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Northwestern University

New Faculty 2019-2020

Marquis Bey

Marquis Bey

College Fellow

  • PhD institution: Cornell University
  • Previous title and institution: PhD candidate at Cornell University
  • Home department: African American Studies 
  • Joint department: English
  • Profile  
My research concerns Blackness, Black feminism, and transgender subjectivity. That is, I work on rethinking what these terms means and, importantly, what a radical re-thinking of these terms might imply. To do this, I operate under the helm of fugitivity—the quotidian practice of refusal; a penchant for subversion and escape—as underlying Blackness, Black feminism, and transness. Additionally, I work on anarchism and what has loosely been deemed Black anarchism as a political mode of justice via the Black Radical Tradition.

Aaron Brown

Associate Professor

  • PhD institution: Tufts University
  • Previous title and institution: Assistant Professor at University of Chicago
  • Home department: Mathematics
My research focuses on smooth dynamical systems and ergodic theory. My recent work involves applying tools from smooth ergodic theory to study actions of discrete groups on manifolds.
Haile Cole

Haile Cole

College Adviser and Assistant Professor of Instruction

  • PhD institution: The University of Texas at Austin
  • Previous title and institution: Visiting Assistant Professor at Amherst College
  • Home department: African American Studies
  • Joint department: Office of Undergraduate Studies and Advising
Broadly, Dr. Cole's scholarly interests include Black feminisms, community-engaged/social justice research methodology, motherhood and reproduction, and health. Over the years, she has conducted research on women’s mass incarceration in both Texas and New York and her most recent project examines Black women’s maternal and infant health disparities in Texas. Her research on maternal and infant health builds upon applied public health experience and years of community organizing and reproductive justice work in Austin, Texas and nationally. This body of work serves as the basis for her current book project entitled Belly: Blackness and Reproduction in the Lone Star State.
Meaghan Fritz

Meaghan Fritz

Assistant Professor of Instruction

  • PhD institution: Northwestern University
  • Previous title and institution: Visiting Assistant Professor at Northwestern University
  • Home department: Cook Family Writing Program
Fritz’s current research examines the seemingly marginal figure of the widow in American literature, showing how her release from the marriage contract in fact placed her at the nexus of national debates on gender, race, and nationhood instigated by the emerging women’s rights movement. Because widowhood’s subjectivity was experienced unevenly among U.S., Native, and African American widows, each chapter explores the larger, uneasy conversation among these women cohabitating under the legal jurisdictions of the United States. Authors such as Elizabeth Keckley in her Civil War pension application, Nancy Ward in her speeches to members of the Cherokee National Council, and Sarah Orne Jewett in her literary sketches, all critiqued their particular systemic subjugations and fought to redefine their relationship to the nation through different modes of effective communication.
Alyssa Garcia

Alyssa Garcia

College Adviser and Assistant Professor of Instruction

  • PhD institution: University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
  • Home department: Gender and Sexualities Studies
  • Joint department: Office of Undergraduate Studies and Advising
Dr. Garcia received her BA in Cross-Cultural Psychology from Brown University and earned her PhD in Anthropology from University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her teaching and research interests include Latin American & Caribbean Studies, Ethnic-Latina/o Studies, Intersectionality, Critical Race Theory, Feminist Ethnography, and Applied Anthropology. Dr. Garcia’s research examines the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in Cuba through an analysis of discourses of sex-work and the body. Her manuscript, “Moral Discourses, Regulated Bodies: Sex, the State, and Subjectivity in Cuba,” is a historically grounded ethnography that traces chronologically the public supervision and state regulation of black female bodies in Cuba.
Megan Geigner

Megan Geigner

Assistant Professor of Instruction

  • PhD institution: Northwestern University
  • Previous title and institution: Assistant Professor and Director of Masqueraders, United States Naval Academy
  • Home department: Cook Family Writing Program
Geigner’s research explores the contributions Irish, Polish, African American, Italian, and Mexican immigrant and migrant communities made to Chicago’s cultural identity at and between the city’s two worlds fairs—the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 and the Century of Progress in 1933. She also researches Chicago’s theatre history and has a forthcoming edited collection titled Makeshift Chicago Stages: A Century of Performance that theorizes why so many Chicago theatres started in marginal spaces or as itinerant companies. She has also published articles about Chicago theatre, world’s fairs, civic performances, and African American theatre in several academic journals and trade publications.
Chad Horne

