Academic tenure is the employment status of professors. The promotion raises their status from assistant to associate professor. Receiving tenure represents a strong relationship between the university and the professor, and is a notion that suggests the professor will continue to research and teach at Bucknell.

Tenured professors are only let go under extreme circumstances, which allows for professors to have academic freedom and be able to truly focus on their intellectual interests and passions. As long as the professors are still meeting core curriculum requirements, they can publish and research any material they please. 

Multiple Bucknell professors received their tenure promotion this year on Jan. 30. Some of these professors include Eddy López, Erica Delsandro, Jaye Austin Williams and Paul Barba. These highlighted professors come from various departments, art and art history, women and gender studies, critical black studies and history. 

Eddy López 

With tenure Professor López is an Associate Professor of Studio Art and an Affiliate Faculty Member in Latin American Studies. López was born in Nicaragua in the midst of a revolution and war. He has used these memories or war to reflect his style of art with “abstractions of vibrant colors, patterns and shapes.” 

Print Media is one of López’s artistic specialties. He uses “​​big data, averaging algorithms, and print media to create wide-scale collage compositions that try to find meaning in a chaotic world.” He also has had multiple exhibits displayed around the world. These include the International Print Center New York, The Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing and the Janet Turner Print Museum, along with many others. 

Professor López has had many solo exhibitions and is also a part of several group exhibitions. Some classes he is teaching during this spring semester are Printmaking 1 and Interface and Web design. Titles of his work and more information on Professor López can be found on his profile on the Bucknell website.

Erica Delsandro 

The newly titled Associate Professor Erica Delsandro teaches different levels of classes within the Women’s and Gender Studies department. Having gone to Bucknell herself, she now shares her vast knowledge with fortunate students who are able to take a class with her.

Outside of her class, she has a significant presence on campus, giving different presentations on critical topics about gender, social constructs, sexuality and more. In January, she spoke with members of the Greek Life community on the topic of “Social Scene and Power,” a prominent issue to discuss with Bucknell students.

In the works for Professor Delsandro is a co-edited collection of a three-article series. It is entitled “Women Writers and the Making of Modernism,” and its objective is to pair “the modernist author Virginia Woolf with a more contemporary author through the lens of feminism and gender politics.”

Jaye Austin Williams 

Teaching in the Critical Black Studies department, Jaye Austin Williams is now an Associate Professor. For the 2022-23 academic year Professor Williams is also serving as the Critical Black Studies Interim Department Chair. 

Aside from being a professor, Williams is also a director, playwright and actor. She has had work on Broadway and in many off-Broadway productions. She is a specialist in “the melding of drama theory, cinema and performance with Critical Black Studies.” She also travels the world giving lectures that analyze structural racism. 

Classes that Professor Williams is teaching this semester include Black Film and Anti Blackness, and Approaches to CBST. In the past she has also taught classes such as “Radical Black Drama and Performance,” “Cinema and the Performance of Slavery,” “Approaches to Critical Black Studies” and “Vampires and Zombies.” 

Paul Barba 

Paul Barba is another Professor to have recently received academic tenure. Barba is now an Associate Professor of History and an Affiliated Faculty Member in Critical Black Studies. 

Some of the major areas of study for Professor Barba are Native Americans, Slavery and Colonialism. In Barba’s first book, “Country of the Cursed and the Driven” (University of Nebraska Press, 2021), he studies the unique slaving regimes of, “Hispanic, Comanche and Anglo-American communities in the 18th- and 19th-century Texas borderlands.” 

The expansion of European colonialism is of particular interest to Barba and the impacts it had on Native and African-descended people. Barba is also a contributor to the “Journal of the Civil War Era” Muster Blog, and his tenure in the history department will be a great addition to Bucknell. 

This semester, he teaches history classes such as “Making the US through Violence” and “American Abolition.”