

Academic Affairs
Welcome to the Academic Affairs webpage! We are responsible for the supervision of recruitment of faculty, curricula, assessment, and academic responsibilities of faculty, as well as the budgetary supervision of all academic departments.
Faculty Funding Opportunities:
If you're interested in applying for professional development funding for the following:
- Professional Travel Funds
- Scholarly Development Award (Small Grant)
- Instructional Mini-Grant
- Pedagogy Travel Funds
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A Faculty Cafe March 28, 2025
Dean Eaton Lounge: 4:00 pm
The Library Shelves of Babel
Presented by Dr. Pedro Ponce, Associate Professor, English Dept. and
William L. Fox Associate Professor, Public Health

Join us for an engaging Faculty Cafe session with Dr. Pedro Ponce, a fiction writer and literary critic, as he presents The Library Shelves of Babel. Supported by a Faculty Research Fellowship Award,
Dr. Ponce's manuscript in progress, blends fiction and nonfiction to imagine a library of books that have influenced, provoked, and haunted readers from early American history to the present. Drawing on the experimental works of Jorge Luis Borges and Roberto Bolano, this talk explores what happens when the aspirations behind human ideals confront the fallibility of human nature.
Academic Affairs News

Faculty Cafe
March 7, 2025
Nation, Class, Race: Differential Mobility Among Professional Bird Guides in Uganda and South Africa
Dean Eaton Lounge, 4:00 - 5:30 p.m.
Presented by Dr. Wendi Haugh, Anthropology and African Studies
Professional bird guides based in countries like Uganda and South Africa are a key fulcrum in the global avitourism industry, which brings together mostly white, relatively affluent birders from high-income countries with people of color living in bird-rich but lower-income countries. To do their work, Black bird guides based on the African continent must navigate a world characterized by increasing mobility alongside persistent and even accelerated barriers to movement. Drawing on interviews and participant observation research with bird guides in Uganda in partnership with a cultural anthropologist who did similar research with bird guides in South Africa, I show how nationality, class, and race help create differential mobilities among these guides as they seek to turn their passion for birds into a profession in a global industry.