New departmental chair appointments in Syracuse University’s College of Arts and Sciences

Syracuse University’s College of Arts and Sciences announces the following departmental chair appointments for the 2008-09 academic year:

African American Studies—Professor William Cole, musician, composer, educator, writer. Cole teaches ethnomusicology, music of the African Diaspora and performance music. He has served as a jazz critic for top music publications such as “Downbeat” and “Coda.” He is the leader and artistic director of “Untempered Ensemble” and “Shadrack Inc.” His performances have included a number of venues such as Town Hall and Symphony Space in New York; Broadway Performance Hall in Seattle; and Hopkins Center in Hanover, New Hampshire.

The Department of English—Associate Professor Erin Mackie, who specializes in restoration and 18th-century British literature and culture; cultural history; popular periodicals; and the discourse of fashion, masculinity, and criminality. Mackie has published books, essays and reviews, and scholarly articles, including the forthcoming book, “Rakes, Highwaymen, and Pirates: The Making of the Modern Gentleman in the Eighteenth Century;” and essays “Jamaica Ladies and Tropical Charms” in ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 36.3-4 (2006); and “Boys Will Be Boys: Masculinity, Criminality, and the Restoration Rake” in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 42.2 (2006): 129-149.

Department of Mathematics—Professor Eugene Poletsky, who specializes in complex analysis and works mainly with functions of several complex variables. His subjects of interest include invariant metrics, plurisubharmonic functions and holomorphic currents.

Department of Philosophy—Associate Professor Mark A. Brown, whose principal research interests are in logic and the metaphysics of action, space, and time. He has published articles on modal logic and on generalized quantifiers, co-edited “Deontic Logic, Agency, and Normative Systems” (Springer, 1996), and is writing a graduate level text, “Logic and Language.” His current work uses modal logic as a tool in exploring philosophical theories of time, action, ability, and obligation.

Department of Psychology—Professor Stephen A. Maisto, a licensed psychologist whose research involves the assessment and treatment of substance use disorders, mechanisms of risk perception and risk taking, and HIV prevention and intervention in psychiatric and other populations.  He is the author of a number of scholarly publications, including “Moderate drinking in the first year after treatment as a predictor of three-year outcomes” in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, 68, 419-427 (2007) and the forthcoming “Alcohol treatment research assessment exposure subject reactivity effects: Part II: Treatment engagement and involvement” in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.