On July 1, 2026, President Safa Zaki announced the appointment of eight professors to endowed chairs as a means of supporting and recognizing faculty research.

Three of the eight professors have received permanent chair positions, namely Laura Henry, who has been named the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Constitutional and International Law and Government, Micheal Kolster, now the Richard E. Steele Professor of Studio Art and Emily M. Peterman, now the Norma L. and Roland G. Ware Jr. Professor of Earth and Oceanographic Science.

The remaining five professors are term chairs, meaning their positions last five years or until they are promoted to another position.

The new term chairs include Stanley F. Druckenmiller Associate Professor of Asian Culture Peggy Wang, A. LeRoy Greason Chair in the Creative Arts Badie Khaleghian, Marvin H. Green Jr. Assistant Professor of History and Asian Studies Guo Jue and Peter M. Small Associate Professor of Economics Martin Abel.

Appointments are made by the Dean of Academic Affairs, and each chair position is delegated to a specific department for a designated period of time.

According to Henry, the availability of endowed chairs each year is “very behind the scenes.”

She expressed her gratitude for the nomination and the availability of these positions.

“I think [Bowdoin’s] hallmark is that we really value teaching inclusive excellence in the classroom, and that’s so important in what we do,” Henry said. “But it’s nice also to be recognized sometimes just as scholars, as people who are part of a discipline, writing articles, writing books, doing data analysis and making contributions in that way.”

Henry hopes to use her funds to travel to research conferences, which are often costly given the international scope of her work.

“I want to go to some conferences in the Arctic again. Those tend to be a little bit expensive, just [with] distance and things like that. And so, in the past … I could go to a conference in D.C. or Chicago. I’ve been practical, and mostly I’ve done that. But if I can get back to Helsinki, or I can get to Reykjavik, or I can go up to Tromso and go to some of those amazing conferences, it’s just such an opportunity to share your work and learn about the work of others,” Henry said. “Conferences give you work in progress, so you don’t have to wait for the journal article to come out or the book to come out. You hear what everybody in the field is doing actively at that moment.”

While Henry hopes to utilize her funding for fieldwork and conferences, Kolster hopes to devote his funds to the acquisition of art supplies.

“In my case, my supplies can be particularly expensive, so it’s very helpful for me to be able to draw from that, to be able to pay for film and paper and other kinds of art supplies,” Kolster said.

Other professors plan to use their funds to support ongoing research, such as Abel in the Department of Economics.

“Lately, I’m doing a lot of research on the implications of artificial intelligence, both to the labor market and to consumers,” Abel said.

Abel has recently been conducting experiments, with students as co-authors, on the implications of assessing workers with AI versus with humans. His work evaluates humans’ levels of effort and their likelihood to behave prosocially depending on the method of assessment.

Professors who receive endowed chair positions often deliver a lecture to the Bowdoin community. DeAlva Stanwood Alexander Professor of Government Micheal Franz, who was named an endowed chair last year, gave his talk last semester.

According to Franz, the talk can be about any aspect of a professor’s research, and he described speaking to the Bowdoin community as a meaningful experience.

“I got to invite my family and the department and others to come, and it was a fun night,” Franz said.

Ultimately, professors who were named to endowed chairs told the Orient they find tremendous value in not only the prestige of the position, but the critical funding that accompanies their endowed professorship.

“The one thing I would emphasize is just the value of having this funding available during a time where public funding for research is really scarce,” Abel said. “It gives me a lot of freedom to really pursue the research that I’m interested in, rather than having to be constrained by what kind of funding opportunities are out there.”