2016-17 New Faculty

Tomas Adalsteinsson

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

Natalia Almada

W. Ford Schumann Visiting Professor in Democratic Studies, Spring ’17

More information here

Nasia Anam

Visiting Assistant Professor of English

Nasia Anam received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at UCLA. She has also taught in Comparative Literature at UCLA, as well as in English Literature at University of Michigan and in Critical Studies at California Institute of the Arts. Her research focuses on contemporary novels of immigration, literature of cities, and postcolonial literature. Her writing and reviews have appeared in Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Interventions, The Journal of South Asian History, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Contemporaries, and The Aerogram.

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Souleymane Badolo

Visiting Artist in Residence in Dance

Lloyd Barba

C3 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Latina/o Studies and Religion

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Sarah Bassett

Croghan Bicentennial Professor in Biblical and Early Christian Studies, Spring ’17

Sarah Bassett is Associate Professor of Art History at Indiana University. She will be visiting Williams in the Spring 2017 semester as the Croghan Bicentennial Professor in Biblical and Early Christian Studies. Her research focuses on the period known as Late Antiquity (3rd-7th cs.) in the later Roman world. Her current work deals with the relationship between form and meaning in late antique art. When not thinking about these materials she may be found lounging with a novel, practicing the harpsichord, or having a walk with her dog, Rupert, a curmudgeonly greyhound.

Les Beldo

Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Environmental Studies

Les Beldo is a sociocultural anthropologist specializing in environment, ethics, and science & technology studies. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 2014. He has previously taught courses in environmental anthropology, social theory, human-animal studies, and qualitative research methods. He is currently writing a book on the conflict over Makah whale hunting in the Pacific Northwest.

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Mary Bercaw Edwards

Visiting Lecturer at Williams-Mystic

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Marina Bilbija

Visiting Assistant Professor of English

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Nancy Birdsall

Visiting Professor of Economics, Spring ’17

Nancy Birdsall is the Center for Global Development’s founding president. From 1993 to 1998, she was executive vice president of the Inter-American Development Bank, the largest of the regional development banks, where she oversaw a $30 billion public and private loan portfolio. Before that she worked 14 years in research, policy, and management positions at the World Bank, including as director of the Policy Research Department. Prior to launching the Center, she served for three years as Senior Associate and Director of the Economic Reform Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace where her work focused on globalization, inequality and the reform of the international financial institutions.

She is the author, co-author, or editor of more than a dozen books and many scholarly papers. Her most recent publications include Cash on Delivery: A New Approach to Foreign Aid and New Ideas on Development after the Financial Crisis, co-edited with Francis Fukuyama. Shorter pieces of her writing have appeared in dozens of U.S. and Latin American newspapers and periodicals. Birdsall received her Ph.D. in economics from Yale University and an M.A. from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Expertise:
Development economics, globalism and inequality, the aid system, international financial institutions, education, Latin America, climate financing

Education:
Ph.D., Yale University, 1979; M.A., Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, 1969; B.A., Newton College of the Sacred Heart, 1967

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Johan Boye

STINT – Research Scholar, Fall ’16

More information here

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Victoria Brooks

Visiting Lecturer in the Graduate Program in Art History, Fall ’16

Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen

Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Graduate Program in Art History

Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen (BA Columbia University) received a PhD in Art & Archaeology from Princeton University in 2015. She specializes in 19th- and early-20-century European art, and has also published occasional essays and criticism on modern and contemporary art. Her current research interests include the history of art history and archaeology, the reception of antiquity in the modern era, artistic pedagogy and academies, the impact of art criticism and journalism on artistic practice in the 19th century, interactions between the visual and performing arts, early film, and psychology and psychoanalysis.

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Pei-Wen Chen

Assistant Professor of Biology

Concurrent remodeling of cellular membrane and actin cytoskeleton occurs in many biological processes such as cytokinesis, phagocytosis and cell migration. Broadly, my lab is interested in understanding the mechanisms underlying the coordinated change in various cellular membrane and actin structures as this coordination is fundamental for normal physiology and often disrupted in pathological conditions like cancer cell invasion and metastasis.

