New Faculty 2023-2024: Weinberg College

New Faculty 2023-2024

New Faculty 2023-24

Diego Arispe-Bazán

Assistant Professor

PhD institution: University of Pennsylvania
Home department: Anthropology
Profile

Diego Arispe-Bazán is a linguistic anthropologist. His book manuscript (in progress) investigates the reproduction of colonial ideology and practice in the postcolonial world via linguistic and discursive strategies within a changing global labor market. His ethnographic research moved between Lima, Peru and Madrid, Spain, and investigates the global effects of economic crisis in the “developed” world. More specifically, he focuses on how local and international differences in Spanish dialectal forms reaffirm ideas about national belonging that expose nationalist identities as extensions of colonial ones. Arispe-Bazán's semiotic approach seek to develop a fine-grained approach to understanding the composition of categories of race and class in Latin America as intertwined colonial processes. His current research focuses on urban Andean Indigenous groups and the way they organize infrastructure/development projects that bring together Indigenous labor, farming, and construction practices with contemporary sustainable technology.

Megan Baker

College Fellow

PhD institution: University of California, Los Angeles
Previous title and institution: Cultural Research Associate at the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma
Home department: Anthropology

Megan Baker is a tribal historian and political anthropologist working in Native North America. Her ethnographic research examines how American Indian communities navigate land dispossession in today's era of political and economic resurgence due to American Indian economic development. As a historian, she specializes in 19th and 20th-century Oklahoma Choctaw legal-economic history and the influence of the Five Tribes’ treaties and laws on historic and contemporary Oklahoma politics. While completing her PhD, Megan worked as a Cultural Research Associate for the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma’s Historic Preservation department. As part of the Community Outreach and Research program, her work involved community-engaged research, exhibit curation, collections research, archival research, public history, NAGPRA, and revitalizing traditional arts like textiles and rivercane basketry. She is an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.

Angela M. Barragán

Assistant Professor of Instruction

PhD institution: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Previous title and institution: Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Chicago
Home department: Physics and Astronomy
Profile

Angela M. Barragán obtained her Master's in Physics from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and completed her Ph.D. in Physics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research in computational biophysics lies at the interface between physics, biology, and chemistry. She uses computational tools such as molecular dynamics simulations, quantum chemistry calculations, and statistical physics methods, aiming to unveil complex details of enzyme reaction mechanisms. Her research has led to elucidating atomistic features of the function of a relevant enzyme for photosynthesis and the inhibition mechanism of an anti-cancer drug that targets a therapeutic kinase known as BTK. Her forthcoming work will explore atomistic details of protein inhibition by antimalarial drugs.

James Bielo

Associate Professor

PhD institution: Michigan State University
Previous title and institution: Associate Professor at Miami University
Home department: Religious Studies
Profile

James Bielo's current ethnographic work focuses on the secondhand circulation of Christian material culture. Churches close. Producers stop producing. People die. Things survive. Every day, scores of items are exchanged through the networked assemblage of estate sales, thrift stores, flea markets, antique malls, auction houses, eBay, Instagram, and more. At the project's core are part-time and full-time resellers: folks who scavenge secondhand venues in search of donated, discarded, and passed over items. The range of material culture is immense, from Bibles and books to prayer guides, rosaries, holy cards, figurines, clothing, art, icons, and other decor. Two early research questions focus on value and ethics in the social life of Christian material culture: How are objects attributed value, from affective attachments to financial profit, devotional use, and aesthetic display? And, how is circulation informed by ethical commitments, ambivalences, and negotiations regarding what is appropriate to source, sell, and buy?

Ty Blakeney

College Fellow

PhD institution: University of California, Berkeley
Home department: French and Italian

Ty Blakeney is a specialist of French literature, culture, and film across the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. His research centers on questions of the history of sexuality and the relationship between sexuality and the state. His first book project focuses on same-sex sex in prisons in the 19th century, and the representation of that sexuality into the present. He has also published articles on sexuality and politics in the work and reception of Marcel Proust, and on right-wing ideologue and avant garde gay author Renaud Camus.

