Faculty members retiring

The 2024–25 academic year marks the retirement of the Trinity College faculty members listed below.

CAROL ANY

Professor of Language and Culture Studies

Since 1984, Carol Any has trained generations of students in Russian, the language that is key to understanding America’s “Other.” Beyond language study, her first-year seminar on The Brothers Karamazov and her courses on War and Peace and Anna Karenina have put students in dialogue with Russian literary giants Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. “One of my favorite things is watching students get excited by these timeless novels which are commonly thought to be daunting,” she says. “That’s when I know I’m doing my job.” Professor Any, who earned her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, is the author of Boris Eikhenbaum: Voices of a Russian Formalist and The Soviet Writers’ Union and Its Leaders: Identity and Authority under Stalin, winner of the University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies).

JEAN CADOGAN

Professor of Fine Arts

Jean Cadogan, a specialist in Italian art of the 14th and 15th centuries, seeks to understand how works of art were encountered and understood by denizens of the late medieval city and how they were imagined and produced by artists and artisans. As a former museum curator, she is fascinated by the physical attributes of works of art—materials, technique, condition—as well as their social function as indicators of social behavior and cultural values. Her classes in Medieval and Renaissance art history encouraged students to see works of art from many different perspectives; she especially advocated encountering them “in the flesh,” in museums or wherever they may be. Cadogan, a faculty member since 1987, earned a B.A. from Wellesley College and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. She has published books on Florentine drawings of the early Renaissance, the Italian paintings at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Domenico Ghirlandaio, the master of Michelangelo, and mural painting in central Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries, as well as numerous articles in scholarly journals.

ALDEN GORDON ’69, P’05, ’10, ’12

Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of Fine Arts

Alden Gordon’s affiliation with Trinity goes back to 1965, when he entered as a first-year, was coxswain of the freshman and JV crew and editor-in-chief of The Trinity Tripod, and graduated with honors. He earned an M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University and was curatorial fellow at The Frick Collection in New York before joining the Trinity faculty in 1978. Gordon was tenured and promoted to full professor and eventually held two named endowed chairs: the Gwendolyn Miles Smith Professorship and the Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professorship. He served as chair of the Fine Arts Department and director of the Trinity College Art Collection. He also directed the Trinity College Campus Master Plan and was a director of development from 1995–98. Gordon curated or contributed to major museum exhibitions in Europe and the United States in his field of 18th-century French art and patronage and was recognized by France for his contribution to the knowledge of French culture in America with the title of Chevalier in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1999). He was a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art, the Centre de Recherche du Château de Versailles, the Getty Research Institute, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gordon will continue his scholarly work in retirement and has founded the website www.PublicArtCT.org, which includes a guide to the history of the campus and buildings of Trinity College.

DAVID MAURO

Professor of Mathematics

David Mauro earned a B.S. in mathematics from Bates College and then earned an M.S. and Ph.D., both in mathematics from SUNY Binghamton. Six years after joining the Trinity faculty in 1982, he earned an M.S. in computer science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Trained primarily in probability and statistics, Mauro has since turned his research attention to graph theory, in particular vertex labelings associated with frequency assignments to transmitters. His philosophy of teaching holds simply that without interpretation, proof, and economy of presentation, mathematics can easily turn from an object of immense beauty to a pit of deep despair. He thus prepared for each lecture by answering two basic questions: What do I want to say? How do I want to say it? Mauro was honored with the Thomas Church Brownell Prize for Teaching Excellence in 2024 and the Trustee Award for Faculty Excellence in 2021.

IRENE PAPOULIS

Principal Lecturer in the Allan K. Smith Center for Writing and Rhetoric

Irene Papoulis taught essay writing and served as director of academic advising and faculty development in Trinity’s Center for Academic and Experiential Advising. She is interested in how writers work in any genre, from the initial formation of ideas to the problems and delights of revision. Her academic interests include psychological approaches to the teaching of writing, creative nonfiction, writing in the public sphere, gender issues in writing, and contemplative practices in the classroom. Her textbook, The Essays Only You Can Write, was published in 2023 by Broadview Press. She appears as an occasional radio panelist on The Colin McEnroe Show, broadcast on Connecticut’s Public Radio (WNPR). Papoulis, a Trinity faculty member since 1996, earned a B.A.in English from SUNY Binghamton, an M.F.A. in fiction writing from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in English from SUNY Stony Brook. She was honored with the Trustee Award for Faculty Excellence in 2023.

DIANE ZANNONI

Fox and Company Professor of Economics

Hired in 1975, Diane Zannoni was among the first women on Trinity’s faculty and the first economist. Throughout her career, she has been a passionate and creative teacher whose contributions span programmatic innovations, original and highly rewarding student learning experiences, and a leadership role in expanding opportunities for at-risk and nontraditional students. With colleagues, she developed a Writing and Reasoning Across the Curriculum Program, a Progressive American Social Movements minor, and study-away programs combining economics and art and lectured on pedagogy across the country for the AAC&U. She developed several first-year seminars, including the first offered to study the economic, social, and political issues of women and the first designed specifically for IDP students. In economics, she introduced econometrics into the curriculum and ensured thousands of economics majors gained a critical understanding of competing views of the macroeconomy. Her published scholarship is collaborative and often interdisciplinary, involving colleagues and students in economics, philosophy, educational studies. A Hartford resident, she co-founded both the Trinity Center for Neighborhoods, supervising more than 40 research reports in the service of solving local community problems, and the Trinity College Child Care Center, for which she won many grants to support its scholarship program. Throughout her career, she devoted considerable energy defending and strengthening academic freedom at the national level and at Trinity.