Chad Horne

Assistant Professor of Instruction

  • PhD institution: University of Toronto
  • Previous title and institution: Visiting Assistant Professor at Franklin & Marshall College
  • Home department: Philosophy 
My research is in applied ethics and political philosophy. I'm particularly interested in how social institutions work and how their workings map on to theories of distributive justice. I've published primarily on the political philosophy of health and health care, where I defend a "market failures" account of justice in health care based in the public choice tradition. I have also published papers on the ethics of markets in contested commodities like kidneys and blood plasma.
Lauren Michele Jackson

Lauren Michele Jackson

College Fellow

  • PhD institution: University of Chicago
  • Previous title and institution: PhD candidate at University of Chicago
  • Home department: English 
  • Joint department: African American Studies 
My work focuses on the aesthetics of racial feeling, particularly black feeling, in twentieth and twenty-first century American literature and culture. I am interested in blackness as affect(s) and how authors, artists, musicians, and filmmakers formally represent these affects across their various disciplinary commitments. My current research investigates aesthetics of disorder that emerge in writing and art following the 1960s.
Ilya Khayutin

Ilya Khayutin

Assistant Professor

  • PhD institution: Hebrew University
  • Previous title and institution: Veblen Research Instructor at Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study
  • Home department: Mathematics
  • Research website
I am interested in the interaction between arithmetic and dynamics, which often incorporates methods and ideas from homogeneous dynamics and ergodic theory, arithmetic geometry, and automorphic forms.
István Kovács

István Kovács

Assistant Professor

  • PhD institution: Eotvos Lorand University
  • Previous title and institution: Visiting Research Scientist, Northeastern University; Visiting scientist, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute; Senior Visiting Researcher, Central European University; Visiting Postdoc, The Donnelly Centre, University of Toronto
  • Home department: Physics and Astronomy
  • Research website
Professor Kovács is working on bridging the gap between structure and function in complex systems. His group is developing novel methodologies to predict the emerging structural and functional patterns in a broad spectrum of problems ranging from systems biology to quantum physics, in close collaboration with experimental groups.
Keara Lane

Keara Lane

Assistant Professor

  • PhD institution: MIT
  • Previous title and institution: Postdoctoral Researcher/Basic Life Research Scientist, Stanford University
  • Home department: Molecular Biosciences
My research focuses on understanding the connection between heterogeneity in the decisions made by single cells and the success or failure of the immune system to fight bacterial infections. The lab tackles this fundamental question in host-pathogen biology using quantitative imaging, single-cell profiling, and microfluidics. Our central goal is to use dynamic single-cell phenotyping to dissect host and pathogen communication networks during infection. The long-term vision for the lab is to develop novel therapeutic strategies based on rewiring immune or pathogen cell behavior.
Hojoon Lee

Hojoon Lee

Assistant Professor

  • PhD institution: University of California Los Angeles
  • Previous title and institution: Associate Research Scientist at Columbia University
  • Home department: Neurobiology
  • Research website 
The taste system evaluates the nutritional value (sweet, umami, salty) and safety (bitter, sour) of food. Since this assessment is critical for the survival of the animal, taste cues immediately cause stereotypical behaviors (attraction vs aversion) and evoke innate affect (pleasure vs disgust). Our research focuses on three fundamental questions:

How are new taste receptor cells made?
How is the peripheral taste system wired?
How do tastes evoke hardwired behaviors?
Justin Mann

Justin Mann

Assistant Professor

  • PhD institution: George Washington University
  • Previous title and institution: Postdoctoral Fellow, Boston University
  • Home department: English
  •  Joint department: African American Studies
My research and teaching focus on black speculative fiction, black feminist theory, and black insecurity. My current project, "Breaking the World: Blackness and Insecurity after the Reagan Administration" argues that black speculative fictions engage in the narrative practice of "world-breaking," a term I use to highlight the political and social aims of such works. Rather than cohere imaginary social and political worlds that cleave to anti-black state and para-state formations, black speculative fictions often imagine the ends of those formations, inciting the possibility that new worlds might emerge from the ashes of the fallen. My work tracks "world-breaking" through the work of authors including Octavia Butler, Colson Whitehead, N.K. Jemisin, and others, to chart its development from the 1980s through to the ongoing War on Terror.
Maria Nastasescu

Maria Nastasescu

Assistant Professor of Instruction

  • PhD institution: California Institute of Technology
  • Previous title and institution: Tamarkin Assistant Professor at Brown University
  • Home department: Mathematics
  • Research website
My research interests lie primarily in the analytic aspects of number theory. Much of my work focuses on problems concerning the size and non-vanishing of certain mathematical objects called L-functions. L-functions are generalizations of the Riemann zeta function, which encodes key information about the distribution of prime numbers. One of the guiding principles of my research centers around the Lindelof Hypothesis, an open problem concerned with finding optimal upper bounds for L-functions on a special line of the complex plane, with many important consequences.
Patricia Nguyen

