2015-16 New Faculty

Beverly Acha

Visiting Lecturer in Art, Fall ’15

Beverly Acha is an artist originally from Miami, Fl. She received a BA in Studio Art and American Studies from Williams College in 2009 and an MFA in Painting/Printmaking from Yale School of Art in 2012. Acha is the recipient of the Frederick M. Peyser Prize in Painting, Berkshire Art Association Fellowship, Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, and Robert Schoelkopf Memorial Travel Grant to Brazil. Acha has been awarded artist residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, Salem Art Works, and Roswell Artist in Residence. Recent exhibitions in New York include “Museum Starter Kit” at El Museo del Barrio and “Over Here, In There”, a two-person show at Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center. Acha has given visiting artist lectures at The School of Visual Arts, Visual and Critical Studies Department, New York, NY and at Williams College. Website: beverlyacha.com

Sara Adler Mandelbaum

Visiting Assistant Professor of Economics

Sara Adler Mandelbaum is an economist specializing in Environmental & Natural Resource Economics and Behavioral & Experimental economics. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. degrees in Economics from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She received her B.A. in Economics and Mathematics from Case Western Reserve University. Sara has over 13 quarters of teaching experience. She has been an instructor for Intermediate Environmental Economics, Natural Resource Economics, Intermediate Microeconomics, Principles of Microeconomics, Principles of Macroeconomics, Introduction to Economics, and Introduction to Graduate Mathematical Finances. Sara’s research uses experimental economics to examine the impacts of present biased preferences and information uncertainty on resource use. Outside of the classroom she can be found playing with her dog, ballroom dancing, baking, running, riding her bike, or exploring the outdoors.
For more information visit about Sara, you can visit her website

Baktygul Aliev

Assistant Professor of Russian

I was born in Kyrgyzstan when it was a part of the USSR. My bachelor’s (American University of Central Asia) and first master’s (Ball State University) degrees were in journalism. Having taught journalism and worked as a freelance journalist in Kyrgyzstan, I studied for another master’s and then a PhD in Russian literature at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. My dissertation explored sociological and political dimensions of human identity formation in Dostoevsky’s novels. I am interested in Russian literature and its intersections with historical and political processes, including Russia’s relationship with the surrounding peoples and cultures.

Sarah Allen

Visiting Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, Spring & Fall 2016

Sarah Allen is Associate Professor of Chinese at Wellesley College, where she teaches courses on (mostly pre-modern) Chinese literature and culture, as well as modern and classical Chinese language. Her research focuses on medieval Chinese literature, especially narratives and anecdotal literature, which allows her to read lots of stories about ghosts, hapless scholars, and animals disguised as beautiful women.

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Cristina Alvarez Millan

Richmond Visiting Professor of Religion, Fall ’15

Cristina Álvarez Millán is an historian of medieval Islamic medicine, with particular interest in the history of the clinical record and Social History of Medicine. She received her Ph.D. in Arabic Philology from the Universidad Complutense of Madrid in 1993, and she has worked in the Dept. of Medieval History and Historiographical Sciences and Techniques in the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) since 2004, responsible for the core course History of Medieval Spain. She has been the recipient of national Spanish research grants and university awards, as well as a postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in London.

Her study of medieval Islamic medicine through extant prescriptions for real patients and case histories opened a field until recently unexplored, which also includes issues such as the abyss between medical theory and actual practice, the analysis of Islamic medical texts in their scientific, literary, historical and social contexts, critical scepticism regarding the reliability of sources, the aims underlying the writing of medical literature, and self-advertising techniques.

She also began work on the inventory of the third most relevant collection of Arabic manuscripts in Spain (preserved at the Royal Academy of History in Madrid), a project which additionally resulted in an unexpected interest and several publications on Pascual de Gayangos, the actual father of Spanish Arabism and a rare –as much as fascinating- specimen in nineteenth-century Spain who became an indispensable international reference for hispanists, historians, archivists, bibliographers and bibliophiles alike.

Her current research mainly focuses on disease description versus retrospective diagnosis, women as patients, individualized versus standardized medicine in medieval Islam, the patient-physician relationship, the history of the clinical record, and the use versus misuse of the history of medieval Islamic medicine.