Haley Bowen

College Fellow

PhD institution: University of Michigan Ann Arbor
Home department: History

Haley Bowen (Ph.D., University of Michigan, 2022) is a historian of the early modern French empire, with particular research interests in state-building, gender, and religious culture. Her current book project, provisionally entitled Breaching the Cloister: Laywomen, Convents, and the State in the Early Modern French Empire, explores how laywomen in Paris, New France, and Martinique engaged with monastic institutions as ambiguous spaces of both incarceration and retreat.

Bowen’s work has been supported by grants from the Doris G. Quinn Foundation, the George Lurcy Charitable and Educational Trust, the Rackham Graduate School and the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan, the Society for French Historical Studies, the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame, the Meeter Center at Calvin College, and the Newberry Library in Chicago. She graduated from Harvard College in 2014 with an A.B. degree in History and Literature, and from 2019-2021 was affiliated as a visiting researcher at the Centre des recherches historiques (CRH) at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.

Jonathan Brack

Assistant Professor

PhD institution: University of Michigan
Previous title and institution: Assistant Professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Home department: History
Profile

Jonathan Brack is a cultural and intellectual historian of the medieval and early modern Islamic world, focusing on the Persianate world. His research interests lie in the intersection of sacred kingship, religious exchanges, and conversion. His first book, An Afterlife for the Khan: Muslims, Buddhists, and Sacred Kingship in Mongol Iran and Eurasia, has been recently published by the University of California Press. His current projects include a study of the place of Judaism and Jews in premodern Persianate Islamic courts, and another explores the relationship between religion and science in Mongol Eurasia.

Pascal Brixel

Assistant Professor

PhD institution: University of Chicago
Previous title and institution: Assistant Professor at Clemson University
Home department: Philosophy
Profile

Pascal Brixel is a moral and political philosopher. His work is primarily about freedom, work, and capitalism. Currently, he is developing a theory of freedom based on the idea that free activity must be intrinsically rather than extrinsically motivated. He approaches these topics in part through an engagement with various historical figures, including Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, and especially Marx.

Germán Campos-Muñoz

Associate Professor of Instruction

PhD institution: The Pennsylvania State University
Previous title and institution: Associate Professor at Appalachian State University
Home department: Classics

Germán Campos Muñoz's research interrogates the reception and transformation of the Greco-Roman classics in Latin American literature and culture. His book, The Classics in South America: Five Case Studies (Bloomsbury, 2021), proposes a transhistorical study of these receptions by examining five case studies selected from key cultural and political moments of the early and late colonial period, the emancipatory era, and the 20th and 21st centuries. He has also published articles on this topic in venues including Dieciocho, Hispanic Review, and Latin American Research Review. Additional research and teaching interests include the disciplinary histories of the world and comparative literature, and literary theory and criticism.

Jenna Christensen

Assistant Professor

PhD institution: University of Chicago
Previous title and institution: Postdoctoral Fellow at University of California, San Diego
Home department: Molecular Biosciences
Profile

Jenna Christensen’s research spans cell biology, evolutionary biology, and biochemistry to understand how cargos such as organelles, vesicles, mRNAs, and protein complexes are transported in cells. She uses comparative genomics across the fungal kingdom to make predictions about which cellular or organismal characteristics correlate with certain transport mechanisms. Those hypotheses are tested using cell biology in different fungal species and biochemical reconstitution of transport complexes. Finally, fundamental transport mechanisms observed across fungi are examined in human cells to understand how transport processes are conserved or have diverged in humans. Together, the goal is to both understand fundamental principles behind intracellular transport and discover exceptions to these ‘rules’.