Specifically, we use focal adhesions (FAs) in mammalian cells as a model structure to investigate the role of Arf GTPase-activating proteins (Arf GAPs) in regulating dynamics of membrane and actomyosin networks. FAs are mechanosensing organelles that not only mediate cell adhesion to the extracellular matrix (ECM) but also sense and activate signaling crucial for cell survival, proliferation and differentiation. We use a combination of approaches including molecular cloning, biochemical and biophysical analyses, quantitative microscopy and cell biology techniques in our studies.

Stemming from my research focus on how lipid-binding enzymes control large protein complexes that can deform cellular membranes, courses I have taught include: “Quantitative Biology and Biophysics” at University of Maryland (UMD), 200 and 300-level molecular and cell biology courses at Grinnell College, and microscopy workshops in the National Institutes of Health and UMD.

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Cory Colbert

Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow in Mathematics

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Meredith Coleman-Tobias

Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow in Religion and Africana Studies

I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate Division of Religion at Emory University. In the American Religious Cultures course of study, my research interests consider Caribbean and North American iterations of African Atlantic religious cultures. I am specifically interested in religious migrations, which I began to study during my tenure as a Fulbright fellow in Barbados (2009-2010). I bring to my research a background in Community Theater, and interrogations of performance, place-making, and knowledge reproduction significantly inform my understanding of religious communities.

Funded by the Ford Foundation, my dissertation project, “Portable Ritual: Sobonfu Somé and the Making of a Dagara Religious Diaspora,” focuses on a Burkinabé teacher and leader based in Sacramento, California. Investigating Ms. Somé’s ritual work and ‘mission’ in Western countries over the last two decades, I examine African and non-African descendants’ intentional practice of Dagara spirituality in North America as a lens through which to understand historical and contemporary Africana religious formations.

In addition to my enthusiasm for exploring a range of African-inspired spiritual and religious identities in the classroom, my teaching proficiencies include American religious history, diaspora theory, global black feminisms/womanisms, and new religious movements.

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Eliza Congdon

Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology

I am coming to Williams from the University of Chicago, where I recently received my PhD in Developmental Psychology. My research focuses on how elementary school-aged children learn new ideas and concepts by interacting with their environments through actions and gestures. I primarily conduct research within the domain of mathematics, and I have used a number of different research methodologies including behavioral, EEG (electroencephalography), fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), and eye tracking. I love to have many projects going at once; I am always open to new collaborations; and I thoroughly enjoy working with undergraduate students in a research and mentorship setting. I grew up in Eastern Massachusetts and I have two cats whose names were inspired by the Boston public transit system, Charlie (after the Charlie Card) and Kendall (after the Kendall/MIT red line stop). I like to ski in the winter and bike in the summer and I generally love to travel – most recently on a US National Parks road trip. I am very much looking forward to becoming a member of the Williams community.

To learn more about my current research and my teaching and mentorship history, please take a look at my personal webpage.

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Jose Constantine

Assistant Professor of Geosciences

More information here

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Andrew Cornell

Visiting Assistant Professor of American Studies

I hold a PhD in American Studies from New York University and I have taught at Haverford College and Université Stendhal (in Grenoble, France). My teaching and research is interdisciplinary and focused on three major areas: 1) studies of work, class, and capitalism, 2) social movement history and dynamics, and 3) critical social and cultural theory. I recently published the book Unruly Equality: U.S. Anarchism in the 20th Century (University of California Press, 2016). My new research concerns cultural contradictions that emerge when powerful nation-states experience declining economic and political influence at the international level. In my free time I enjoy hiking, cooking Indian food, and playing with my Boston Terrier, Lily. For more information about my work, please visit my personal website.

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Diana Davis

Visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics

Diana Davis studies geometry and dynamical systems, particularly billiards and linear flows. After graduating from Williams in 2007, she earned a Ph.D. at Brown University and taught at Phillips Exeter Academy and Northwestern University. She is best known for her video that explains her Ph.D. thesis result using colors and dance, which went viral in the mathematics community. Outside of the classroom, she is a competitive long-distance runner.

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Kenneth Draper

Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics

I received my Ph.D. in Classical Studies from Indiana University in 2015 and have been teaching there as a Visiting Assistant Professor in 2015-16. My principal research concerns the conception and use of literary genres during the Augustan period, particularly in the poetry of Horace, but I am interested broadly in Greek and Roman culture as well as its later reception, especially in the medieval and early modern periods. In 2013-2014, I was the Resident Instructor at the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome, where I took part in teaching the Ancient City course, an on-site survey of Roman history and material culture. I devote (too) much of my free time to devouring burritos, speaking French, and watching mediocre procedural dramas.

