Biographies for Dean of Arts and Sciences Search Committee Members

Bryant Byrd is a senior pre-medical student pursuing a B.S. degree in biochemistry and cellular and molecular biology. His record as an undergraduate student has earned him membership in numerous academic and service honor societies such as Alpha Epsilon Delta, Phi Kappa Phi, and Phi Beta Kappa. As a freshman, he was named the CRC Press Outstanding General Chemistry Student. For the past two years, he has served as a pre-health advisor, assisting students in the College of Arts and Sciences. He is currently applying to medical school, which he hopes to begin in the fall of 2005.

Lisa Byrd is a doctoral candidate in the English Department and a graduate assistant in the College of Arts and Sciences Advising Center. She has served as the Assistant Director, and as Acting Director, of Composition. She also served as the graduate student representative on an English Department faculty search committee. Lisa is writing a dissertation exploring the representation of queens in Early Modern court masques and popular drama and was awarded one of two inaugural dissertation fellowships from the Medieval and Renaissance Curriculum and Outreach Institute for her work in this area.

Linda Davidson serves the Knoxville campus as Vice Chancellor for Development and the University of Tennessee System as Associate Vice President for Development. She currently is responsible for the college-based fundraising in Knoxville, the Center for Health Sciences in Memphis, as well as the planned giving, corporate and foundations programs. The college-based fundraising program at UTK began in 1980 when Mrs. Davidson was hired as the development director for the College of Liberal Arts (now Arts and Sciences). The Knoxville Campus has 20 fundraisers assigned to colleges/programs. There are currently three professional fundraisers and one support person housed in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Todd Diacon is Professor and Head of the History Department. His academic specialty is the history of Latin America in general, and the history of modern Brazil in particular. His latest book, Stringing Together a Nation: Candido Mariano da Silva Rondon and the Construction of a Modern Brazil, 1906-1930, has just been published by Duke University Press.

David Feldman is Professor and Head of the Political Science Department at UTK. His research areas include environmental & energy policy (focus on water resources and climate change) and ethics and policy. He has authored more than 60 articles or book chapters and four books. He also has been a policy analyst for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (1988-1993); served as editor of The Review of Policy Research; helped prepare legislation on water rights for the Tennessee legislature; and testified before Congress on national water policy.

Carol Harden, Professor and former Head of the Department of Geography, studies watershed processes, including human impacts on water and soil resources in mountain environments. From May to August of 2004 she was a Fulbright scholar in Andean Ecuador. She is a past chair of the Geomorphology Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers and a current officer on the Executive Committee of the International Association of Geomorphologists.

Carolyn Hodges is Professor of German and Associate Dean for Academic Personnel in the College of Arts and Sciences. She also serves as chair of the Comparative Literature Committee. She has a B.A. in French from Arcadia University and the M.A. and Ph.D. in Germanic Languages and Literatures from the University of Chicago. Her teaching and research emphasize multicultural perspectives in modern German literature, comparisons of African-American, Afro-German, and German literature, and theories and approaches to multicultural education. She has published two books and numerous articles and has another book in preparation.

Beauvais Lyons is the Ellen McClung Berry Professor of Art and a past president of the UTK Faculty Senate. He has taught printmaking in the School of Art since 1985. U.S. News and World Report has ranked the printmaking program #3 nationally. His prints and other works have been exhibited internationally and are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), the Smithsonian Museum of American Art (Washington, D.C.) and the Nelson Atkins Museum (Kansas City, Mo.).

Susan Martin is Professor of Classics and Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs. She specializes in classical Roman law with particular emphasis on its relationship to the society and economy of Rome. Her publications focus on contract law and in particular, the organization of such essential functions as construction and transportation. She has been a fellow at the American Academy in Rome and at Harvard Law School. She teaches courses in Latin at all levels, Roman law, and women in antiquity.

Harry (Hap) McSween is Professor and former Head of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and a College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Science. He is a NASA Principal Investigator for cosmochemistry and a co-investigator for a number of spacecraft missions, including Mars Odyssey, which is mapping the planet from orbit and the Mars Exploration Rovers, which are currently operating on the surface. Dr. McSween teaches courses at all levels and is the author of five books.

Cynthia Peterson is Professor in the Department of Biochemistry & Cellular & Molecular Biology. She received the Ph.D. from Louisiana State University in 1986 and pursued postdoctoral work at the University of California, Berkeley, before joining the faculty at the University of Tennessee in 1992. Dr. Peterson has an active research program studying circulatory proteins that regulate blood coagulation, direct wound healing, and control cancer progression, with extramural support from the National Institutes of Health and the American Heart Association. She has close research ties with scientists from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory through the Joint Institute of Biological Sciences, and she helps coordinate the Program in Genome Science and Technology, a joint graduate program with the national lab.

John Zomchick is Professor and Head of the Department of English. He served for a year as interim associate dean for academic programs in the College of Arts and Sciences. He is currently chair of the ad hoc committee on a Humanities Initiative, an effort to support and develop scholarship and publication opportunities, including interdisciplinary opportunities, for humanities faculty at UT. He works on Restoration and eighteenth-century British literature. His research interests include the novel, law and literature, and the Anglophone literature of the Caribbean.