Iza Ding

Associate Professor

PhD institution: Harvard University
Previous title and institution: Assistant Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of Pittsburgh
Home department: Political Science
Profile

Iza Ding is a social scientist exploring modernity and its discontents, especially in areas related to the environment, climate change, bureaucracy, morality, political memory, ideology, and political regimes. She is the author of The Performative State: Public Scrutiny and Environmental Governance in China (Cornell University Press 2022). She is currently working on a book-length monograph on the global historical waves of environmentalism.

Kaize Ding

Assistant Professor

PhD institution: Arizona State University
Home department: Statisitics and Data Science
Profile

Kaize's research interests generally lie in data mining, machine learning, and natural language processing, with a particular focus on graph mining/graph machine learning, data-efficient learning, and reliable AI.

His dedication and expertise have led to the publication of numerous high-impact works in top-tier conferences such as AAAI, EMNLP, IJCAI, KDD, NeurIPS, and TheWebConf, as well as prestigious journals like TNNLS and TKDD. As a recognition to his contributions, Kaize has been selected as the recipient of several prestigious awards and honors at ASU, including the Graduate Outstanding Research Award, CS PhD Outstanding Student Award, and Graduate College Completion Fellowship, etc.

Kaize’s research goal is to develop effective and reliable knowledge-guided AI algorithms to tackle real-world challenges across various domains, such as cybersecurity, social good, and healthcare. Notably, Kaize has also established strong collaborations with industrial leaders, including Google Brain, Microsoft Research, and Amazon Alexa AI. Beyond his academic pursuits, Kaize finds joy in sports and outdoor activities, particularly basketball, hiking, and traveling.

Tara Fickle

Associate Professor

PhD institution: UCLA
Previous title and institution: Associate Professor of English at University of Oregon
Home program: Asian American Studies
Profile

Tara Fickle is Associate Professor of Asian American Studies at Northwestern University. Her first book, The Race Card: From Gaming Technologies to Model Minorities, (NYU Press, 2019, winner of Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award), explores how games have been used to establish and combat Asian and Asian American racial stereotypes. Her book with co-editor Chris Patterson, Made in Asia/America: Why video games were never (really) about Us (Duke University Press, 2024), explores the key role video games play within the race-makings of Asia/America. Fickle’s current research projects include the racialized and gendered dimensions of global esports (competitive gaming), virtual currency harvesting in video games, and a digital archive of the canonical Asian American anthology, Aiiieeeee! She teaches courses on Asian American literature and culture, gaming, comics, and the digital humanities.

Alfonso Fierro

Assistant Professor

PhD institution: University of California Berkeley
Previous title and institution: Assistant Professor, Modern Languages and Literatures Department, Kenyon College
Home department: Spanish and Portuguese
Profile

Alfonso Fierro obtained his Ph.D. in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from UC Berkeley in 2022. His research attempts to understand how futurist, utopian, and speculative forms of literature and architecture in Latin America relate to urban struggles and social movements in the region. His current book project, tentatively titled Utopian Habitations reconstructs post-revolutionary Mexico’s literary and architectural urban utopianism (1920-1968) by analyzing socialist realism novels, experimental architecture projects, futurist magazines, and other material. Alfonso writes regularly in the magazine Arquine, and occasionally in other media such as Public Books and Jardín Lac. He is co-curator of the art exhibit Cartografías Ocultas: Circuitos del Arte Correo en México (2021-2022).

James Fitzgerald

Associate Professor

PhD institution: Stanford University
Previous title and institution: Group Leader at the Janelia Research Campus (HHMI)
Home department: Neurobiology
Profile

James Fitzgerald is a broad theoretical neuroscientist who wants to understand the brain as a coherent whole. His active research interests include sensory processing, learning and memory, whole-brain dynamics, and neural network theory. Fitzgerald seeks a multiscale understanding of the brain, and he asks questions that link cognition and behavior to biological mechanisms. He also seeks general principles, which should illuminate the details of specific systems and direct broad thinking. These integrative goals lead him to collaborate with many experimental laboratories specializing in different neuroscience problems, brain systems, and animal models.

