Anna Miley Akerstedt
STINT - Research Scholar
I am joining Williams this fall as a STINT-fellow from Stockholm, Sweden. I am a clinical neuropsychologist, teacher, and researcher at the Karolinska University Hospital and the Karolinska Institute. My clinical practice and research projects are in epilepsy and aging. I am particularly interested in how lifestyle and psychological factors influence cognitive performance in older adults with focal epilepsy. I received my undergraduate degree in psychology from Lawrence University, Appleton WI, and my Ph.D. in clinical psychology from UMass, Amherst. I did my pre-doctoral internship in the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine, and my post-doctoral training at the Division of Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology, both at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, NY.
My passion as a teacher is to excite students about the fascinating discipline of neuropsychology. I am very much looking forward to meeting and working with students and hearing more about their thoughts on learning and higher education. I am bringing my family with me, and we are looking forward to explore the Purple Valley.
Hesham Aly
Visiting Assistant Professor of Physical Education and Head Coach of the Men's and Women's Squash Teams
Hesham is the Visiting Assistant Professor of Physical Education and Head Coach of the Men's and Women's Squash teams. A squash professional from Egypt, he has sixteen years of coaching experience working with some of the leading pro players in the world, such as Nour El Sherbini. Before this new chapter at Williams, he served as the Women’s Squash Assistant Coach at Princeton University, where he helped the team reach the national tournament finals in 2022.
Hesham's passion for squash began in Alexandria, Egypt where he grew up playing the sport. He taught the game at his club for ten years, and took on the role of Director of the Squash Academy at the Alexandria Sporting Club during his final two years there.
His enthusiasm for squash isn't limited to coaching. He recently published an article with the College Squash Association on the transition from junior to college squash.
Now at Williams College, Hesham is keen to bring his experience, passion, and commitment to the broader Williams community.
Lloyd B. Anderson
Assistant Professor at Williams-Mystic
Lloyd is the incoming Assistant Professor of Oceanography in the Williams-Mystic Coastal and Ocean Studies Program. After completing his undergraduate degree at Bowdoin College, where he investigated intertidal chemistry variations in clam flats, he first stepped into the world of paleoceanography as a Fulbright research grantee at the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany, studying Mississippi River runoff into the Gulf of Mexico during the last ice age. In his Ph.D. at Columbia University, Lloyd has conducted research in paleoceanography and paleoclimatology, where he has analyzed the chemistry of microfossil shells buried in sediments under the deep ocean to assess surface ocean carbon chemistry and ocean temperatures in the Cenozoic Era (the last 65 million years).
Lloyd loves investigating linkages between “hidden” yet measurable geochemical tracers that allow us to learn more about biogeochemical and physical processes operating in the modern and historical ocean environment. He is looking forward to working with Williams students and students in the Williams-Mystic program to explore the coastal oceans of New England and continue research in paleoceanography, paleoclimatology, and micropaleontology. Since he will be based primarily in coastal Mystic, CT, Lloyd is excited to reconnect with his passion for kayaking, canoeing, and paddleboarding!
Ben L. Augenbraun
Assistant Professor of Chemistry
I am a molecular spectroscopist joining Williams as an assistant professor of chemistry. My research involves using lasers to study and control gas-phase molecules at low temperatures, near absolute zero. I am interested in the structures of molecules that are relevant to a range of scientific endeavors, such as quantum computing, astrochemistry, catalysis, and testing the fundamental symmetries of nature. I have loved working with lasers ever since my own experiences as an undergraduate researcher. I graduated from Williams in 2015 and received a PhD from Harvard University in 2022. Since then, I have worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard studying the possibility of laser cooling derivatives of organic molecules. I am truly excited to work alongside students as they develop their scientific identities within the rich liberal arts environment at Williams. I also look forward to exploring the Purple Valley with my wife, Melissa, and cheering on Ephs at their games and shows.
Charlotte L. Barkan
Assistant Professor of Biology
I am a neurobiologist interested in how brains generate behavior. I study how evolution can tinker with neural circuits to lead to behavioral diversity across species. At Williams, my lab will investigate the evolution of vocal communication in Xenopus frogs using electrophysiology, genetic, and behavioral approaches to examine the neural basis of courtship call production and female auditory preferences. I completed my undergraduate education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where I studied the auditory system of songbirds and then went on to pursue my PhD at Columbia University where I began studying the neural circuits underlying frog vocalizations. For the past several years I have worked at Reed College in Portland, OR as a postdoc and most recently as a visiting assistant professor. I am excited about new adventures on the east coast and in my free time I enjoy cooking, growing vegetables and dahlias, ceramics, exploring outdoors and spending time with my partner and two cats.
