Three faculty members in the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences have recently been awarded endowed professorial positions.
Stephen Valentine has been selected to hold the C. Eugene Bennett Chair in Chemistry. Valentine’s research interests include the development of novel gas-phase separations techniques that can be combined with mass spectrometry (MS). His laboratory recently secured a $1.37 million National Institutes of Health grant to build custom IMS‑MS instrumentation for characterizing intrinsically disordered proteins.
C. Eugene Bennett was the co‑founder of F&M Scientific Corp., which designed, manufactured and sold scientific instruments for chemical laboratories. He earned both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in chemistry from the Eberly College.
In 1994, the C. Eugene Bennett Family Foundation established a $1.6 million endowment to create the C. Eugene Bennett Chair in Chemistry and the C. Eugene and Edna P. Bennett Careers for Chemists Program at WVU.
Karen Culcasi has been awarded the Harriet E. Lyon Professorship in Women’s and Gender Studies. Named for Harriet E. Lyon, WVU’s first female graduate (1891), the Lyon Professorship was endowed in honor of Judith Gold Stitzel, founding director of WVU’s Center for Women’s and Gender Studies. It places women's concerns, ideas, perspectives, and interests at the center of the scholarly and teaching enterprise.
Culcasi’s work uses critical and feminist geopolitical frameworks to examine contested identities in Southwest Asia, North Africa and Appalachia. Her book Displacing Territory: Syrian and Palestinian Refugees in Jordan earned the 2023 American Association of Geographers Meridian Book Award.
Manal Al Natour is the new Armand E. and Mary W. Singer Professor in the Humanities. Al Natour coordinates WVU’s Arabic Studies program. Her research and teaching focuses on modern Arabic language and literature, cultural studies, contemporary women’s writing, feminism and the Arab Spring. Dr. Al Natour has also published extensively in leading peer reviewed journals and edited volumes.
The Singer Professorship is named for Armand and Mary Singer, a team devoted to scholarship in the humanities. In 2000, Mary and Armand, together with their daughter and son-in-law, Fredericka Ann Singer Hill and Thomas Hill, established the professorship as part of WVU’s Building Greatness Campaign.
“This newest group of individuals selected for these distinguished positions honors the exceptional academic legacy of the Eberly College faculty,” said Greg Dunaway, dean of the Eberly College. “I am confident that Professors Valentine, Culcasi and Al Natour will make excellent contributions that will reflect well on their units, the Eberly College and WVU.”
