Davis Baird, chair and professor in the Department of Philosophy, and Kwame Dawes, an English professor and the University’s poet in residence, will interview with President Sorensen and others on April 7-8 and April 11-12, respectively. The other two finalists are David F. Godshalk, chair of the history department at Shippensburg University Pennsylvania (April 5-6 interview), and James C. McKusick, director of the honors program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (March 30-31 interview).

Provost Mark Becker approved the list of finalists, and President Sorensen will select candidates for follow-up interviews.

Dawes earned his Ph.D. in English at the University of New Brunswick. He began his teaching career at USC in 1992, starting at USC Sumter before joining the Columbia campus English department in 1996. He is director of the S.C. Poetry Initiative and was director of the MFA/creative writing program at USC from 2001 to 2003.

An accomplished poet and fiction writer with several volumes in print, Dawes has received numerous recognitions for his work, including the 2004 Silver Musgrave Medal for Literature, Jamaica, and the 2001 Pushcart Prize for “Inheritance,” which first appeared in The Caribbean Writer.

Baird earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford University and began his teaching career at USC in 1982 as an assistant professor in the philosophy department. Now the Louise Fry Scudder Professor and chair of the department since 1992, Baird also is associate director of the USC NanoCenter where he has led the center’s National Science Foundation-sponsored focus on the ethical implications of nano technology.

Baird has served on numerous committees at USC, including the University Value Centered-Management Committee, the University Faculty Budget Committee, and the Dean Search Committee for the College of Arts and Sciences.

Godshalk earned his Ph.D. in history from Yale University and completed his bachelor’s degree from USC’s Honors College. He joined Shippensburg University in 1994 and now is professor and chair of the history department. He also was director of general education there from 2002 to 2004.

Godshalk’s publications include Veiled Visions: The 1906 Atlanta Race Riot and the Reshaping of American Race Relations (University of North Carolina Press, August 2005), and “William J. Northen’s Public and Personal Struggles Against Lynching,” in Jumpin' Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights (Princeton University Press, 2000).

James C. McKusick earned his Ph.D. in English from Yale University and has directed the honors college at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, since 2002. He also is a professor in that institution’s English department, which he chaired from 1998 to 2002.

His publications include Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology (St. Martin’s Press, 2000), Literature and Nature: Four Centuries of Nature Writing, co-edited with Bridget Keegan (Prentice-Hall, 2001), and
Coleridge’s Philosophy of Language (Yale University Press, 1986)

3/2005