2018-19 New Faculty

 

Sonya Auer

Visiting Assistant Professor of Biology

I am an evolutionary ecologist with a passionate interest in understanding how animals acquire and use energy to cope with changes in their environment over ecological and evolutionary time scales. I’ve studied birds and fish all over the world but most recently was working in Scotland where I was studying the energetics of juvenile salmon in small mountain streams. This work was part of a fun collaborative project aimed at understanding whether and how salmon help their offspring by dying on the spawning grounds. Next year, I’ll be teaching two really interesting courses here at the college – Conservation Biology (F) and Global Change Ecology (S). More

Amanda Bergold

Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology

Amanda Bergold is a social psychologist who studies how the principles of psychology can be applied to the legal system. In her doctoral studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Graduate Center, CUNY, her dissertation work examined how diversity impacted the quality of jury deliberations. She has spent the past two years in a fellowship with the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice based at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Her work at the Quattrone Center has focused on using facial recognition algorithms to improve the quality of eyewitness lineups. This work is featured in her recent publication, forthcoming in Law and Human Behavior.

Back to the Top

Roxana Blancas Curiel

Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Mexican Literature and Cultural Production

Roxana Blancas Curiel received her Ph.D. in Contemporary Mexican and Iberian Peninsular literature from the University of California, Riverside. Her research and teaching interests include Mexican literature and cultural production from the 20th and 21st centuries; US-Mexico-Central American borderlines and cultural studies; as well as feminist and queer theory. Her current research encompasses the contributions of the performance of female masculinity in our understanding of femininity and masculinity outside the heteronormative spectrum in Mexican social imaginary towards the construction of national identity. See more

Back to the Top

Jacek Blaszkiewicz

Visiting Assistant Professor of Musicology

I am a historian of nineteenth-century French music with broad interests in urban soundscapes, empire and colonialism, opera and operetta, and the relations between musical aesthetics and municipal politics. My forthcoming book project tells the sonic history of Paris during the Second Empire (1852-70). The construction of new boulevards, the demolition of old neighborhoods, the cancan spectacles, the World’s Fairs, and the street markets all offer resonant stories about music’s entanglement with urbanization, capitalism, and the historiography of Paris. I completed a PhD in musicology at the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester, where my research was supported by a Fulbright fellowship and an Alvin Johnson AMS 50 fellowship from the American Musicological Society. Outside of academia I remain an unapologetic Francophile, and enjoy accompanying French art song on the piano, hosting language exchange groups, and baking patisserie with my wife.

Back to the Top

Alice Bradley

Assistant Professor of Geosciences

Alice Bradley’s research sits at the intersection of engineering and climate science, where she studies how to observe changes in sea ice environments. Her research includes small, low-cost sensors, novel field approaches, unmanned aircraft (drone) based sensing, and integrating in situ and satellite-based observations. She comes to Williams College from a postdoctoral research position at Dartmouth College and a PhD in the remote sensing of sea ice from the University of Colorado Boulder. In addition to research and teaching in earth and environmental sciences, she enjoys cross-country skiing and making things.

Back to the Top

Theresa Brock

Visiting Assistant Professor of French

I come to Williams College from Penn State, where I completed a Ph.D. in French & Francophone Literature with a graduate minor in Women’s Studies, and where I also designed and taught upper-level courses. I am a scholar of early modern France with strong interests in literature, women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, and the relationship between word and image. My teaching and research interrogate points of overlap between our current understandings of these topics and the writings and culture of the early modern world. How can we approach early modern texts and modern-day representations of them ethically, respecting both our own vantage point and the historical and cultural difference that these texts represent? In what ways might early modern engagement with what we now call gender, sexuality, and visual culture inform our present experiences of visual and technological immersion, as well as feminist activism? I will be teaching 3 courses here at Williams that address these questions, among others: The French Adventure (Fall 2018), Fairy Tales (Spring 2019), Le Moyen Âge en images (Spring 2019). I also examine similar topics of inquiry in my forthcoming article in Women in French Studies on gender and genre in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméronand in my book manuscript, entitled Women and Spiritual Politics: The Heptaméron’s Approach to Reform.

