Excellence Rewarded: Here Are Seven Saint Mary’s Faculty Who Attained Tenure Status this Year

Seven faculty members at Saint Mary’s College have been granted tenure, ensuring both job security and academic freedom. 

The designation was awarded at the Faculty Recognition Dinner on September 22, when the campus community gathered to celebrate professional milestones of both new and long-standing faculty members at the College. Theology and Religious Studies professor Paul Giurlanda, for instance, was recognized for his 45 years of service to Saint Mary’s.  

Faculty members are tenured and promoted for their skillful, dedicated teaching; scholarly vitality; and their effective service to the College community.

“These newly-tenured faculty members have not only demonstrated their commitment to student-centered education and expertise in their respective fields, but have made extraordinary contributions to the academic community. We eagerly anticipate the innovative research, pedagogy, and leadership they will bring in the years ahead,” said Corey Cook, Provost and Executive Vice President. 

Here are the seven Saint Mary’s College faculty members earning tenure.

Sunayani Bhattacharya, PhD | Associate Professor of English

Bhattacharya’s research areas include postcolonial studies, world literature, and novel studies. She has published her work in the academic journal Comparative Literature and in several edited volumes. In her recent book, The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal, published by Bloomsbury, she studies the ways in which Bengalis thought about reading and how they approached the thorny question of influence. She shows how they relied on classical Sanskrit and Perso-Arabic literary and aesthetic models, whose traditions coexisted, albeit contentiously, with the everyday present. 

Veronica Hefner, PhD | Associate Professor of Communication

Hefner is a quantitative media scholar with an emphasis in interpersonal communication. She studies how media use and consumption are related to ideals—specifically, the ideal romantic relationship and the ideal body type. Quantitative Methods is her favorite class to teach, Hefner says, because it challenges students beyond the confines of a traditional communication course. The reward? Seeing students’ pride when they successfully pass the class.

Khameeka N. Kitt-Hopper, PhD | Associate Professor of Biology

A Saint Mary’s alumna, Kitt-Hopper completed her PhD in Cell Biology and Anatomy at the University of Arizona before securing a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Biology at Stanford University. Her current work involves analyzing protein complexes in normal and breast cancer cell lines to better understand the mechanisms involved in cancer initiation and progression. In addition to her work as a scientist and faculty member, Kitt-Hopper has a passion for public science education and finding ways to support student learning and retention in the sciences. 

Zuleikha Kurji, PhD | Associate Professor of Chemistry

Kurji did her undergraduate training at Cornell University, graduate work at Caltech, and postdoc work at Washington State University and Caltech. Her research focuses primarily on polymers and their material properties. At Saint Mary’s, she works with undergraduate students to chemically synthesize polymers that bend in response to light and investigate how changing the chemical structure of these materials affects how fast, how far, and how often they bend. She is proud to have participated in the Summer Research Program nearly every summer she joined the College in 2017. 

Mary Raygoza, PhD | Associate Professor of Education

Raygoza strives to foster what she calls “quantitative civic literacy” through her scholarship and working alongside her teacher-candidate students. She engages critical methodologies to center, understand, and uplift the voices and lived experiences of teachers and young people seeking educational equity and anti-racist classrooms. She has published articles in numerous peer-reviewed journals and serves as the Principal Investigator on a recently awarded five-year, $1.2 million Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Track 1 grant from the National Science Foundation.

Stacey Robbins, PhD | Associate Professor in the Department of Leadership

As program director for the BA in Leadership and Organizational Studies, Robbins engages in scholarship that highlights the importance of communicating and collaborating across boundaries and creating space for diverse perspectives. She brings more than 15 years of experience as an educator and leader in K–12, higher education, and workplace settings. She also values cultural exchange; recent global work includes co-leading a study abroad program in Guatemala and working with teachers and career coaches in Shenzhen, China. 

Grant J. Rozeboom, PhD | Associate Professor of Business Ethics and Social Responsibility

Saint Mary’s current TransAmerica Professor, Rozeboom received his PhD in Philosophy from Stanford University and was previously a business ethics professor at St. Norbert College in Wisconsin. His research explores how relational equality and moral responsibility can be best realized in the context of work and organizations. He has published articles in numerous academic journals, including Ethics, Philosophy & Public Affairs and Business Ethics Quarterly, and he co-edited the volume Working as Equals, recently published by Oxford University Press. In addition to teaching and developing business ethics courses across undergraduate and graduate programs at Saint Mary's, he co-created the annual Lasallian Societal Impact Case Competition and is the director of the Executive Doctorate of Business Administration program.

READ MORE: Explore the work of faculty featured in the “Closer Look” series. Check out Part One, Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four.

And see all the faculty members who were honored earlier this year with Faculty Awards and Provost Research Grants.

LEARN MORE about Saint Mary’s Office of Academic Affairs.