At the winter meeting of Kenyon’s Board of Trustees on Feb. 4, 2022, the Board approved the promotion to full professor of the following members of the faculty, effective July 1, 2022:
Katherine Elkins
Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities
Katherine Elkins is the director of the Integrated Program in Humane Studies and co-directs KDH, Kenyon's Digital Humanities Collaboratory. Her research focuses on the role of memory and emotion in the embodied structure of experience, on the long conversation between philosophy and literature, and on the ways in which computational approaches can help us understand language and creativity.
Yutan Getzler
Associate Professor of Chemistry
Since arriving at Kenyon in 2004, Yutan Getzler’s scholarship has focused on sustainability in materials science. In collaboration with Kenyon undergraduates, he developed one of the first catalysts to make a new topology of poly(lactic acid), a biodegradable plastic derived from annually renewable feedstocks. Another project seeks to understand the design of bespoke degradable polymers for specialty applications. Recent work has built a theoretical framework for an ideal circular polymer economy.
Zoë Kontes
National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished Teaching Associate Professor of Classics
Zoë Kontes is an Old World archeologist who has excavated in Sicily, Greece and Cyprus. Kontes was awarded a Teaching Fellowship from the Whiting Foundation in 2009, and the Kenyon College Trustee Teaching Excellence Award in 2013. Her courses include surveys of both Greek and Roman art and archeology, as well as seminars on Sicilian archeology, Athenian topography and the illegal antiquities trade.
Kimmarie Murphy
Associate Professor of Anthropology
Kimmarie Murphy joined the faculty at Kenyon in 2004. She holds a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from the State University of New York in Plattsburgh and a Ph.D. in biological anthropology from Indiana University. Trained as a biocultural anthropologist, she is interested in understanding contemporary patterns of health and nutrition as a way of interpreting diet and disease in the past. Her research focuses on human osteology with an emphasis on paleopathology and stable isotope analysis.