Trenton D. Barnes
Assistant Professor of Art
Trenton D. Barnes, Assistant Professor of Native American and Indigenous Arts, is a scholar of the Indigenous Americas whose research and teaching concern the art and architectural history of ancient central Mexico. He holds a Ph.D. and A.M. in the History of Art and Architecture from Harvard Univeristy and a B.A. in Art History from Columbia University. His first book project, To Walk the Space of Time: Emptiness and the Production of Bodies in the Architecture of Teotihuacan, comprises the first architectural history of the ceremonial center of the largest city of American antiquity. His research has been supported by Dumbarton Oaks, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and several institutes of Harvard, including the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, the Asia Center, and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Before joining Williams College, Dr. Barnes was Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Texas at Arlington and a Postdoctoral Research Associate and Lecturer in the Program in Latin American Studies of Princeton University.
Messias Basques
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Africana Studies
Messias Basques is an Afro-Brazilian anthropologist. In 2018, inspired by a collective of Black undergraduate students, he co-created with them a syllabus entirely based on pioneering Black anthropologists from the African continent and the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean. In 2022, the Brazilian Anthropological Association awarded the initiative the Best Teaching Project in Brazil. It also received the Award for Science Communication.
Over the past few years, he has been editing and translating into Portuguese books by Zora Neale Hurston, Sefi Atta, Junot Díaz, and John Steinbeck. In 2021, he wrote an introduction to the Brazilian edition of Barracoon: the Story of the Last “Black Cargo” by Zora Neale Hurston.
He graduated from the University of São Paulo with a BA in Social Sciences and earned his Ph.D. in Anthropology at the National Museum of Rio de Janeiro (2020). From July 2022 to June 2023, he was a Visiting Scholar at the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at Harvard University. He is one of the Fellows of the Leadership Program of the American Anthropological Association (2023). At the Department of Africana Studies, he will work on a book based on his teaching project, Black Voices in Anthropology. And he also looks forward to encouraging students to learn from and connect with Black and Indigenous authors from the Global South.
Caitlyn Bowman-Cornelius
Assistant Professor of Biology
Caitlyn Bowman-Cornelius is a biochemist who studies the astounding metabolic changes that happen during pregnancy and early postnatal life. She uses a combination of physiology, analytical chemistry, and molecular and cell biology to explore how cells get energy and make the building blocks needed for specialized functions. Her passion for metabolic biochemistry started during her undergraduate training in biology at Juniata College and grew in the lab of her PhD mentor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Caitlyn completed postdoctoral training at the University of Pennsylvania where she developed stable-isotope tracing approaches and analytical chemistry workflows to study maternal-fetal metabolism and cardiovascular disease in mice. At Williams, the Bowman Lab will work together to quantify macronutrient use and metabolic fuel-switching in mouse models at key points during the life cycle and to model this in cultured cells. Caitlyn has previously taught Human Physiology and Cell Biology courses, and she’s delighted to teach metabolic biochemistry and related courses here at Williams. She wants her students to appreciate the metabolic logic by which cells and organisms function. Outside the lab, Caitlyn enjoys hiking and observing local flora and fauna.
Da'Von A. Boyd
Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow in Political Science
I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Departments of Political Science and African American Studies at Yale University as a Beinecke scholar. I graduated Summa Cum Laude from Morehouse College with a B.A. in Political Science as a Stamps Leadership Scholar, Mellon Mays fellow, and the recipient of the Robert Brisbane Award, given to the top-ranking scholar in the Department of Political Science. My dissertation tentatively titled, The Black Spirit, offers a theoretical and historical account of Black political theology in constructing the philosophical, ethical, and political design of the Civil Rights Movement by examining the political theories of its’ preeminent organizations, including the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Nation of Islam, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. For my work thus far, I was awarded the 2021 Alex Willingham Best Political Theory Paper Award at the National Conference of Black Political Scientists. Additionally, I have received the Prize Teaching Fellowship, Poorvu Center’s Teaching Innovation Grant, Sterling Prize Fellowship, and was inducted into the Edward Bouchet Graduate Honor Society at Yale.
Virginia Burrus
Croghan Bicentennial Professor in Biblical and Early Christian Studies
Virginia Burrus is the Bishop W. Earl Ledden Professor of Religion at Syracuse University and the Croghan Visiting Professor at Williams College in the fall of 2023. Her research, writing, and teaching centers on Christianity in Late Antiquity, with special focus on gender, sexuality, and the body; martyrdom and asceticism; ancient novels and hagiography; and ecocritical approaches to ancient Christian texts and artifacts. Her most recent books are Ancient Christian Ecopoetics: Cosmologies, Saints, Things (Penn Press, 2019); The Lives of Saint Constantina (Oxford UP, 2020, with Marco Conti and Dennis Trout); Byzantine Tree Life: Christianity and the Arboreal Imagination (Palgrave, 2021, with Thomas Arentzen and Glenn Peers), and Earthquakes and Gardens: Saint Hilarion's Cyprus (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2023). She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and lives in Bennington, VT.