Danielle Gilbert

Assistant Professor

PhD institution: George Washington University
Previous title and institution: Postdoctoral Fellow at Dartmouth College; Assistant Professor at the U.S. Air Force Academy
Home department: Political Science
Profile

Danielle Gilbert is a political scientist specializing in political violence, international security, and negotiations. Her research explores the causes and consequences of hostage taking, including projects on rebel kidnapping, hostage recovery policy, and hostage diplomacy. Her current book project examines why and how armed groups kidnap during civil war. It is based on her PhD dissertation, which received the American Political Science Association’s 2021 Merze Tate Award for the best dissertation in international relations, law, and politics. She is a member of the Bipartisan Commission on Hostage Taking and Wrongful Detention at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, DC and has advised the British, Canadian, and U.S. governments on hostage recovery policy.

Hasheem Hakeem

Assistant Professor of Instruction

PhD institution: Simon Fraser University
Previous title and institution: Assistant Professor (Teaching) at University of Calgary
Home department: French and Italian

Hasheem Hakeem's research focuses on queer pedagogical approaches to French language teaching, queer and cultural studies, critical discourse analysis, and more recently queer ethics. He is currently co-editing a journal issue for Arborescences entitled “Au-delà de l’inclusion : pour une pédagogie critique, intersectionnelle et décolonisante”. Teaching French through contemporary social issues is part of Hakeem's pedagogical commitment to developing students’ critical literacy skills in both lower and upper-level language courses. He is also a member of the Diversity, Decolonization, and the French Curriculum (DDFC) steering committee.

Maayan Hilel

Assistant Professor of Instruction

PhD institution: Tel Aviv University
Previous title and institution: Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University
Home program: Jewish and Israel Studies
Profile

Maayan Hilel is a historian of the modern Middle East specializing in the cultural and social history of Palestine / the Land of Israel. Her book manuscript explores the emergence of modern leisure culture in Palestine's urban centers during the formative years of British rule (1918-1948). Relying on relational history, it examines intercommunal relations and cultural transformations within Jewish-Zionist and Palestinian-Arab societies. Through archival research in Hebrew, Arabic, and English her research focuses on the ways in which members of marginalized social groups such as women, children, workers, and villagers participated, experienced, and interpreted major historical changes unfolded at that time. In her current research project, she focuses on the history of children and childhood in late Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine.

César Hoyos Álvarez

Assistant Professor of Instruction

PhD institution: University of California, Davis
Previous title and institution: Associate Instructor at University of California, Davis
Home department: Spanish and Portuguese

César Enrique Hoyos Álvarez’s research delves into the implementation of critical pedagogies, specifically translanguaging and Critical Language Awareness, in university-level Spanish courses. His research provides valuable insights for language educators on how to apply critical pedagogies and addresses the need for more inclusive learning environments that cater to the linguistic and socio-affective needs of emergent bilinguals. In addition, Hoyos Álvarez has conducted extensive research in applied linguistics, language and emotion, language ideologies, psycholinguistics, lexical development, and language development in neurodivergent populations.

Kevin Hunter

Assistant Professor of Instruction

PhD institution: The University of Iowa
Previous title and institution: PhD Candidate at the University of Iowa
Home department: Chemistry

Kevin Hunter's research is in the field of Chemistry Education, which utilizes chemistry content expertise to improve the teaching and learning of chemistry. Using qualitative research methods and guiding theoretical lenses, Hunter's work investigates the ways students reason about chemical concepts in general and organic chemistry. From these data, he works on the development of a range instructional materials that help support student learning. Through this work, he hopes to make chemistry a more approachable subject for a wider range of learners at the college level.

Jonas Jin

Assistant Professor of Instruction

PhD institution: Princeton University
Previous title and institution: Graduate Student at Princeton University
Home department: Economics
Profile

Jonas Jin's research lies at the intersection of development and labor economics. He is particularly interested in the causes and consequences of inequality in developing countries. He primarily studies intergenerational mobility and the factors affecting childhood opportunities, such as education, parental migration, and political institutions.

