A departure… and a deanship

Remembered

Susan Nolen-Hoeksema ’82, who led the Yale Depression and Cognition Program and chaired the psychology department, died at the age of 53 on January 2, while recovering from heart surgery. Her research focused on gender differences in depression and people’s tendency to focus on causes and consequences of problems rather than on active problem-solving. Students and faculty told the Yale Daily News that Nolen-Hoeksema had an unusual ability to balance her research, her teaching, and her family.

Robert Bork, the Yale Law School professor whose conservative views made his nomination to the Supreme Court controversial, died on December 19. He was 85. He taught at Yale from 1962 to 1972 and again from 1977 to 1979. His unsuccessful nomination during the Reagan administration split Bork’s former colleagues at Yale, with some testifying for him and some against. But as a teacher, wrote journalist Jeff Greenfield ’67LLB, Bork was “as bracing a figure as a student could hope to find… exactly the right person to teach, and to challenge, the assumptions of an overwhelmingly liberal group of students.”

Appointed

Christian Wiman, an American poet whose verse has won numerous accolades, has been appointed to the faculty of the Divinity School and the Institute of Sacred Music. For the past decade, Wiman served as editor of Poetry, the oldest American monthly magazine about verse. Wiman begins his five-year appointment on July 1.

Yale Law School appointed immigration law expert Cristina Rodríguez ’95, ’00JD, to the faculty in January. She is the school’s first tenured Hispanic professor. Rodríguez joined the law faculty at New York University in 2004; since 2011, she has been on leave from NYU in order to work in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.

Moving on

The director of Yale’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, Kelly Brownell, is leaving to become dean of Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy. Brownell, a national expert on obesity, has served as chair of the psychology department and master of Silliman College.