Kelly P. Bushnell
Visiting Assistant Professor of Ocean Literature at Williams-Mystic
Bhumika Chauhan
Visiting Lecturer in Sociology
I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at New York University. My research interests lie at the intersection of work, inequality, and social movements. My dissertation explores globalization, automation, and migration through a global labor process approach. Through in-depth interviews, I map the position of workers of a single transnational software firm working in the United States and India. I plan to extend this research by exploring ways of building a transnational labor movement and examining the strategic role of high-skill workers in the labor movement. My other projects include an analysis of the effect of STEM workers on non-STEM workers’ wages. Another ongoing collaborative project investigates racial disparities in experiences of precarious work. I have previously worked on a project on the impact of programming on the gender wage gap. I was born and raised in India and received most of my academic training there. My research before the Ph.D., which continues to shape my thinking about teaching, asked how anti-caste and feminist social justice movements in India influenced critical pedagogical practices in the classroom. I was also very active in my graduate workers union at NYU, and I am always up for discussing organizing strategies and attempts at radical social change.
Rene R. Cordero
Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow in History
I was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, but I was raised in the heart of Harlem, NYC. I received a B.A. and M.A. from the City College of New York (CUNY) in history, and I am now in the final stages of completing my Ph.D. in History at Brown University. Broadly conceived, my research interests include how Afro-Latin Americans have envisioned, articulated, and mobilized around ideas of freedom and liberation during the twentieth century. My manuscript explores this theme through the Caribbean context of university student movements in the Dominican Republic during the Cold War. Through oral histories, state archives, photographs, and personal archives, I show how students’ demands for freedom and liberation hinged on the push and pull of transnational and domestic forces. These included, but were not limited to, U.S. imperialism, domestic authoritarianism, and racial and national identity questions that emerged during the heady years of the 1960s and 70s. I am the creator of Opening the Archives-Dominican Republic project (OTA), a digital archive that makes documents about U.S.-Dominican relations during the Cold War publicly accessible. In my free time, I am a Martial Arts practitioner and aficionado, and I am always looking to learn new forms of Martial Arts combat.
Chase Cormier
Visiting Assistant Professor of French
As a heritage speaker of Louisiana French, I have a unique perspective on Francophone life. I am interested in literature, cinema, folklore, foodways, linguistics, and postcolonial studies in Acadia, Haiti, Louisiana, and Quebec. My Cajun-Creole identity and my passion for sharing knowledge of other cultures have shaped me as an educator and as a researcher. I earned my Ph.D. in Francophone Studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where I also began my journey as an instructor. I then taught at Université Sainte-Anne in Church Point, Nova Scotia and at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse before moving here to Williams College. I have published articles on French-Acadian and Louisiana literature and cuisine. I also write poetry and prose in French, and I have published texts in various reviews of creative writing, including Feux Follets and Revue Ancrages. I am currently writing a novel in Louisiana French titled Mal, which is to be published by Éditions Perce-Neige in 2023.
Eric J. Disbro
Visiting Assistant Professor of French
Eric (he/they) is an interdisciplinary scholar of global francophone island literatures whose research examines queer, trans, and Indigenous gender studies in the areas of embodiment, storytelling, and communal care studies. He teaches courses on francophone LGBTQIA+ and women’s writing, comparative island/archipelagic studies, creolization, trans and queer studies, and maritime epistemologies. Their writing has appeared in Women in French Studies, The French Review, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, and ASAP/Journal. His dissertation complies and examines narratives of queer and trans representation from Mauritius, Madagascar,Kanaky/New Caledonia, and Te Ao Mā’ohi/French Polynesia while analyzing queer and trans influences on concepts of transition, intimacy, and care access. These Indigenous or creolized knowledges find resonance with maritime epistemologies nascent in archipelagic locales to implicate gender-diverse ways of being at the heart of the planet’s modes of survival and continuance.
Before arriving at Williams, Eric taught at the Pennsylvania State University before completing their dual-title PhD in French and Francophone Studies & Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in 2023. In addition to their academic work, Eric enjoys film, live theater and drag, food documentaries, crochet, playing the piano, and team trivia.
