Professors Ganeshananthan and Todd Promoted
Congratulations to V. V. Ganeshananthan and Kim Todd! Novelist and journalist Ganeshananthan this year was granted tenure and promoted to associate professor; in addition, she was awarded a McKnight Presidential Fellowship (2022-2023 to 2024-2025), an honor recognizing the most promising University of Minnesota faculty members promoted to associate professor in an academic year. Creative nonfiction writer and journalist Todd was promoted to full professor.
Ganeshananthan will publish her second novel, Brotherless Night (Random House), in January 2023. Her novel Love Marriage (Random House, 2008) was long-listed for the Orange Prize and named one of Washington Post Book World’s Best of 2008, as well as a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Pick. Ganeshananthan was a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow in Fiction (2014-2016) and was granted a American Academy Berlin Prize Residency (2017). Ganeshananthan has published work in The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Post, Granta, Best American Nonrequired Reading, Columbia Journalism Review, and Ploughshares, among others. Ganeshananthan co-hosts the podcast Fiction/Non/Fiction with Whitney Terrell.
Todd is the author of five books, including Chrysalis, Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis (Harcourt, 2007) and Tinkering with Eden, A Natural History of Exotic Species in America (W.W. Norton, 2001). Her most recent book, Sensational: The Hidden History of America’s “Girl Stunt Reporters" (Harper, 2021), was runner-up for the Book of the Year Award from the American Journalism Historians Association (AJHA) and a finalist for a Minnesota Book Award. Todd was granted Hedgebrook Colony and MacDowell Colony Residencies and the Sigurd Olsen Nature Writing Award, as well as the Donald V. Hawkins Professorship and Talle Faculty Research Award at the University. She has published work with Smithsonian, Orion, Paris Review Daily, and High Country News, among others. Todd has also served as the Director of the Creative Writing Program.
