The Bowdoin College Board of Trustees elected a new vice chair and granted tenure to four faculty members during meetings held February 8–10, 2024, in Boston.
The board unanimously elected Diana L. "Dee" Spagnuolo vice chair, effective July 1, 2024.
Dee Spagnuolo, a member of the Class of 1996, is a partner in Ballard Spahr LLP’s Philadelphia office, where she is on the management committee’s executive team, as well as the partner in charge of attorney career advancement. She represented the US Women’s National Hockey Team during their boycott of the world championships as they protested inequitable wages and lack of programming for women and girls, and ultimately negotiated a favorable deal with USA Hockey. An ice hockey player, All-American field hockey player, and three-sport captain at Bowdoin, Spagnuolo was inducted into the Athletics Hall of Honor in December 2023. A government and legal studies and Spanish double major, Spagnuolo was awarded the Andrew Allison Haldane Cup, which recognizes outstanding qualities of leadership and character in a member of the senior class. After Bowdoin, she served as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic before heading to the University of Pennsylvania for law school. Prior service to Bowdoin includes membership on the Alumni Council and the Reunion Committee for her class. Spagnuolo’s wife, Sasha Ballen, is also a member of the Class of 1996.
The board also granted tenure to four faculty members; the promotions had been recommended by the board’s Academic Affairs Committee.
The following faculty members were promoted from assistant professor to associate professor with tenure, effective July 1, 2024.
Sakura Christmas, History and Asian Studies
A scholar of modern Japan, Christmas conducts research on the history of borderlands, environment, and imperialism in the twentieth century. She has spent more than a decade living, studying, and working in Japan, China, and Mongolia, including a year each as a Princeton-in-Asia fellow in Xinjiang and a Fulbright researcher in Inner Mongolia. Her book, Territorial Natures: The Limits of Imperial Japan in Inner Mongolia (forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press), examines how Japanese-led population transfers and environmental policies demarcated Inner Mongolia as an autonomous province in the 1930s and offers an alternate understanding to the beginnings of the multiethnic framework of the People’s Republic of China. Her research has been supported by the American Council for Learned Societies, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Social Science Research Council. This semester, she is teaching courses on East Asian environmental history and Tokyo.
Joseph Jay Sosa, Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies
Sosa is an anthropologist and queer studies scholar working in Brazil and the US and focusing on aesthetics, affect, public culture, and statecraft. Sosa’s first book, Brazil’s Sex Wars: The Aesthetics of Queer Activism in São Paulo (University of Texas Press, forthcoming in 2024), examines how sexual human rights cultures transformed over Brazil’s turbulent decade in the 2010s. He has also written about street protest, political sexism, and the production of hate crime statistics. Sosa is also currently researching the history of the US butyl nitrite [poppers] industry, examining how poppers enabled new erotic orientations and played key roles in the sexual revolution, gay power, the early AIDS crisis, and contemporary queer culture. Sosa is the former cochair for the Association of Queer Anthropology, and his research has been generously funded by the National Science Foundation, Fulbright IIE, Mellon Foundation, Wenner Gren Foundation, and Ford Foundation.
A mathematician, Tanabe researches number theory and representation theory, with particular emphases on automorphic forms and the special values of L-functions. She was awarded an American Mathematical Society (AMS)-Simons Research Enhancement Grant for Primarily Undergraduate Institution Faculty, which supports two projects awaiting publication—"Moments of Rankin-Selberg L-functions of Large Weights” and “Subconvexity Bound for Rankin-Selberg L-functions: t-aspect.” Tanabe has given a number of invited talks in the past year, including at the Association for Women in Mathematics Research Symposium, where she presented in a special session on number theory at primarily undergraduate institutions, “Joint Mathematics Meetings,” for which she participated in a special session on women in automorphic forms, and a Bates College mathematics department seminar. She is currently teaching the courses “Functions of a Complex Variable” and “Advanced Topics in Rings and Number Theory.”