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Amal Eqeiq

Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature

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VaNatta Ford

Assistant Professor of Africana Studies

VaNatta Ford is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies. Prior to teaching at Williams, she taught courses in the rhetoric of popular culture, public speaking, intercultural communication, and the rhetoric of rap music at Columbia College in South Carolina and also served as an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow of African American Rhetoric at Ripon College, in Ripon, WI. VaNatta’s research focuses on the intersections of identity politics and gender, rap and religion, and popular culture and social media. She is the co-editor of Black Women and Popular Culture: The Conversation Continues (2014), and is currently working on a book manuscript, Tone DEF: Exploring Colorism in the Rhetoric of Rap Lyrics, forthcoming in 2017. Extending her interests in religion and hip hop music, VaNatta is in the beginning stages of a new co-edited collection titled I Am a God: Conversations on Kanye West, Religion & Hip-Hop. She earned her Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Intercultural Communication, with and emphasis in African American Rhetorical Traditions, and a Master of Divinity both from Howard University.

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Christopher Gibson

Visiting Professor of Leadership Studies

Chris Gibson is a former Member of the U.S. House of Representatives (NY-19), and a former Colonel in the U.S. Army. In his last Army assignment, Chris commanded the 82nd Airborne Division’s 2nd Brigade and led them on the humanitarian relief operation to Haiti after the devastating earthquake there in 2010. He served four combat tours in Iraq and was awarded four Bronze Star Medals and the Purple Heart. Chris holds a Ph.D. in Government from Cornell University and is the author of Securing the State, a book on national security decision-making published in 2008. He previously taught American Politics at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and served as a Hoover National Security Affairs Fellow at Stanford University.

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Catherine Girard

Visiting Assistant Professor of Art

I specialize in eighteenth-century European art, with a focus on animal art, violence, cultural exchange, and natural history in the early modern world. My work examines how defamiliarization informs artistic processes and the formation of images. Before completing my Ph.D. at Harvard University in 2014, I received art historical training at Université de Montréal and Paris-IV Sorbonne. In my current book project, Rococo Massacres, I study eighteenth-century French paintings with a hunting subject alongside cultural practices of Louis XV’s court. My interest in the visual culture of hunting was in part determined by my upbringing: I come from a family who carries on Native American hunting techniques in the northern boreal forest of Quebec.

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Matthew Gold

Artist in Residence in Percussion and Contemporary Music Performance

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Pamela Harris

Assistant Professor of Mathematics

Dr. Pamela E. Harris received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee in May 2012. Her research interests focus on combinatorial problems related to representation theory. Dr. Harris has previously taught courses in number theory, linear algebra, calculus, and statistics and probability. In addition to enjoying working with students on original research, Dr. Harris actively works to improve diversity and retention rates among women and minorities in the mathematical sciences through her work and involvement with the Society for Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS). Dr. Harris enjoys cooking all types of spicy food, playing tennis, and she is looking forward to joining a new jiu jitsu dojo.

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Brynn Hatton

Visiting Assistant Professor of Art

Brynn Hatton (Ph.D., Art History, Northwestern University, 2016; Visiting Assistant Professor of Art) specializes in art and visual culture of the 20th and 21st centuries, with an emphasis on the artistic and intellectual histories of contemporary global social movements and political activism. Her teaching and research are both rigorously interdisciplinary, incorporating thought from social movement mobilization theory, critical race theory, urban studies, transnational and post-colonial literatures. Dr. Hatton has extensive experience working abroad in numerous parts of the world, including Southeast Asia, East Africa, Oceania, Europe, and the Middle East. Her dissertation and forthcoming book manuscript were developed out of international fieldwork supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the U.S. Department of Education. She has taught courses in modern and contemporary global art and arts of the African diaspora. In addition, she writes criticism for Artforum and MCA DNA, and has contributed to major curatorial projects including the award-winning “The City Lost and Found: Capturing New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, 1960–1980” at the Art Institute of Chicago.

