Kenyon’s Board of Trustees considered the recommendations of the Tenure and Promotion Committee at its April meeting. These five members of the College’s faculty have earned appointment without limit and the title of associate professor, effective July 1, 2025.
Huachen Li
Assistant Professor of Economics
Huachen Li joined the Kenyon faculty in 2019 after completing his Ph.D. at North Carolina State University. His training is in macroeconomics and applied time series. He works on macroeconomic applications and methods of vector autoregressions (VARs) with time-varying parameters and stochastic volatility. In his spare time, he enjoys guitar, chess and watching college sports.
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Doctor of Philosophy in Economics from North Carolina State University (2019)
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Master of Arts in Management from Wake Forest University (2013)
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Bachelor of Arts in Business Economics from the College of Wooster (2012)
Catherine Mauck
Assistant Professor of Chemistry
Katie Mauck’s research interests lie at the intersection of physical chemistry and materials science. She has used various spectroscopic techniques to understand energy processes and morphology in emerging semiconductor materials with applications in optoelectronics, such as solar cells and light emitting devices. She has done art conservation science research at museums as well, including a Fulbright fellowship at the Musee National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, and worked at a nanotechnology start-up prior to her graduate work. At Kenyon, Mauck studies the vibrational signatures of intermolecular coupling and assembly in hybrid, inorganic and organic materials with infrared reflectance absorbance spectroscopy and other standard optical methods.
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Doctor of Philosophy in Chemistry from Northwestern University (2017)
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Bachelor of Arts in Chemistry from Oberlin College (2009)
Margaret Stevenson
Associate Professor of Psychology
Margaret Stevenson’s research interests explore the experiences of marginalized populations within the justice system through methodologically rigorous research rooted in social psychological theory. She has examined, for example, how adolescent offender and victim race influences legal decision-makers’ perceptions of adolescent offenders of violent and sexual crime. Her peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters focus on applying principles of social psychology toward understanding miscarriages of justice within the legal system that predominantly affect disadvantaged populations (i.e., people of color). Her recent Oxford University Press edited books, “Criminal Juries in the 21st Century: Psychological Science and the Law” and “The Legacy of Racism for Children: Psychology, Law, and Public Policy,” address racial discrimination within the justice system. She currently serves as past president of the American Psychological Association Division 37’s Section on Child Maltreatment.
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Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology from the University of Illinois at Chicago (2008)
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Master of Arts in Psychology from the University of Illinois at Chicago (2006)
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Bachelor of Science in Psychology and a Bachelor of Arts in French from The Ohio State University (2003)
Matthew Suazo
Assistant Professor of English
Matt Suazo specializes in early and 19th-century hemispheric American literature, and his courses speak to his overlapping interests in authorship, postcolonial studies, the environment, and multi-ethnic U.S. literatures. His current book project — “Wetland Americas: Literature, Race and the Mississippi River Valley in Translation, 1542-1884” — explores the circulation of discourses of race and environment within the U.S. and around the Atlantic World. In 2019, he completed work on this project as an American Antiquarian Society-National Endowment for the Humanities Long-term Fellow. Portions of his research have been published in Early American Literature, as well as in the edited collections, “Neither the Time Nor the Place: The New Nineteenth-Century American Studies” and “Swamp Souths: Literary and Cultural Ecologies.”
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Doctor of Philosophy in Literature and American Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz (2015)
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Master of Arts in English from the University of New Orleans (2001)
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Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Virginia (1994)
Orchid Tierney
Assistant Professor of English
Orchid Tierney’s scholarship focuses on critical discard studies, plant studies, atmospheric aesthetics, and ecopoetics. She is the author of “this abattoir is a college” (2025) and “a year of misreading the wildcats” (2019) as well as several chapbooks, including “pedagogies for the planthroposcene” (2025), “looking at the Tiny: Mad lichen on the surfaces of reading” (2023), “ocean plastic” (2019), and “blue doors” (2018). Tierney is the co-editor of “The Routledge Companion to Ecopoetics” (2023) and her scholarship has appeared in SubStance, Jacket2, “The Cambridge Companion to Australian Poetry,” “Teaching the Literature of Climate Change” and “The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry and Politics Since 1900.” Tierney is a Black Earth Institute Fellow for 2022-2025 and a senior editor for the Kenyon Review.
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Doctor of Philosophy in English from the University of Pennsylvania (2019)
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Master of Arts in English from the University of Otago, New Zealand (2013)
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Master of Creative Writing from the University of Auckland, New Zealand (2010)
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Bachelor of Arts in History and English from the University of Otago, New Zealand (2001)