Back to the Top

Julia Bryan-Wilson

Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor of Art History

Julia Bryan-Wilson, who will be at Williams in 2018-19 as the Robert Sterling Clark Professor, is professor of modern and contemporary art at UC Berkeley and director of the Berkeley Arts Research Center. She researches contemporary art in the Americas through the lenses of artistic labor, feminist and queer theory, and critical race studies. She is writing on a book about the monochrome black wood sculptures of Louise Nevelson. More

Xizhen Cai

Assistant Professor of Statistics

I was born and raised in Lanzhou in China. I came to US after graduating from Zhejiang University and I received my Ph. D degree in Statistics at Penn State University in 2014. Prior to joining Williams College, I worked as an Assistant Teaching Professor of Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University from 2014-2016 and as a Postdoctoral Fellow Research Associate at Temple University from 2016-2018. My research focuses on statistical techniques to resolve issues with large and high dimensional datasets. I studied variable selection methods for survival models and in network analysis, estimation and inference procedures of time-varying features with intensive longitudinal data. I am also interested in analyzing the rhetorical styles in English text data. I enjoy very much working with students both in the classrooms and on research topics in statistics.

Back to the Top

Lauren Cannady

Lecturer in the Program of Graduate Art History, Spring ’19

Don Carlson

Visiting Professor of Economics

Back to the Top

Nicholas Carr

Richmond Visiting Professor
See webpage

Gregory Casey

Assistant Professor of Economics

I am interested in long-run economic outcomes and their relationship to prominent public policy debates. Much of my research is in the field of environmental macroeconomics. I investigate questions like: ‘how will climate change affect the economy?’ or ‘how can public policy interventions limit carbon emissions?’. I am also interested in the relationship between technology and labor market outcomes. For example, I study the effect of automation on unemployment and inequality between workers and capital owners. I am currently finishing up my PhD in economics at Brown University. I attended Hamilton College as an undergraduate and am looking forward to returning to a liberal arts environment. For more detailed information on my background and research papers, please see my website.

Back to the Top

Mel Chen

Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor of Art History

Jason Cieply

Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian

Jason Cieply is an enthusiast of Russian culture interested in the ways revolution makes us think, feel, and speak. He completed his PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stanford University in 2016 and is currently at work on his book project, Voices of Enthusiasm: Revolutionary Emotion and Interclass Imitation in Soviet Narrative Fiction. His research explores one state of mind historically associated with revolutionary societies — enthusiasm  — and the Soviet artists, who shaped and were shaped by it in the first years of the Soviet project.  At Williams Cieply is teaching two courses focusing on the relationship between artistic experimentation, revolutionary politics, and subjectivity in twentieth-century Russian culture, as well as courses in Russian language. His recent publications include the article, “The Silent Side of Polyphony: On the Disappearances of ‘Silentium!’ from the Drafts of Dostoevskii and Bakhtin” (Slavic Review).

Matthew Clasen

Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology

I recently received my Ph.D. from American University’s Behavior, Cognition, and Neuroscience program in Washington, DC. In my research at American University, I studied how factors such as age, drug exposure, and diet history influenced the affective properties and intravenous self-administration of abused drugs. Combining each of these factors, my dissertation research found that a long-term history of a Western diet (i.e., a diet high in saturated fats, simple carbohydrates, and refined sugars) increased the intravenous self-administration (and overdose death likelihood) of cocaine. This data provides evidence that the consumption of highly caloric and palatable diets increases the vulnerability of problematic drug intake which has immediate relevance to the obesogenic society in which we live today.

At Williams College, my research will continue to investigate how the long-term consumption of a Western diet influences the intravenous self-administration of other abused drugs (i.e., opioids, prescription psychostimulants, alcohol, etc.). My lab will concurrently evaluate the neural underpinnings of these results, in addition to exploring novel therapeutic interventions.

Back to the Top

Carl Cornell

Visiting Lecturer in French

Carl Cornell is currently completing his Ph.D. in French and Francophone Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. His research interests include urban studies, modernity and postmodernity, 20th- and 21st-century French literature, the poetics of space, and sustainability. In his dissertation, entitled “Oikos: Sustainability, Dwelling, and Culture in Urban France,” he examines how cultural initiatives impact the creation of livable spaces in French cities. He received a Chateaubriand Fellowship for fall 2016 to conduct on-site research in Angoulême, Lyon, and Nantes, the three cities that serve as case studies for his dissertation. Part of his findings appeared in a July 2018 article in Contemporary French Civilization entitled “Past into future: the ‘rewriting’ of Angoulême’s identity.” He has extensive experience teaching both online and in residence, and has also maintained an active interest in the digital humanities, especially as they inform fresh approaches to classroom instruction. More