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Galen Jackson

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

I received my Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles. During the 2015-2016 academic year, I was a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow in the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to coming to UCLA, I received an M.A. in international relations from the University of Chicago. I am an alumnus of Williams College, class of 2009, where I was a double major in history and political science.

My research interests include great power politics, American foreign policy, the Arab-Israeli conflict, Cold War studies, nuclear security studies, leadership studies, and the interaction between domestic politics and foreign policy decision-making. My work has been published in Security Studies, International Security, and the Journal of Cold War Studies.

When I’m out of my office, I can usually be found playing basketball, rock climbing, or hiking.

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Bill Jannen

Visiting Lecturer in Computer Science

Bill Jannen is generally interested in file systems and storage. While at Stony Brook University, he was a member of the team that developed BetrFS, a Linux file system built using write-optimized dictionaries. Prior to joining Stony Brook, he worked on RNA secondary structure prediction with Professor Aalberts in the Physics department. Bill is a silkscreen printmaker and a card game player.

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Steffani Jemison

Arthur Levitt, Jr. ’52 Artist-in-Residence, Spring ’17

I’m a practicing artist based in Brooklyn, New York. I graduated from Columbia University (BA, Comparative Literature) and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA, Studio). My work encompasses many media, including text, video, performance, and sound. My recent work has concerned utopia, abstraction, private languages, and universal languages; recent projects include Promise Machine, a commission for the Museum of Modern Art (2015) and Mikrokosmos, a commission for the Neue Museum Graz (2016). I’ve taught photography, video, theory, and professional practice at Parsons, Cooper Union, Wellesley, and Rice University, among others. Website: http://www.steffanijemison.com

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Kelly Baker Josephs

Sterling Brown ’22 Visiting Professor of Africana Studies

Kelly Baker Josephs is the Sterling Brown ’22 Visiting Professor of Africana Studies. She is visiting from York College/CUNY, where she is Associate Professor of English, and specializes in World Anglophone Literature with an emphasis on Caribbean Literature. She teaches courses in Anglophone Caribbean Literature, Postcolonial Literature and Theory, Literatures of the African Diaspora, and Gender Studies. Her book, Disturbers of the Peace: Representations of Insanity in Anglophone Caribbean Literature (University of Virginia Press, 2013), considers the ubiquity of madmen and madwomen in Caribbean literature between 1959 and 1980. She is the editor of sx salon: a small axe literary platform and manages The Caribbean Commons website. Her current project, Caribbean Articulations: Storytelling in a Digital Age, explores the intersections between new technologies and Caribbean cultural production.

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Catherine Kealhofer

Assistant Professor of Physics

My research focuses on methods of generating and manipulating ultrafast electron pulses as well as using these pulses to study dynamical physical processes in the solid state. I graduated from Princeton with an A.B. in Physics in 2003, and I completed my PhD at Stanford in 2013, studying ultrafast electron emission from nanostructures. As a post-doc in Munich (at the Ludwig Maximilians Universität and Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics), I worked on manipulating electron pulses using terahertz electromagnetic fields with the goal of generating very short pulses for ultrafast electron diffraction. I’m mostly from the San Francisco Bay Area, but I also love to travel: besides Munich and Princeton, I’ve lived in Paris (as a high-school student) and Gwangju (where I taught middle school as a Princeton-in-Asia fellow). Outside of Physics, my interests are usually in flux but have recently included hiking & trail running, baking bread, and practicing/ inflicting my rudimentary German on the residents of Munich.

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Margaret Bundy Scott Visiting Professor of English

More information here

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Lisa Koryushkina

Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology, Spring ’17

Lisa Koryushkina received her PhD in Anthropology from Brown University. A demographic anthropologist by training, she works on issues of migration, citizenship, family, social change and nationalism in Russia and Central Asia. In particular, she is interested in an impact of migration on local conflicts between migrants, the state and permanent population in Southern regions of Russia and a rise of anti-migrant discourses that frame this interaction. She has published her work in Ethnology, Nationalities Papers and several edited volumes.
In her free time, she enjoys making crazy craft projects with her 2 kids and debating a fate of the universe from anthropological and economic perspectives with her husband.

