Five African Americans Scholars Who Have Been Named to New Positions in Academia

Phillip Atiba Goff was named Carl I. Hovland Professor of African American Studies and Professor of Psychology at Yale University. He studies the science of racial bias and discrimination through analysis of police behavior and other aspects of our criminal legal system. He began his academic career at Pennsylvania State University before earning tenure at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Professor Goff is a graduate of Harvard University. He holds a Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford University.

This coming fall, Jomaira Salas Pujols will join the faculty in the sociology department at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. She is completing work on a doctorate in sociology at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

Pujols is a first-generation college student who earned a bachelor’s degree at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, where she majored in sociology and minored in education.

Katwiwa Mule was promoted to full professor of world literatures at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. He joined the faculty at Smith College in 1999.

After earning a bachelor’s degree in education and a master’s degree from Kenyatta University in Nairobi, Kenya, and spending two years teaching Swahili language and literature at Egerton University in Kenya, Professor Mule came to the United States and earned a doctorate in comparative literature with a minor in women’s studies at Pennsylvania State University.

Kimberly Juanita Brown is a new associate professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. She also serves as the co-director of the Dartmouth Consortium of Studies in Race, Migration, and Sexuality.

Dr. Brown is a graduate of Queens College of the City University of New York. She holds two master’s degrees and a Ph.D. from Yale University.

Sonia Eden, a clinical assistant professor, has been named interim chair of the Wayne State University department of neurosurgery. Dr. Eden specializes in minimally-invasive spine surgery, complex spine and spinal cord surgery, sacroiliac joint surgery, endoscopic and minimally-invasive brain surgery, and peripheral nerve surgery. Dr. Eden was on the staff at Ascension Borgess Brain and Spine Institute in Kalamazoo from 2008 to 2020. She also served as a clinical assistant professor at the Western Michigan University School of Medicine from 2010-2020.

A native of Detroit, Dr. Eden is a graduate of Yale Univerity with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering. She received her medical degree from the University of Michigan in 2000.

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1 COMMENT

  1. Congrats to all on their new position. What I do question is that it astounds me that people such as Sonia Eden spend the majority of their medical career nestled in the White environs of Kalamazoo, MI. Then, suddenly they have this reinvigorated love for the city of Detroit now it has become significantly White gentrified. In other words, it’s the trendy thing to do in a current context. In lieu of Sonia Eden’s accomplishment, she hold membership to a so-called Black elitist group (i.e., The Links) which perpetually seek the validation of the White establishment class. I wonder how many native born Black American girls, teenagers, or undergraduate students she mentored who went to medical school.

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