The Wellesley College Board of Trustees has voted to grant tenure to five outstanding faculty members in the diverse disciplines of Africana studies, art, biological sciences, linguistics, and mathematics.
“The awarding of tenure is perhaps the greatest milestone in a professor’s career—recognition that their teaching and their research, scholarship, and creative work have placed them among the best in their field,” said Courtney Coile, the College’s provost and the Lia Gelin Poorvu ’56 Dean of the College. “The five remarkable professors who earned tenure this year are contributing powerfully to the academic enterprise at Wellesley. They are mentoring the next generation of women who will make a difference in the world, while simultaneously advancing the frontiers of knowledge and discovery more broadly.”
The faculty awarded tenure, effective September 1, 2026, are:
Chipo Dendere, to be tenured as associate professor of Africana studies, is a comparative political scientist with a focus on African politics. Her work has been published in a number of respected journals. Her book, Death, Diversion, and Departure: Voter Exit and the Persistence of Autocracy in Zimbabwe, published by Cambridge University Press, combines quantitative and qualitative analysis to explore how changes in the voter population due to migration and HIV/AIDS contribute to the survival of authoritarian regimes. Professor Dendere brings her expertise into the classroom in courses on African politics, the Black diaspora, and the politics of chocolate, many of which are cross-listed with political science. She has also taught in the Calderwood Seminars in Public Writing and Maurer Public Speaking Initiative.
Kara Yacoubou Djima, to be tenured as associate professor of mathematics, is an applied mathematician who studies problems at the intersection of harmonic analysis and machine learning, including analysis on graphs, diffusion geometry, and image processing. Her research, published in prestigious venues, develops and applies theoretical and computational techniques from these two broad fields to process, analyze, and interpret “big data.” Her work uses the representation of data (for example, human voice or social media trends) to create relatively simple building blocks that harness hidden structures in the data to extract relevant information and often reduce the computational cost of algorithms. She has taught here at all levels of the mathematics and statistics curriculum, including calculus I and II, linear algebra, and advanced topics courses.
Sabriya Fisher, to be tenured as associate professor of cognitive and linguistic sciences, researches sociolinguistics, language variation, and change, varieties of English, and the language varieties of the African diaspora. She has published on these topics in important journals. Her current work looks at morphosyntactic variation in the speech of high school students in the Boston and Philadelphia areas, and how their use of language interacts with their experiences in school. Professor Fisher teaches a number of linguistics courses, including Introduction to Linguistics, Sociolinguistics, Form and Meaning, When Languages Collide, and African American English, which is cross-listed with our Department of Africana Studies.
Kathya Landeros, to be tenured as associate professor of art, is a visual artist whose work over the past decade focuses on Latinx communities and the exploration of history, migration, representation, and belonging. Her research has been supported by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and a Fulbright fellowship. In addition, Professor Landeros has recently held the prestigious Anderson Ranch Latinx Artist Residency. Her work has been featured in 15 exhibitions and added to the permanent collections at the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa, and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum at the University of Oregon-Eugene. In 2025, Professor Landeros published a monograph titled Verdant Land. Professor Landeros teaches courses in photography at all levels of the curriculum.
Becca Selden, to be tenured as associate professor of biological sciences, focuses on the effect of a warming climate on ocean ecosystems, with a specific focus on fisheries and aquatic farming. She has published widely and in distinguished venues. In addition, her work has contributed to the development of predictive online tools for use by the public, such as the Nature Conservancy’s Marine Mapping Tool. Professor Selden has shared her expertise with the public through testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources; participation in workshops organized by the Environmental Defense Fund and Nature Conservancy; and interviews for the BBC and Science News. Professor Selden teaches Introduction to Organismal Biology, Applied Statistics and Data Science in Biology, as well as courses on marine biology and ecosystems. She helped to design the initial offering of the College’s team-taught course on the climate crisis.