Back to the Top

Howard Dean

Bennett Boskey Distinguished Visiting Professor of Leadership Studies, Spring ’19
See bio and twitter

Back to the Top

Phoebe Donnelly

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

Phoebe Donnelly’s research interests are at the intersection of security and gender. Her regional focus is on East Africa and last year she did research on armed groups in Kenya and Uganda. Phoebe did her graduate work at The Fletcher School at Tufts University and her undergraduate degree is from The University of Wisconsin-Madison. Phoebe recently co-authored a report for the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) based on research she helped lead on women and violent extremism in Somalia. To learn more about Phoebe’s research and teaching you can visit her website.

Back to the Top

Hali Edison

Visiting Professor, Center for Development Economics

Hali Edison comes to Williams after a long career in Washington DC at the International Monetary Fund and the Federal Reserve Board. She was also an economic advisor at the U.S. Department of Treasury and the Norwegian Central Bank. She enjoys conducting research and has published widely in academic journals, focusing mainly on issues in international finance. Dr. Edison has taught at the University of Bergen, University of Maryland, Johns Hopkins University and at the IMF Institute. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the London School of Economics. Outside of work, she enjoys spending time with her family, playing golf, and traveling.

Back to the Top

Radwa El Barouni

Visiting Lecturer in Arabic Studies

Prior to moving to the States to obtain her Ph.D. in Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, from the University of Texas, Austin, Radwa El Barouni taught English literature in the English department and Arabic content courses in several study abroad programs at Alexandria University in Egypt, and in Morocco. She is currently writing her dissertation titled “Renarrating al-Andalus in the Arabic Novel from the Nahḍa to the Present: Iterations of Subjectivity, Community & State”. She investigates the intellectual, aesthetic and socio-political production of an Arab historical imaginary and the literary staging of the Arab past and future through the representations of al-Andalus. Using a hybrid methodology, she engages theoretically with broader issues about the use of time in historical fiction, the genre’s porous borders and its incorporation of a diverse display of genres found in classical Arabic adab and historiography and the implications of that for the specificity of Arabic historical fiction and the selective processes involved in its writing. Her dissertation argues that the recent surge of Arabic historical fiction, which is coextensive with the absence or inaccessibility of archives, serves to intervene in and counter historical narratives engineered on a national level helping to destabilize regime monopoly over historical meaning. Her interest in historical fiction stems from Radwa’s active participation in the 2011 Egyptian revolution, and being cognizant of how the narratives we are told about the past form our subjectivity and perceptions of agency in the present. Her other research interests lie in dystopic fiction, graphic novels, development of genres, literary theory and translation. When she is not teaching or researching, Radwa loves traveling, hiking, photography, and cooking.

Back to the Top

Brahim El Guabli

Assistant Professor of Arabic Studies

Brahim El Guabli was born and raised in a small Berber village in southeast Morocco, and is proud of his roots as an immigrant, a Muslim, and a first-generation college student. Upon completing his training as a bilingual teacher (French and Arabic) in the highly selective Ouarzazate Teacher Training School in 1999, he was assigned to teach in remote villages in the High Atlas mountains. Noticing the needs of the rural communities, Brahim started numerous educational projects to spread literacy and started school libraries in these isolated communities. Committed to exploring the links between research, social justice and learning, which deeply informed his graduate work in Comparative Literature at Princeton University, Brahim is eager to design and lead study projects that involve community service. His research project, which stemmed from his own memories of political repression, attempts to unravel the connections between traumatic pasts, the rewriting of history and the exercise of citizenship in post-state-violence contexts. Examining the notions of disappearance and invisibilization, Brahim makes an argument for literature’s central role in empowering the victims of violent pasts through memory and archive creation practices. Brahim’s work has appeared in book chapters and academic journal articles, including a special issue he co-edited of The Journal of North African Studies on violence and the politics of aesthetics in the Maghreb. Brahim taught different language and content courses at Swarthmore College, Bryn Mawr College, and Princeton University (AI). He enjoys cooking, reading, walking in his neighborhood community, and spending time with his family.

