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Appointed

Ingrid C. (Indy) Burke (left) has been named dean of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, succeeding Peter Crane. Burke is currently director of the Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Wyoming, where she has been on the faculty since 2008. A biogeochemist by training, Burke studies the ecology of semiarid rangelands. She begins her term at Yale on October 1.

Pericles Lewis, a former Yale English and comparative literature professor who became the founding president of Yale-NUS College in Singapore in 2012, will return to Yale in the fall of 2017 as vice president for global strategy and deputy provost for international affairs. The newly created dual position, which incorporates some of the portfolio assigned to vice president Linda Koch Lorimer ’77JD before her retirement last year, will “provide renewed and unified focus to a vitally important area of the university,” President Peter Salovey ’86PhD and Provost Ben Polak said in announcing the appointment.

Honored

Joan Steitz and Ellen Rosand are this year’s recipients of the William Clyde DeVane Medal, awarded annually by the Yale Phi Beta Kappa chapter for outstanding undergraduate teaching. Steitz, a Sterling Professor of Biophyics and Biochemistry, is best known for her research of RNA biology; the student who nominated her said she has “a unique way of motivating her students to produce the best work they can muster.” Rosand, the George A. Saden Professor Emeritus of Music, is a musicologist who has led the Yale Baroque Opera Project; she was hailed as “a much-loved mentor to generations of dedicated students.”

Yale University

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Remembered

Michael Holquist ’68PhD (left), a professor emeritus of comparative literature, died on June 26. He was 80 years old. Holquist, a specialist in Russian literature, was an authority on the literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin. Holquist taught at Yale from 1968 to 1975 and then again from 1986 to his retirement in 2005.

Phyllis Curtin, who served as the first woman master of Branford College from 1979 to 1983, died on June 5. She was 94. Curtin, a soprano who had a noted career in opera, taught voice and oversaw the opera program at the School of Music from 1974 to 1983. A principal soprano with the New York City Opera from 1953 to 1960, she also sang with the Metropolitan Opera and other companies.

Otto-Werner Mueller, who directed the Yale Philharmonia from 1973 to 1987, died on February 25 at age 89. Born in Germany, Mueller was a professor of conducting at the School of Music during his tenure with the Philharmonia. He later headed the orchestral studies and conducting departments at the Curtis Institute of Music.

Fred Robinson, the Douglas Tracy Smith Professor Emeritus of English, died on May 5. He was 85. A scholar of Old English literature and the history of the English language, Robinson was a native of Alabama. He began teaching at Yale in 1972.