Patricia Nguyen

Assistant Professor of Intsruction

  • PhD institution: Northwestern University
  • Previous title and institution: Visiting Assistant Professor, Asian American Studies, Northwestern University
  • Home department: Asian American Studies
  • Research website

Dr. Patricia Nguyen's research and performance work examines critical refugee studies, political economy, forced migration, cultural memory, oral histories, and nation building in the United States and Vietnam. Dr. Nguyen has published work in Women Studies Quarterly, Harvard Kennedy School's Asian American Policy Review, Women and Performance, The Funambulist, and The Methuen Drama Anthology of Modern Asian Plays. As a performance artist, she has performed at the Nha San Collective in Vietnam, Mission Cultural Center in San Francisco, Jane Addams Hull House, Links Hall, Prague Quadrennial, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Chile. She is also co-founder and executive director of Axis Lab, a community arts organization that focuses on inclusive and equitable development. In recent news, Dr. Nguyen is an award winning memorial designer for the Chicago Torture Justice Memorial Project, the first monument in the United States to honor survivors of police violence.

Gayle Ratliff

Gayle Ratliff

Assistant Professor of Instruction

  • PhD institution: Illinois Institute of Technology
  • Previous title and institution: Adjunct Professor of Physics, Illinois Institute of Technology
    Postdoctoral Research Associate, Adler Planetarium
  • Home department: Physics and Astronomy
My research interests include assessing the impact of a range of active learning techniques in the physics classroom and understanding ways to retain underrepresented groups in STEM fields. I also have an interest in the intersection of science and art, looking at ways to breed a culture of creativity, spur innovation, encourage interdisciplinary study and promote inclusion.
Beatriz Reyes

Beatriz Reyes

Assistant Professor of Instruction

  • PhD institution: Drexel University Dornsife School of Public Health
  • Previous title and institution: Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University
  • Home department: Global Health Studies
Dr. Reyes, who is of Tepehuán descent and a citizen of the Navajo Nation, is a public health practitioner. Her work focuses on the development, implementation, and evaluation of evidence-based programs addressing health disparities through a community-based participatory research approach. In her past research, she assessed the experiences and behaviors of lay health facilitators in a faith-placed 16-week prediabetes prevention program in two churches in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Through a qualitative analysis, she assessed adaptations (deletions, changes, and additions) to program materials by lay health facilitators, which enabled a better understanding of how these facilitators and program participants generated data throughout the program’s implementation. Dr. Reyes’s research at the Foundations of Health Research Center focused on how to best facilitate and support coping skills among first-generation college students, utilizing theories and strategies from Growth Mindset, Shift and Persist, and Skin-Deep Resilience. Through Dr. Edith Chen’s partnership with the TRiO Student Support Services at a local university, Dr. Reyes implemented a 5-session intervention to freshmen first-generation students.
Mérida M. Rúa

Mérida M. Rúa

Professor

  • PhD institution: University of Michigan
  • Previous title and institution: Professor, American Studies and Latina and Latino Studies, Williams College
  • Home program: Latina and Latino Studies
Mérida M. Rúa is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research and teaching focus on the history and politics of communities of color in U.S. urban life. Her work centers the everyday experiences of Puerto Ricans in Chicago as it also necessarily considers their structural and social relations to other racialized groups. Rúa's current book project, Shouldering Age in the Big City, chronicles the ordinary, diverse, and complex lives of older adult Latinas and Latinos to examine not only how they talk about and make meaning of their experiences and their environments as aging persons, but also the ways in which these frames of reference have and continue to guide their actions and inactions. The book aims to convey a better understanding of the diverse aging population, and how specific groups within this population navigate social and structural inequalities as they make their lives and communities. Rúa's research program bridges areas of inquiry -- Latina and Latino studies, American studies, urban studies, and aging studies -- typically segmented in the scholarly literature, social policy, and public discourse. In so doing, it disrupts dominant narratives of U.S. cities as social and political spaces polarized between black and white and offers more nuanced attention to age and aging in examinations of urban social and spatial practices.
David Schieber

David Schieber

Assistant Professor of Instruction

  • PhD institution:University of California, Los Angeles
  • Previous title and institution: Graduate Student at the University of California, Los Angeles
  • Home department:  Sociology
  • Profile
David's teaching and research interests lie at the intersection of work and organizations, health, gender, sexuality, culture, and economic sociology. His work to date pursues two broad questions 1.) How do organizations make decisions when their economic interests contradict their worker’s shared cultural values? and 2.) How do workers navigate different types of precarious employment? David's recent work uses qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate these questions in the context of sex workers working in the the California adult film industry.
Molly Schnell