Hollyamber Kennedy

Assistant Professor

PhD institution: Columbia University
Previous title and institution: Postdoctoral Fellow and Guest Lecturer and at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta) at the ETH in Zurich, Switzerland
Home department: Art History

Hollyamber Kennedy (she/her) researches and teaches modern architectural and landscape history, with an emphasis on heritage politics and the material and environmental legacies of colonial building cultures and land practices. Focusing on transregional links between sub-Saharan Africa and Central and Eastern Europe, her work investigates the ways in which architecture and infrastructure facilitated imperial governance and reshaped agrarian modernities through rural modernization projects across the 19th and 20th centuries. Her current book project, (Un)settling Territory, which emerges out of her doctoral research, examines the visual and technical building cultures of two ministry-supported ‘settler-state’ projects in the non-aligned jurisdictions of German South-West Africa, present-day Namibia, and the German states of Posen and West Prussia, in present-day Poland.

Claire Kirwin

Assistant Professor

PhD institution: The University of Chicago
Previous title and institution: Assistant Professor at Clemson University
Home department: Philosophy
Profile

Claire Kirwin works on the nature of value—ethical, aesthetic, and beyond—and the nature of our relationship to it as minded creatures. Currently, she is writing about moral knowledge, love, alienation, the first-person perspective, and whether value is real (it is). Her work in these contemporary areas wears its historical heart on its sleeve, with her research informed and inspired by several figures from the history of philosophy, most centrally Plato and Nietzsche. She maintains a secondary research program on Nietzsche; she is especially interested in him as a critic of morality, in which role he stands as a powerful antagonist but also a source of inspiration for her own work.

Silyane Larcher

Associate Professor

PhD institution: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) - Paris
Previous title and institution: Research Scholar in Political Science at CNRS (French National Center for Scientific Research)
Home department: Black Studies
Joint program: Gender and Sexuality Studies

Silyane Larcher is a political theorist and a social scientist. Combining the tools of political theory, ethnography, historical sociology and feminist and gender studies, her scholarship examines how colonialism, liberalism and race inform social and political hierarchies in the French Atlantic context, with a main focus on the French Caribbean and Black women’s experience in postcolonial France. She studies more specifically how tensions between inclusion and exclusion reveal racialized and gendered norms of citizenship and social bonding in an officially colour-blind Republic, from the legal status of the ex-enslaved in the post-emancipation context to Black French women's struggles against inequality, patriarchy and racism in contemporary France. She is completing a book exploring the social and historical conditions of Afrofeminist activism, a European Black and diasporic feminism, in Paris suburbs. Her next research project is an intellectual history from below of anti-racism, through the prism of gender, in postcolonial France. Silyane Larcher was selected as a 2021-2022 fellow at Harvard University's Hutchins Center for African and African American Research.

Yangtian Luo

Assistant Professor of Instruction

PhD institution: University of Wisconsin-Madison
Previous title and institution: Lecturer at Lawrence University
Home department: Asian Languages and Cultures

Yangtian specializes in Chinese Linguistics, Second Language Acquisition, and Teaching Chinese as a Second Language. Her publications include works in the International Journal of Chinese Linguistics and a study examining the impact of COVID-19 on Chinese L2 learners' motivation. Her ongoing research revolves around a multi-modal Chinese text corpus focusing on Speech Respiration, an exploration aimed at understanding the complexities of learning Mandarin.

Almaz Mesghina

Assistant Professor of Instruction

PhD institution: University of Chicago
Home department: Psychology
Joint program: Cognitive Science

Broadly, Almaz Mesghina researches how insights from cognitive psychology can inform education practices. Mesghina is particularly interested in understanding the cognitive mechanisms underlying when stress and anxiety facilitates vs. threatens our capacity to engage in higher-order reasoning and learning in STEM. With these in mind, she explores whether student-centered (emotion regulation strategies) and teacher-centered (instructional design) interventions can promote learning at times when stress and anxiety pose a threat.