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Valentine Balguerie

Visiting Assistant Professor of French

Valentine Balguerie’s primary research and teaching interests focus on the literature and culture of early modern France, with a special attention to women and gender studies, philosophy and seventeenth-century prose fiction. She’s especially fascinated by the notion of personhood and its evolution from the Greek and Roman tradition, and most particularly, the formulation of feminine personhood in 17th-century historical novellas, which was the focus of her graduate studies at Brown University.

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Ethan Barron

Assistant Professor of Physical Education, Head Men’s Track & Field Coach

I am a new addition to Williams after brief stops at both Middlebury College and Tufts University. While earning degrees in chemistry and math at Midd, I realized that I was more driven by people than numbers. That lead to masters programs in Education as well as Human Development at Tufts and a career in coaching. Before becoming a coach, I had dreams of owning a bakery.

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Kirsten Beck

Visiting Assistant Professor of Arabic Studies

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Steve Best

Margaret Bundy Scott Visiting Professor of English, Fall ’15

David Brakke

Croghan Bicentennial Visiting Professor of Religion, Fall ’15

I am a professor of history at Ohio State, and I teach and do research in ancient Christianity, especially monasticism and “Gnosticism.” I received my PhD from Yale University and, before joining Ohio State, I taught for nineteen years in the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University. One of my current projects is to revise, update, and expand The Gnostic Scriptures, a collection of ancient sources originally edited and translated by Bentley Layton.
More information here

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Katherine Brown

Visiting Assistant Professor of French

Katherine A. Brown received her Ph.D. in French literature from Princeton University and has taught most recently at the College of William and Mary. She is the author of Boccaccio’s Fabliaux (2014) and several articles comparing the French and Italian traditions of the medieval period. Her research and teaching interests include medieval short stories, romances, and epic, cross-cultural exchanges, geo-criticism in medieval literature, space and boundaries, and French and Francophone cinema.

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Matthew Chao

Assistant Professor of Economics

My training and interests are at the intersection of psychology and economics, i.e. behavioral economics. My research examines how firms and governments use (non-monetary) cognitive and social incentives to influence individual decision-making. My current projects evaluate the effectiveness of these incentives in marketing and fundraising campaigns, in employee compensation systems, and in regulatory policies on conflicts-of-interest. My research utilizes a range of research methods including observational data analysis, computer lab experiments, and field experiments. I am receiving my Ph.D. in Social Science from Caltech in June of this year; I also hold a B.A. from Dartmouth College. Prior to my time at Caltech, I spent two years on the research staff at Harvard Business School working for the Negotiations faculty.

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Lauren Childs

Visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics, Spring ’16

Lauren Childs uses mathematical models and quantitative analysis to address biologically motivated questions such as the impact of pathogen-host interactions on disease transmission. Her research includes computational approaches with applications to the immune system, infectious disease, bacteriophage-host interactions, and coupled oscillators. Following her Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Cornell University in 2010, she held postdoctoral positions in the Schools of Mathematics and Biology at Georgia Tech and most recently in the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. In her spare time, she enjoys spending time outdoors, often hiking, biking, and running, but her passion is ultimate frisbee. Since 2000, she has played for and coached a variety of ultimate teams, including appearances at college and club nationals as well as various international tournaments. More information can be found at her website.

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Jeremy Cone

Assistant Professor of Psychology

I’m coming to Williams most directly from Yale University where I was a post-doc in the Human Cooperation Lab. Before that, I was a visiting faculty member here at Williams for a year. I received my PhD in social psychology from Cornell in the Summer of 2012. My research aims to build a broad, inter-disciplinary understanding of how non-conscious processes function and how and when they result in changes to implicit mental representations. Some of the kinds of questions I ask: After you’ve developed an impression of someone, what kinds of things could you learn about them that would instantly change your automatic and unintentional responses towards them? Can learning something wildly inconsistent with an impression you’ve developed of someone change the way you visually represent their face? How does learning that members of your group behave in anti-social ways change how you automatically and unintentionally evaluate the group? For more info on recent work and to learn how to get involved, check out: http://cornellpsych.org/people/jcone/

