APPOINTED To the Board of Trustees: Alison R. Bernstein P’09, vice president for the Knowledge, Creativity and Freedom program at the Ford Foundation; H. Scott Bierman ’77, professor of economics and dean of the college at Carleton; Scott D. Freeman ’85, a principal at Colony Realty Partners, in Boston; and Kathy Whelan P’05, a mystery novelist, member of the Corporation at Belmont Hill School in Belmont, Mass., and chair of Belmont Hill’s women’s lecture series. Read the complete news story.

As special assistant to President Elaine Tuttle Hansen charged with advancing the goals of developing diversity and inclusion at Bates, Leslie Hill (right), associate professor of politics, on Aug. 1. Hill chaired the Program in Women and Gender Studies from 2001 to 2004, and served as division chair for interdisciplinary-studies programs from 2004 into this year. She succeeds Sue Houchins as special assistant.

PROMOTED To tenured positions as associate professor: Amy Douglass, psychology; Stephanie Kelley-Romano, rhetoric; Jennifer Koviach, chemistry; Trian Nguyen, art and visual culture; Susan Stark, philosophy.

From associate to full professor: Francisca López, Spanish; from lecturer to senior lecturer: Elke Morris, art and visual culture, and William Pope.L, theater.

HONORED With one of the year’s 24 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation “genius” grants, Corey Harris ’91. Bates awarded Harris, a musician and teacher, an honorary doctor of music degree in May.

PUBLISHED “The Little Ice Age, Blowing Sand and a Lost Township,” an article by faculty members Gerald Bigelow, Michael Jones, and Michael Retelle explaining how changing weather may have obliterated a medieval Shetland Islands settlement (“Ask Me Another,” Summer 2007), in the Simmer [sic] 2007 issue of the literary magazine The New Shetlander; a one-act stage adaptation by Professor of Theater Paul Kuritz of the famous short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” in the new compilation The Best American Short Plays 2001–2002 (Applause Theatre & Cinema Books); and Discrimination of Chiral Compounds Using NMR Spectroscopy, a guide for research chemists by Dana Professor of Chemistry Thomas Wenzel (John Wiley & Sons, 2007).

DEPARTED Andrea L’Hommedieu, oral historian at the Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library, as of Aug. 7. Starting in 1998, L’Hommedieu was central to the archives’ Muskie Oral History Project and also completed an oral history project about Bates for the College’s 150th anniversary (“Talk to Me,” Spring 2005).

John McClendon, associate professor in the African American and American studies programs, as of July 31. McClendon joined the philosophy faculty at Michigan State, where he is also director of African American studies.

DECEASED Richard N. Lafrance, a standout in local ice hockey — he was invited to play for the U.S. Olympic Team in 1960 — who tended the ice at Bates’ Underhill Arena until 1998. He died on June 11, at 74.

Barbara A. Lafrance, a custodian for Physical Plant from 1989 to 1999. Predeceased in June by her husband, Richard, she died on July 18, at 70.

Aurora P. Cornish, a member of the Health Center staff from 1959 to 1981, on Aug. 13, at 89.