LEWISTON — At its May 14 meeting, the Bates College Board of Trustees voted to promote three faculty members from associate professor to full professor, and one lecturer to senior lecturer. The promotions take effect in August, at the start of the college’s academic year.

The faculty members are: Francesco Duina, Department of Sociology, promoted to professor; Baltasar Fra-Molinero, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, to professor; Kirk Read, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, to professor; and Katalin Vecsey, Department of Theater and Rhetoric, to senior lecturer.

The designation of full professor is the highest faculty rank the college confers, other than named professorships. It rests upon demonstrated excellence in teaching, scholarly or artistic engagement, and academic service sustained during a substantial period of time resulting in the achievement of recognition both within the college and within the faculty member’s field.

Lecturers promoted to senior lecturer have demonstrated excellence in teaching and significant professional, scholarly or artistic achievement during many years at the college.

Duina serves as chair of the sociology department at Bates and has been a visiting professor at Copenhagen Business School in Denmark. At Bates he has taught economic sociology, comparative sociology, sociological theory, globalization, European integration and the sociology of competition.

Now in his 11th year at Bates, Duina received his master’s degree and doctorate in sociology from Harvard University, and a master’s in social sciences and bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Chicago.

Fra-Molinero chairs the Spanish program at Bates. In addition to all levels of Spanish language, he has taught Spanish theater, Cervantes’ “Don Quixote,” medieval Spain, Latin American and Spanish cinema, and the Afro-Hispanic diaspora.

Now in his 17th year at Bates, Fra-Molinero received his doctorate in Spanish and a master’s in linguistics from Indiana University. He holds a doctorate and bachelor’s degree in English philology from the University of Seville in Spain.

Read is chair of the Division of Humanities. A specialist in early modern French literature, he concentrates on pre-Revolutionary France and Francophone North Africa. He has served as chair of French in 2011 and also chairs the Bates Arts Collaborative, a campuswide initiative promoting and advancing the arts at the college.

Read received his doctorate and master’s in French literature at Princeton, and a bachelor’s degree in French at Dartmouth. Prior to arriving at Bates in 1990, he taught at Princeton and Dartmouth. He is also an exhibiting photographer, and has written and recorded nearly 20 audio commentaries for Maine Public Radio.

Vecsey is senior lecturer in theater. Now in her 16th year at Bates, she teaches courses in voice and speech and voice and gender. She serves as vocal director for mainstage and student-directed theater productions, has directed 10 other productions, and advises student performance groups.

Vecsey is a native of Hungary. She received her doctorate in developmental and educational psychology at Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, and the equivalent of master’s and bachelor’s degrees in speech and language pathology and special education at Barczi Gusztav College, also in Budapest.