Newly appointed to tenure-track positions are Maya Federman, assistant professor of economics; Carmen R. Fought, assistant professor of linguistics; Maria A. Gutierrez de Soldatenko, assistant professor of gender and feminist studies and Chicano/a studies; Douglas T. Northrop, assistant professor of history; and Mario G. Maldonado, Luce Professor in Brain, Mind, Medicine: Cross-cultural Perspectives. (See Profile, below, for more about Maldonado.). Additionally, Jesse Lerner, an accomplished filmmaker, artist, teacher and scholar, has been given a three-year appointment as MacArthur assistant professor of media studies.

Federman, a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University, holds an M.A. degree from Harvard and a B.S. degree from MIT. Her academic specialties include labor economics, public finance and education.

Fought is teaching courses in sociolinguistics, bilingualism, phonology and language in American ethnic minority groups. Her research interests include the acquisition of phonology by children, sociolinguistic variation in bilingual communities, Spanish in the U.S., dialect contact and intonation. She holds B.A. and M.A. degrees from Stanford and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.

Gutierrez de Soldatenko, a sociologist with special training and teaching experience in women's studies and Chicano/a studies, comes to Pitzer from Arizona State University, where she has been an assistant professor since 1995. She previously taught for one year at Cal State Northridge. Her dissertation research at UCLA, where she earned M.A. and Ph.D. degrees, focused on Latina garment workers in Los Angeles.

A visiting instructor at Pitzer last year, Northrop holds a B.A from Williams College, a second B.A. degree from Emmanuel College at Cambridge University in England and an M.A. from Stanford, where he is a Ph.D. candidate. For his dissertation research on the history of Muslim peoples and cultures of Central Asia as they were incorporated into the Soviet Union, Northrop spent two years in Tashkent and Moscow and learned Russian, Uzbek, Turkis, some German, French and Ukrainian.

Lerner has made seven films, including "Natives" (1991), "Inside Voices: South Central Los Angeles" (1993) and "Ruins" (1997). He has taught previously at UC San Diego, Bennington College, Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City and San Carlos Academy of the National University of Mexico. He holds a B.A. degree from UCLA and an M.A. degree from USC.