Aug. 11, 2005

Hot Hires

The University of Texas at San Antonio has several goals for its College of Business: increasing its prominence, especially in the world of research; boosting its focus on international economics; and serving as a showcase for the role a minority-serving institution can play in a diverse business world.

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It’s not surprising, then, that officials are excited about the arrival of Hamid Beladi, who is the editor or associate editor of four journals focused on international economic issues and an expert on international trade. Lynda de la Viña, dean of the business school, notes that San Antonio will now be the headquarters for the International Review of Economics and Finance, one of the journals Beladi edits. San Antonio’s business school already had strong ties to China and to Latin America — and wants Beladi to lead the international economics track of a planned Ph.D. in economics.

Beladi, who has taught at the University of Dayton and North Dakota State University, says that he was attracted to San Antonio by the opportunity to help create a new Ph.D. program

In both his teaching and research, Beladi plans to focus on international trade and finance. “I am interested in issues at the interface of trade and the environment, in the foreign investment in less developed countries, in migration models of economic development, trade and wage inequality, political economy of trade, and in topics in macroeconomics and international trade,” he says.

At Augsburg College, the religion department is excited that it is filling the Lutheran institution’s first endowed chair with David Tiede, who recently finished an 18-year tenure as president of Luther Seminary and who taught New Testament there for 16 years before becoming president.

Christopher Kimball, provost at Augsburg, says that Tiede’s arrival is a real coup, given his stature as a scholar of the New Testament and in the Lutheran faith, on which he has written 10 books.

Tiede says he enjoyed being a president, and learned a lot as an administrator, “especially the difficulty of focused attention in the midst of constant distractions.” One of the things he’s looking forward to is the way “academic work privileges the intense leisure the ancients called schole.“

At Augsburg, Tiede says his emphasis will be on “New Testament and Christian origins.” He hopes to revive a course he once taught called “The Crucible of Christianity.”

“The title was stolen from Arnold Toynbee, but the focus is the various communities which were seeking to sustain the faith of Israel in the midst of converging social and political pressures until and beyond the Roman destruction of the second temple in Jerusalem,” Tiede explains. “Now my interests are sharpened by a growing awareness of the world of many cultures and religions with which the early Christian movement had to contend. And how did they sustain their missionary hope in that larger world long before this surviving form of the faith of Israel had any privileged status in the Roman order? Such vulnerable hope may prove interesting to inhabitants of the post-modern world where all faiths, philosophies and ideologies contend for adherents in the marketplace of ideas.”

Yale University is among the many institutions making hires in diaspora literature in its many definitions. Joining the English faculty this fall is Caryl Phillips, the acclaimed British/Caribbean novelist and playwright. Since 1998, Phillips has been teaching at Barnard College, but he says that he was attracted to the idea of moving to a larger university and that Yale spent a year recruiting him.

Phillips will be teaching a course in fiction writing in the fall, and a course on the African novel in the spring semester. Both courses will be for undergraduates and the latter course will include a class field trip — to Ghana.

— Scott Jaschik

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