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Joanna Das

Postdoctoral Fellow in Dance

(BA in Dance and History, Columbia; MA in American Studies, NYU; PhD in History, Columbia; Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Stanford)
I come to Williams after having taught at Barnard College and Stanford University. My passion in life is teaching dance history, theory, and practice from an intercultural and interdisciplinary perspective. My research focuses on the intersection of race, politics, and performance in the modern world, and I am currently writing a book about the choreographer Katherine Dunham (1909-2006) for Oxford University Press. One of my secondary research interests is in musical theater dance, and I am working on an article about the musical In Dahomey (1903). Before and during graduate school, I worked as a professional dancer and choreographer in New York City, where I performed at Dance Theater Workshop (now NYLA), the Cunningham Studio, WAXWorks, and DanceNow/NYC. My love for dance and dance history has also led to some fun side gigs, including curating an exhibit on the history of American Ballet Theater for the Library of Congress and serving as a historical consultant for The Rockettes.

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Rachel Friedman

Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Arabic Literature

Rachel Friedman completed her undergraduate studies at Georgetown University and her graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley. She is interested in the intersections of literature and religion in classical Arabic poetry and prose. Her current research focuses on theories of language in classical Islamic texts, specifically literary and legal interpretations of the Qur’an. She has done research abroad in Yemen, Morocco, and Tunisia, and she enjoys traveling to new places.

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Eugene Gholz

Stanley Kaplan Visiting Professor of American Foreign Policy

Eugene Gholz is the Stanley Kaplan Visiting Professor of American Foreign Policy at Williams College for 2015-16, on leave from the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. His research and teaching interests primarily focus on innovation, defense management, energy, and U.S. foreign policy, striving to combine scholarly rigor with real-world relevance – really understanding practical policy problems the way that government decision-makers face them and trying to make serious academic work comprehensible to people outside the ivory tower. From 2010-2012, he served in the Pentagon as Senior Advisor to the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Manufacturing and Industrial Base Policy. He is the coauthor of two books: Buying Military Transformation: Technological Innovation and the Defense Industry, and U.S. Defense Politics: The Origins of Security Policy. He is also a research affiliate of MIT’s Security Studies Program and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. His PhD is from MIT. When he’s not doing academic things, you are likely to find him at the squash courts.

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Matthew Gibson

Assistant Professor of Economics

I work on environmental and labor economics, including the effect of air pollution on test scores, firm responses to environmental regulations, and the effect of sleep on wages. (Naturally my undergrad major was Russian literature.) I lived in Moscow and DC before heading to graduate school at UC San Diego. Outside economics, I enjoy hiking, cooking, and the blues.

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Glenn Gordinier

Senior Lecturer in Maritime Studies

More information here

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Judd Greenstein

Arthur Levitt, Jr. ’52 Artist-in-Residence in Music, Spring ’16

More information here</strong

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Catherine Robinson Hall

Lecturer in Maritime Studies

More information here

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J. Albert Harrill

Croghan Bicentennial Visiting Professor of Religion, Fall ’15

J. Albert Harrill. B.A. (highest honors) religious studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1986); M.A., Ph.D. New Testament and early Christian literature, University of Chicago (1989, 1993). New Testament studies from the wider historical perspective of classical culture and Roman imperial society. Author of three books: The Manumission of Slaves in Early Christianity (Mohr Siebeck, 1995); Slaves in the New Testament: Literary, Social, and Moral Dimensions (Fortress Press, 2006); and Paul the Apostle: His Life and Legacy in Their Roman Context (Cambridge University Press, 2012).

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Mamoru Hatakeyama

Visiting Lecturer in Japanese

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Kristen Haut

Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology

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Man He

Assistant Professor of Chinese

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Christopher Heuer

Lecturer in the Graduate Program in Art History, Fall ’15

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Joan Huguet

Visiting Assistant Professor of Music

Joan Huguet recently completed her Ph.D. in Music Theory at the Eastman School of Music (Rochester, NY), where she wrote a dissertation on formal and Schenkerian analysis of Beethoven’s sonata rondos. A graduate of a small liberal arts college herself, Joan is thrilled to be joining the Williams community, and she looks forward to sharing her passion for 18th- and 19th- century music with students from many different areas of study. In addition to playing the piano and listening to a wide variety of musical genres, Joan enjoys cooking, travel, and yoga.

Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre

Croghan Bicentennial Visiting Professor of Religion, Spring ’16

Richard King

Lecturer in Maritime Studies

More information here.