Carine Nemr

Assistant Professor of Instruction

PhD institution: University of Toronto
Previous title and institution: Visiting Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Harvey Mudd College
Home department: Chemistry

Carine Nemr developed new tools for the detection and treatment of bacterial infections during her graduate studies. She employed microfluidics, eletrochemistry, and fluorescence imaging for the sensing of antibiotic resistant bacteria. Nemr also investigated the biocompatibility and antibacterial properties of multifunctional 3D-printed wound dressings in vitro and in vivo. During her transition to teaching, Nemr began to focus on chemical education research. Revisions of chemistry laboratory and lecture curricula to ensure content synergy and to improve student understanding, as well as creating novel active learning tools for the classroom are among Nemr's current interests.

Matey Neykov

Assistant Professor

PhD institution: Harvard University
Previous title and institution: Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon University
Home department: Statistics and Data Science
Profile

Matey Neykov's research interests include the areas of high-dimensional and nonparametric inference. He particularly likes to think about, and sometimes successfully answer fundamental statistical questions. He has contributed to multiple topics in the aforementioned areas, among which are single index models, graphical models, conditional independence testing and the Gaussian sequence model. In addition to his theoretical interests, Dr. Neykov enjoys working on statistical applications in medical settings such as electronic medical records (EMRs) and personalized medicine.

Akin Ogundiran

Professor

PhD institution: Boston University
Previous title and institution: Chancellor's Professor and Professor of Africana Studies, Anthropology, & History at The University of North Carolina-Charlotte
Home department: History

Akin Ogundiran is broadly interested in the deep-time history of Africa over the past 2,500 years, with emphasis on the Yoruba world. His research intersects cultural, political economy, and environmental approaches to study the history of complex social systems at different scales—e.g., household, urbanism, and empire. Ogundiran’s ongoing projects are in three parts: the archaeology and history of an Early Iron Age community formation (400 BC-100 AD); the political economy and social ecology of the Oyo Empire (1570-1830); and the landscape history of the Osun-Osogbo Grove—a UNESCO World Heritage Site (since the late sixteenth century), all in southwest Nigeria. His methodology is eclectic, ranging from archaeology, orality, and ritual archives to landscape studies, material life, and documentary sources. He is also interested in the cultural history of the Black Atlantic.

Claudia Quevedo-Webb

Assistant Professor of Instruction

PhD institution: Universidad Complutense
Previous title and institution: Assistant Instructional Professor in Spanish at the University of Chicago
Home department: Spanish and Portuguese

Claudia Quevedo-Webb's research areas of interest focus on new technologies in the language classroom, particularly the use of VR, as well as diversity, equity and inclusion in second language teaching and learning. She is currently the co-director of DEI-SLT, an open educational resource website supported by CERCLL (University of Arizona), that offers support to educators who want to bridge language teaching and social justice.

Maksym Radziwill

Professor

PhD institution: Stanford University
Previous title and institution: University Chair in Mathematics at UT Austin
Home department: Mathematics

Maksym Radziwill's main research area is number theory. In number theory, he is interested in multiplicative number theory and the analytic theory of L-functions and automorphic forms. He is also interested in the interplay of number theory with other areas of mathematics, specifically the spectral theory of hyperbolic manifolds, probability theory, in particular branching random walks, and dynamics. The leitmotif of his work is the study of randomness emerging from deterministic structures.

Mariajosé Rodríguez-Pliego

College Fellow

PhD institution: Brown University
Previous title and institution: Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellow at Brown University
Home department: English

Mariajosé Rodríguez-Pliego is a comparative scholar of Latinx and Indigenous literatures. Her current book project studies nationhood from the vantage point of immigrant and Indigenous writers from Mexico and the United States. She works with oral and written stories in English, Nahuatl, and Spanish that imagine forms of land ownership and belonging outside the structures of citizenship created by nation-states. Her research interests also include environmental narratives about rivers, feminist horror fiction, and Indigenous language revitalization.