Kevin Flaherty

Lecturer in Astronomy

Kevin began his career with an undergraduate degree from the University of Rochester in 2005, followed by a PhD in Astronomy from the University of Arizona in 2011. After spending two years working on the James Webb Space Telescope NIRCam instrument, he returned to the northeast for a position as a postdoctoral researcher at Wesleyan University. In 2018 he joined the Williams Astronomy and Physics departments as the observatory manager and astronomy lab instructor. In his research career he has focused on the structure of gas and dust surrounding young stars, and how planets form out of this material. Using a combination of radio interferometry and infrared imaging he has studied the kinematics of these systems, be it the highly variable inner reaches of planet-forming disks, the turbulence in the outer disk, or the role of gas in more evolved debris disks systems. He is also interested in making astronomy a more inclusive environment, and in bringing astronomy to others through outreach in the community. When not working on astronomy, Kevin enjoys cooking, hiking, and playing frisbee. See webpage

Back to the Top

Prisca Gayles

Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow in Africana Studies

Prisca Gayles is the Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow in Africana Studies at Williams and a Ph.D Candidate in Latin American Studies (African Diaspora Studies-affiliated) at the University of Texas-Austin. Her research interests include the politicization of blackness in the context of collective action in African Diaspora with a focus on Afro-Latin America. Further interests include Transnational Black Feminist theory and social economy in the African diaspora. Her dissertation project is an ethnographic study of the black social movement in Argentina. Specifically she examines the relational processes by which movement participants and political stakeholders seek racial justice in an environment were blacks are largely invisible. Prisca has taught a number of courses including: Human Rights in Argentina, Introduction to Latin America, Race and Equity in Brazil and Solidarity Economy in Latin America. In her spare time Prisca enjoys reading, listening to history podcasts, studying languages, and participating in a variety of fitness activities from biking excursions to teaching fitness classes.

Aracelis Girmay

Margaret Bundy Scott Professor of English, Spring ’19

Back to the Top

Bethany Hicok

Lecturer in English

Dr. Bethany Hicok is currently Professor of English and Director of the Honors Program at Westminster College in New Wilmington, PA, where she has taught since 2001. She will join the English Department at Williams College in the fall as a Lecturer. She teaches courses in modern poetry, modernism, critical theory, gender, women’s and sexuality studies, and interdisciplinary courses on genetics and literature, utopias, and Ancient Greek literature and justice. She is the author of two critical books on American poetry, Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil (University of Virginia Press,2016), and Degrees of Freedom: American Women Poets and the Women’s College, 1905-1955 (Bucknell 2008), which focuses on the poetry of Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and Sylvia Plath. She is also co-editor of a collection of essays, Elizabeth Bishop in the 21st Century (University of Virginia Press 2012). She has published a number of essays on modern poetry and two book chapters on teaching. She led an NEH Summer Seminar for College and University Professors, Elizabeth Bishop and the Literary Archive, at Vassar College in June 2017, and she was a participant in the 2010 NEH summer seminar on Brazilian literature held in São Paulo, Brazil.

She received her BA in English, cum laude, from Russell Sage College and her MA, MAT and PhD from the University of Rochester.

Back to the Top

Olesya Ivantsova

Visiting Lecturer in the Graduate Program in Art History

Olesya Ivantsova is currently finishing her PhD in German Studies at McGill University. Her research interests include literary representations of cities, travel literature, literature of the Weimar Republic, and German-Russian cultural relations.

Back to the Top

Jackson,Galen

Assistant Professor of Political Science

See website

Shakia Johnson, born and raised in Springfield, Massachusetts, is a graduate of Pioneer Valley’s Performing Arts Charter High School in South Hadley, Ma and Dean College in Franklin, Ma. She received her teaching artist certificate from the National Dance Institute in New York in 2009. Johnson has choreographed and directed more than 50 hip hop, modern, African and lyrical works that have been performed at Trenton Educational Dance Institute, Rider University, the Princeton School of Ballet and the Bates Dance Festival. She has performed for numerous hip hop events and has opened for concerts by Fat Joe, Jadakiss, 112, Charlie Baltimore, Kima from “Total” and Omarion. In 2005 she choreographed a hip-hop number for the Celtics/NBA half-time show. She has toured the U.S. and abroad dancing with Face Da Phlave Entertainment and Illstyle and Peace Productions. Johnson is an alumnus of Jacob’s Pillow and Bates Dance Festival’s Young Dancers Workshop and was selected for BDF’s Emerging Choreographer program in 2006. Shakia has been teaching at the Bates Dance Festival for 4 years and spent her last summer teaching the Bates Professional Training Program and created her repertory work called, “Circle of Love . Shakia currently teaches at Mt.Holyoke College, Smith College and Amherst College.