Elizabeth G. Elmi
Assistant Professor of Music
I am an interdisciplinary scholar specializing in the cultural intersections of music and lyric poetry from late medieval and Renaissance Italy. I hold a Ph.D. in musicology and an M.A. in Italian literature from Indiana University in addition to an A.B. in music and Italian from Vassar College. In both research and teaching, I address how music was historically performed, transformed, and defined as a cultural practice by centering questions of orality and literacy, creative agency, and cultural difference. I am currently working on a book project, Inscribing the Self in Occupied Southern Italy, that maps the musical cultures of the Kingdom of Naples as expressions of local identity in what was an occupied territory within a broader Mediterranean empire. I come to Williams this year after spending fifteen months living in Italy, first on a Fulbright U.S. Scholar grant to the Università degli Studi della Basilicata and then as a Paul Mellon Rome Prize winner in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies at the American Academy in Rome. Previously, I have held teaching positions in musicology, Italian, and comparative literature at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, Iowa State University, and Indiana University. I enjoy cooking, baking, singing, and hiking, and I care deeply about both the intellectual pursuits and real-life concerns of my students and colleagues. It is my great honor to be joining the Williams community this year.
Kara Gadeken
Visiting Assistant Professor of Marine Ecology
Kara is the Assistant Professor of Marine Ecology and is joining the Williams-Mystic faculty as a visiting professor for Spring 2024. Kara got her bachelor’s degree in biology from the College of William & Mary and received her PhD in Marine Sciences in 2022 from the University of South Alabama at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab, where she studied how stressful low oxygen conditions affect the interplay of ecology and biogeochemistry in shallow coastal sediments. After her PhD Kara moved to Stony Brook University on Long Island for a postdoctoral fellowship where she has been exploring ways to image and quantify the complex structures created by sediment-dwelling organisms. Kara also co-instructs the Investigative Marine Biology Laboratory course at Shoals Marine Lab and has a blast introducing students to marine biology and the scientific process.
Doing ecology is a unique challenge in sediments because the organisms inhabit an opaque environment, so in her research Kara uses creative methods and experimental tools to “see through mud”. Her research has involved constructing a field deployable benthic chamber system to measure sediment oxygen fluxes, using geochemical imaging tools to make “heat maps” of sediment chemical concentrations, and collaborating with radiologists at Stony Brook Hospital to put buckets of mud in their fancy CT machines and create three-dimensional models of seagrass roots and animal burrows. During her free time Kara enjoys swimming, scuba diving, reading, sewing and cycling. She just got a folding bike and is very excited about it.
Michael P. Gaudio
Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor of Art History
Clark Professor for the Academic year 2023-2024, Michael Gaudio is Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Minnesota. His research interests, which range across a broad temporal span, focus on the intersections of artistic practice, science, religion, and cultural contact in the Atlantic world. He has written on topics that include early modern costume studies, early American natural history illustration, and thirteenth-century cartography. He is the author of three books: Engraving the Savage: The New World and Techniques of Civilization (2008), The Bible and the Printed Image in Early Modern England (2017), and Sound, Image, Silence: Art and the Aural Imagination in the Atlantic World (2019).
Philip Gerson
Visiting Professor of Economics
Philip Gerson comes to Williams following a 29-year career at the International Monetary Fund. While at the IMF he served as Deputy Director of the Fund’s European and Fiscal Affairs Departments. His research has focused on issues related to public finance and on macrofiscal issues more broadly.
Chris Halsted
Visiting Assistant Professor of Geosciences
Chris Halsted (he/him) is a geoscientist with broad research interests including Earth surface processes, isotope geochemistry, glaciology, and paleoclimatology. For the last few years, he has been particularly interested in reconstructing the glacial and landscape history of New England, a project that involved hauling rocks down mountains, mapping surficial features in all seasons, and reconciling conflicting geochemical data across the region. He is an expert in cosmogenic nuclide geochemistry and is involved with efforts to unravel global patterns of sediment erosion, transport, and burial using this isotope system. He also recently joined an international project spearheaded by the Greenland Geological Survey that aims to reconstruct the evolution and dynamics of the Greenland Ice Sheet over at least the past 5 million years (and potentially back 30 million years!).
Prior to Williams, Chris was a lecturer at the University of Vermont, where he taught introductory and upper-level courses on modern climate change, and an adjunct professor at Champlain College, where he was the resident scientist in their Core Curriculum department. When not science-ing, Chris enjoys live music, cooking, and (of course) a variety of outdoor adventures.
Iyanna C. Hamby
Visiting Lecturer in Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies
Iyanna Hamby (she/her) is a sixth-year doctoral student in Theater and Performance Studies at UCLA. Prior to beginning her doctoral studies, Iyanna earned her BA in English from Fisk University. Iyanna’s ongoing research investigates black rendered counter-historical projects and embodied practice. Her dissertation is titled, Re-Performing American Slavery: Reckoning with Archival Opacities & Fabulating Black Futures Post-Reconstruction to Present. In her research she extends emerging black feminist and queer scholarship from theorists such as Daphne Brooks, Saidiya Hartman, and Tavia Nyong’o. She has recently completed a chapter titled: “Mythic Configurations of the Vessel in Gem of the Ocean & Reckoning with Recovery” which can be read in the forthcoming anthology on August Wilson in Context (Cambridge UP, 2023).