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Elizabeth Kolbert

Class of 1946 Environmental Fellow-in-Residence

Elizabeth Kolbert has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1999. Prior to that, she was a reporter for The New York Times. Her web page can be found at: elizabethkolbert.com.

Christophe Kone

Assistant Professor of German

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Joel Lee

Assistant Professor of Anthropology

Joel Lee’s research and teaching interests cluster around South Asian religions, the history of untouchability and anti-caste thought, language and semiotics, Hindi and Urdu literature, and the social life of the senses. His articles and current book project explore the politics of majoritarian inclusion and its subversion in relations between the state and stigmatized castes in colonial and postcolonial India. He is co-author, with Jayshree Mangubhai and Aloysius Irudayam, of Dalit Women Speak Out: Caste, Class and Gender Violence in India (Zubaan, 2011). He holds a PhD from Columbia University and held a research fellowship at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin before coming to Williams.

Haydee Lindo

Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow in Mathematics

Christopher Marcisz

Visiting Lecturer in Anthropology, Fall ’15

Christopher Marcisz has worked for over 20 years as a writer, editor, and journalist. For many years he was a writer and later editor at the Berkshire Eagle in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, covering local government and institutions like Williams College, MCLA, and Mass MoCA. Before moving to the Berkshires he worked on the international desk for Newsweek magazine in New York, covered national energy policy in Washington for a policy newsletter, and helped edit and was a sports columnist for an English-language weekly in Moscow. He studied English and History at the University of Pennsylvania, with a focus on twentieth-century America, and earned a masters in journalism from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

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Michael Martinez-Raguso

Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish

My research focuses on the intersections of literature, philosophy, and politics in 20th and 21st century Latin America, looking in particular at human rights violations, state power, and the relation between text, image, and body. My book project examines why state formation in Latin America always seems to be accompanied by violence against women. I analyze experimental fiction to trace this question from the dictatorships of Argentina and Chile to the crisis of femicide on the U.S.-Mexico border, research that I look forward to exploring with students in the Senior Seminar at Williams College. I hold degrees from The State University of New York at Buffalo (Ph.D. in Spanish) and Loyola University Chicago (M.A. in Spanish, B.A. in Philosophy and Classical Civilization), and have taught Spanish language and culture at both institutions.

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Jason Mientkiewicz

Visiting Lecturer in Art

Jason Mientkiewicz received his MA from the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art and his BA from Vassar College. He has worked previously for the Williams College art department, the Clark Art Institute and various arts institutions in Poland and Germany. His MA qualifying paper addresses the early collage practice of the German artist Max Ernst and its relationships with 19th and 20th-century discourses on vision, psychology and pedagogy.

Broadly, his research focuses on early 20th-century modernism, particularly in Russia and East-Central Europe, as well as the historiography of modern art. Current interests also include theories of language, labor and the political possibilities of avant-garde thought and practice in the visual arts and elsewhere.

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Asvelt Nduwumwami

Instructor in Chemistry

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Michael Nishizaki

Visiting Assistant Professor of Marine Sciences

I am a marine biologist, with specific interests in the interactions between organisms and their physical environment. My work has included studies of mussels, barnacles, sea urchins and harmful algal blooms. I received my Ph.D. from the University of Washington in Seattle, and taught several classes in marine biology as visiting faculty at Bowdoin College in Maine. In my free time I play several sports, most commonly hockey. More information about me can be found at mikenish.com

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Jamie Parra

C3 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in American Studies

Jamie Parra received his PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University in 2015. His research and teaching interests include nineteenth-century American literary and visual culture, slavery, critical theory, and gender and sexuality studies. He is currently working on his first book project, Prisoners of Style: Slavery, Ethics, and the Lives of American Literary Characters. In addition to his scholarly work, he frequently writes about contemporary art and design for Whitewall magazine. His website is jamieparra.com

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Elena Perez

Visiting Lecturer in Art

Will Rawls

Arthur Levitt, Jr. ’52 Artist-in-Residence in Dance, Spring ’16

Colin Regan

Visiting Lecturer in Physical Education and Head Men’s Crew Coach

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Mary Roberts

Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor of Art History

Mary Roberts is the John Schaeffer Associate Professor of British Art at the University of Sydney, Australia. She specializes in nineteenth-century British and Ottoman art with particular expertise in Orientalism, artistic exchanges between the Ottoman Empire and Europe and the culture of travel. Mary has been awarded residential fellowships at the Yale Center for British Art (1999 and 2008), the Getty Research Institute (2008-9), the Clark Art Institute and Oakley Center for the Humanities (2009-10) and the CASVA at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC (2014-15). Her latest book, entitled: Istanbul Exchanges. Ottomans, Orientalists and Nineteenth-century visual culture, is forthcoming in May 2015 with the University of California Press.
More information here

