Presidential Professors
Presidential Professorships are honorary positions that recognize members of the Bucknell faculty for outstanding achievement in all three areas of University life: teaching, scholarship and service. Professorships are awarded annually to two faculty members for a three-year term, so that six faculty members hold the title of Presidential Professor in any given year. Recipients receive additional funding to support teaching, research and scholarship as well as a paid one-semester leave.
Selection of Presidential Professors is based on a sustained record of distinguished teaching and scholarship as well as significant service to the University and the profession. To qualify for selection, eligible faculty must have served at least four years at the rank of full professor and demonstrate outstanding teaching and scholarship via a nomination letter from a senior faculty member familiar with their work and a summary of their retention, promotion or post-tenure review processes provided by their college’s dean.
Eligible faculty members are invited to apply annually in the fall semester.
2024-27 Presidential Professors
Peter Brooksbank joined the Department of Mathematics in 2004 and was instrumental in the founding of the interdisciplinary Dominguez Center for Data Science, where he serves as a co-director. He also helped to create the Discovery Residential College and serves as a co-director of the Residential Colleges. Brooksbank engages his students in undergraduate research in mathematics and collaborates with colleagues to team-teach Integrated Perspectives courses. He mentors junior colleagues through the Bucknell Faculty Mentoring Program, is a member of the Faculty Colloquium Committee and a former member of the Faculty Council, and served on the Provost Search Committee. His current scholarship focuses on the recovery of information from grids of data known as tensors. With his Presidential Professorship funding, he will continue his research of tensor analysis and group isomorphism, collaborating with mathematicians from the United States, Europe, Australia and New Zealand.
Coralynn Davis is chair of the Department of Women's & Gender Studies, which she joined in 2000. She has served as chair of the faculty (2020-24), faculty director for Academic Civic Engagement (2016-20), and interim director of the Center for the Study of Race, Gender & Ethnicity (fall 2023). The recipient of the 2011 Christian R. & Mary F. Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching, Davis produced Sama in the Forest, an ethnographic film based on her decades of research on the lives and stories of Maithil women. Sama won "Best Feature" from the Society for Visual Anthropology in 2023. She plans to use her award funding to arrange a 10-day international writers' retreat for critical Mithila studies in India or Australia, and to undertake pedagogical training in critical reading, classroom mindfulness practices and AI. She plans to use her leave period to collaborate on workshops with community-based NGOs in India and Nepal.