Speaker Biographies

Friday Speakers

Adam F. Falk

Since becoming president of Williams in April 2010, Adam Falk has focused on advancing the college’s mission of providing the finest possible liberal arts education by working with faculty to strengthen the curriculum, further enrich student residential life, and maximize the educational value derived from the growing diversity of the college’s students, faculty, and staff. He has overseen a wide reorganization of the college administration and led the successful effort to raise the funds needed to resume the $82 million Sawyer Library Project, which will transform teaching and learning in the humanities and social sciences. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and a winner of prestigious awards from the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, the Research Corporation, and the Sloan Foundation.

Catharine Bond Hill ’76

Cappy Hill entered Williams in the fall of 1972 as a member of only the second class to have women in it all four years. She returned as a member of the economics department faculty in 1985, and went on to chair the department and the Center for Development Economics and to serve as provost from 1999 to 2006, when she became president of Vassar. Her scholarly work focuses on higher education affordability and access (issues on which she has developed a national voice), as well as on economic development and reform in Africa. Under her leadership, Vassar has reinstated need-blind admissions and replaced loans with grants for low-income families. She continues to teach an advanced-level seminar at Vassar on the economics of higher education.

Stephen R. Lewis, Jr. ’60

A graduate of the Class of 1960, Steve Lewis returned to Williams as a member of the economics department faculty in 1966. In the first of his two terms as provost, he worked as closely with Jack Sawyer as did anyone, and he has often testified that the lessons he learned from that relationship informed much of his subsequent career. That includes the 15 years he served as president of Carleton College, where, with the support of Williams classmate Fay Vincent, he established the John E. Sawyer Professorship of Liberal Learning. Under Lewis’ leadership, Carleton completed its most successful fundraising campaign, added extensively to its educational infrastructure, diversified its student body, faculty, and staff, and experienced record increases in applications.

Francis C. Oakley

Frank Oakley joined the Williams history department in 1961—the year that Jack Sawyer began his presidency. Oakley served as dean of the faculty from 1977 to 1984, and as president from 1985 to 1993. As president, he led the Third Century Campaign to a successful conclusion and was instrumental in establishing tutorial courses, doubling the minority student population, building the Jewish Religious Center, and founding the Bolin Fellowships, the Center for Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, and the Multicultural Center (now Davis Center). He has written 14 books, co-edited three others, and has frequently contributed articles, translations, and book reviews to journals on topics in medieval and early modern intellectual and religious history and on American higher education. His publications include Community of Learning: The American College and the Liberal Arts Tradition (Oxford University Press, 1992). A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Medieval Academy of America, he is also an Honorary Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

Saturday Speakers

Jeannie Albrecht

Albrecht’s research focuses on computer systems, including distributed systems, mobile and wide-area networks, operating systems, and green computing. Her current research involves building energy monitoring and management systems for reducing the carbon footprint of homes and buildings. She is actively involved in the National Science Foundation’s Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) project, a virtual laboratory for exploring the design of future Internet architectures at scale. Since arriving at Williams in 2007, she has taught classes in data structures, operating systems, and distributed systems. Her work is funded by the NSF through both the GENI project and a CAREER award. She received her B.S. from Gettysburg College, her M.S. from Duke University, and her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego.

Meg Bossong ’05

Bossong is the manager of community engagement for the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center (BARCC). In that role, she manages the community-facing education and outreach work of Massachusetts’s oldest and largest rape crisis center. Over the last five years with BARCC, her work has included collaboration with a variety of community partners in education, health care, faith communities, law enforcement, and municipal government to coordinate sexual violence prevention and intervention initiatives. She holds a B.A. in political science from Williams with a concentration in comparative social change and an M.S. in Law and Public Policy from Northeastern University with a focus in interdisciplinary approaches to violence prevention.

Leslie Brown

Brown is the author of Upbuilding Black Durham: Gender, Class, and Black Community Development in the Urban South, winner of the 2009 Frederick Jackson Turner Prize, and co-editor of Living with Jim Crow: African American Women and Memories of the Segregated South, which won the Oral History Association Book Award in 2011. Her third book, African American Voices II: A Documentary Reader, is due out this year.  Brown is currently working on several other projects, including a monograph on African American women and migration and a compilation of writing and speeches by Shirley Chisholm. Brown received her B.A. from Tufts University. Before pursuing graduate studies, she served as a college administrator at Skidmore College and as director of New York’s Higher Education Opportunity Program. At Williams since 2008, she received a certificate in women’s studies and her A.M. and Ph.D. in history from Duke University.

Satyan Devadoss

Devadoss earned his B.S. from North Central College and his Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University. Prior to coming to Williams in 2002, he was an Arnold Ross assistant professor at the Ohio State University. In 2007, he received the Henry L. Alder Award from the Mathematics Association of America for distinguished teaching by beginning professors. He has authored a textbook on computational geometry, created a DVD lecture series on the shape of nature, and written dozens of research articles on topics ranging from origami and cartography to phylogenetics and particle collisions, attracting support from the National Science Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Department of Defense. He also has an incredible love for really good ice cream.