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Natalie Robin

Visiting Lecturer in Theatre, Spring ’16

Natalie Robin is a NYC-based lighting designer of theater, opera, dance, music and performance art and the associate producer of American Realness, a festival of contemporary performance curated by Ben Pryor. She is a founding company member and Associate Producer of Polybe + Seats, an Associate Artist of Target Margin Theater, and an adjunct faculty member at NYU Tisch. Natalie is ​also a contributing writer to Live Design Magazine and Stage Directions Magazines. Her design work often focuses on new American plays, contemporary dance and site-specific work. BA: Columbia. MFA: NYU/Tisch. Member USA 829. More information here

Maria Rodriguez

Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow in Art History

Mari Rodriguez is a Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow in Art History, specializing in contemporary art in Latin America. She is a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, where she received her Masters in 2011. She recently completed a Fulbright Student Scholarship in Brazil, researching artistic experimentation in São Paulo during Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1970s. Mari has taught courses on contemporary art of the United States and Latin America, as well as on modern and contemporary photography. Her research interests include conceptual art, art and politics, visual culture, and avant-garde radicalism. More information here.

Adam Romero

C3 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Environmental Studies

More information here

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Alejandro Sarria

Visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics

Hello, my name is Alejandro Sarria. I obtained my Ph.D in Mathematics from the University of New Orleans in Dec 2012 under Professor Ralph Saxton.

My research is in partial differential equations (pde) and mathematical fluid dynamics. Briefly, I study regularity properties in solutions of pdes modelling, among other phenomena, gas dynamics, water waves, ideal fluids, and liquid crystals. After graduating, I spent two years as a Postdoc at the University of Colorado at Boulder. There I taught linear algebra, real analysis, differential equations, discrete math, and a graduate course on Sobolev spaces with applications to pdes. Currently I am working with Steve Preston from CU Boulder on a project involving the 3D Euler equations of ideal fluids in a cylindrical domain.

I particularly enjoy running, hiking and playing/watching soccer, and look forward to working with Students and Faculty at Williams on exciting research projects and courses!    More information here

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Arunava Sen

Visiting Professor of Economics, Spring ’16

I am an economic theorist working in the area of game theory and mechanism design.
I am particularly interested in the design of voting rules and auctions.
I received my Ph.d from Princeton University in 1987. My earlier degrees were
from the University of Oxford and Delhi University. I am currently Professor
at the Indian Statistical Institute, New Delhi, India.
I am a Fellow of the Econometric Society (2003) and a recipient
of the Infosys Prize (Social Sciences, 2012).
Here is a link to my website.

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Heeryoon Shin

Visiting Assistant Professor of Art

Charlotte Silander

STINT – Research Scholar, Fall ’15

Charlotte Silander is a Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science at Linnaeus University, Sweden. Her research interests are European politics, policymaking and Higher Education. Charlotte works as a senior lecturer and researcher at the Department of Education where she is involved in research projects concerning the European Union and changing science systems effect on higher education.

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Christina Simko

Assistant Professor of Sociology

Christina Simko completed her Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Virginia. Her research and teaching specialties include culture, politics, media, and memory. She has also taught courses on sociological theory, and she especially enjoys bringing the “sociological imagination” to life by connecting classic texts with contemporary images, films, and other media. Her work on September 11 commemorations has appeared in the American Sociological Review, and her book, The Politics of Consolation: Memory and the Meaning of September 11, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. She grew up near the Appalachian Trail in Virginia and is looking forward to exploring the Berkshires with her dog Sophie, a spunky beagle-terrier mix.

