputations of Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton " (under contract with Continuum, to be published in 2007).
Barczewski is the recipient of the 2003 Gentry Award, the College of Architecture, Arts and Humanities' highest honor for outstanding teaching in the humanities, as well as the college's 2004 Research Award.
She was a member of the Clemson City Council from 2000-01, and a participant in the Jericho Project, a federally funded project exploring how to use technology in the education of future teachers.
She received a bachelor's degree from Columbia University and master's and doctoral degrees from Yale University.
Edwards, an expert in Chaucer and Middle English literature, joined the Penn State faculty in 1989. He was a member of the UB English faculty from 1972-1989, serving as department chair from 1985-89.
While at Penn State, he was director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies from 1996-2001. He remains a fellow of the institute.
He has received awards and grants from many notable funding sources, including the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew Mellon Foundation. He has authored numerous publications, including "The Flight From Desire: Augustine and Ovid to Chaucer" (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and "Chaucer and Boccaccio: Antiquity and Modernity" (Houndsmills, Hants: Palgrave Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's, 2002), which was named the Choice Outstanding Academic title for 2002.
He is a life member of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge.
Edwards earned a bachelor's degree in English and master's and doctoral degrees in comparative literature, all from the University of California-Riverside.
Whitaker joined the Boston University faculty in 1985 after spending seven years on the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was named associate chair for research in the BU physics department in 1986 and associate dean in the university's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in 1994.
His area of research specialization is experimental high-energy physics, in particular particle detectors, experimental tests of the Standard Model, and experimental search for origins of electroweak symmetry breaking.
He has been working on the ATLAS Experiment for the Large Hadron Collider at CERN since 1994. His work at BU has been funded continuously by the U.S. Department of Energy since 1986.
Whitaker earned a bachelor's degree in physics and mathematics and a doctorate in experimental high-energy particle physics, both from the University of California-Berkeley.
Prior to his appointment as interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences last July, McCombe had been vice provost for graduate education and dean of the Graduate School since Jan. 1, 2005. He joined the UB faculty in 1982, and has served in a variety of administrative posts, including associate chair and chair of the Department of Physics, and more recently as associate dean for research and sponsored programs in the CAS.
Prior to coming to UB, he was head of the Electronics Technology Division of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C.
He also is director of UB's Center for Spin Effects and Quantum Information in Nanostructures, and holds an appointment as an adjunct professor of electrical engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
McCombe's research interests are in the general area of semiconductor physics, particularly optical, infrared and far infrared spectroscopy of semiconductor nanostructures, and spin-dependent properties of semiconductors for spintronics applications.
He earned a bachelor's degree in physics, cum laude, from Bowdoin College and a doctorate in solid-state physics from Brown University.