Iyanna looks forward to joining the WGSS department and teaching classes revolving Black Feminist & Queer Performance/Studies. Iyanna enjoys baking, watching Lord of the Rings whenever she gets the chance, and listening to the Spider-Verse soundtracks.
Masashi Harada
Assistant Professor of Japanese
Masashi Harada is an educator of the Japanese language and a linguist who specializes in formal semantics of natural languages, i.e., the scientific study of the meanings of sentences in natural languages. As a linguist, he is interested in what patterns and constraints natural languages have about the way the meanings of sentences are derived from the meanings of words in the sentences, and he works primarily on Japanese and English to address the question. He is also passionate about teaching, and he has taught the Japanese language and linguistics as an instructor and a teaching assistant at Grinnell College, McGill University, the University of Kansas, and Waseda University. Outside of work, he loves to cook and do outdoor activities such as skiing and camping with his family.
Caitlin E. Hegarty
Assistant Professor of Economics
Caitlin Hegarty is a macroeconomist with interests in labor, inequality, and macro-finance. Her current research addresses differences in behavior across firms, including how firms contribute to labor market inequality and how they react to financial shocks. She received her PhD in economics from the University of Michigan and her BA in economics from Boston College. Prior to completing the PhD, she worked at the Federal Reserve Board and has held visiting positions at the Federal Reserve Banks of Chicago and Richmond. She is originally from Long Island, NY.
Xiaoming Hou
Visiting Assistant Professor of Chinese
Xiaoming Hou will be a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. He received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Macau. As a second language educator, he has had over a decade of teaching experience in teaching Chinese in colleges and universities (e.g., Bucknell University, Hamilton College and Johns Hopkins University), summer immersion programs (e.g., STARTALK and the Middlebury Chinese Summer School), and study abroad programs (e.g, Middlebury in Beijing and Associated Colleges in China). He currently works as a Skill Architect for Duolingo, helping them re-design their Chinese course.
He is an active researcher as well. His research broadly lies in second language acquisition and instruction with a focus on Chinese as a second language acquisition. His recent publications in Language and Cognition and Applied Psycholinguistics tackle the difficulty in second language acquisition of the notorious Mandarin Ba-construction.
Ziliang Liu
Assistant Professor of Art
Ziliang (Alex) Liu is an art historian of early imperial Chinese art and architecture, focusing on issues of materiality, the intersection of art and technical knowledge, and the relationship between art and the body in early China. Liu graduated with a PhD in art history from Harvard University and is currently completing a book project that examines how understanding of materials shaped art in the Western Han (206 BCE–9 CE), bringing together discourses in ancient Chinese metaphysics, theories of alchemy and medicine, as well as new discoveries in conservation science. Liu’s research has been supported by the Metropolitan Center for Far Eastern Art Studies in Kyoto, the David D. Rockefeller Fund, the Victor and William Fung Foundation, the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, and the Harvard University Asia Center.
Liu was the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Asian Societies, Cultures and Languages at Dartmouth College and the Ittleson Predoctoral Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art. Before joining Williams, he has taught at Dartmouth College and Harvard University, and has held curatorial and research positions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Harvard Art Museums.
Sydney Maresca
Visiting Assistant Professor of Theatre
Sydney Maresca is theater designer and dress historian with a strong background in clothing construction and textile crafts. Her design work has been seen on Broadway, cable television, and around the world. Notable projects include the upcoming Broadway premiere of The Cottage directed by Jason Alexander, the Broadway premiere and North American Tour of The Lighting Thief: The Percy Jackson Musical, the Broadway and London premieres of the award-winning play Hand to God, and Real Enemies at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival. Her research work is focused on clothing and textiles in the early American northeast that speak to indigenous and immigrant encounters, craft, labor, and women’s roles in their communities.
Prior to joining Williams, Sydney has held full-time faculty positions at New York University and Marymount Manhattan College. She has worked with students both as an educator and as a designer at a number of colleges and universities including Pace, Princeton, NYU, The New School, Sarah Lawrence, Montclair State University, Western Connecticut State University, Juilliard, and the Curtis Institute.
Peter Ogunniran
Assistant Professor of German
Peter Ogunniran will join the Department of German and Russian as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2023. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in European Studies (German) from the University of Ibadan, Ibadan in Nigeria, and Masters in Modern Languages (German) from the University of Mississippi.