Shira Schwartz

Assistant Professor

PhD institution: University of Michigan
Previous title and institution: Phyllis Backer Professor of Jewish Studies and Assistant Professor of Religion, Syracuse University; Visiting Scholar, Concentration in Education and Jewish Studies, School of Education, Stanford University
Home department: Religious Studies
Joint program: Jewish and Israel Studies
Profile

Shira E. Schwartz specializes in late antique rabbinic and contemporary Orthodox Judaism, comparative ex-religion, and queer/trans religion. Drawing on training in Comparative Literature, Judaic Studies, ethnography and salivary bioscience, Schwartz crosses the humanities with the social and biomedical sciences to highlight the role of space in shaping hormonal bodies in gendered/sexed, sexual and ethnoreligious minoritized lives. Linking these methods and subject positions, Schwartz’s research explores how embodied categories are constructed and inscribed in religious, educational, and biomedical institutions through the crossing lives that inhabit them. Current projects include Yeshiva Quirls, Evanjudaism, and Hormonal Ethnography.

Ananth Shankar

Assistant Professor

PhD institution: Harvard University
Previous title and institution: CLE Moore Instructor at MIT, 2017-2020; Assistant Professor at University of Wisconsin, Madison, 2020-2023
Home department: Mathematics
Profile

Ananth Shankar works in Number Theory and Arithmetic Geometry. Shankar's research has mainly focused on Shimura varieties and abelian varieties. Shankar has also worked on arithmetic differential equations.

Oscar Stuhler

College Fellow

PhD institution: New York University
Home department: Sociology
Profile

Oscar Stuhler studies discourse with formal, quantitative methods. At the core of Stuhler's research agenda is an effort to develop methods and theory for analyzing textual representations of social structures. In this research program, Stuhler makes central concepts in the analysis of social structure — among them roles, agency, and relationships — measurable in textual data. This has allowed him to study, for instance, how agency is distributed among male and female characters in fiction writing, and how German news media portrays refugees according to a set of discursive roles. In my other work, he studies aspects of public discourse, such as rhetorical frames, political critique, or agenda-setting. Currently, Stuhler is working on a project on temporal horizons in climate change news coverage.

LaShandra Sullivan

Associate Professor

PhD institution: University of Chicago
Previous title and institution: Associate Professor at Reed College
Home department: Anthropology
Profile

LaShandra Sullivan is a cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on historical reconfigurations of relations with land and landscapes, racialized and gendered labor, queer politics, and property. This work ranges from struggles for land titling to contestations over implicit ethno-racial, gendered, and sexed markings of bodies, space, and dwellings in Brazil and the United States. Much of the ethnographic components of this research centers on collaborations with activists who contest historical and ongoing oppression through myriad forms of protest—both formal and informal, spectacular and quotidian. She also studies the more mundane ways that the seemingly ephemeral aspects of daily life like practices of meaning-making, coping, and spiritual dimensions of relations between people (and things) arise out of material histories in ordinary moments. Her research concerns how such moments dually instantiate both the repetitions and transformations of those histories. Her first book, Unsettling Agribusiness: Indigenous Land Struggle in Brazil, is an ethnography of protest camps of land activists in the center-west state of Mato Grosso do Sul. She currently conducts ethnographic and archival research in Rio de Janeiro, as well as in her home state of Mississippi.

Allison Wade

Assistant Professor of Instruction

MFA institution: School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Previous title and institution: Lecturer, Northwestern University
Home department: Art Theory and Practice
Profile

Allison Wade is a visual artist whose practice is material-based, intuitive, and formally focused. She combines ceramics, textiles, wood, and metal into unexpected, often tenuous abstract sculptures that explore the intersection of flatness and form. Wade’s process, which she likens to syntax, is closely aligned with writing. Deploying an idiosyncratic visual language, she explores the structural and formal contingencies of her materials and marks, grouping them into words, sentences, and paragraphs that function both as distinct elements and parts of a whole.