Shakia Johnson

Arthur Levitt, Jr. ’52 Artist-in-Residence, Spring ’19

Shakia Johnson, born and raised in Springfield, Massachusetts, is a graduate of Pioneer Valley’s Performing Arts Charter High School in South Hadley, Ma and Dean College in Franklin, Ma. She received her teaching artist certificate from the National Dance Institute in New York in 2009. Johnson has choreographed and directed more than 50 hip hop, modern, African and lyrical works that have been performed at Trenton Educational Dance Institute, Rider University, the Princeton School of Ballet and the Bates Dance Festival. She has performed for numerous hip hop events and has opened for concerts by Fat Joe, Jadakiss, 112, Charlie Baltimore, Kima from “Total” and Omarion. In 2005 she choreographed a hip-hop number for the Celtics/NBA half-time show. She has toured the U.S. and abroad dancing with Face Da Phlave Entertainment and Illstyle and Peace Productions. Johnson is an alumnus of Jacob’s Pillow and Bates Dance Festival’s Young Dancers Workshop and was selected for BDF’s Emerging Choreographer program in 2006. Shakia has been teaching at the Bates Dance Festival for 4 years and spent her last summer teaching the Bates Professional Training Program and created her repertory work called, “Circle of Love . Shakia currently teaches at Mt.Holyoke College, Smith College and Amherst College.

Back to the Top

Susanne Ryuyin Kerekes

Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow in Religion and Asian Studies

2018-2020 Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow in Religion and Asian Studies
Buddhism in Thailand is experienced, practiced, lived, promoted and perpetuated in very material ways! My research celebrates the rich and eclectic materiality of this religious tradition that is so often deemed immaterial. In addition to the material “stuff”, agency, and networks (“New Materialism”) that constitute contemporary Thai Buddhist practice, I also study nineteenth-century Thai manuscripts, and am beginning a new project on Thai Buddhist amulets, magic, and astrology. Apart from these topics, I have taught an in-situ spring-break course related to Thai Buddhism and business for the past four years through the Lauder Institute/Wharton of the University of Pennsylvania, where I am currently finalizing my dissertation as a PhD candidate with a specialty on Buddhism and material culture. Even though I did not have the opportunity to live in a monastery (women are not allowed to ordain as nuns in Thailand), I have lived for three years without a cell phone and I continue to live without social media. I prefer old-school “social media”: rendezvous usually over tea, talking instead of texting, and (my favorite) snail mail. More information is available here.

Back to the Top

Herbert Kessler

Croghan Bicentennial Professor in Biblical and Early Christian Studies, Fall ’18

I come out of retirement to serve as Croghan Professor after teaching medieval art history at the University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Emory, and, once before, at Williams. The course I am offering is designed to probe ideas underlying my forthcoming book Experiencing Medieval Art, which shifts focus away from the traditional methods I learned as a Ph.D. student at Princeton and onto the object of art itself. Focusing on the issues of materiality, beauty, and performance I have been studying during the past two decades, “The Medieval Object” asks the question: How did art engage medieval subjects in the perception of their world and contemplation of the Divine?

Back to the Top

Pramila Kolekar

Visiting Lecturer in the Graduate Program in Art History

Back to the Top

Lu Kou

Visiting Assistant Professor of Chinese

My name is Lu Kou. I am a literary scholar and medievalist. I will receive my Ph.D. in pre-modern Chinese literature in May 2018 from Harvard University with a secondary field in Classical Philology. My current project on courtly writings from medieval China examines the “discursive battles” waged among different court centers during the Period of Disunion (420–589). I explore how “words”—both spoken and written—became “weapons” wielded by court elites to prevail in the fierce power struggles and to construct their states’ political/cultural legitimacy. My teaching interests include Chinese poetry, fantastic narratives, and Chinese language, with a particular interest in the transformation of pre-modern literature in the modern/contemporary world.

Alicia Maggard

Postdoctoral Fellow in Maritime History

Alicia Maggard is a historian of the 19th c. United States with particular interests in the history of technology, political economy, and the relationship between material infrastructures and state power. Her research focuses on shifting state-industrial relations and the rise of the U.S. as a maritime industrial power. She looks forward to teaching in a thoroughly interdisciplinary program and to supervising student research on the maritime past.

