Two faculty members named to endowed chairs

History professor Reed Browning and music professor Dane Heuchemer, two prominent members of the Kenyon faculty, have been named to endowed chairs at the College. The appointments were made and announced by President S. Georgia Nugent and Provost Gregory Spaid.

Browning will assume the Roy T. Wortman Distinguished Professorship in History upon the retirement this summer of the chair's namesake, Distinguished Professor of History Roy Wortman. Winner of the Trustee Teaching Excellence Award for a senior faculty member in 2001, Browning, who came to the College in 1967, has special interests in a variety of areas, including the histories of the American colonies, Great Britain, Europe, and baseball, the mysteries of Dorothy Sayers, and the music of Gilbert and Sullivan. His most recent books are The War of the Austrian Succession , the award-winning Cy Young: A Baseball Life , and Baseball's Greatest Season, 1924 . A graduate of Dartmouth College, Browning earned his doctorate at Yale University.

Heuchemer will become the third person to hold the James D. and Cornelia W. Ireland Professorship in Music, first occupied by Benjamin Locke and currently held by Camilla Cai, who will retire this summer. Heuchemer's primary interests lie in musicology, where he specializes in sixteenth-century Germany, and in conducting, where he leads the Early Music Ensemble, which he founded, and the Symphonic Wind Ensemble. He is also active as a performer, playing the cornetto, the trumpet, and the natural-or valveless-trumpet, and as a conductor with local and regional groups. A member of the music faculty since 1995, Heuchemer earned a B.M. at the University of Northern Colorado and a Ph.D. at the University of Cincinnati.

Both professorships were funded during Kenyon's "Claiming Our Place" campaign. The Wortman Chair was created by a group of the professor's former students led by James Pierce Jr. '78, while the Ireland Chair was given in memory of her parents by Cornelia Ireland Hallinan '76, former chair of the College's board, her husband, Robert Hallinan '74, and other family members.