2011-12 New Faculty


Abe, Sayaka
Adams, Jason
Braggs, Rashida
Collenberg, Carrie
Dilthey, Michael R.
D’Souza, Aruna
Elkins, James
Ferando, Christina
Forna, Aminatta
Gillis, Meghan
Glubokov, Andrey
Green, Brendan
Howe, Nicolas
Huffman, James
Joosten,Julie
Kohler, Pia
Kolbert, Elizabeth
Kurkowicz, Joanna
Lawrence, Ed
Lawrence, Mark
Lebestky, Tim
Livingstone, Rob
MacNamidhe, Margaret
Maloney, Katherine
Manigault-Bryant, LeRhonda
Michelin, Rob
Miller, Heidi
Njoya, Nimu
Okigbo, Austin
Osbakken, Stephanie
Parwani, Lata
Perilloux, Carin
Pitchon, Joel
Prindle, Dan
Raphelson, Ben
Roberts, Jeff
Rosengren, Cecilia
Rulikova, Marketa
Seifert, Michael
Smesko, Kyle
Spero, Patrick
Stevenson, Doris
Stroud, Catherine
Sullivan, Mecca
van der Kolk, Hana
White, Gregory

 

Sayaka Abe

Visiting Assistant Professor of Japanese

Sayaka Abe received her doctorate in linguistics at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2007. She has held research and teaching positions at several places including University of Trento, Vassar College and Grand Valley State University. Her teaching interests include: elementary to advanced Japanese, Japanese linguistics and general linguistics. Her research interests are primarily in cognitive linguistics and historical linguistics, particularly concerning visual/spatial concepts, (inter)subjectivity and grammatical change.

Jason Adams

Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science

Jason Adams is a political theorist working at the intersection of power, media and subjectivity. Adams’s graduate studies were conducted in Hawaii, Switzerland and Canada, earning a Ph.D in Political Science at the University of Hawaii, A.B.D. status in Media & Communication at the European Graduate School and an M.A. in Political Science at Simon Fraser University, following a B.A. in Politics, Society, Behavior and Change at The Evergreen State College. He served as Editorial Assistant for the journal Theory & Event for five years while working as a graduate student under dissertation advisor Michael J. Shapiro at the University of Hawaii. Adams was also the in-person Teaching Assistant for Giorgio Agamben during his August 2006 course Homo Sacer, held at Saas-Fee, Switzerland through the European Graduate School. Generally, his work concerns the relation between liberal and critical approaches to national and alternate modes of political subjectivity, particularly with respect to the early modern and late modern period. He has been published in the journals New Political Science, Borderlands, Theory & Event, CTheory, Philosophy & Scripture, Rhizomes and Boundary 2, while also serving as a contributing writer on music, film and Internet culture for PopMatters. His work has appeared in an encyclopedia concerned with public policy and another on the politics of social networks, as well as several edited books dealing with various aspects of critical political thought. Most recently, Adams is co-editor with Arun Saldanha of the volume Deleuze & Race, which is currently under review. He has previously taught at the European Graduate School, the University of Hawaii, Hawaii Pacific University and Arkansas State University.

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Rashida Braggs

Assistant Professor of Africana Studies

In addition to several article length projects, I am writing a book manuscript that draws on interdisciplinary methodologies to explore the migratory experiences of African American musicians and jazz away from the U.S. to France after WWII. My manuscript project is just one aspect of a larger interest in jazz and blues, the interplay of word, sound, and art, advertising, and transnational centered scholarship and pedagogy. Since receiving my doctorate in Performance Studies at Northwestern University, I have taught at Stanford University, the University of Heidelberg, and in Vietnam, as well as published in such journals as the Journal of Popular Music Studies. In my free time, I enjoy acting, writing, slamming poetry, and singing. Also, I love sports, everything from basketball to Ultimate Frisbee. So, I anticipate joining the vibrant intellectual, athletic and creative community at Williams College.

Carrie Collenberg

Visiting Assistant Professor of German

Carrie Collenberg received her PhD in German Studies at the University of Minnesota in 2011 and has spent time doing research in Germany and in Switzerland. She has taught a variety of courses in the German program at California State University, Long Beach for the past three years. Her research focuses on Visual Studies with a concentration on the aesthetic representation of terrorism in Germany and the United States and her recent work has focused on German cinema, the semiotics of seeing, and Heinrich von Kleist. She is currently under contract to co-author a second-year textbook on learning German through film.

