Two faculty members were appointed to endowed professorships.
Fred Hobson was named the Lineberger professor in the humanities; and Tom Linden, physician, author and print and broadcast journalist, has been named Glaxo Wellcome Distinguished Professor in Medical Journalism. Both appointments were effective July 1.
Hobson
A member of the Department of English since 1989, Hobson specializes in American biography and autobiography and Southern fiction and intellectual history. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in 19th- and 20th-century American literature, particularly that of the American South.
His extensive publications include the books Mencken: A Life--nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography three years ago--and Tell About the South: The Southern Rage to Explain--which won the Jules F. Landry Award in 1983. Another study, The Savage South: History of an Image, is under contract with the Oxford University Press.
Besides writing numerous articles, Hobson has contributed to the New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, the Times Literary Supplement and others.
He is co-editor of the Southern Literary Journal and editor of the Southern Literary Studies series of the Louisiana State University Press, and he serves on the editorial boards of South Atlantic Review, Southern Cultures and Series in Contemporary American Literature.
Hobson has received several awards for his work as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Humanities Center. This fall he will be on a Kenan research leave to complete a book tentatively titled The White Southern (Racial) Conversion Narrative.
The Lineberger professorships were created in 1984 by the Lineberger Foundation, a philanthropic organization established from 1944 to 1990 by four Lineberger brothers, all of whom were Carolina alumni. The foundation has contributed to numerous University endeavors, including the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, School of Medicine, Medical Foundation and libraries.
Linden
Linden, who has anchored medical programs for Lifetime Medical Television and was health and science correspondent for CNBC, will create a new medical journalism program for the School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
He will teach a medical journalism course, begun with Glaxo support in 1991, geared toward showing students how to report health and medical issues fully, fairly and accurately. The course addresses medical research, drug development, epidemiology, federal and state health programs, ethics, law, malpractice and other facets of medicine.
Linden, a licensed physician and psychiatrist, has been a contributing medical cyberspace writer for The Los Angeles Times. He is co-author of the 1995 book Dr. Tom Linden's Guide to Online Medicine, and currently he anchors Journal Watch Audio, a bimonthly medical continuing education program sponsored by the Audio Digest Foundation and the Massachusetts Medical Society.
Linden also has worked in private practice in adult and child psychiatry, co-hosted Physicians' Journal Update for Lifetime Television and been a medical editor for a Los Angeles television station.
He is a president of the National Association of Physician Broadcasters and in 1993 won the association's Jules Bergman Award for Excellence in Medical Reporting for The Insanity Defense, which he hosted and co-wrote for Lifetime Medical Television.
An endowment for the professorship was created with $333,000 contributed over three years by Glaxo Wellcome Inc. The gift will be matched by a grant of $167,000 from the state's Distinguished Professors Endowment Trust Fund to create a $500,000 endowed professorship.
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