RELEASED: June 13, 2001

DANVILLE, KY—Six Centre College professors have been honored for their excellence in teaching, scholarly work and contributions to the college community. William Levin, Mark Rasmussen, Jack Thompson, Mykol Hamilton, Beau Weston and Thomas McCollough have been named Centre Scholars.

The Centre Scholars are selected from Centre's full-time faculty for a term of two years. Each scholar receives a stipend above the normal salary.

The Centre Scholars program was made possible at Centre through a challenge gift to the college endowment from David Grissom, a Centre alumnus and Louisville businessman who chairs the college's board of trustees. Levin is associate professor of art history and has taught at Centre since 1986. He will become professor of art history in the fall.

Levin has taught courses and seminars covering the entire chronology of the Western artistic tradition. He has particular expertise in Italian art and architecture from 1100 to 1750. He gained considerable experience when he lived in Italy from 1976-81.

Levin is the author of Images of Love and Death in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art (University of Michigan Press, 1976) and has published numerous articles through the years. Levin holds a bachelor's degree in history from Northwestern University and a master's and a doctorate in the history of art from the University of Michigan.

Rasmussen is associate professor of English and has taught at Centre since1989. His teaching includes courses in medieval and Renaissance literature, literary criticism and theory, and the history of the English language, as well as freshman humanities. A summa cum laude graduate of Harvard, with a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins, he has published essays on Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and the poetics of complaint, and he has edited a collection of essays on Renaissance literature that will be published by Palgrave Press this fall.

Rasmussen has served as the college's Director of Writing, chair of the English program, and chair of the Curriculum Committee during a two-year process of curricular reform. He will spend the 2001-2002 school year in Strasbourg, France, directing the Centre-in-Europe program.

Thompson is professor of psychology at Centre, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1976. His academic interest is psychophysiology, and he is the author of The Psychobiology of Emotion (Plenum Press 1988) and Women in Celtic Law and Culture (The Edwin Mellen Press, 1996). Thompson's research has also led to numerous articles in scholarly journals.

Thompson is committed to having students involved in research, and his regular collaboration with Centre students has led to numerous presentations at the Kentucky Academy of Science and other professional meetings. A graduate of Wagner College (B.A.), Thompson received master's and doctoral degrees from Rutgers.

Hamilton is associate professor of psychology at Centre. She began teaching at Centre in 1988. Her academic interests have been focused on sex bias and language, gender and education, gender differences, gender issues relevant to children as well as AIDS issues related to people's attitudes toward homosexuality. She has frequently delivered papers at scholarly conferences, including a recent invited address in Germany summarizing her 15 years of research on sex bias in language. She also teaches ballroom dancing classes for the school's physical education department.

Hamilton holds a bachelor's degree in psychology from Stanford University and a master's degree in women's studies from San Jose State University. She earned master's and doctoral degrees in social psychology at the University of California-Los Angeles.

Weston, who joined Centre's faculty in 1990, is associate professor of sociology. He has a special interest in the sociology of religion. He is the author of Presbyterian Pluralism: Competition in a Protestant House, published in 1997 by the University of Tennessee Press. And Weston is an elder in the Presbyterian Church.

He has pursued research and taught courses on a number of topics related to family life and major contemporary social issues. Weston earned a bachelor's degree with high honors from Swarthmore College and subsequently completed a master's degree from Yale Divinity School and master's and doctoral degrees at Yale University.

McCollough is professor of religion and history at Centre, where he has taught since 1980. He has been assistant director and field archaeologist of the excavations at Sepphoris since 1985 and beginning this year will serve also as the assistant director of the excavations at Cana. Since 1985 McCollough has been taking a number of Centre students to Israel for archaeological digs. In 1992 and 1993, he and his students were part of a team that uncovered at Sepphoris rare amulets that are estimated to be around 2,000 years old. He and fellow Centre professor, Beth Glazier-McDonald, have published scholarly articles about the amulets in Atiquot and Archaeology Odyssey.

He has co-edited a book entitled, Archaeology and the Galilee in the Roman and Byzantine Eras and has a forthcoming a book entitled, Ancient Christian Commentary on the Book of Daniel and another co-edited book entitled, The Archaeology of Difference.

McCollough has particular expertise in the history of Christianity and Christian thought, Biblical history and archaeology, and the contemporary Middle East. He received a bachelor's degree from the University of Florida and master's and doctoral degrees from the University of Notre Dame. He also has a master of divinity degree from Duke University.

As a group, these professors, now named Centre Scholars, embody the ideals of the teacher-scholar: teaching effectively and contributing to their scholarly disciplines memorably.

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