More news of Yale people

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Appointed

This winter brought two pieces of news for French professor Alice Kaplan ’81PhD (left). In December, she was appointed director of the Whitney Humanities Center, which promotes research and scholarly exchange among humanities disciplines at Yale. In January, she was named a Sterling Professor, Yale’s highest faculty honor. Kaplan, who has taught at Yale since 2008, studies Francophone literature and history of the 1900s and 2000s.

Former Yale College dean Jonathan Holloway ’95PhD will be the new president of Rutgers University. Holloway, a historian who specializes in American history and African American studies, began teaching at Yale in 1999. He was master of Calhoun College from 2005 to 2014; he was dean of Yale College from 2014 to 2017, when he left Yale to be provost of Northwestern University. Holloway will become Rutgers’s first African American president when he takes office on July 1.

Honored

Four alumni of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences have been selected as recipients of the Graduate School Alumni Association’s 2020 Wilbur Lucius Cross Medal for “outstanding work in scholarship, public service, teaching, or academic administration.” The awardees are: psychiatrist and geneticist Matthew State ’01PhD of the University of California–San Francisco; historian Brenda Stevenson ’90PhD of the University of California–Los Angeles; environmental sociologist Dorceta Taylor ’85MFS, ’91PhD, of the University of Michigan; and chemist Veronica Vaida ’77PhD of the University of Colorado–Boulder.