2012-13 New Faculty

Ackerson, William
Barnes, Ashley
Birdsall, Nancy
Blair, James
Bruhn, Jorgen
Chuks, Jennifer
Cohen, Phoebe
Colbert-Goicoa, David
Cone, Jeremy
Cornell, Andrew
Cowden, Margaux
Coyne, Ryan
Curulla, Annelle
Dessein, Eva
Dosunmu, Oyebade
Edwards, Kaye
El-Anwar, Abeer
Ephraim, Laura
Gardiner, Katie
Gardner Spencer, Matthew
Haringer, Andrew
Harrington, Nicole
Hasan-Rokem, Galit
Heinrichs, Johanna
Heller, Peter
Hofelich, Alicia
Honecker, Scott

Kaiser,David
Kiggins, Ryan
King, Jeremy
Klots,Yakov
Knibbs, Eric
Lee, Yong Suk
Liao, Hao-Hsiang
Love, Nia
Manglos, Nicolette
Mihailovic, Alexander
Miles, Carolyn
Mitchell, Gregory
Mixer, Mark
Morgan, Elizabeth
Mukai, Emi
Muparutsa, Tendai
Naginski, Erika
Ninh,Thien-Huong
Parker,Janine
Premnath, Sreshta Rit
Searle, Llerena
Shaddock, Justin
Sharpe, Avery
Smith, Candis Watts
Thompson, Drew
Thorson, Joshua
Wang, Qing Wendy
Williams, Marion

 

David Ackerson

Visiting Lecturer in Physical Education and Acting Director of the Williams Outing Club

David has assumed the role of Interim Williams Outing Club Director after 3 years as the Assistant Director. Since graduating from SUNY Cortland with a Master’s Degree in Recreation and Leisure Studies, David has taught for several colleges and universities including Ithaca College, New England College, Cornell University, and his Alma Mater. At Williams David has worked teaching Physical Education classes in a variety of activities, with the majority of his course load in Rock Climbing classes. In addition, David has trained Williams students as climbing instructors on campus and on trips to local crags as well as to Joshua Tree National Park. When not working or climbing, David can often be found hiking local trails with his dog Henry.

Ashley Barnes

Visiting Assistant Professor of English

Ashley Barnes comes to Williams with a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, where she specialized in nineteenth-century American literature. Her dissertation makes the case for reading Henry James as adapting a kind of love story that begins with Harriet Beecher Stowe: a love story that succeeds by way of emotions that are figured as performative and public rather than private and deep. The dissertation further argues for taking this love story as a literary critical approach, a possible model for the way that a reader might fall in love with a text.
This project built on her longstanding interests in narrative theory and in theories of emotion and ethics, and it led her to investigate guides to Bible reading, the art of portraiture, and turn-of-the-century collecting and decorating practices. She looks forward to hiking up Mt. Greylock and, with any luck, thinking productively Melvillean thoughts there.

Nancy Birdsall

Visiting Professor of Economics, Fall ’12

Nancy Birdsall is the founding president of the Center for Global Development, a think-and-do tank in Washington DC working to reduce global poverty and inequality through rigorous research and active engagement with the policy community. Previously, she served as an Executive Vice President at the Inter-American Development Bank and held management positions at the World Bank, including Director of Policy Research. In 2006 she was a Visiting Professor at Johns Hopkins/SAIS Bologna Italy. Her most recent publications include Cash on Delivery: A New Approach to Foreign Aid and New Ideas on Development after the Financial Crisis, which she co-authored with Francis Fukuyama. More

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James Blair

Assistant Professor of Chemistry

I graduated from Carleton College and then attended the University of California Berkeley, where I received a doctorate in chemistry. As a chemist, my interests lie at the intersection of chemistry and biology. In my research I have emphasized applying chemical techniques to biological problems, because chemical tools provide a powerful way to interrogate cellular systems. At Berkeley I studied the chemical biology of signaling pathways in cancer cells by designing drug-like small molecules to study the activity of an enzyme that, when dysregulated, causes cancer. As a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, I switched fields to bacterial cell biology, studying the biochemical role an essential gene plays in controlling the growth of Caulobacter crescentus, a freshwater bacterium that is a model for bacterial cell development. At Williams my research lab will leverage chemical and biological techniques to develop novel antibiotics targeting bacterial signaling machinery. Outside the classroom and the lab, I’m a coffee enthusiast, an avid cyclist, a skier, a cook, and a photographer.