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Basil Kreimendahl

Visiting Lecturer in Theatre, Spring ’17

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Mingming Liu

Visiting Assistant Professor of Chinese

My research focuses on zhiguai (strange writing) in early medieval China, and its later development into other forms, including film and science fiction. I am interested in the relationship between fantasy and reality, and what constitutes as “strange” in different cultural contexts. I have also published translation works, mainly in Dunhuang studies. I received my Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from University of California, Riverside, and have taught literature and language courses at Pomona College, Harvey Mudd College, and UC Riverside. I enjoy painting and gardening as hobbies.

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Christina Mandt

Visiting Assistant Professor of German

Christina Mandt completed the Ph.D. program in German Literature at Rutgers University, where she pursued interdisciplinary work at the crossroads of adaptation, cinema, digital, and gender studies. Further research interests range from Baroque emblematics to the films of David Lynch. She also holds a joint B.A. and Master’s degree in German Literature and Linguistics, Media Studies, and Psychology from the University of Cologne, as well as a post-graduate certificate in German language pedagogy from the University of Bonn. Previous positions include appointments as a part-time lecturer in German and as the coordinator of interdisciplinary lecture programs at the University of Cologne. Christina Mandt is an alumna of the German National Academic Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes). Her commitment to teaching resulted in Rutgers University’s Dissertation Teaching Award and the University Award for Teaching from the president of the University of Cologne.

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Thabane Vincent Maphai

Class of 1955 Visiting Professor of International Studies

Dr. Thabane Vincent Maphai, BA (Hons), MA, PhD

He has an unusual and distinguished career in academia, private sector and public service.

In an academic career spanning two decades, he studied and taught at various universities both locally and abroad and held fellowships at Oxford, Harvard (1988), Princeton (1989) and Stanford (1995) universities. He taught philosophy at Northeastern University in Boston.

He was appointed into senior position by all 3 post-apartheid Presidents: Mandela, Mbeki and Zuma.

He studied in South Africa Belgium, United Kingdom and USA.graduated from UNISA with BA degree in 1975.

His hobbies include running and soccer. He is very passionate about wild-life and the African bush life.

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Robert McMahon

Stanley Kaplan Visiting Professor of American Foreign Policy, Fall ’16

Robert J. McMahon is a specialist in the history of American foreign relations. He has previously taught at Ohio State University and the University of Florida and has held visiting professorships at the University of Virginia, University College Dublin, and the Free University (Berlin). Among his books are Dean Acheson and the Creation of an American World Order (2008), The Cold War: A Very Short Introduction (2003), and Cold War on the Periphery: The United States, India, and Pakistan (1994).

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Brian Messier

Artist-in-Residence in Winds and Director of the Wind Ensemble

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Ralph Morrison

Assistant Professor of Mathematics

As a member of the Williams class of 2010, I majored in math and did lots of student theatre before going on to math graduate school at UC Berkeley and then a postdoc at KTH in Stockholm, Sweden. I’m very excited to return to Williams as part of the math department, where I’ll be specializing in algebraic and tropical geometry. More information here

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Lama Nassif

Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature

Lama Nassif received her MA in TESOL from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, and her PhD in Foreign Language Education from the University of Texas at Austin. She has taught Arabic at The University of Texas at Austin and Middlebury College. She is interested in noticing and attention in second language development, and the interface between second language acquisition research and second language pedagogy. She is currently investigating Arabic learners’ spoken production when simultaneously introduced to Modern Standard Arabic and a spoken variety, a key issue in Arabic learning and instruction.

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Jon Park

Visiting Assistant Professor of Computer Science

More information here

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Kailani Polzak

C3 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Art History

Kailani Polzak specializes in European visual culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly in relation to the pictorial politics of race and colonialism. Her doctoral dissertation, entitled “Inscribed Distances: Picturing Human Difference and Scientific Discovery Between Europe and Oceania, 1768-1822,” focuses on British, French, and Russian voyages in the Pacific and the role that portrait painting, natural history illustration, and cartography played in the formulation of race. Polzak completed her doctoral training at the University of California, Berkeley, where she co-organized the international conference “Difference/Distance: Picturing Race Across Oceans in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.” Her interests extend well past the subject of her dissertation, and she has taught courses on the Spanish artist Francisco de Goya, French painting in the nineteenth century, and methods in the history of art.

