HWS News
13 June 2025 • Faculty Faculty Promotion Awarded
Five assistant professors are approved for promotion.
At the most recent meeting of the Hobart and William Smith Board of Trustees, Kanaté Dahouda (French, Francophone and Italian Studies), Daniel Graham (Psychological Science), Leslie Hebb (Physics), Leah Himmelhoch (Greek and Roman Studies) and Courtney Wells (French, Francophone and Italian studies) were approved for promotion upon recommendation of President Mark D. Gearan. The five faculty members will be promoted to the rank of Professor effective July 1, 2025.
“With their body of research and commitment to education, these esteemed professors strive to enrich, challenge and support students to reach their fullest potential,” Provost and Dean of Faculty Sarah Kirk says. “On behalf of our campus community I want to congratulate Kanaté, Dan, Leslie, Leah and Courtney on their promotions.”
Dahouda is a professor of French and Francophone Studies and Chair of the Department of French, Francophone and Italian Studies. At HWS, where Dahouda has been a faculty member since 2001, he teaches courses on French and Francophone literatures and cultures through colonial, postcolonial and contemporary frameworks, with a particular focus on Africa, Canada and the Caribbean.
His teaching and scholarship engage deeply with Francophone imaginaries, interrogating the representations of America in Francophone literature, media and society. He further examines the lived experiences and cultural expressions of African and Caribbean diasporas as they confront and negotiate the political and social realities of the Americas and Europe.
Dahouda is also recognized as a political analyst, literary critic, speechwriter, and expert in linguistic editing. He has contributed significantly to political discourse on contemporary Africa, with a particular focus on Ivorian politics and the transformative leadership of President Alassane Ouattara.
Dahouda is deeply committed to advancing global understanding of French and Francophone issues through political, critical, historically grounded, and culturally nuanced perspectives.
Most recently, he wrote a book chapter “African Perceptions on the Black Diaspora.” Dahouda earned his Ph.D. from Université Laval in Canada. He completed his B.A., M.A., and post-masters’ studies at Université Nationale de Côte d'Ivoire.
Graham is a professor of psychological science. His teaching philosophy is motivated through his interdisciplinary training in psychology, physics, nonlinear dynamics and his specialization in visual neuroscience. In his courses at HWS, where he has taught since 2012, Graham emphasizes critical thinking, mathematical reasoning, awareness and acceptance of human differences.
Graham’s research focuses on human and mammal brains from a variety of perspectives: computational, behavioral and theoretical, focusing especially on vision coding. One ongoing strand of his work focuses on natural, aesthetic, artistic stimuli and their processing and creation.
Graham is author of An Internet in Your Head: A New Paradigm for How the Brain Works. Published in 2021 by Columbia University Press, the book proposes that we can achieve a better understanding of how the human brain works if we compare its basic operation to that of the internet. He writes a blog for Psychology Today on the same theme. Graham earned his Ph.D. in psychology and his M.S. in physics from Cornell University. He earned his B.A. in physics from Middlebury College.
Hebb is a professor of physics. She is an observational astronomer with a variety of active research programs designed to understand the structure, formation and evolution of stars and planets by exploring the time-domain in stellar astrophysics.
Before joining HWS in 2013, Hebb was a post-doctoral scholar at the University of St. Andrews and Vanderbilt University and a research faculty member at the University of Washington. Hebb has contributed to more than 100 academic astronomy publications in diverse research areas related to the measurement of fundamental properties of low mass stars and the characterization of magnetic activity on stars other than the Sun.
Hebb has been awarded several grants from NASA and the National Science Foundation including a recent grant to study magnetic activity on low mass stars using data from NASA's Kepler satellite. In 2020, Hebb co-authored an article in the Astrophysical Journal confirming the existence of a new extrasolar planet (planets revolving around a star other than the sun). Throughout the 2023-24 school year in conjunction with the solar eclipse, Hebb coordinated a series of programs and events for students and community members that explored the scientific, cultural and historic significance of the Sun in our lives. Hebb earned her Ph.D. and M.S. from Johns Hopkins University and her B.S. from the University of Denver.
Himmelhoch is a professor of Greek and Roman studies. She teaches Greek and Roman language, literature and culture, as well as the reception of Greco-Roman antiquity. She joined HWS in 2003.
Himmelhoch studies memory and identity in Greek poetry (with particular focus on Homer and Aeschylus), Roman poetry's reception of the Greek poetic tradition and the use of pre-historic and ancient cultures in modern narratives. She teaches courses on Greek and Latin language; Greek archaeology; Greek and Roman literature and culture; ancient Greece and Rome in cinema; how masculinity and femininity are defined and used in ancient Greek and Roman texts; the importance of pre-history, archaeology and ancient culture to modern socio-political discourse.
With in-depth commentary and context, Himmelhoch last year published a new translation of “Agamemnon” written by the the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus. “Agamemnon” explores the complexities of fate, justice and revenge against the backdrop of the Trojan War.
Currently, Himmelhoch is spearheading the creation of a website (called Palinodia, ‘retracing the path’) to serve as a scholarly resource — expressly designed for high school teachers and students — on the ancient world’s reception by the modern one. Himmelhoch earned her B.A. from Yale University, and both her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin.
Wells is a professor of French, Francophone and Italian studies. His teaching and research interests include medieval lyric poetry, Catalan and Italian troubadour lyric, the oral and written transmission of medieval texts, romance verse and prose, medieval literary theory and Renaissance literary theory. Wells also teaches contemporary Catalan and Occitan culture in France and Dante's Divine Comedy.
He is currently preparing his book manuscript, “Strange Territory: The Troubadour Lyric in Medieval Catalonia and Italy” for publication. He is vice president of the Société Guilhem IX and Board Member of the Association Internationale d’Études Occitanes. He has written numerous articles and occasionally serves as guest editor for “Tenso: Journal of the Société Guilhem IX,” which publishes articles, primarily in English, but also in French, Occitan, Catalan, Spanish, Italian and German on all subjects Occitan. (Occitan is a Romance language spoken in parts of Southern France, Monaco, Italy's Occitan Valleys, and Spain's Val d'Aran.)
Before joining HWS in 2012, Wells taught at Wartburg College. He earned his Ph.D. in medieval French Literature from the Department of Romance Studies and his M.A. in French Language and Literature from Boston University. He earned his B.A. in French Language and Literature from the University of Dallas.
