HFA Faculty Rebecca Dingo and Jason Hooper Named Associate Directors for Office of Faculty Development
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The Office of Faculty Development (OFD) has announced that two HFA faculty members—Professor of English Rebecca Dingo and Senior Lecturer in Music Theory Jason Hooper—have joined the OFD as senior fellows and associate directors.
“We are thrilled to welcome Dr. Dingo and Dr. Hooper to our faculty development team,” says Leyla Keough-Hameed, director of faculty development, who chaired the search committee. “The wealth of knowledge and experience they bring will help us grow and institutionalize two of our signature programs – supporting scholarly writing and non-tenure track faculty, respectively.”
“I am excited to build on the excellent work that OFD is doing to support faculty and librarians and their writing projects,” says Dingo, professor of English, whose main portfolio area is supporting the scholarly writing of the university’s faculty and librarians. “Over the past three semesters as a CLF and Fellow with OFD, I have come to know so many faculty and librarians who have shared with me their hopes for writing support. As a senior fellow and associate director, I am looking forward to implementing new programs and bolstering existing programming to best support the writing needs of all faculty and librarians across the campus, regardless of their stage and genre of writing."
“Rebecca has quickly become an indispensable team member,” adds Angela de Oliveira, associate provost. “She creatively applies evidence-based best practices to create welcoming, holistic programming that supports not only scholarly writing but supports faculty as whole people. Sharing her professional expertise and perspective with the campus is an incredible gift to our faculty and librarians.”
The primary portfolio area supported by Hooper, lecturer in music and dance, is the unique needs of non-tenure track faculty. He states, “In this inaugural role, I am grateful for the opportunity to create professional development programming so that continuing-track faculty across all career stages feel they belong to their unit and the wider campus, value and appreciate their work, and have a sense their colleagues do the same. By building mutual support networks, we recognize both our own value and the value of others.”
“I am very impressed with Jason’s commitment to equitable institutional change,” says de Oliveira. “He is an involved and thoughtful member of our community who has worked to improve the equitable treatment of our faculty and students since joining UMass. I am confident that he will continue to grow the transformational work begun by Dr. Christiane Healey in exciting and innovative ways.”
More information about the OFD and how the office supports faculty can be found at https://www.umass.edu/faculty-development/.