Back to the Top

Bobby McElver

Visiting Lecturer in Theatre

Bobby McElver is a professional sound designer and composer for theater and dance. Based in NYC for almost 10 years, he is an associate with The Wooster Group (and was a company member from 2011-2016). Other collaborators include Andrew Schneider, Faye Driscoll, NYC Players, Half Straddle, Young Jean Lee, Palissimo, Erin Markey. He has recently been in residency at EMPAC, developing spatial audio content and presenting on techniques using Wave Field Synthesis. He has taught a series of international workshops on how to create live performance via audio recordings and in-ear monitoring for performers, as well as the curation of emotion through sound design, and the rapid prototyping of ideas through theater technology. Nominated for a 2015 Bessie for Outstanding Music Composition/Sound Design.
More

Back to the Top

Carolina Melgarejo-Torres

Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish

Carolina studied Linguistics at El Colegio de México, where she is completing her PhD on the semantics of space. She does research on expressions of spatiality, Mexican Spanish, and normativity. Carolina taught Spanish at Harvard University from 2012 to 2018, where she was also part of a project to develop resources for heritage learners’ courses. Carolina’s work appeared in Estudios de Gramática del Español and Boletín de Lingüística

Back to the Top

Andrew Miller

Visiting Assistant Professor of English

Andrew Miller is currently finishing his PhD at Princeton University. His research focuses on the norms and eccentricities of poetic style in the Renaissance, with a particular focus on the reception of classical literature and continental humanism in sixteenth-century England. His book project, Afflicted Styles: Vulgar Humanism and Minor Affects in the English Renaissance, examines the oddly productive role that bad feelings play in the social life of vernacular style. He is also a student, teacher, and fitful practitioner of the visual arts, especially photography and film.

Back to the Top

Murad Mumtaz

Assistant Professor of Art

Murad Khan Mumtaz examines historical intersections of art, literature and religious expression in South Asia. His primary research focuses on devotional portraiture with a special interest in representations of Muslim saints in early modern India. He is also an artist trained in the traditional practices of North Indian painting, which he exhibits, researches and teaches internationally.

A native of Lahore, Murad was educated at Pakistan’s National College of Arts, where he first studied Indo-Persian painting. He later completed an MFA in visual art at Columbia University. He recently received his PhD from the University of Virginia.

Back to the Top

Eli Nelson

Assistant Professor of American Studies

See website

Back to the Top

Sarah Olsen

Assistant Professor of Classics

Sarah Olsen received her PhD in Classics from UC Berkeley in 2016 and she is thrilled to join the faculty at Williams after teaching for two years at Amherst College. Her research focuses on ancient Greek performance culture, especially as it relates to the representation of dance and music in literature. She is currently working on a book entitled The Unruly Body: Dance, Literature, and Culture in Ancient Greece, which explores the importance of solo dance as a source of creativity and transgression in Greek literature. She has also written articles on topics like sexuality and narrative in the ancient novel, the construction of genre in archaic Greek song, and the representation of female sympotic entertainers in Greek art and literature. When not at work on her teaching or research, she enjoys hiking, camping, and attending local dance and theater productions.

Back to the Top

Muneko Otani

Visiting Artist in Residence in Violin

Back to the Top

Melinda Petre

Visiting Assistant Professor of Economics

My research focuses on human capital, including the returns to skills in the labor market and understanding how decisions and shocks impact human capital development. Topics include cognitive and non-cognitive skills in various labor market contexts and educational responses to economic conditions. I have taught introductory economics courses in macro and microeconomics, as well as intermediate microeconomics, undergraduate labor economics, health economics, and taxation and social programs. My favorite classes to teach are those where students are actively engaged in discussion. I like to exercise, run, and watch sports when not studying or teaching economics. See website

Back to the Top

Anna Plantinga

Assistant Professor of Statistics

Anna Plantinga is currently finishing her Ph.D. in Biostatistics at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on the development of statistical methods for genomic and microbiome data. In particular, she is exploring ways to account for data structure and incorporate phylogenetic or functional information in microbiome analysis. Besides statistics, she enjoys playing viola, hiking and camping, and board games.