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Munjulika Rahman

Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance History and Theory

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Mark Raymond

Assistant Professor of Physical Education and Head Coach of Football

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Sophie Saint-Just

Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies

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Avinoam Shalem

Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor of Art History

More information here

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Swati Singh

Assistant Professor of Physics

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Mirta Suquet

Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish

I am a literary critic whose research explores the representation of HIV/AIDS in the European and Latin American literature from a comparative perspective.
I obtained my PhD in Latin American Literature and Culture and Comparative Literature from the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain. My teaching and research interests focus on a variety of topics: twentieth and twenty-first century Latin American and Caribbean literatures and cultures, representations of conflicts of the body and subjectivity (such as illness, mourning, loss), cultural studies, gender studies and queer studies.

I have taught Literary Theory and Criticism and Caribbean and Latin American literature at the University of Havana (Cuba), the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain) and the Baruch College (CUNY). I have also taught different levels of Spanish language courses at the College of Staten Island (CUNY), the Baruch College (CUNY), and the Hunter College (CUNY).

My dissertation Faces of HIV/AIDS. Disease and Identity in Latin American Narratives of Self: Comparative Perspectives focuses on a group of Latin-American writers (Joaquin Hurtado, Marta Dillon, Pedro Lemebel, Severo Sarduy, Reinaldo Arenas, Miguel Ángel Fraga, among others), tracing the changes in the representations of HIV/AIDS over three decades of Latin American literature. My research delves into the representations of prejudices about disease and sexuality, in dialogue with the political contexts of the region. I am also exploring the vulnerability of women vis-à-vis the disease. I argue that connecting the personal with the public, the intimate story with national history, Latin American writers assume the disease as a metaphor of the Latin American identity.

Recent publications include “Faces of HIV/AIDS in Cuban literature”, in the volume Cuba: arte y literatura en el exilio (Valencia, Legua editorial, 2011), “Memoria y Resistencia. La escritura femenina del VIH/SIDA en la literatura hispanoamericana”, in La voz dormida? Memoria y género en las literaturas hispánicas (Varsovia, Biblioteka Iberyjska, Instituto de Estudios Ibéricos e Iberoamericanos de la Universidad de Varsovia, 2015).
More information about my publications and other scholarly activities is available on my CV .

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Peyam Tabrizian

Visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics

My name is Peyam (Pie-Am) Tabrizian, and I am very excited to join Williams College for a year as a new postdoc. I grew up in Austria, and I got both BA and my PhD at the University of California – Berkeley, under the supervision of Prof. Lawrence Craig Evans. My specialty is in Partial Differential Equations (PDE). More precisely, I am currently studying the Kramers-Smoluchowski equation, a PDE which arises from chemical reactions. See more

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Matthew Tokeshi

Assistant Professor of Political Science

My research focuses on the politics of group identity and racial attitudes in the United States. My dissertation examines white voters’ responses to African American candidates for high-profile statewide offices such as governor or U.S. Senator. My work has won two American Political Science Association awards: the Timothy Cook Award given to the best paper presented by a graduate student on political communication and the best paper on race, ethnicity, and politics (honorable mention). My other areas of research and teaching interest are in public opinion and political behavior, political psychology, experimental and survey methods, campaigns and elections, and political communication. I received my Ph.D. in politics and social policy from Princeton in 2016. I’m originally from the Los Angeles area and hold a B.A. in political science and psychology from the University of California, Berkeley, but I have lived on the East Coast (Brooklyn, NY or Princeton, NJ) for the last ten years. Outside of political science, I enjoy cooking, traveling, sports, and playing with my dog Calvin, a cuddly 12-pound terrier mix.

Laurie Tupper

Assistant Professor of Statistics

Daniel Turek

Assistant Professor of Statistics

Daniel Turek completed his undergraduate and Master’s degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science at MIT, and subsequently earned his PhD in Statistics from the University of Otago located in Dunedin, New Zealand. His research interests lie at the intersection of these disciplines, designing state-of-the-art statistical software and algorithms for likelihood-based and Bayesian analyses. Paramount to this is developing a self-adapting Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm, which dynamically determines a highly-efficient sampling approach customized to the statistical model and dataset at hand. See danielturek.com and r-nimble.org for more information.

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Yabin Wang

Visiting Assistant Professor of Economics, Spring ’17

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Vincent Wimbush

Croghan Bicentennial Professor in Biblical and Early Christian Studies, Spring ’17

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Saadia Yacoob

Assistant Professor of Religion