The Trinity College Board of Trustees voted in April 2020 to approve the promotions to the position of associate professor with tenure of Ethan Rutherford in English and Per Sebastian Skardal in mathematics. At its February meeting, the board approved the promotion to the position of associate professor with tenure of Reo Matsuzaki in political science.
Matsuzaki, a scholar of colonialism and its legacies in East and Southeast Asia, published Statebuilding by Imposition: Resistance and Control in Colonial Taiwan and the Philippines in 2019. In his current project, he seeks to identify the causal mechanisms that explain variation in the production of colonial legacies by examining Japanese wartime occupation and postwar institutional development in Southeast Asia. Matsuzaki also is an associate in research at Harvard University’s Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies and at Yale University’s Council of East Asian Studies. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law before joining the Trinity faculty in 2013. He earned a B.S. from Georgetown University and a Ph.D. from M.I.T.
Rutherford’s fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, One Story, American Short Fiction, and The Best American Short Stories. His first book, The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories, won the Minnesota Book Award and the Friends of American Writers Award, among other honors. Rutherford earned an M.F.A. in fiction from the University of Minnesota. Before coming to Trinity in 2014, he taught at Macalester College, the University of Minnesota, and the M.F.A. program at Hamline University.
Skardal specializes in nonlinear dynamics, stochastic processes, and complex networks and teaches courses in applied mathematics, dynamical systems, differential equations, and more. He began his academic career as an undergraduate at Boston College, where he studied mathematics and computer science. Skardal, a Trinity faculty member since 2015, earned a Ph.D. at the University of Colorado at Boulder and spent two years as a postdoctoral research fellow in Barcelona.