Jørgen Bruhn

Research Scholar, Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature, Fall ’12

Jørgen Bruhn is a guest teacher giving only one course at Williams in the Fall term of 2012. Jørgen Bruhn has worked in several areas of comparative literature: he did his master thesis on Marcel Proust, he wrote his Ph.d. on the Russian theorist M.M Bakhtin, and as a post doc scholar he wrote on French Medieval literature. For the last six years Bruhn has mainly been teaching in the field of intermediality. After having graduated from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, he is currently teaching at Linnæus University in Växjö, Sweden. Bruhn’s recent publications include articles on novel-to-film adaptation, comics, and theory of intermediality as well as a book on medieval French Arthurian literature. Bruhn is currently editing an anthology on Adaptation theory to be published on Continuum late 2012, and he is writing a book on the mediality of literature.

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Jennifer Chuks

Assistant Professor of Physical Education and Assistant Athletic Administrator

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Phoebe Cohen

Assistant Professor of Geosciences

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David Colbert-Goicoa

Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish Language and Literature

Jeremy Cone

Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology

I’m coming to Williams from Cornell University, where I received my PhD in social psychology in the summer of 2012. My work focuses primarily on people’s judgments and decision-making, exploring, in particular, how implicit and explicit processes interact to influence judgment. This has included projects exploring how people resolve intuition/reason conflicts (e.g., Inbar, Cone, & Gilovich, 2010) as well as how intuitions develop over time. I’m also especially interested in subjective well-being, exploring how people can live the Good Life, and whether they have awareness of the best ways to do so (e.g., Cone & Gilovich, 2010).

For more info on recent work and to learn how to get involved, check out: Cornell Psych.org

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Andrew Cornell

Visiting Assistant Professor in the Program in American Studies

Andrew Cornell will be a visiting assistant professor in the American Studies program from 2012-2014. After earning a PhD in American Studies from New York University, he taught for a year at Université Stendhal – Grenoble 3, a public university in the southeast of France.

Professor Cornell specializes in the study of political economy and work, radical social movements of the 20th and 21st centuries, and the ways culture operates in complex systems of power. He takes an interdisciplinary approach to these topics, combining historical methods with the insights of various schools of critical social theory.

He is the author of Oppose and Propose! Lessons from Movement for New Society, an analysis of a feminist pacifist organization active in the 1970s and 1980s. He has written for popular magazines and websites such as Utne Reader, Left Turn, The Nation.com, and Punk Planet. He is currently completing a book-length intellectual and social history of U.S. anarchist movements active in the mid-20th century.

Prior to his academic career, Professor Cornell worked as a labor union organizer, coordinated programs that sent books to prisoners, and staffed a summer camp for children with LGBTQ parents. In his spare time he enjoys skiing, snowboarding, hiking, bicycling, skateboarding, and playing music loudly.

Margaux Cowden

Visiting Assistant Professor of English

Margaux Cowden earned her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Irvine in 2009 and has spent the last two years teaching American Studies and LGBT Studies at Temple University in Philadelphia. She specializes in American literature and transatlantic modernism, with an emphasis on gender and sexuality. Her current book project maps the convergence of modernist literature, sexual science, and human geography and explores the ways in which modernist appropriations of geography generate queer sexual frameworks. When not geeking out on turn-of-the-century science, she can be found feeding her sourdough bread starter, knitting, sewing, and cycling.

Annelle Curulla

Assistant Professor of French Literature and Language

Annelle Curulla (Ph.D Columbia University, B.A. Connecticut College) works on the literature and culture of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, with an emphasis on the theory and practice of theater. Her dissertation, “The Convent Plays of the French Revolution,” examined theatrical representations of sacred feminine space in relation to republican gender ideology and the development of French drama Additional research interests in book history, woman and authorship, and the relationship between literature and secularism. Prior visiting positions at Bowdoin College and Sarah Lawrence College.

