2005 University Professorships
Donald Franceschetti, Physics, was awarded the Faudree University Professorship
Previously Awarded Professorships
Dr. Janann Sherman, Department of History, Atkins Professorship
Dr. Janann Sherman received her Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 1993; she came to the University of Memphis in 1994, and this August became chair of the History Department. Her research interests are in recent (20th century) American history, with particular emphasis on women and American politics. Her books include No Place for a Woman: A Life of Senator Margaret Chase Smith, The Perfect 36: Tennessee Delivers Woman Suffrage, Interviews with Betty Friedan, and Memphis in Black and White.
She is currently at work on a young people's biography of feminist Betty Friedan and a biography of Phoebe Fairgrave Omlie, an aviation pioneer, who with her husband Vernon Omlie, established the first airport in Memphis in the 1920s. After campaigning for Franklin D. Roosevelt, Mrs. Omlie served in the federal government from 1932-1952, helping to organize and regulate military and civil aviation.
For additional information on Dr. Sherman, visit the History Department website.
Dr. Leonard Lawlor, Department of Philosophy, Faudree Professorship (Hardins)
Professor Lawlor received his Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1988. His primary research and teaching interest is contemporary Continental Philosophy, including Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, Bergson, Husserl, and Nietzsche.
He is the author of four books: Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology (Indiana, 2002); Thinking Through French Philosophy: The Being of the Question (Indiana, 2003); The Challenge of Bergsonism: Phenomenology, Ontology, Ethics (Continuum Books, 2003); and Imagination and Chance: The Difference Between the Thought of Ricoeur and Derrida (The SUNY Press, 1992). He is one of the co-editors of Chiasmi International: Trilingual Studies Concerning the Thought of Merleau-Ponty. He has translated Merleau-Ponty and Hyppolite into English. He has written dozens of articles on Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, and Gadamer. He was awarded a Dunavant Professorship in 2001. He is in the process of writing a new book to be called Memory and Life: An Archaeology of the Experience of Thought.