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Michael R. Dilthey

Visiting Instructor in Music

Dr. Michael R. Dilthey is Assistant Professor of Music at MCLA where he teaches music theory and technology. He holds a Doctor of Music degree in Composition from Northwestern University. Selections from his recent opera, Spa, A Joy of Women’s Desiring, were performed at Carnegie Hall in New York and in Stockholm, Sweden. He lives in North Adams, MA with his wife and four sons.

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Aruna D’Souza

Visiting Lecturer in the Graduate Program in Art History, Fall ’11

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James Elkins

Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor of Art History

James Elkins grew up in Ithaca, New York, separated from Cornell University by a quarter-mile of woods once owned by the naturalist Laurence Palmer.

He stayed on in Ithaca long enough to get the BA degree (in English and Art History), with summer hitchhiking trips to Alaska, Mexico, Guatemala, the Caribbean, and Columbia. For the last twenty-five years he has lived in Chicago; he got a graduate degree in painting, and then switched to Art History, got another graduate degree, and went on to do the PhD in Art History, which he finished in 1989. (All from the University of Chicago.) Since then he has been teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is currently E.C. Chadbourne Chair in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism.

His writing focuses on the history and theory of images in art, science, and nature. Some of his books are exclusively on fine art (What Painting Is, Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles?). Others include scientific and non-art images, writing systems, and archaeology (The Domain of Images, On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them), and some are about natural history (How to Use Your Eyes).

Current projects include a series called the Stone Summer Theory Institutes, a book called The Project of Painting: 1900-2000, a series called Theories of Modernism and Postmodernism in the Visual Art, and a book written against Camera Lucida.

He married Margaret MacNamidhe in 1994 on Inishmore, one of the Aran Islands, off the West coast of Ireland. Margaret is also an art historian, with a specialty in Delacroix. Jim’s interests include microscopy (with a Zeiss Nomarski differential interference microscope and Anoptral phase contrast), optics (he owns an ophthalmologist’s slit-lamp microscope), stereo photography (with a Realist camera), playing piano, and (whenever possible) winter ocean diving.

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Christina Ferando

Visiting Lecturer in Art

Christina Ferando is a specialist in eighteenth and nineteenth-century art. Her interests include the history of display and exhibition practices in artists’ studios, private collections and public museums, as well as issues of copying, originality and reproduction. She received her PhD at Columbia University and has worked and lectured at several museums and galleries, including the Yale University Art Gallery, the Gagosian Gallery, and the Museum of Modern Art. Her most recent publications include an article on the reinvention of sculptor Antonio Canova in nineteenth-century Italian theater, published in the December 2010 issue of the Journal of Art Historiography. She is also currently working on a book on the sculptor entitled Staging Canova: Sculpture and the Art of Looking.

Aminatta Forna

Sterling Brown ’22 Visiting Professor of Africana Studies, Fall ’11

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Meghan Gillis

Assistant Professor of Physical Education and Head Coach of Women’s Ice Hockey

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Andrey Glubokov

Visiting Assistant Professor of Statistics

Brendan Green

Stanley Kaplan Visiting Fellow in the Department of Political Science and Leadership Studies

Brendan Green hails from Akron, Ohio, and holds an A.B. in political science from the University of Chicago. He recently received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where his dissertation, “Two Concepts of Liberty: American Grand Strategy and the Liberal Tradition,” was chaired by Barry Posen. He is editor and a coauthor, with Harvey Sapolsky and Benjamin Friedman, of U.S. Military Innovation Since the Cold War: Creation Without Destruction (Routledge 2009). He has been selected for several honors and awards, including a Miller Center Fellowship in American Politics, Foreign Policy, and World Politics at the University of Virginia and a Belfer Center Fellowship in International Security Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. In the past, he has consulted for the RAND corporation on counter-insurgency. His interests include: U.S. foreign policy, liberalism and world politics, military doctrine, the role of ideas in international politics, and diplomatic and military history. He is a fan of political science, the Cincinnati Bengals, the Cleveland Indians, and lost causes.

