Three Black Women in New Faculty Roles at Leading Colleges and Universities

Iris Mack is a new lecturer at the Freeman School of Business at Tulane University in New Orleans. A former astronaut candidate and investment banker, Dr. Mack is the author of Mama Says, ”Money Doesn’t Grow on Trees!’‘ (CreateSpace, 2011) and Energy Trading and Risk Management: A Practical Approach to Hedging, Trading and Portfolio Diversification (John Wiley & Sons, 2014).

Dr. Mack is a graduate of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. She holds a master’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley and an MBA from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Dr. Mack was the second African-American woman to earn a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from Harvard University.

Gina Athena Ulysse was promoted to full professor of anthropology at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. Dr. Ulysse is the author of Downtown Ladies: Informal Commercial Importers, a Haitian Anthropologist and Self-Making in Jamaica (University of Chicago Press, 2008) and Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-Quake Chronicle (Wesleyan University Press, 2015).

Professor Ulysse is a graduate of Upsala College in New Jersey, which has now closed. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.

Lorelle D. Semley was named an associate professor of history and granted tenure at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. She joined the Holy Cross faculty in 2011 after teaching at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and Wesleyan University in Connecticut. Dr. Semley is the author of Mother is Gold, Father is Glass: Gender and Colonialism in a Yoruba Town (Indiana University Press, 2011).

Dr. Semley is graduate of Georgetown University, where she majored in French. She holds a master’s degree in African studies from Yale University and a second master’s degree and a Ph.D. in history from Northwestern University.