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Aishah Shahidah Simmons

Sterling Brown ’22 Visiting Professor of Africana Studies, Spring ’16

Aishah Shahidah Simmons is an award-winning Black feminist lesbian filmmaker, writer, international lecturer, and activist. Her internationally acclaimed shorts Silence…Broken and In My Father’s House explore the issues of race, gender, homophobia, rape, and misogyny. An incest and rape survivor, Ms. Simmons is the creator of the Ford Foundation-funded, internationally acclaimed, award-winning film NO! The Rape Documentary. NO! explores the international atrocity of heterosexual rape and other forms of sexual assault through the first person testimonies, scholarship, spirituality, activism and cultural work of African-Americans. Subtitled in Spanish, French, and Portuguese, NO! also explores how rape is used as a weapon of homophobia. Alice Walker, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Color Purple says, “If the Black community in the Americas and in the world would heal itself, it must complete the work NO! begins.” She is the author of several essays, which have been published in both scholarly journals and anthologies, including the Foreword to the recently released Dear Sister: Letters to Survivors of Sexual Violence (Lisa Factora-Brochers, ed., AK Press 2014). Ms. Simmons presently teaches in the Women’s Studies and LGBT Studies programs at Temple University, and was both an Erma O’Brien Distinguished Guest Professor at Scripps College and a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies/Artist-in-Residence at the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture at the University of Chicago.. An Associate Editor of the online publication The Feminist Wire, Ms. Simmons’ cultural work and activism have been documented extensively in a wide range of media outlets including The Root, Crisis, Forbes, Left of Black, In These Times, Ms. Magazine, Alternet, ColorLines, Associated Press, The Philadelphia Weekly, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Philadelphia Gay News, Essence Magazine, Latitudes/Noires, NPR, Pacifica Radio Network, and BET. Ms. Simmons has screened her work, guest lectured, and facilitated workshops and dialogues at colleges and universities, high schools, conferences, international film festivals, rape crisis centers, battered women shelters, community centers, juvenile correctional facilities, and government sponsored events across the United States and Canada, throughout Italy, in South Africa, France, England, Croatia, Hungary, The Netherlands, Mexico, Kenya, Malaysia, and India. You can follow her on twitter @Afrolez and connect with her on her AfroLezCulturalWorker Facebook page. Additional information can be found at NOtheRapeDocumentary.org.

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Laura Smalarz

Assistant Professor of Psychology

Laura Smalarz is a Southern California native who completed her doctorate in Social Psychology at Iowa State University. She has spent time in New York City (at the Innocence Project) and in Boston (with family) and is excited to join the Williams community. Her research involves the application of Psychology to the study of the legal system. In particular, she is interested in eyewitness misidentification, false confessions, and social biases that contribute to and result from wrongful conviction.

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Kameron Steele

Visiting Lecturer in Theatre, Fall ’15

Kameron Steele has worked internationally as an actor and director in professional theatre and film since 1989 (AEA). A master teacher of the Suzuki Method of Actor Training, Steele has been an associate member of Tadashi Suzuki’s company (SCOT) since 1991. He was also a resident artist at Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center from 1998-2008, and at HERE Arts Center in New York City from 2007-2011. A Founding Member of the AlaSur theatre company in Mendoza, Argentina, Steele’s directing work has been seen in the USA, Mexico, Argentina, Spain, Belgium, China, Taiwan and Japan. Steele received his BFA in performance studies from Northwestern University, his MFA in theatre direction from CalArts, and has previously lectured at Brooklyn College, Long Island University, NYU, CalArts, Institut del Teatre (Barcelona), UNCuyo (Mendoza), UNA (Buenos Aires), STA (Shanghai), TNUA (Taipei) and Hosei University (Tokyo). Fluent in Spanish and Japanese, Steele’s translation of Suzuki’s Culture is the Body will be published by Theatre Communications Group (TCG) in summer 2015.
More information here

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Anicia Timberlake

C3 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Music

Anicia Timberlake received her Ph.D. in History and Literature of Music from UC Berkeley in 2015. Her dissertation, “The Politics and Praxis of Children’s Music Education in the German Democratic Republic (1949-1989),” investigates music pedagogy in socialist Germany beyond state-mandated propaganda songs, showing how music teachers, musicologists, and composers used non-texted forms of music to shape children to their own ideals of the socialist citizen. Anicia’s other research interests include Schlager (a German pop genre) and child stars in contemporary America. Outside of work, she plays the viola, the violin, and the bass, and enjoys the outdoors. Anicia is from Santa Cruz, CA.