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Nicolas Howe

Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies

I am a cultural geographer whose interests range widely across the environmental humanities and social sciences. I earned my PhD from UCLA in 2009, and I taught for a year at Case Western Reserve University before coming to Williams as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Environmental Studies. My research focuses on the intersection of religious and environmental politics in modern America, with emphasis on space, secularism, and civil society. I also have strong interests in sociolegal studies, environmental history, cultural theory, visual and material cultures, and the philosophy of geography. I am currently working on a book manuscript based on my dissertation, tentatively titled “The Secular Eye: Law, Landscape, and American Civil Society,” in which I ask how secularism has shaped the imagination and experience of public space from the 1970s to the present. At Williams, I have taught interdisciplinary courses on space and consumption and the role of religion in American environmental thought. This coming year, I will teach an introduction to environmental studies and a seminar on the cultural study of climate change. I am thrilled to be teaching at Williams and living in Williamstown.

James Huffman

Bennett Boskey Visiting Professor of History, Spring ’12

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Julie Joosten

Visiting Assistant Professor of English

I’m completing my PhD in English Literature at Cornell University, where my dissertation examines voice, affect, and forms of thought that take place as feeling in 19th-century British and American Literature. I’m also very interested in avant-garde and experimental contemporary poetry and received an MFA in poetry at the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop. I’ve taught at Cornell, Wells College, the University of Iowa, and am very much looking forward to teaching at Williams.

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Pia Kohler

Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies

I am from Geneva, Switzerland, but am coming to Williams from Fairbanks, Alaska. Having originally been trained in the environmental sciences, my research now focuses on the interplay between science and politics, especially in addressing global environmental challenges we face today, such as climate change and chemical pollution. In particular I focus on how scientists, and other knowledge holders, such as indigenous people and laypeople, can shape and influence outcomes in global environmental negotiations. I have been fortunate to be able to gain a great deal of first-hand experience of such negotiations through my ongoing work as a writer with the Earth Negotiations Bulletin, a non-governmental group entrusted with providing reports of multilateral negotiations on the environment. I have a PhD from MIT in International Environmental Policy, a Masters in Environmental Sciences from Yale, and a Bachelors of Science from McGill University, and I have taught at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and at Wellesley College.

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Elizabeth Kolbert

W. Ford Schumann Visiting Professor in Democratic Studies, Spring ’12

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Joanna Kurkowicz

Lyell B Clay Artist in Residence, Violin and Concertmaster, Berkshire Symphony

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Ed Lawrence

Instructor in Music

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Mark Lawrence

Stanley Kaplan Visiting Professor of American Foreign Policy

Mark Lawrence is a specialist in the history of U.S. foreign relations and normally teaches at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is an Associate Professor. A native of Massachusetts, he earned his doctorate from Yale University in 1999 and has lived in Austin since 2000. At UT, he teaches courses on American diplomatic history since 1776, the Vietnam War, the 1960s, and nuclear history. Professor Lawrence’s books include Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam, published by the University of California Press, in 2005, and The Vietnam War: A Concise International History, published by Oxford University Press in 2008. He is now working on a study of U.S. policymaking toward the developing world in the 1960s and early 1970s, a period of profound transformation in U.S. foreign relations. He hopes to complete the book during the 2011-2012 academic year and looks forward to teaching at Williams. Professor Lawrence spends his free time running, watching the Red Sox, and (most of all) taking care of his baby daughter.

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Tim Lebestky

Assistant Professor of Biology

I am a neurobiologist primarily interested in using behavioral genetics to understand the molecular basis of arousal and sensory integration. Animals use their senses to learn about their immediate environment, parse the relevant information, and react in a meaningful way. If the sensory inputs are not interpreted correctly, this can cause inappropriate reactions, such as exaggerated behavioral responses to innocuous non-threatening stimuli, or by not reacting strongly enough to real threats. These concepts also translate into human biology, as imbalances in arousal and sensory gating are linked to pathologies, such as insomnia, attentional disorders, autism, and anxiety.
I utilize the genetic model system of Drosophila melanogaster for testing the molecular nature of multiple behaviors. I developed a novel startle assay to identify molecules important for the gating mechanism for “stress-based” arousal, and two genes that I found include a dopamine receptor and the serotonin transporter. Given the relevance of these neuromodulators in regulating mood, I am hopeful that our behavioral studies will provide additional insights into conserved genetic networks that can help us understand the pathology of neuropsychiatric disorders and potentially identify novel therapeutic targets.
In my spare time I enjoy fixing and riding bicycles, art, movies, hiking, and being dragged down the street on “walks” by my sweet but somewhat poorly behaved dog. I grew up in Kansas and have spent my graduate and postdoctoral years in southern California (UCLA and California Institute of Technology, respectively). I’m looking forward to the changing seasons and also trying my hand at cross-country skiing.