Molly Schnell

Assistant Professor

  • PhD institution: Princeton University
  • Previous title and institution: Postdoctoral Fellow, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research
  • Home department: Economics
  • Research website
My research examines how incentives and constraints facing both medical providers and consumers influence health care access, health behaviors, and health outcomes. Much of my work focusses on the provision of pharmaceuticals in markets across the United States.
Nicole Spigner

Nicole Spigner

Assistant Professor

  • PhD institution: Vanderbilt University
  • Previous title and institution: Assistant Professor at Columbia College Chicago
  • Home department: African American Studies
  • Joint department: English
  • Research website
My research and teaching focus broadly upon African American literature, Gender and Women's Studies, and American Studies. More specifically, I specialize in Black Classicism and literature of the long nineteenth century. My manuscript in development, Niobe Repeating: Black New Women’s Literature and Ovidian Transformation, argues that Black New Women classicist writers rewrote Ovid’s stories of motherhood, birth, rebirth, and transformation in an effort to define and defend black female artistic identities in America. Broadly, my work interrogates issues of turn-of-the-twentieth-century, proto-black feminism and black feminine identity formation. More specifically, Niobe Repeating highlights these understudied literary histories and neoclassical fiction and poetry of early black feminist women to analyze how class, race, and gender shaped their positions as American citizens and as women artists.
Roel Tempelaar

Roel Tempelaar

Assistant Professor

  • PhD institution: University of Groningen
  • Previous title and institution: Postdoctoral Scholar at Columbia University
  • Home department:  Chemistry
  • Research website
My research is aimed at unraveling how quantum mechanics dictates the optical and dynamical properties of biologically relevant and emerging materials. In many such materials, a multitude of components such as electrons, nuclei, and optical modes interact, resulting in behavior that seems nontrivial based on known fundamental principles. Examples can be found in the light-to-energy conversion in photosynthesis, charge interactions in semiconducting atomic monolayers, and the hybridization of photons and electronic states inside optical cavities. By developing new numerical and analytical tools I seek to make such behavior comprehensible, while advancing our fundamental understanding of the chemistry and physics at the nano scale.
Tracy Vaughn-Manley

Tracy Vaughn-Manley

Assistant Professor

  • PhD institution: University of Massachusetts Amherst
  • Previous title and institution: Associate Professor of Instruction at Northwestern University
  • Home department: African American Studies
Tracy Vaughn-Manley's current research on Black women's literature and quilting engages the ways in which many Black women writers draw on what she refers to as the “Black aesthetic quilting tradition” to make quilting and its simultaneous acts of repurposing, improvising, and creating, a significant representation of catharsis in their poetry and fiction. Vaughn-Manley's work considers the connections between quilts, gender, culture and identity as well as the intersections between literature, history, and material culture to explore the interiority of Black life—specifically the lives of Black American women. By employing the quilt and the tradition of quilt-making as cathartic acts to overcome oppression, loss, misrepresentation, and invisibility, she argues that these authors situate the production and preservation of American folk culture squarely in the hands of Black women.
Jennifer Weintritt

Jennifer Weintritt

College Fellow

  • PhD institution: Yale University
  • Previous title and institution: PhD candidate at Yale University
  • Home department: Classics 
I specialize in the formation and reception of the classical tradition from antiquity to the present day. My current book project, The Greek Epic Cycle in Latin Epic, investigates the role of narrative continuation in shaping literary canons and notions of cultural inheritance. With an approach informed by Adaptation and Fan Studies, I trace how Roman poets frame their poems as continuations of Homer’s story of the Trojan War in order to secure a place in the epic tradition. Overall, my scholarship seeks to bring into focus the fundamentally intercultural nature of Classics. Right now, I’m working on an article that shows how modern ideas about gender have impacted the very text we print in the case of one poem by the Latin poet Catullus.
Michele Zugnoni

Michele Zugnoni

Assistant Professor of Instruction

  • PhD institution: University of California, Davis
  • Previous title and institution: Teaching Associate, University of California, Davis
  • Home department:  Cook Family Writing Program
Zugnoni’s work is focused on the narrative experiences of first-generation college students, and in particular, how writing teachers can help first-generation students cultivate a sense of community and professional identity in the writing classroom. Zugnoni is also updating the International WAC/WID Mapping Project with data from universities across the U.S. This project is focused on how U.S.-based universities utilize WAC/WID within their writing classrooms and programs.
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