Back to the Top

Kailani Polzak

Assistant Professor of Art

Back to the Top

Lindsay Pope

Visiting Director of Choral/Vocal Activities

Lindsay Pope recently completed her doctorate in choral conducting from the University of North Texas, where she led the University Singers and served as assistant conductor to the Dallas Symphony Chorus. Previously, she was Director of Choral Activities at Mount Holyoke College 2011-2016. She has traveled to the Republic of Georgia and Corsica and study and perform traditional folk music. Her dissertation explores the intersection of gender and cross-cultural identity in the life and choral works of Reena Esmail. Her passions include hiking, yoga, writing, and spending time with her husband, 2 dogs, and cat.

Back to the Top

Bob Rawle

Assistant Professor of Chemistry

Bob Rawle is an incoming assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry. He attended Pomona College as an undergraduate, received his PhD in biophysical chemistry at Stanford University, and was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Virginia, studying the biophysics of influenza virus and Zika virus. His research interests are focused on the molecular events that underly virus entry into host cells and on the biophysical chemistry of lipid membranes. In his spare time, Bob transforms into a terrifying blue ice dragon and chases his young children around the house.

Back to the Top

Eli Remolona

Visiting Professor of Economics

Before joining the Williams faculty, Eli Remolona was the regional head for Asia and the Pacific of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), which is popularly known as the “central bank for central banks.” Until 2008, Eli was Head of Economics for Asia and the Pacific for the BIS. He joined the BIS in Basel, Switzerland, in 1999 and for six years served as Head of Financial Markets and Editor of the BIS Quarterly Review. Before that, he was Research Officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where he worked for 14 years, covering country risk and international financial markets. He has taught at Columbia, NYU and the University of the Philippines and has published scholarly papers on financial markets and international finance. He has a Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University.

 

Shantee Rosado

U.S. Afro-Latinidades Fellow In Latina and Latino Studies

Shantee Rosado is a Ph.D. candidate in the Sociology Department at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her B.A. (Cum Laude) in sociology and psychology from Macalester College in 2009 and her M.A. in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania in 2013. Shantee’s work examines racial and ethnic identities and inequalities in Latin America and the United States. She also has interests in social movements, with an emphasis on movements for racial justice and Black land rights. Her current project qualitatively addresses how 1.5- and second-generation Puerto Ricans and Dominicans negotiate the meaning of race and Blackness in two regions of the country: a majority-Black county in Pennsylvania and a majority-Latino region in Florida. Aside from research, Shantee has taught several courses while at the University of Pennsylvania, including Race and Ethnic Relations and a graduate-level course titled Cross-Cultural Awareness. In her spare time, Shantee enjoys long-distance running and listening to Hip Hop and Salsa.

 

Back to the Top

Dylan Schneider

Visiting Assistant Professor of Music

See webpage and more

Back to the Top

Pallavi Sen

Assistant Professor of Art
Pallavi Sen is from Bombay, India. She works with installation, printmaking, textiles, Instagram, and intuitive movement. Current interests include inner lives of birds and animals, South Asian costumes, domestic architecture, altars, deities, skate/bro culture, style, pattern history, toxic masculinity, friendship + love, lovers as collaborators, farming and the artist as farmer, work spaces, work tables, eco-feminism, love poems, the gates to Indian homes, walking, and cooking deliberately. Completely devoted to material and craft, she works with all sustainable surfaces and tools.

In addition to teaching, she has worked as an artist assistant, a book repairer, a museum researcher, bench jeweller, textile designer, quilter, graphic designer, visual merchandiser, laser technician, shop attendant, printshop assistant, resident advisor, and matte-maker for a frame shop. She also runs a food project, LUNCHY!, which includes group meals, Instagram cooking tutorials, and an anti-waste, anti packaging cooking manifesto. Her primary motivation is to build objects that live in the world + indulge her senses without poisoning soil/water/air/body with their material parts and timeline.

She received her MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from VCU, and has been an artist in residence at Ox-Bow School of Art, Mildred’s Lane, Woodstock Byrdcliffe Artists Guild, Wormfarm Institute, Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Yale Summer School of Art & Music, and Flux Factory. In the absence of a permanent studio, this is how she made most of her work, and met almost all her friends.

Back to the Top

Andrew Sisson

Visiting Assistant Professor of English
Andrew Sisson studies Renaissance literature in relation to the history of political thought, with a particular focus on sixteenth-century poetry and drama. His scholarly interests also include aesthetic theory, global history, and the films of Alfred Hitchcock. He received his doctorate in English at Johns Hopkins University, and has taught at Emory University and the University of Richmond.

Back to the Top

Yana Skorobogatov

Assistant Professor of History
I am a historian of Russia and the Soviet Union. My current book manuscript is a history of the Soviet death penalty after 1954. In addition to my interests in topics related to criminal justice, I am fascinated by the idea of Soviet communism’s afterlife, a theme I will explore in my second book project about the transition from communism to capitalism on the island of Sakhalin, in the Russian Far East. I come to Williams College by way of California, where I received my PhD in History from the University of California, Berkeley in 2018. There I taught courses on the history of incarceration, global history, and the history of Modern European and America. I spend my free time running and swimming outside, dabbling into journalism, and brainstorming an article-length think piece about my life as a first-generation Russian-American citizen.

Ben Snyder

Assistant Professor of Sociology
Ben completed his PhD in sociology at the University of Virginia and taught at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand prior to joining Williams. His research and teaching interests include work and economic life, culture, morality, emotions, technology, surveillance, and temporality. His book The Disrupted Workplace: Time and the Moral Order of Flexible Capitalism (2016, Oxford University Press) is an ethnographic comparison of the relationship between capitalism, time, and moral life among long-haul truck drivers, Wall Street financial traders, and unemployed job seekers. Currently, Ben is investigating how emerging police surveillance technologies, such as predictive policing and wide area persistent surveillance, create time machines that present American cities with new opportunities and ethical dilemmas. Ben’s classes focus on making the turn from social critique to social action, and often involve building bridges between the classroom, student activism, and publics outside the academy. He is especially excited to work with students who want to engage in unabashedly utopian thinking about the future.
More

Back to the Top

Greta Snyder

Visiting Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Greta comes to Williams by way of New Zealand; there, she spent five great years as a lecturer (assistant professor) in political science and international relations at Victoria University of Wellington, and did four of the “great walks.” Her research focuses on activism, identity politics, and inter-group equity. Right now, she is working on project that considers how ideas about ecology from various disciplines might shift or inform political theorizing about racial equity. In the future, she plans to write a book about the different ways that transnational activists exercise power. Greta loves sketch comedy — one of the articles she has published is about Chappelle’s Show — and movies that are so bad they are good. While she has savored her time in New Zealand, she is excited to be returning to the U.S. and to be joining the members of the Williams community in discussions about power, social ecology, activism, and equity. If you are interested in previewing the courses Greta will teach or learning more about her work, you can check out her website.

Back to the Top

Matthew Swagler

Visiting Assistant Professor of History
Matt Swagler received his PhD in History from Columbia University and
has taught courses on African history and politics at New York
University and the City University of New York. Based on his research
in Congo, Senegal, and France, Matt currently studies how student and
youth organizations in Africa fought for a radical restructuring of
their newly-independent countries from the 1950s through the 1970s. In
addition to teaching and writing about Africa, he likes to spend as
much time as possible with his one year-old son and organizing for
social justice.

Munjulika Tarah

Assistant Professor of Dance

Back to the Top

Owen Thompson

Assistant Professor of Economics
Owen Thompson is an economist working on topics related to labor markets, health, discrimination and public policy. More information can be found on his personal homepage.

Back to the Top

Maria Udén

STINT – Research Scholar
See webpage

Lawrence Wills

Croghan Bicentennial Professor in Biblical and Early Christian Studies
I am a scholar of religion, focusing on ancient Judaism and Christianity. I received my doctorate from Harvard Divinity School, and have taught at Harvard, Wesleyan, Episcopal Divinity School, and for the past two years as visiting professor at Brown. In spring 2019 I will be at Williams as the Croghan Bicentennial Visiting Professor in Religion.

My interest has been in narrative, mainly ancient novellas—popular in the ancient world among Jews, Christians, Greeks, and Romans, but largely unknown today! My other main interest is in the social world and identity constructions of ancient Jews and Christians.

I am now completing a commentary on the Book of Judith, an ancient Jewish novella, and am writing a book on ancient Jewish and Christian identity and their negotiation and eventual separation. One of my hobbies, which ties my interests together, is a fascination with popular culture—ancient, modern, and cross-cultural.

Back to the Top