Provost Sammye C. Greer has announced the appointments of Josephine F. Wilson, professor of psychology, to the Paul Luther Keil Chair in Psychology and Terry Otten, professor of English, to the Kenneth E. Wray Chair in the Humanities.

Both are newly endowed chair positions, created by gifts to the university designated for support of faculty activities. In addition to providing a stipend and program/research support, an endowed chair represents one of the most prestigious achievements for college faculty members at American universities.

Wittenberg now has four endowed chair positions.
The Paul Luther Keil Chair in Psychology is funded through a gift to Wittenberg’s $70 million Defining Moments Campaign. The Rev. Paul L. Keil ’47, who served the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America as a pastor for more than 50 years, endowed the chair in honor of his parents, Luther F. and Mary Ruth Slater Keil. Keil passed away Sept. 21, 2000.
Wilson, who joined the faculty in 1982, was nominated for the position by the psychology faculty. She has authored more than 20 peer-reviewed articles, most with Wittenberg student co-authors, on subjects ranging from schedule-induced behaviors in humans and other animals to eating disorders. The recipient of the 1988 Omicron Delta Kappa Award for Excellence in Teaching and the 1993 Alumni Association Award for Distinguished Teaching, Wilson teaches courses in behavioral neuroscience, health psychology, psychology of women, and sensation and perception.
Former Wittenberg board member Ruth Wray endowed the Kenneth E. Wray Chair in the Humanities not only to honor her late husband, but also to recognize the university’s humanities faculty whose work she admired. Both Ruth and Kenneth Wray were members of the Class of 1937. The family made its financial commitment to the chair during The Campaign for Wittenberg in 1977-82, and it was funded following Ruth’s death on Dec. 27, 1998.
A faculty committee representing six humanities departments nominated Otten, who came to Wittenberg in 1966 and has compiled an impressive record as a teacher and a scholar. Otten received the Alumni Association Award for Distinguished Teaching in 1975. Thirteen years later he was named Ohio Professor of the Year by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education.
Chair of the English department from 1981 to 1986, Otten teaches mostly Romantic and modern literature and drama. He has authored more than 50 articles, three books — The Deserted Stage, After Innocence and The Crime of Innocence in the Fiction of Toni Morrison — and essays in six anthologies. In 1998, he was honored by the Toni Morrison Society as a “trailblazer in Morrison scholarship.”