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David Traven

Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science

David Traven holds a PhD. in Political Science from Ohio State University as well as an M.A. in Philosophy. He specializes in the law and ethics of armed conflict, international relations, and political theory. From 2014-2015 he was a MacArthur postdoctoral fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, and from 2013-2014 he taught at Kenyon College. He is the author of the forthcoming articles “Moral Cognition and the Law and Ethics of Armed Conflict” and, co-authored with Marcus Holmes, “Acting Rationally Without Really Thinking: A Logic of Rational Intuitionism for IR Theory,” International Studies Review (2015). His current book project, Law and Sentiment in International Politics: Culture, Cognition, and the Evolution of the Laws of War, examines how moral psychology shapes the creation of norms of war, particularly norms that protect non-combatants. In this book, Professor Traven combines extensive historical research and philosophical analysis with psychological experiments to show how moral beliefs and emotions—empathy in particular—influenced the development of moral and legal rules that govern the treatment of civilians in war.

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Damian Turner

Assistant Professor of Biology

Kristen van Ginhoven

Visiting Lecturer in Theatre, Spring ’16

Kristen van Ginhoven is the co-founder and Artistic Director of WAM Theatre, located in the Berkshires of MA. She is a Canadian who has spent the last twenty years working all around the world as an actor, director, educator and now producer and artistic director. She has worked locally at places like Barrington Stage Company and internationally at places like the Stratford Festival of Canada. For more information, see here.

Joshua Vandiver

Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science

Emily Vasiliauskas

Assistant Professor of English

Emily Vasiliauskas studies the literature of the English Renaissance. Her book project, Dead Letters: The Afterlife before Religion, recovers the forgotten origins of the afterlife as a way of imagining and creating ties between the living and the dead through the resources of secular literary culture, resources which included style, print publication, and the emerging category of authorship. Within a generation, the literary afterlife was incorporated into Anglican teachings, as the posthumous influence of books came to be understood as spiritually significant to authors. A chapter from this project on “The Outmodedness of Shakespeare’s Sonnets” is forthcoming in ELH. Her other teaching and research interests include the classical tradition, vanitas painting, time and temporality, secularization, moral philosophy, and tragedy. She was educated at Harvard, Cambridge, the Warburg Institute, and Princeton, and she couldn’t be more excited about joining the English Department at Williams College.

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Wadsworth,Zachary

Assistant Professor of Music

Zachary Wadsworth is a composer whose music has been performed in Carnegie Hall and Westminster Abbey. Coming to Williams from the University of Calgary, his research interests center around music in film and television, opera, music theory, and music composition. After studies at the Eastman School of Music, Yale University, and Cornell University, he has cultivated a broad reputation as a scholar and a creative artist. For more information about Dr. Wadsworth, visit zacharywadsworth.com.

Stephen Winter

Visiting Lecturer in Art

Stephen Winter has been a indie filmmaker, writer and radical artist in New York since the early 1990’s. He earned his Masters from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and Bachelors from School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Stephen has worked closely with Lee Daniels, Jonathan Caouette, Xan Cassavetes, Zoe Cassavetes, David France, John Krokidas, Daniel Radcliffe and John Cameron Mitchell, Three of his films have gone to Cannes, four of his films have gone to Skywalker Ranch and one was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary. His new film as director and writer is “Jason and Shirley” jasonandshirleyfilm.com which has been hailed by most and attacked by others. He’s a cyclist, a queer and Jamaican Hungarian Jewish biracial and most of his aesthetic interests converge around those elements.

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Joshua Yesnowitz

Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science

Joshua Yesnowitz specializes in American political and intellectual development with a particular focus on higher education, social movements, minority politics, and youth political engagement. He is co-editor of, and chapter contributor to, African Americans in U.S. Foreign Policy: From the Era of Frederick Douglass to the Age of Obama (Illinois University Press, 2015) and Agitation with a Smile: Howard Zinn’s Legacies and the Future of Activism (Paradigm Publishers, 2013). Joshua is currently preparing a book manuscript which examines institutional change and the historically-contingent role of American higher education in student political socialization. Prof. Yesnowitz holds graduate degrees from Boston University (PhD in Political Science) and Boston College (MA in Political Science) and completed his undergraduate studies at Skidmore College (BA in Government and American Studies).

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