Duke Awards Tenure to Faculty Members on the Campus Side

Here we recognize and celebrate Duke colleagues who recently achieved promotion and tenure. Earning promotion and tenure after a rigorous review process by peers and leaders inside and outside Duke is a testament to the caliber of each individual faculty member and the impact of their research, teaching and mentoring, and their reputation among their peers. It is also, in a way, an invitation to be a partner in shaping the future of Duke and its mission, playing a role in advancing its academic excellence and making it a more equitable and engaged institution. Congratulations!

H. Timothy Lovelace, Jr.
John Hope Franklin Research Scholar, Professor of Law
H. Timothy Lovelace, Jr., a noted legal historian of the civil rights movement, joined the Duke Law faculty in June 2020 from Indiana University where he was a professor of law at the Maurer School of Law and affiliated faculty in the Department of History. He previously taught at Duke Law as the John Hope Franklin Visiting Professor of American Legal History in the Spring 2019 semester. Lovelace’s work examines how the civil rights movement in the United States helped to shape international human rights law. He has published articles in journals including the Law and History Review, American Journal of Legal History, and the Journal of American History, and his article, “William Worthy's Passport,” was selected for the 2015 Law & Humanities Interdisciplinary Junior Scholar Workshop. His forthcoming book, The World is on Our Side: The U.S. and the U.N. Race Convention (Cambridge University Press), examines how U.S. civil rights politics shaped the development of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.
Appointment Date: July 1, 2020

Brian McAdoo
Associate Professor of Earth and Ocean Sciences
Brian McAdoo is associate professor of earth  and ocean sciences in the Nicholas School of the Environment. His research focuses on how geophysical hazards, such as earthquakes, tsunamis, landslides or extreme climate events, interact with the human environment to pose risks to marginalized populations. He was a member of the United Nations post-disaster reconnaissance team that documented the effects of the historic 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean that killed nearly 280,000 people and caused $13 billion in damages. He has also conducted assessments of tsunami risks in Japan; hurricane impacts in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico; landslide risks in Nepal; avalanche risks in the United States; and post-earthquake recovery in Haiti. McAdoo’s faculty career began with 15 years at Vassar College in New York and 8 years as a founding professor of environmental science at Yale-National University of Singapore, Asia’s first four-year liberal arts college. He earned his doctoral degree in Earth Sciences, with a focus on submarine geomorphology, in 1999 from the University of California – Santa Cruz. He earned a diploma in science in geology in 1992 as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, and his bachelor of science degree in geology in 1991 from Duke, where his faculty advisor was Paul Baker, professor of earth and ocean sciences. Since earning his Ph.D. in 1999, he has authored or co-authored more than 45 peer-reviewed studies, presented more than 45 invited seminars, and developed and taught more than a dozen different undergraduate courses —nearly all interdisciplinary in scope and interactive in nature — on topics including oceanography, global geophysics and plate tectonics, planetary health and Foundations of Science, a common curriculum course for non-science majors.
Appointment Date: July 1, 2021

Gina-Gail S. Fletcher
Professor of Law
Gina-Gail Fletcher, a scholar of complex financial instruments and market regulation, joined the Duke Law faculty in July 2020 from the Indiana University Maurer School of Law where she was an associate professor of law. She visited Duke Law in the Fall 2019 semester, when she taught Business Associations. Fletcher’s current research focuses on the interplay of public regulation and private ordering in enhancing market stability and integrity. Her recent scholarship has been published or is forthcoming in New York University Law Review, Duke Law Journal, and Iowa Law Review. Additionally, her scholarship has also been featured on the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation and the Oxford Legal Blog. She has presented her work at Yale Law School, Duke Law School, and Notre Dame Law School, among others, and she has been an invited speaker at George Washington University Law School on the role of the CFTC in the financial markets.
Appointment Date: July 1, 2020

Jay Pearson
Associate Professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy
Jay Pearson is associate professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy. His research examines how policy-sponsored structural inequality influences social determination of health. A native of Hertford County, North Carolina, Pearson’s early experiences in the rural agricultural south shaped his academic interests and inform his research agenda. Pearson began his public health career as a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer in Honduras where he worked on child survival. Upon returning to the U.S. he worked as a health educator with the East Coast Migrant Health Project. Pearson served as assistant project director of an NIH-funded research study in which he was responsible for primary data collection in an ethnically diverse Detroit community. While pursuing his doctoral degree at the University of Michigan, Pearson began to study the social determinants of population health. He is particularly interested in the health effects of conventional and nonconventional resources associated with racial assignment, sociocultural resources, national origin, immigration and cultural orientations.
Appointment Date: July 1, 2021

Deondra Rose
Associate Professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy
Deondra Rose is an associate professor of public policy in the Sanford School of Public Policy with secondary appointments in political science and history in the Trinity College of Arts & Sciences. She is also the director of Polis: Center for Politics. Her research focuses on the feedback effects of landmark social policies on the American political landscape. In addition to U.S. public/social policy, Rose’s research and teaching interests include higher education policy, American political development, political behavior, identity politics (e.g., gender, race, and socioeconomic status) and inequality. She is the author of “Citizens by Degree: Higher Education Policy and the Changing Gender Dynamics of American Citizenship.” Rose’s research has appeared in Studies in American Political Development, the Journal of Policy History, the Journal of Women, Politics & Policy and PS: Political Science & Politics.
Appointment Date: July 1, 2021

Candis Watts Smith
Associate Professor of Political Science
Candis Watts Smith’s expertise highlights race and ethnicity's role in shaping the American political landscape. Her research agenda illuminates the ways in which demographic dynamics influence citizens’ and denizens’ of the U.S. understanding of their own identity, their political attitudes and their policy preferences. It also examines the extent to which public resources are distributed in equitable ways. In addition to publishing in peer reviewed journals, textbooks and the public sphere, she is the author of three books, Black Mosaic: The Politics of Black Pan-Ethnic Diversity, Stay Woke: A People’s Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter and Racial Stasis: The Millennial Generation and the Stagnation of Racial Attitudes in American Politics. She is also the co-editor of Black Politics in Transition: Immigration, Suburbanization, and Gentrification. Prior to her appointment at Duke University, she was a member of the Departments of Political and African American Studies at Penn State. She is a co-host of the Democracy Works Podcast and a TEDx alumna.
Appointment Date: July 1, 2021

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