School Notes: Faculty of Arts & Sciences
November/December 2018

Four named Sterling Professors

Four FAS faculty members were honored with Sterling professorships, the highest 
honor bestowed on Yale faculty. Anna Marie Pyle, newly named as Sterling Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology, conducts research in the structural complexity of RNA molecules and RNA recognition by protein enzymes. Daniel Spielman ’92, who studies the design and analysis of algorithms, network science, machine learning, digital communications, and scientific computing, has been appointed as Sterling Professor of Computer Science. Nicholas A. Christakis ’84, a sociologist and physician who specializes in network science, biosocial science, computational science, and medicine, has been named as Sterling Professor of Sociology. Ruth Yeazell ’71PhD, whose research interests include the novel from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, the history of gender and sexuality, and the relations of literature to the visual arts, has been appointed as Sterling Professor of English.

Author joins FAS as Presidential Visiting Fellow

Roxane Gay, prominent writer and associate professor of English at Purdue University, will join the FAS as visiting associate professor in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies for the spring 2019 term. While at Yale, she will teach a seminar in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, English, and African American studies titled Writing Trauma, and she will give two public lectures. Professor Gay is a Haitian American journalist, essayist, memoirist, and author interested in issues of feminism, race, gender, and their intersections. Her writing appears in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. She is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. She is the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, the New York Times bestselling Bad Feminist, the nationally bestselling Difficult Women, and the New York Times bestselling Hunger. She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel. She has several books forthcoming and is also at work on television and film projects. Professor Gay is one of eight 2018–19 Presidential Visiting Fellows in the FAS.