He completed his joint PhD in German and Comparative Literature at Washington University in Saint Louis, where he also earned a Graduate Certificate in Higher Education Administration. He has taught different language levels and topics in German studies. His research interests include 19th and 20th century German Literature and Culture, German Colonial History and Literature, Visual Culture, Afro-German Studies, Nationalism and (Post)Colonialism. He is also a photographer and enjoys learning new things.
Ben Oliver
Assistant Professor of Physical Education and Director of the Williams Outing Club
Ben Oliver is an outdoor educator with specialties in outdoor orientation, risk management, program evaluation, and the use of technology in managing outdoor programs. He has a BA in geology from Hamilton College, and an MS in outdoor education from the University of New Hampshire.
From 2011 to 2022, Ben served first as Assistant Director and then Director of Outdoor Education at Colgate University. As Director, Ben oversaw all aspects of the program, including weekly trips, a challenge course, rental center, climbing wall, and Nordic ski trails. His primary focus was overseeing the 400+ hour staff training program and the 6-day Wilderness Adventure outdoor orientation program. In addition to countless backpack and canoe trips in the Adirondacks, Ben also led a variety of break trips including sea kayaking along the southern coast of Newfoundland, mountain biking in Moab, UT, lightweight backpacking in the Superstitions of Arizona, and ice climbing in Ouray, CO.
Between Colgate and Williams, Ben worked for the Sierra Club as the Safety, Security, & Emergency Preparedness Manager - overseeing risk management for the club’s outings programs all over the US and across the globe.
In his free time, Ben enjoys coffee, board games, and spending as much time as he can road and gravel cycling.
Ruth Ozeki
Margaret Bundy Scott Distinguished Visiting Professor
Ruth Ozeki is a writer, filmmaker, and Zen Buddhist priest, whose novels have been translated and published in over thirty-five countries, garnering international critical acclaim for their ability to integrate issues of science, technology, religion, environmental politics and global pop culture into unique, hybrid, narrative forms. Her most recent novel, The Book of Form and Emptiness, won the 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Massachusetts Book Prize, among others. Her novel, A Tale for the Time Being won the LA Times Book Prize and was a finalist for the 2013 Booker Prize and the National Book Critics' Circle Award. Her nonfiction work includes a memoir, The Face: A Time Code, and the documentary film, Halving the Bones. A longtime Buddhist practitioner, Ruth was ordained as a priest in 2010 and is affiliated with the Brooklyn Zen Center and the Everyday Zen Foundation. She is Professor Emerita of English Language & Literature at Smith College, where she was the Grace Jarcho Ross 1933 Professor of Humanities. A dual citizen of Canada and the United States, she splits her time between Western Massachusetts, New York City, and British Columbia, Canada.
Jessica R. Pearson-Bleyer
Visiting Assistant Professor of Theatre
Jessica Pearson-Bleyer is a theatrical director and historian who specializes in the American Musical Theatre. In her monograph project, “Who’s That Girl?: Women Writing Women on the Broadway Stage,” she investigates the oft-overlooked work of female lyricists, librettists, and composers in the mid-twentieth century. Her recent public-facing scholarship includes a virtual workshop for the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies (BBQ+) titled, “I Don’t Want to Sing ‘Poor Unfortunate Souls’: Advocating and Embracing Fat Bodies in Educational Theatre Spaces.” Her favorite past directing projects include Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street and Blood Brothers at Tufts University, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee at Merrimack College, and One Flea Spare for HoboJungle Theatre Company. She holds a PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies from Tufts University.
Glenn Peers
Croghan Bicentennial Professor in Biblical and Early Christian Studies
Never having been to a museum before I was 18, I have always experienced the power and enigma of art very strongly, and I would like to try to communicate something of the beautiful strangeness of art. I always find art has some exciting excess even after the best class discussions. I’ve continued to explore those qualities in my research projects and curatorial work, and so encounters with art, real and immediate, are important for teaching and successful classes. I began my graduate career and early publishing on topics related to medieval theories and practice of iconoclasm, and I am continuing to think through these positions, but now from a very strong view to explaining the material and experiential strangeness of art. I've taught at the University of Texas at Austin and Syracuse University (I'm emeritus now), and I aim to continue this exploration of art's otherness in my class on Late Antiquity and Disability Studies. We'll investigate the holdings in WCMA, Special Collections, and also the Clark in order to analyze some aspects of the history of the diversely abled, healing and conservation.