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Rob Livingstone

Lecturer in Physical Education, Head Strength and Conditioning Coach

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Margaret MacNamidhe

Visiting Lecturer in the Graduate Program in Art History

Teaching at Williams College gives Margaret MacNamidhe (pronounced “McNamee”) the opportunity to explore material which has fascinated her for many years: the widely varying forms the Romantic movement assumed through its decades’ long expression in different centers. The French Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix, along with the work of his little-known peers (active in the Paris of the 1820s) is the subject of a forthcoming book by MacNamidhe, and her current project investigates the drawing of Pablo Picasso during his Rose Period (1905-1907). MacNamidhe’s Ph.D. is from the Johns Hopkins University; a Fulbright scholarship brought her to the U.S. initially (for an M.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago). Her undergraduate training was entirely studio-based. After graduating from the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, she spent the next four years painting full-time, including scholarship-supported stays in Greece, Italy, and Norway. Studio residencies in Ireland began with the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annaghmakerrig before moving to Temple Bar Gallery and Studios. She has exhibited in Ireland, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, and one of her largest paintings is on permanent exhibition in the National Concert Hall, Dublin (Irish Government Collection). MacNamidhe’s other media included stained glass and large-format drawing. Her previous art-history teaching experience was at University College Dublin, the American University of Paris, Columbia University, Paris extension, Johns Hopkins, the University of Chicago, De Paul University, Chicago, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

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Katherine Maloney

Assistant Professor of Physical Education and Head Coach of Women’s Crew

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LeRhonda Manigault-Bryant

Assistant Professor of Africana Studies

LeRhonda Manigault-Bryant attended Duke University (AB) and Emory University (Master of Divinity and PhD), and returns to Williams College after having taught at Wake Forest University. She currently has three manuscript projects underway, and at Williams will teach courses that merge her interdisciplinary specializations in religion, gender, race, music, and popular culture, as well as her expertise in ethnographic methods. For her creative efforts, she has been the recipient of national awards from the Fund for Theological Education, the Ford Foundation, the Louisville Institute, and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.

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Rob Michelin

Visiting Instructor in Music & Director of the Zambezi Marimba Band

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Heidi Miller

Visiting Instructor in Music & Director of Symphonics Winds

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Nimu Njoya

Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science

I am a political theorist with broad teaching interests in the history of political thought; my courses are as likely to begin in the Athenian Agora as in twenty-first century global markets. I will be coming to Williams from Rutgers University, where I received my Ph.D. in political science with a specialization in modern political thought and feminist theory. I received my B.A. from Macalester College and my M.A. degree from the University of Amsterdam. In my doctoral and post-doctoral research, I have focused on questions of liberty and justice in the global context, particularly for women and other groups of people who are marginalized by gender, race and class distinctions. I am also deeply engaged in thinking about the political significance of aesthetics, particularly in its relation to revolutionary and imperialist projects of the eighteenth century and beyond. My most recently published article looks at the political and aesthetic qualities of the African American blues tradition, using lessons from this historical consciousness to reflect on American democracy in the age of terrorism. I have also done research on gender and globalization, and I am very keen on exploring the policy implications of political ideas and ideals. This work has been central to the advisory role that I have played in several international organizations, including the United Nations.

Austin Okigbo

Visiting Assistant Professor of Music, Fall ’11

Austin C. Okigbo comes to Williams College from University of Notre Dame where he taught in the departments of Music, Theology, and Africana Studies. He received his doctorate in ethnomusicology and a doctoral minor in African Studies in 2010 from Indiana University, Bloomington. He holds a master of music from Westminster Choir College, Princeton, NJ where he studied with Joseph Flummerfelt, James Jordan, Robin Leaver, and Frank Abrahams in the areas of conducting, sacred music, and music education. He also has degrees in philosophy and theology from the Pontifical Urban University, Rome. His research focuses on music in African, African American, and African Diaspora religious experiences; Black World music and resistance movements; and music and the global politics of AIDS.
Professor Okigbo has presented regularly at the annual meetings of the Society for Ethnomusicology and the African Studies Association, and his publications have appeared in Africa Today Journal and Du Bois Review. He is currently working on a monograph on Religious Choral Music Performance in a South African Zulu HIV/AIDS Struggle. His next big project looks at music and the dynamics of inter-religious dialogue in the West African Muslim country of Mali
Professor Okigbo has conducted church and community choirs, high school and university ensembles in Nigeria, South Africa, and the US, including the International Vocal Ensemble at the Indiana Jacob School of Music. He has also collaborated with the Pittsburg Squonk Opera, a world touring avant garde group as gumboot dance choreographer. His other specialties are in West African drumming, xylophones, and the Zimbabwean Shona marimba.
Professor Okigbo is a recipient of several awards and fellowships including the Carlton Hodge Prize honorary recognition for achievements in African Studies, the Laura Boulton Fellowship, and the Ronald R. Smith Fellow at Indiana University Bloomington; Fulbright-Hays Fellowship (2006-2007); the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship; President’s Distinguished Leadership Award from Indiana University Foundations, Bloomington; the William and Mary Renecker Foundations Scholarship, and the Charlotte Newcomb Scholarship.