Charles B. Dew

Dew teaches the history of the South and the Civil War and Reconstruction at Williams. He attended Woodberry Forest School in Virginia and earned a B.A. from Williams in 1958 before completing his Ph.D. at the Johns Hopkins University under the direction of C. Vann Woodward. He is the author of three books: Ironmaker to the Confederacy: Joseph R. Anderson and the Tredegar Iron Works; Bond of Iron: Master and Slave at Buffalo Forge; and Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War. Both Ironmaker to the Confederacy and Apostles of Disunion received the Fletcher Pratt Award, given by the Civil War Roundtable of New York for the best nonfiction book on the Civil War in its year of publication. Bond of Iron was awarded the Organization of American Historians’ Elliott Rudwick Prize and was a finalist for the Lincoln Prize.

Adam Falk

Since becoming president of Williams in April 2010, Falk has focused on advancing the college’s mission of providing the finest possible liberal arts education by working with faculty to strengthen the curriculum, further enrich student residential life, and maximize the educational value derived from the growing diversity of the college’s students, faculty, and staff. He has overseen a wide reorganization of the college administration and led the successful effort to raise the funds needed to resume the $82 million Sawyer Library Project, which will transform teaching and learning in the humanities and social sciences. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and a winner of prestigious awards from the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, the Research Corporation, and the Sloan Foundation.

Ifiok Inyang ’11

Inyang graduated from Williams with a degree in political science and concentrations in leadership studies, Africana studies, and legal studies. While at Williams, Inyang held various positions, including as a Junior Advisor, a member of the varsity football team, Sankofa, and Ritmo Latino, and he served as co-president of College Council in 2010-2011. He is from Newark, N.J., and currently works as a senior consultant for Booz Allen Hamilton in Washington, D.C.

Christina Olsen

Olsen came to Williams in May 2012 after serving as director of education and public programs at the Portland Art Museum. She has worked previously at the Getty Foundation, the Getty Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Olsen has developed a number of initiatives around public participation in museums and digital publication, including Shine a Light with Portland State University’s Social Practice Program in 2009, and 2011’s Object Stories at the Portland Art Museum—an installation, publishing platform, and online archive for visitors to tell stories about objects. Olsen has lectured, taught, and written on a broad range of topics, including the changing face of museums in the 21st century, old and new notions of the public, and secular art in 15th century Italy. She has a Ph.D. in Italian Renaissance art from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.A. from the University of Chicago.

Olivia Polk ’16

A first-year student from Simi Valley, Calif., Polk is the freshman representative of the Queer Student Union. She dreams of having a contract major approved in underwater basket weaving and queer of color critique, but until then, she’s settled for being a prospective double major in art history and geosciences. She likes her Williams experience like she likes her identity– disparate and complex.

Sophia Rosenfeld ’15

Rosenfeld is a sophomore English major from Ridgewood, N.J. She took part in the Gaudino Fund’s Resettling Refugees in Maine program during Winter Study. On campus, Rosenfeld serves on the boards of the Campaign for Asian American Studies, Storytime, and the Human Library Project.

Kairav Sinha ’15

Sinha, a sophomore, came to Williams from San Jose, Calif., where he led the outreach program of Leland High School’s public speaking team, ranked in the top three in the United States. A biology research assistant and tutor at Williams, Sinha is the founding director of Williams Speaks, through which 15 Williams students teach public speaking to more than 800 elementary and middle school students across Berkshire County. He also serves as communications officer of the Lehman Council for Community Engagement.

Rick Spalding

Spalding has served as chaplain to the college since the summer of 2000. Until the creation this spring of the Center for Learning in Action, he was also coordinator of community service. As chaplain he provides support for the many forms of religious and spiritual life on campus—with more than 30 different traditions represented in the student body this year—and works with students individually, helping them to work through times of crisis, sadness and loss, and to think about vocation, purpose, and meaning. Spalding runs the “Where Am I?” orientation program and leads a Winter Study travel course to Nicaragua called “Explorations in Solidarity.” An ordained Presbyterian minister, he holds degrees from Yale, Union Theological Seminary, and Hartford Seminary. He loves to cook, goes sea kayaking as often as possible, and is currently being trained by a Chesapeake Bay retriever.

Chris Winters

After graduating from Williams in 1995, Winters earned an M.S./M.B.A. from Northeastern University and worked as a management consultant in Cambridge, Mass., where he helped companies seeking to improve their marketing, pricing, and product launch capabilities. Winters returned to Williamstown and joined the staff of the provost’s office in 2005, first as director of institutional research, and now as associate provost. Winters enjoys using data to think about puzzles in higher education—particularly those involving optimal resource allocation now and in the future.