Rit Premnath
Associate Professor of Art
Rit (Sreshta Rit Premnath) is a Bangalore-born, Brooklyn-based artist. His recent installations, paintings and videos have focused on how our bodily occupation of space and endurance through time is shaped by systems of power and control. He has had solo exhibitions at the MIT List Visual Arts Center (Cambridge), Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati, Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego, Contemporary Art Gallery Vancouver, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, and Nomas Foundation (Rome), among many others. He is the founding editor of the publication Shifter (published from 2004 to 2021) which explored themes at the intersection of contemporary art, critical theory and experimental writing. Prior to joining Williams College, Premnath taught undergraduate and graduate courses at the Parsons School of Design at the New School, and served as the Director of the BFA Fine Arts Program.
https://sreshtaritpremnath.com/
https://shifter-magazine.com/
Michael Sardo
Visiting Lecturer in English
I am an Emmy-nominated writer and producer of television who's had fifty-four scripts produced, if you count Elvira's Halloween MTV Special (and really, why wouldn't you?) worked on hundreds of episodes, created and run several series, lectured/given master classes/taught/mentored at Columbia University's School of the Arts, Maine Media Workshop, NYU in LA, Chapman University, Stonybrook University, Branducers in Vittoria, Spain and the HBO Europe program in Banska Stiavnica, Slovakia.
My wife and I moved to Williamstown on April 8, 2020, at the start of the pandemic. There were four people on the plane. There's a story right there.
Aparna Sarkar
Visiting Lecturer in Art
I am a painter living in Brooklyn, teaching courses in gouache during WS and oil painting during the spring semester. I am excited to be at Williams after teaching art and mathematics (separately) to students from 3rd-12th grade at Saint Ann's School in Brooklyn since 2014. In 2021, I graduated from RISD with an MFA in Painting; my BA from Pomona College was in (pure) Mathematics. While I am primarily an oil painter, my art practice encompasses drawing, printmaking, and ceramics. Reading and writing are core to both my studio and teaching philosophies, as is community; I am a new member of Below Grand, a curatorial collective with a gallery in lower Manhattan. Recently, I've been making still-life paintings that deal in abstraction and pattern from observation of Indian family textiles and other objects. Last year, I had a solo show at Tappeto Volante Gallery in Brooklyn, as well as a two-person show at Peep Projects in Philadelphia in collaboration with another Williams art professor: Pallavi Sen. Otherwise, I've worked mostly with galleries in NY and LA. You can see more of my work, through its various iterations, at my website: aparnasarkar.us. It's a pleasure to be here, working with curious and driven Williams students in the studio art building.
Mario Sassi
Visiting Assistant Professor of Romance Languages
Mario Sassi obtained his Ph.D. in Italian at the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught both language and culture—with particular attention given to Dante’s Divine Comedy. He also taught for DePauw University’s summer study abroad program in Grado, Italy. His research focuses on Medieval storytelling and popular narratives, considering the role of the supernatural in religious and literary works (exempla and novelle). He is interested in the interactions between language and creativity, publishing on medieval Italian language and manuscripts. Additionally, he studies medievalism in contemporary pop culture, including in videogames and TV shows. He is excited about introducing Williams students to the world of Italian culture and language. In his free time, Mario enjoys cooking and baking, visiting art museums, dogs, and nature.
Will Schmenner
Lecturer in the Graduate Program in Art History
Matt Sharrock
Artist Associate and Visiting Artist in Residence in Percussion and Contemporary Music Performance
Hailed as one of “Boston’s best percussionists” by I Care if You Listen, Matt Sharrock (they/them) is a versatile marimbist, percussionist, and conductor who tirelessly champions the music of living composers. As half of the bass clarinet/marimba duo Transient Canvas, they have premiered over 80 pieces while touring extensively in the United States and abroad. From 2013-2020 they served as Music Director and conductor for Equilibrium and are a founding member of the mixed quartet Hinge and the Boston Percussion Group. In demand as a chamber musician, Matt is the resident percussionist with the Chameleon Arts Ensemble of Boston and has performed with the Lydian String Quartet, Boston Musica Viva, Sound Icon, the Lorelei Ensemble, and Dinosaur Annex, among others. As an orchestral percussionist, Matt can be heard regularly with the New Hampshire Music Festival Orchestra, the Vista Philharmonic, and the Grammy-winning Boston Modern Orchestra Project. They have recorded on Beauport Classical, BMOP/sound, Innova, Navona, New Focus, and Ravello record labels. They are an assistant professor of core studies and composition at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee and a course author and facilitator for Berklee Online. Matt proudly endorses Marimba One and Encore Mallets. When they aren't performing or teaching they enjoy hiking, cooking, and playing Dungeons & Dragons.
Gordon P. Smith
Visiting Assistant Professor of Biology
I am an insect ecologist interested in the role of within-species variation in species interactions, especially plant-pollinator mutualisms. I started my career as an undergraduate here at Williams, after which I got my PhD at the University of Arizona studying sex-associated differences in the behavior of hawkmoths in both flower and larval host-plant contexts. As a post-doc, I worked at the University of California Riverside and the University of Oregon, researching the pollination behavior and pathogens infecting wild bees on sunflower farms in the California central valley. Most recently I’ve been an NSF Post-doctoral Fellow at Cornell, using preserved insect specimens from museums to forensically examine how hawkmoths have changed their floral foraging behavior over the last 100 years.