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Ryan Coyne

Assistant Professor of Religion

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Eva Dessein

Visiting Assistant Professor of French Language and Pedagogy

Eva Dessein is finishing her PhD at Vanderbilt University in French and Applied Linguistics. She will join the Williams faculty in the Fall as a Visiting Assistant Professor in French Language and Pedagogy. Eva is interested in Language Pedagogy and the impact of language learning on identity construction. Her current research focuses on learner identity development in study abroad contexts.
A native speaker of French, she has taught French language courses at all levels of the language curriculum both on the Vanderbilt campus and in the Vanderbilt in France study abroad program in Aix-en-Provence, and English courses at the English Department of La Sorbonne and La Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. More

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Oyebade Dosunmu

Visiting Assistant Professor of Music

Dr. Oyebade Dosunmu holds M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Ethnomusicology from the University of Pittsburgh where he also earned a Certificate in African Studies. His research spans traditional and urban music cultures across Africa and the African Diaspora, including Yoruba masquerading and theatrical genres, popular music, and modern art music. His other interests include music and postcoloniality, transnationalism in music, music and politics, music and youth subcultures, music theater in world cultures, and Afro-Asiatic musical dialogue. Dr. Dosunmu has delivered papers at various conferences in the United States, Europe and Nigeria, and contributed to academic and non-academic publications. His current book project on transnational afrobeat maps the dance-protest genre’s migrations from 1960s Lagos to the United States and Europe, and examines aesthetic and ideological dialogues ensuing in the process. Presently, he is also compiling two anthologies of vocal works by composers from Africa and the African Diaspora. Dr. Dosunmu’s engagement with African music integrates the scholarly and performative, as evident in the “hands-on” approach he encourages in his World Music and African Music courses. As an active performer, he has featured with various African dance and drumming ensembles and choirs in Africa and the United States. He directs the Fela Sowande Singers, a vocal ensemble dedicated to the performance of African choral music, and co-edits the multimedia periodical AfroBeat Journal.

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Kaye Edwards

Class of 1955 Visiting Professor of International Studies, Spring ’13

A member of Haverford College’s faculty since 1986, Kaye Edwards received her Ph.D. from the University of Colorado in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology and did post-doctoral research in tropical parasitology in Boston. She currently teaches courses that explore various dimensions of social injustice, including how they generate health inequalities and how they might be transformed through actions grounded in solidarity with oppressed communities. Edwards was Director of the Center for Peace and Global Citizenship (CPGC) from 2003-2006, and is the founder of Haverford House, CPGC’s post-baccalaureate community-action program in Philadelphia. She currently serves as the Coordinator of the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program and as the Faculty Director of Quaker Affairs. This summer, Edwards will accompany 10 Haverford students as they learn about Nicaraguan natural and political history and visit grassroots projects in central Nicaragua. During her upcoming sabbatical, she will explore specific ways that U.S. and Nicaraguan activists can address the high levels of cervical cancer in Nicaragua through technology transfer, liberatory pedagogy, and mutually beneficial cross-cultural partnerships.

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Abeer El-Anwar

Visiting Assistant Professor of Arabic

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Laura Ephraim

Assistant Professor of Political Science

Laura Ephraim is a political theorist with strong interests in the history of science, techno-futurism, and feminist theory. She completed her graduate studies at Northwestern University in 2010, where her research traced the influence of rhetorical sensibilities upon dominant understandings of “science” among early-modern political thinkers. She is currently an associate fellow of Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Center and teaches political and social theory for the Bard Prison Initiative, a degree program for incarcerated adults. When not in prison, she enjoys cooking, tap dancing, and treasure hunting at thrift stores. An “Eph” since birth, Laura is thrilled to be joining a community where she need never explain how to pronounce her last name.

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Katie Gardiner

Visiting Artist in Residence in Choral Activities, Fall ’12

Katie Gardiner is thrilled to be filling in as Visiting Artist-in-Residence in Choral Activities at Williams College for the fall 2012 semester. Ms. Gardiner is currently the interim Director of Choral Activities at Skidmore College. Katie Gardiner holds degrees in Choral Conducting and Music Education from the Eastman School of Music and the Hartt School of Music. As a vocalist, Ms. Gardiner has performed with the acclaimed professional ensemble “Voices” in Rochester, NY. Ms. Gardiner, a Connecticut native, now resides in Vermont.

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Matthew Gardner Spencer

Visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics

I majored in mathematics at Williams college and continued on to receive my Ph.D. in mathematics from Brown University in 2011. My research interests include groups of power series, arithmetic dynamics, and number theory. Before returning to Williams, I taught a variety of courses at Brown University and Oberlin College. In what spare time I can find, I enjoy solving puzzles-some mathematical, some lexical, and many that defy categorization.

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Andrew Haringer

Visiting Assistant Professor of Music, Fall ’12

A native of Seattle, Professor Haringer received his BA from Dartmouth College and his PhD from Columbia University. His research interests include the music of Franz Liszt; political, religious, and poetic themes in Romantic music; topics theory; and film music. His writings on music have appeared in American, Italian, and French publications, and he is currently at work on a chapter for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Topics Theory. He has taught courses on a diverse range of musical subjects at Dartmouth, Columbia, NYU, Manhattan College, and Montclair State University. An active pianist, he has performed throughout New York City as a soloist and accompanist. When not in the classroom or library, he enjoys hiking, biking, and other outdoor pursuits.

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Nicole Harrington

Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology, Spring ’13

Dr. Nicole Harrington is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Williamstown and Pittsfield. An expert in cognitive behavioral therapy, Dr. Harrington is the former Program Director of the Brien Family Center where she established an anxiety disorders treatment program. Her research interests include the cognitive behavioral treatment of anxiety disorders in community mental health settings and the effectiveness of practice-research collaboratives. Dr. Harrington received her PhD from the University of Vermont and completed her clinical internship and post-doctoral training at the National Center for PTSD at the Boston VA Medical Center. She was an adjunct member of the psychology faculty at the University of Massachusetts – Boston and a consultant to the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center before moving to the Berkshires.

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Galit Hasan-Rokem

Croghan Bicentennial Visiting Professor in Jewish Studies, Fall ’12

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Johanna Heinrichs

Visiting Lecturer in Art History

Johanna Heinrichs studies Renaissance architectural history, with a special interest in villa and landscape studies as well as urbanism. After receiving a B.A. from Williams College, she spent two years as a Williams Herchel Smith fellow at the University of Cambridge. During her Ph.D. studies in the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University, she taught courses on the urban history of Rome and on Italian Renaissance painting and sculpture. Her current research deals with the patronage of Venetian nobles in Venice’s mainland territories in the sixteenth century.

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Peter Heller

Visiting Professor of Economics, Spring ’13

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Alicia Hofelich

Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology

I did my graduate work at the University of Michigan, where I received a PhD in Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience and a Masters in Statistics. I have enjoyed teaching courses in Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Neuroscience, and Introductory Psychology and look forward to developing a course in Social Neuroscience. My research interests in empathy bridge the fields of both cognitive and social psychology. In my work, I use an interdisciplinary approach to understand how basic processes like attention, emotion perception, and facial imitation interact with individual differences to produce empathy and helping behavior. Outside of teaching and research, I am also an avid musician, and played flute in U of M’s Life Sciences Orchestra throughout my time in graduate school.

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Scott Honecker

Visiting Assistant Professor of Physical Education and Head Wrestling Coach

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David Kaiser

Stanley Kaplan Visiting Professor of American Foreign Policy

David Kaiser returns this fall for his second stint as the Stanley Kaplan Visiting Professor in Leadership Studies, teaching two courses on American foreign policy. (He was the first incumbent of the chair in 2006-7.) For the last 36 years he has taught at Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, and the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. He has written six books on European diplomacy, American foreign policy, baseball,, and famous criminal cases. He is also an active cyclist who enjoys the terrain around Williamstown.

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Ryan Kiggins

Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science

I am a Visiting Assistant Professor in Political Science / International Relations for the 2012-13 academic year. I received a Ph.D. in Political Science / International Relations in 2011 from the University of Florida. My research interests include international political economy, international relations theory, US cyber security policy, US internet governance policy, the global politics of electronic commerce, and, more broadly, information communications technology and global politics. My dissertation found that US policymakers purposed the internet, in the post-Cold War era, as the master key for opening overseas markets and political institutions to American products and political ideals. Recent publications include a book chapter that examines how US internet governance policy is informed by US national security discourse. Other work, presently under review, includes a monograph based on dissertation findings, while, in progress work includes a monograph on the normative origins US cyber security policy and a book manuscript based on my dissertation. I have taught introduction to international relations, international political economy, world politics (comparative politics), international relations of the middle east, and ethics and international affairs (international organization and law). I will be offering a course on Global Cyber Politics during the Spring 2013 term.

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Jeremy King

Visiting Professor of History, Spring ’13

A major in Russian and East European Studies as an undergraduate at Yale, Jeremy King received his PhD in History at Columbia University, and published his dissertation with Princeton University Press in 2002 as “Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1848-1948.” Professor of History at Mount Holyoke College, he has guest-taught at Amherst College and at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic. He is now completing a book, “Who Is Who? Separate but Equal in Imperial Austria,” concerning constitutional experiments aimed at containing conflict among Germans, Czechs, Poles, Ukrainians, Italians, and other “nations” or “races” in imperial Austria before the First World War.

Yakov Klots

Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian

Yakov (Yasha) Klots holds an M.A. in Russian literature from Boston College (2005) and a Ph.D. from Yale University (2011), where he also taught courses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian culture. He has worked on contemporary Russian poetry, émigré literature, bilingualism and literary translation, Gulag narratives, and the mythology of St. Petersburg. He is the author of Joseph Brodsky in Lithuania (St. Petersburg: Perlov Design Center, 2010; in Russian), which includes his photographs of Lithuanian towns and rural landscapes. Together with Ross Ufberg, he translated intro English Tamara Petkevich’s Memoir of a Gulag Actress (DeKalb: Northern Illinois UP, 2010) and, most recently, Sergei Dovlatov’s The Outpost: Notes of a Correspondent. He is currently on an anthology of Russian poetry about New York. His hobbies include street photography and travel.

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Eric Knibbs

Assistant Professor of History
Eric Knibbs is a historian of the Middle Ages, with particular interest in the phenomenon of medieval forgery and the false decretals of Pseudo-Isidore. He is the author of “Ansgar, Rimbert and the Forged Foundations of Hamburg Bremen” (Ashgate, 2009). He has taught at Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania; he received his Ph.D.
in Medieval Studies from Yale in 2009.

Yong Suk Lee

Assistant Professor of Economics

Yong Suk Lee (Ph.D., Economics, Brown University) specializes in urban economics, development economics with a focus on East Asia, and the economics of education and health. His recent research examines business start-ups in the US, secondary school allocation systems in South Korea, NGO organization in Indonesia, and Medicaid subsidies to nursing homes in the US. Yong Suk comes from a diverse academic and professional background. He received a Master of Public Policy from Duke University and a Bachelor degree in architecture from Seoul National University. As he made the transition from architecture to economics, he worked as an architecture designer and real estate development consultant for five years.

Haohsiang Liao

Visiting Lecturer in Chinese

Haohsiang Liao is a Ph.D. Candidate in Chinese Language Pedagogy at the Ohio State University. He received his MA from the Graduate Institute of Teaching Chinese as a Second Language at National Taiwan Normal University. He has taught Chinese at Williams College and Harvard University. He has also co-authored three Chinese language textbooks for advanced learners. His research interests are Chinese language pedagogy, Chinese linguistics, and cross-cultural communication.

Nia Love

Visiting Artist-in-Residence in Dance

Nia Love Ms. Love is a recent 2001-2002 recipient of the International Fulbright Fellow for both performer/lecturer and researcher.

A graduate from Howard University Fine Art Department received her BFA in Theatre/ Directing and a graduate from Florida State University Dance department where she received her MFA in Dance Performance and choreography. As a dancer, Love has performed works by and worked with Alicia Alonzo (Ballet Nacionale de Cuba), Garth Fagan/ (Bucket Dance Theatre), Kevin Jeff (Jubilations), Pearl Reynolds, Alwin Nicolais and Min Tanaka (Japan), Marlies Yearby (The Ali Project) and Ornette Coleman (Prime Time). Ms. Love’s work has been presented at such venues the Royce Hall Theater, in Los Angeles; Theater Artaus, in San Francisco; the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, in Washington, DC; and throughout New York City—Lincoln Center, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Dance Theater Workshop, Symphony Space, Dancing in the Streets, Aaron Davis Hall, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, 651 Arts, Judson Church, Wave Hill and Sadler Wells (London).

She was the guest artist in residence at DTW 2009-2010. Presently Ms. Love is a current faculty at Dance New Amsterdam in New York city. Most recently Love has joined forces with Marjani Forte and both choreographers, dancers are Co-Directors of Love|Forte a collective.

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Nicolette Manglos

Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology

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Alexander Mihailovic

Visiting Professor of English, Spring ’13
Alexandar Mihailovic’s books are Corporeal Words: Mikhail Bakhtin’s Theology of Discourse (Northwestern University Press) and the edited volume Tchaikovsky and His Contemporaries: A Centenary Symposium (Greenwood Press). His published articles cover a range of subjects, including African-American studies, cultural relations during the Cold War, Orthodox theology and literary theory, nineteenth- and twentieth century Russian and Ukrainian literatures, the criminal subculture in Russia, Russian popular music, contemporary Russian painters, Russian cinema and the current struggle for LGBT rights in Russia. He has translated Russian literature and literary criticism. He received his B.A. from Columbia and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Yale, and has taught at Hofstra University, Columbia and Bennington College.

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Carolyn Miles

Assistant Professor of Physical Education, Coordinator of Student-Athlete Well Being and Physical Education

Carolyn was born and raised in the New York metropolitan area. As a college student she attended the University of New Hampshire in Durham. She majored in kinesiology with a focus in physical education/pedagogy and a minor in nutrition. A four year member of the varsity women’s rowing team, Carolyn was captain her senior year. After graduation, Carolyn stayed in New Hampshire to become a graduate assistant to her former team. She took over the varsity coach’s role during the second semester and led the team to a first place finish at New England Championships and an ECAC trophy. The following two years she became the novice coach, working to train a crew of 25 to 30 women annually.
In the fall of 2001 Carolyn move back to New York to take a position at Sarah Lawrence College as the aquatics director. She ran the pool, training a staff of lifeguards and water safety instructors. In addition Carolyn coached the rowing team, a program that had only 2 members when she arrived but quickly became one of the largest teams on campus. Carolyn was named Associate Director of Physical Education and Athletics a few years after joining the Sarah Lawrence staff. She was elected to the Administrative Staff Committee of the College and became Chair. Carolyn also served as swim chair for the Hudson Valley Athletic Conference for 6 years and is currently the Vice President of the women’s conference.
For eleven summers beginning in 1997, Carolyn worked at Camp Merriwood, a residential camp in New Hampshire. Carolyn’s position as Head counselor was to organize daily activities for 135 campers and over 30 staff members.
In the fall of 2004 Carolyn began graduate work at Columbia University’s Teachers College. She studied applied physiology and nutrition, a program she picked so that she could teach a wider variety of physical education activity courses to the students at Sarah Lawrence College.
In 2010 Carolyn was named Acting Director of Physical Education and Athletics after the retirement of the previous director. In this role she is responsible for the management and administration of all aspects of the intercollegiate athletic program including budgeting, personnel management, year-round facilities use management, and supporting coaches in the recruitment and retention of student athletes.
When Carolyn is not working she enjoys spending time with her family, especially playing with her three-year-old son Reed. Carolyn also enjoys skiing, reading and traveling.

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Gregory Mitchell

Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies

Gregory is thrilled to be joining the Department of Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies as its new assistant professor. His research concerns male prostitution, sex tourism, and everyday performances of racialized masculinity in Brazil. He received his PhD in Performance Studies at Northwestern University, from whose Gender Studies program he also received a PhD Certificate and a Mellon Cluster Fellowship. While there, he designed and taught many popular courses on topics such as: sexual economies and sex work; queer theory and sexuality in global context; gender and performance; and ethnographic methods. In 2010, students voted him into the Faculty Honor Roll for excellence in teaching. He also received the Presidential Fellowship and membership in the Society of Fellows, that university’s highest honor for graduate research. His work appears in American Ethnologist, The Journal of Popular Music Studies, and The Wagadu Journal of Transnational Feminist Studies, as well as in several edited volumes in Brazil and the United States. In his spare time, he enjoys cooking and is currently honing his skills at Indian cuisine. He is excited to be moving to Williamstown and is eager to explore the area’s natural surroundings.

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Mark Mixer

Visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics

I specialize in discrete mathematics, including combinatorics, graph theory, group theory, and geometry. I earned a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Northeastern University in 2010, and a B.A. from Dartmouth College in 2003. After receiving my doctorate, I worked as a post-doctoral fellow at l’Université libre de Bruxelles in Belgium and then at the Fields Institute in Toronto. Currently, my research includes a geometric project on tessellations of finite closed flat 3-manifolds and an algebraic project on the alternating groups.

I lived most of my life in New England and am excited to call Williamstown home for the 2012-2013 year.

Elizabeth Morgan

Visiting Lecturer in Art, Fall ’12

My interest in architecture continues to be inspired by both the academic and professional realms. The professors and critics I had at the Yale School of Architecture introduced me to ways of thinking I may never have discovered on my own. Just as their insights have profoundly informed my architectural work, I strive to have a similar impact on others. The most important thing I attempt to convey in design studios is an understanding of the power of form. The ability to recognize architecture as a physical index of choices – revealed in how a wall meets a ceiling, how one material transitions into another – is essential to developing an architectural language and to creating specific qualities of space.

In addition to teaching, I am a practicing architect with Kuhn Riddle Architects in Amherst, MA. My work has ranged in size from a 15,000 square-foot masonry building for the University of Massachusetts Amherst Marching Band to a 1,000 square-foot affordable home. In 2010, a colleague and I received the Western Massachusetts American Institute of Architects’ highest recognition, the Honor Award, for our design of a sustainable residential housing development. I am particularly interested in exploring the overlap of modern and vernacular design in my own work, and approach each project with sensitivity to site, scale, material and light.

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Emi Mukai

Visiting Assistant Professor of Japanese

I just received my ph.D. in Linguistics from University of Southern California. My major concern has been the properties of so-called the Computational System (hypothesized to be at the center of our language faculty), and how to argue for its realization scientifically. I am also interested in the grammar of Japanese and the difference and the similarity among languages, and I love teaching Japanese.

I have never lived in a snowy area in my life so far and am so looking forward to moving in and enjoying the fresh air in Williamstown, and meeting all of you!

Tendai Muparutsa

Visiting Artist in Residence in African Music Performance

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Erika Naginski

Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor of Art History

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Thien-Huong Ninh

Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow in Religion

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Janine Parker

Visiting Artist-in-Residence in Dance

Janine Parker has been teaching ballet for twenty-five years, including as an adjunct member of the Williams College Dance Department since 2007. Before moving out to Western Massachusetts she had a longtime affiliation with the Boston Ballet School, where she continues to teach during the summer. She is also the director of The Ballet School at Bement, an after school program in Deerfield, MA, that she founded in 2007. Ms. Parker has written about ballet and dance since 1989 for The Boston Phoenix and The Boston Globe. For the 2012-13 academic year, Ms. Parker will teach Beginning through Advanced Ballet, co-teach the DANC100 course “Foundations in Dance,” and serve as Co- Director for CoDa, the contemporary dance ensemble on campus.

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Sreshta Rit Premnath

Arthur Levitt, Jr. ’52 Artist-in-Residence In Art, Fall ’12

Sreshta Rit Premnath is an artist and editor of the magazine Shifter. He completed his MFA at Bard College in 2006, and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2008. In 2011 he received an Art Matters Foundation Grant.

Premnath’s work has been presented in solo exhibitions, including “Storeys End”, Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin, 2011; “Rhizome”, Wave Hill, New York, 2011; “Leo (procedures in search of an original index)”, Gallery SKE, Bangalore, 2010; “Zero Knot”, Art Statements, Art|41|Basel, 2010; as well as numerous group exhibitions.

Premnath currently teaches in the MFA program at Parsons College (New York) as well as the BFA program at Cooper Union (New York) and looks forward to working with students at Williams College as the Arthur Levitt Fellow in the fall of 2012.

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Llerena Searle

Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology

Llerena Searle is a cultural anthropologist who researches urban change in India. In particular, she studies the ways in which business people, financiers, consultants, and other elites have attempted to transform Indian land and buildings into international financial resources, precipitating a sudden, violent, and unequal urbanization process. In addition, she is interested in material and consumer cultures, media, semiotics, and the built environment. She first visited India as an undergraduate at Williams College and went on to do her PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. She has taught anthropology at the Rhode Island School of Design and at the University of Rhode Island.

Justin Shaddock

Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Philosophy

Justin Shaddock is a philosopher interested in the relationships among the self, the world, and society. He focuses on the topics of self-knowledge and freedom in the modern German philosophical tradition. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Kant’s idea that our self-knowledge justifies our metaphysical knowledge. He is currently researching Hegel and Marx, concentrating on the questions of how modern social institutions constitute the self and condition our freedom. Justin will be a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Philosophy Department at Williams College from 2012-2014. He earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Chicago in 2011, and his B.A. from the University of Notre Dame in 2004. He and his wife have two rabbits. Flannel is sassy and Barkley is sweet. More

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Avery Sharpe

Sterling Brown ’22 Visiting Professor of Music, Fall ’12
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Candis Watts Smith

Assistant Professor of Political Science

Candis Watts Smith received her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Duke University. After receiving her doctorate, Dr. Smith spent one year at Texas A&M University as a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Political Science, working closely with the Project for Equity, Representation and Governance (PERG). She specializes in American politics, with an emphasis racial and ethnic politics. Her current research agenda addresses how demographic changes influence American politics. This agenda includes a project entitled Black Mosaic: Changing Contours of Black Identity and Black Politics, which is a comparative analysis of African Americans’ and Black immigrants’ identities, attitudes, and behaviors. Dr. Smith is also working on a project on the Millennial Generation and their interactions with and reactions to race and politics.

Drew Thompson

Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow in Art and History

As the Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow in Art and History, I will instruct classes on photography and African visual culture. My current research uses the lives and works of Mozambican photographers to explore racial discourses in colonial and post-independence Mozambique. I have taught and guest lectured courses on African cinema, European and African art, and museum studies. I am currently working on a co-edited journal issue for Critical Interventions on the contemporary arts of Central and Portuguese-speaking Africa. My work has been published in African Arts, the Dictionary of African Biography, and JSTOR’s ALUKA Struggles for Freedom digital archive. Other areas of particular interest to me are the study of historical photographic archives in Southern Africa and curating museum exhibitions. I am presently completing my PhD at the University of Minnesota in African History, and I am a graduate of Williams College.

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Joshua Thorson

Visiting Lecturer in Art

Joshua Thorson is an artist, writer, and curator whose main interests are at the intersections of narrative, psychology, science, and religion. He received an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts in Film/Video. His work has been screened at the Museum of Modern Art, Rotterdam International Film Festival, the New Museum, American Repertory Theater, among others.

Thorson is currently working on a practice-based Ph.D. in Electronic Arts at RPI, where he has taught video and art history courses. In addition to a written paper, the dissertation project will include a feature-length video and a curated screening series of works by several artists spanning four decades of narrative video art. Thorson’s essay on Lisa Steele’s narrative body of work will be published in the forthcoming DVD box set of her work. He has worked as an editor on several of Charles Atlas’s Merce Cunningham Dance Company films, most recently on the 90 minute film “Ocean.”

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Qing (Wendy) Wang

Assistant Professor of Statistics

I grew up in Beijing, China and came to the U.S. to pursue a doctorate degree in 2007. I have been studying in the Department of Statistics at Penn State University for almost 5 years and was expected to receive my Doctorate Degree in Statistics in summer 2012.
The primary focus of my thesis research has been a set of topics concerning U-statistics (a class of unbiased estimators) and their practical implementation. More generally, I am interested in modern nonparametric methodology in statistics.

During my years at Penn State, I taught a senior-level course in Applied Regression Analysis for three semesters and an introductory statistics course for one semester. To learn more about my research and teaching experience, please visit my webpage.

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Marion Williams

Visiting Lecturer in Theatre, Fall ’12

Marion Williams designs for in theatre, opera and dance performances across the country. Her work has been presented Off-Broadway, McCarter Theatre, The Old Globe, Actor’s Theatre of Louisville, Centerstage, PlayMakers Repertory Company, The Folger Shakespeare Theatre, Louisville Ballet, Cincinnati Ballet, Triad Stage, Tulsa Ballet, The Juilliard Opera Center, Manhattan School of Muisc, Round House Theatre, Florida State Opera, Two River Theatre Company, Introdans, Mint Theater, Barrington Stage Company, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Berkshire Theatre Festival, and the Jose Limon Dance company among others. More