Wade received an MFA from the Fiber and Material Studies Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and holds a BA in English literature from Stanford University. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, most recently at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Wisconsin. She has been awarded residencies at Loghaven, Ox-Bow, ACRE, Mustarinda (Finland), and the Vermont Studio Center and has been a visiting artist at the Kansas City Art Institute, Miami University, Rhodes College, the Cranbrook Academy of Art’s Ceramics Department, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Interlink program.

Abbe Walker

Assistant Professor of Instruction

PhD institution: Bryn Mawr College
Previous title and institution: Visiting Assistant Professor at Connecticut College
Home department: Classics

Abbe Walker's research and teaching interests focus on ancient religions, transitional and marginal women in antiquity, and particularly the role of women in early Christian asceticism. Her book, Bride of Hades to Bride of Christ (Routledge 2020), takes an original approach to illuminating gender and female agency in antiquity by juxtaposing the metaphor of the ‘bride of Hades’—elaborated in various ways in Greek archaic poetry, tragedy, medical treatises, and epitaphs—with that of the ‘bride of Christ,’ the label applied to the life-long Christian virgin, particularly in the works of Latin church fathers like Jerome, Ambrose, and Augustine. Her classes emphasize some of the less familiar aspects of Greco-Roman and early Christian culture, including ancient ideas about gender and sexuality, magic, and the lives of the non-elite.

Doris Warriner

Professor

PhD institution: University of Pennsylvania
Previous title and institution: Professor of English, Arizona State University
Home department: Anthropology

Doris Warriner is an educational anthropologist who investigates how social practices are influenced by large-scale processes such as displacement, ethnic conflict, immigration, transnationalism and climate change. She draws on theories and approaches from linguistic anthropology, educational anthropology, applied linguistics, and literacy studies to understand the social, political, economic, and ideological dimensions of language, literacy, and mobility with a focus on the relationship between communicative practices and the lived experiences and learning trajectories of immigrant and refugee families. In addition, she analyzes the narrative dimensions of memory -- or how memories of displacement and/or traumatic experience are framed and reframed interactionally—and how this framing helps to shape/reshape a narrator's identity and/or moral stance.

S. B. West

Associate Professor of Instruction

PhD institution: University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Previous title and institution: Associate Professor, Northeastern Illinois University; Visiting Instructor, University of Puget Sound
Home program: Gender and Sexuality Studies
Profile

The research and intellectual production of S.B. West, PhD engages “Latin American” literary and cultural canon hemispherically, with an emphasis on textual production from the Mayan or Yucatán peninsula. Their work is organized around abolitionist, decolonial and trans feminisms that question and challenge the colonial, cisheteronormative underpinnings of gender, class and race relations. Their current book-length project, entitled Autonomy and Abolition in the "Caste War", is a rereading of Yucatán’s nineteenth-century textual register that emphasizes how the gender and race war mobilized the transference of colonial oppression into liberal state-building. They also have active projects on contemporary Yucatec Maya or Maaya T'aan “literature”, US Spanish-language “im/migration” literature, and feminist theory.

Claudia Yau

Assistant Professor

PhD institution: Princeton University
Previous title and institution: Assistant Professor at University of Houston
Home department: Philosophy
Joint department: Classics

Claudia Yau specializes in ancient Greek philosophy, especially ancient ethics and epistemology. Her primary research is on Plato's and Aristotle's accounts of wisdom, including the role of wisdom in ethics and politics. She has additional work on Aristotle’s theory of justice and argumentative strategies in Sextus Empiricus.

Jesse Yeh

Assistant Professor of Instruction

PhD institution: University of Michigan
Home program: Legal Studies

Jesse Yeh (he / him) is a mixed-methods sociologist, focusing upon the intersections of race and immigration, gender and sexuality, crime and law, and social movement and politics. Jesse is currently working on his book project, which explores how everyday people makes sense of and engage with the racial politics of law-and-order.