I am very excited to be back in the purple valley, and to teach Conservation Bio and an ecology senior seminar this coming year! While I’m here, my research will focus on the consequences of variation in plant-pollinator interactions, investigating variation in floral foraging contexts, the mechanics of pollen transfer, and patterns of local pollen foraging in historical time.
Felipe Soza
Assistant Professor of Classics
I am a historian of antiquity, with a particular interest in the ancient Greek world and the eastern Mediterranean, as well as the history of historiography. I research imperialism and autocratic forms of power and their institutional, social and cultural expressions of domination. I also work on the long history of the classical tradition in Latin America. My current book project, From Empire to Kingdom: The Antigonid Imperial Project in the Hellenistic Age, studies one of the main imperial dynasties that emerged out of the collapse of Alexander the Great's transcontinental empire. Originally from Chile, I received my Ph.D. from Harvard University. I am a big fan of soccer (fútbol!), basketball, tennis, squash, and sports generally; and I am always available for pick up games.
William Stahl
Visiting Assistant Professor of American Studies
William Stahl is a political scientist specializing in political theory and race, ethnicity, and politics. He is currently writing a book manuscript on biography and democracy tentatively titled Margins of Freedom, and has previously published articles in Contemporary Political Theory. Before coming to Williams, he was a Visiting Scholar and Lecturer in the Social Science Division at New York University, Abu Dhabi. He received his Ph.D. in political science from UCLA in 2018. In his free time, he enjoys food, music, travel, and video games.
Kim Stauffer
Visiting Lecturer in Theatre
Kim (she/her) is a professional actor, director, and member of Actors’ Equity Association. Most recently, she was seen onstage in What the Constitution Means to Me at The Rep in Albany, NY. Select credits include NY Classical Theatre, The Shakespeare Theatre Company, Kansas City Repertory Theatre, Actors’ Theatre of Louisville, Barrington Stage Company, VA Stage Company, WAM Theatre, and Chester Theatre. She is an artist-activist who seeks out stories that embody change and inspire community dialogue.
As an educator, she specializes in actor training based in Stanislavski and Meisner Techniques. Her creative research in Applied Theatre is with the Center for Listening and Presence, focusing on the use of theatre to teach deep listening skills.
Isaac C. Veysey-White
Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish
I am a scholar of contemporary Spanish literature and comics, with special interest in historical memory, social movements, and cultural trauma. I am largely interested in how literature and other cultural production informs and is informed by historical and cultural events. My dissertation project, for example, investigated criticisms of neoliberalism in contemporary Spanish comics following the 2008 economic crisis. The economic crisis in Spain has left a lasting mark and has faced scathing criticism in literary and comics circles, the latter of which has experienced a boom in recent decades. In 2022, I published “Dystopian Necropolitics in Arnau Sanz Martínez’s Un fantasma and the Admonitory Role of Contagion Narratives in the COVID-19 Era” with Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, which considered how the recent COVID-19 pandemic in Spain compares to a dystopian graphic novel that was published shortly before the outbreak of COVID-19. How the COVID-19 pandemic in Spain (and globally) informs cultural production is a future direction of my research. I have also published “Liberatory Queer Performance and the Coloniality of Gender in Melibea Obono’s La Bastarda” with Spanish and Portuguese Review in 2020. I am also a Spanish-language educator, and have experience teaching introductory and intermediate Spanish, Spanish grammar, writing & composition, and literature & culture. I am passionate about the full spectrum of language learning, from the most beginner courses to the most advanced courses on literature and cultural studies. I have also had the opportunity to train abroad as a language instructor, earning a 120-hour TEFL certificate from Teacher Training Madrid in Madrid, Spain in 2020.
Xiaotian Yin
Visiting Lecturer in Art
Xiaotian (Lily) Yin is an art historian specializing in the art of Inner Asia and China. He research interest lies in Buddhist art in the Himalayas and along the Silkroad, focusing on mural paintings in the cave shrines, esoteric Buddhist imagery, and Buddhist printing and publishing cultures. Currently a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University, Xiaotian is completing her dissertation, which examines the artistic and religious innovations in Inner Asia from the tenth to the twelfth century, when Tibetan Buddhism emerged as the perceived religious ideal for much of Asia, adopting a transregional and transcultural perspective.
Before joining Williams, Xiaotian served as a visiting lecturer at the Department of Art History at Dartmouth College and Zhejiang University, China. Her research has been supported by the Victor and William Fung Foundation, the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, the Harvard University Asia Center, the Harvard China Fund, and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange.