Two Hamilton faculty members were approved for tenure by the College’s Board of Trustees during a recent meeting. The board granted tenure to Russell Marcus, philosophy, and Benjamin Widiss, literature and creative writing.
The granting of tenure is based on recommendations of the vice president for academic affairs and dean of faculty, and the committee on appointments, with the college president presenting final recommendations to the board of trustees. The tenures are effective July 1. With the granting of tenure comes the title of associate professor.
Russell Marcus was appointed to the faculty in 2007. He teaches logic and modern philosophy, as well as philosophy of language and philosophy of mathematics, his main area of research. In addition to working on our knowledge of mathematics and Descartes’s epistemology, Marcus has published articles on philosophical pedagogy. He also spends some time thinking about, and teaching a course on, the role of intuitions in philosophy.
In 2015, Marcus published Autonomy Platonism and the Indispensability Argument. This year he co-edited with Mark McEvoy An Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mathematics (Bloomsbury).
Before coming to Hamilton, Marcus taught philosophy at Queens College, Hofstra University and the College of Staten Island, and high school mathematics in New York City and in Costa Rica. He received a doctorate from City University of New York.
At Hamilton, Marcus was awarded The John R. Hatch Excellence in Teaching Award in 2011 and received the Class of 1963 Excellence in Teaching Award in 2016.
Appointed to the faculty in 2014, Benjamin Widiss specializes in twentieth-century and contemporary American literature and film. In 2011 he wrote Obscure Invitations: The Persistence of the Author in Twentieth-Century American Literature.
Widiss is working on a second book that explores a constellation of relationships between mass production and individual bodily presence, conceptions of temporality and loss, and constructions of adolescence and maturity as a means to articulate the aesthetic postures of an emergent post-postmodernism.
He received a doctorate in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and a bachelor's degree from Yale University.