Courses taught in the past: African American folklore and music, world music and culture, popular music in global perspective, introduction to African music, music in African religious experience, and world music ensemble conducting.

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Stephanie Osbakken

Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology, Spring ’12

Stephanie Osbakken is currently completing her doctorate in sociology at the University of Michigan, which she will defend in August 2011. Her research explores the social forces behind interdisciplinary research collaborations in the health sciences. Specifically, she investigates how research scientists and other health professionals negotiate disciplinary differences as well as less concrete symbolic boundaries such as status as they create innovative science. More broadly, Stephanie’s interests lie at the intersection of gender scholarship, medical sociology, organizational studies, and social psychology. She looks forward to teaching and mentoring students in these areas while at Williams in Spring 2012. Outside the classroom, Stephanie enjoys traveling, cooking, and spending time with her husband and new baby girl.

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Lata Parwani

Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow in History

I am a historian of Modern South Asia. My research and teaching interests focus broadly on the inter-regional, colonial and post-colonial history of South Asia. Currently I am completing my PhD in History at Tufts University. My dissertation, “Sindhis between Region, Religion and Nation,” is a social history of the Sindhi Hindu minority community from Sindh, a Muslim majority province that became a part of Pakistan. My study investigates questions of identity, citizenship and belonging faced by the Sindhi Hindus following the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent. Engaging with literature on nationalism, decolonization, post-colonial studies, and diaspora theory, I examine the ways in which Sindhi Hindus have negotiated their regional, religious, and national identities in the aftermath of decolonization. I have taught at Harvard University at 2001-04 and Tufts University from 2005-2007.
Other than academics, I enjoy the outdoors, cooking, cricket, Bollywood films and Sufi music from South Asia. I look forward to meeting and teaching students at Williams.

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Carin Perilloux

Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology

Carin Perilloux recently completed her doctorate in Evolutionary Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests center on human mating and conflict between the sexes and she is currently studying misperceptions of sexual interest. In her free time, she enjoys photography, golf, video games, and board games.
See more.

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Joel Pitchon

Visiting Artist-in-Residence in Violin, Fall ’11

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Dan Prindle

Visiting Instructor in Music, Fall ’11

Dan Prindle holds an M.M. in Music Theory from UMASS Amherst and B.M. in Composition from the Berklee College of Music. As a scholar, Dan has presented his research in the field of music theory pedagogy at conferences at the University of Massachusetts, George Washington University (Washington, D.C.), and the University of Washington (Seattle, Washington). He is an experienced composer with a portfolio of over twenty compositions for various chamber ensembles, choir, and symphony orchestra. He also has extensive performing and recording experience, having performed or recorded with such major-label recording artists as Simon Kirke (of Free, Bad Company, Ringo Starr’s All-Star Band) and Frank Black (of the Pixies).

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Ben Rapelson

Visiting Lecturer in Physical Education and Assistant Track and Field Coach

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Jeff Roberts

Visiting Assistant Professor of Music

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Cecilia Rosengren

Research Scholar, Visiting Professor of History, Fall ’11

I am associate professor at the Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and STINT Visiting Fellow at Williams College during the Fall 2011. My experience as a teacher dates back to my time as PhD-student. I have since then been teaching introductory courses as well as in-depth courses on European intellectual and cultural history from Antiquity to our times, at the University of Gothenburg as well as at Södertörn University College in Stockholm.

My PhD investigated the controversy between government friendly forces and the oppositional liberal voices in the new public sphere in early 19th century Sweden. I have also studied the strategies in different media from 1810 to 1844 to legitimize and popularize the up-start Bernadotte dynasty. However, my research interest nowadays lies mainly within the field of history of philosophy, with an emphasis on gender, Early Modern cultural history, conceptions and historiographical issues. In 2009 I published a monograph in Swedish on the English seventeenth century philosopher Anne Conway: Conway. Natural Philosophy and Women Thinkers in the Age of the Baroque, and I am currently working on a study dealing with the notions of suffering and happiness in the writings of Early Modern women philosophers. The course that I will offer at Williams on gender and intellectual life in seventeenth century Europe will explore aspects of this latter research.
For more information and publication list, see: More

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Marketa Rulikova

Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology, Fall ’11

Marketa Rulikova received her PhD from the Polish Academy of Sciences. She has taught at several institutions in the US, including Williams College, Bennington College, and Keene State College. She was also an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Metropolitan University in Prague and is a member of the faculty at New York University in Prague. Rulikova is working on a book about undocumented Eastern European immigrants in the US. Her research focuses on global migration, social stratification and cultural transformation in post-socialist Europe.

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Michael Seifert

Visiting Assistant Professor of Physics

I am a theoretical physicist, broadly interested in the fields of general relativity and classical field theory. My recent work has centered on the mathematical modeling and observational signals of possible violations of Lorentz symmetry, the symmetry between space and time that underlies special relativity and general relativity. I received my B.A. in Physics from Swarthmore College in 2001, and my Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2008. Before coming to Williams, I also taught at Eckerd College. When I’m not thinking about physics, I enjoy playing the trombone and orienteering.

Recent Publications: Page 1 More

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Kyle Smesko

Lecturer in Physical Education, Assistant Football Coach

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Patrick Spero

Assistant Professor of History and Leadership Studies

Patrick Spero is a specialist in early American history, with a particular focus on political history. He received his Ph.D. in 2009 from the University of Pennsylvania for his dissertation “Creating Pennsylvania: The Politics of the Frontier and the State, 1682-1800.” He has published essays and reviews on early American print culture, revolutionary politics, frontier life, and education. Prior to his arrival at Williams College in 2011, Spero was the Pew Post-Doctoral Fellow in Early American History at the American Philosophical Society. Spero also has a background in digital history and is interested in how new technology can be applied to the humanities. At Williams, Spero will be teaching courses in early American history and leadership studies.

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Doris Stevenson

Lyell B Clay Artist in Residence, Piano

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Catherine Stroud

Assistant Professor of Psychology

Dr. Kate Stroud received her PhD in clinical psychology from Stony Brook University. Her research examines the relationship between stress and depression in first onsets versus recurrences, interpersonal factors in the development of depression and factors that contribute to successful relationships. She has taught at Stony Brook University and Northwestern University.

Mecca Sullivan

Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies

Mecca Jamilah Sullivan is the current Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is a Ph.D. candidate in English Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, where her research focuses on voice, identity, and conceptions of difference in contemporary Afrodiasporic women’s literature. She has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Temple University, and the Community College of Philadelphia, and has presented work at the Modern Language Association convention, the National Women’s Studies Association convention, and the Pan-African Literary Forum in Ghana. She is also a fiction writer and playwright whose creative work has appeared in Callaloo, Women’s Work, Best New Writing, and other publications.

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Hana van der Kolk

Arthur Levitt, Jr. ’52 Artist-in-Residence in Dance

Hana van der Kolk’s choreographic projects combine elements of conceptual practice with postmodern choreography and take place in a wide range of sites, including the stage, studios and galleries, in writing, on film, and in outdoor, public spaces. She has taught in many settings including throughout Tallinn, Estonia on a grant from the US Embassy and at the School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam, where she is a regular guest teacher. Hana holds an MFA in choreography from UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures. More at hanavanderkolk.com and vimeo.com

Gregory White

Class of 1946 Visiting Distinguished Professor of International Environmental Studies, Fall ’11

Gregory White is a Professor of Government at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts. The author of the forthcoming Climate Change and Migration: Security and Borders in a Warming World (Oxford University Press, 2011), he is a specialist on North African politics, global environmental politics, and immigration studies. For 2009-10, Professor White was in residence at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, where he studied climate science under the auspices of a New Directions Grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The recipient of Fulbright scholarships to Tunisia and Morocco, Professor White holds a Ph.D. in Political Science and African Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

A native of Philadelphia, he lives in Leeds, MA, with his wife, Tricia, and two children.

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