A&S New Faculty 2023

Tomoya Asaba will join the Department of Physics in January 2025. Asaba focuses on experimental condensed matter physics, and his research primarily delves into the complexities of correlated and topological materials, particularly in low-dimensional systems. His innovative approach incorporates techniques such as epitaxial growth, scanning tunneling microscopy and thermoelectric power measurements. His studies on fabricating quantum wires of RuCl3 and the loop current state in CsV3Sb5 have been published in prestigious journals like Science Advances and Nature Physics. In addition, he received the prestigious Japanese grant PRESTO in 2022. 
 
Formerly on the faculty of Kyoto University, Asaba holds a master’s degree in science from the University of Tokyo (2011) and he earned his doctorate in science from the University of Michigan (2018). He was a Director's Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory until 2021, and besides teaching the fascinating world of condensed matter physics, Asaba is eager to mentor students at UVA and to develop new techniques on quantum wires to realize quantum computers and open a new era of atomic-scale physics. 
 

Anneleise Azúa is a historian and ethnographer with fieldwork experience along the Texas-Mexico border and in Central Mexico. Her interests include plant medicine, botany, settler colonialism and race in the twentieth-century borderlands.    

Her book manuscript explores the ways humans, plants and the land create history and culture together. The book reveals the science of plant medicine and healing in Texas and Mexico and its complex relationship with the environment, colonialism and transnational understandings of race.

Azúa received her Ph.D. and M.A. in American studies from the University of Texas at Austin and her bachelor’s degree in communications and gender studies from the University of Southern California. She has held a Rising Scholar Postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Virginia, a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies (Anthropology) at the University of Houston, as well as a research EDUFI Fulbright Fellowship in the Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki, Finland. From 2018-2020, she served as a curatorial fellow in the Division of Medicine and Science at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, and in 2022, she published an article titled “Nuestra Ciencia as Transborder Ecological Knowledge and Survival” in the American Anthropological Association’s Culture, Agriculture, Food, and Environment (CAFÉ). 

In the Spring of 2025, she will be teaching a course titled “Latinx and Indigenous Environmentalisms” in the Department of American Studies. She is also working on a grant for a food project that investigates the rise of Tex-Mex food popularity in the Nordic countries.

A novelist whose works of absurdity and social commentary have been translated into more than 20 languages, Jesse Ball is the author of more than 20 books of short and long fiction verse and drawings. He is a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Heinz Foundation, the American Academy in Berlin, and Nederlands Letterenfonds (Dutch Foundation for Literature). He is the winner of the Gordon Burn Prize, as well as the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize, and his books have been shortlisted or longlisted for the Believer Book Award, a New York Public Library Literary Lion, an L.A. Times Book Prize, and the National Book Award. His novels have also been an Editor’s Choice or A Book of the Year selection by The New York Times, NPR, the San Francisco Chronicle and The New Yorker. Ball was named a Granta Best Young American Novelist in 2017.  

Ball previously taught at UVA last year as the Kapnick Foundation Distinguished Writer-in-Residence. He will join the faculty in January 2025. 

His next novel, The Repeat Room, published by Catapult Books, will appear in September.  

A sociocultural anthropologist, Ernesto Javier Benitez specializes in the intersections of Indigeneity, race, gender and development. His long-term research is grounded in a decade-long ethnographic engagement with the Amazonian Kichwa (also spelled Quichua) people of Ecuador’s Napo province. He has paid particular attention to the ecotourism boom that occurred in Ecuador’s Upper Amazon in the early 1990s and the impact it has had on the livelihoods and identities of Kichwa people, many of whom have gradually shifted from agricultural and subsistence-based activities to service-based work in ecotourism. His dissertation offers an ethnographic account of how Kichwa tour guides in Napo — the vast majority of whom are young men — negotiate the demands and expectations of the ecotourism industry and how, in the process, they produce and enact new understandings of their ethnic, gendered and sexual identities. His current research project is concerned with the opportunities and challenges facing Indigenous Kichwa women who decide to run for political office in their territories.

Benitez holds a Ph.D. in global and sociocultural studies with a concentration in sociocultural anthropology from Florida International University (2021). In 2021, Benitez was awarded a two-year Rising Scholars Postdoctoral Fellowship at UVA, after which he was invited to join the Department of Anthropology as an assistant professor where he has taught undergraduate courses in anthropology such as “Contemporary Indigenous Peoples in Latin America (ANTH2590)” and “Topics on the Anthropology of Tourism (ANTH3590)”.

Trees provide us with countless ecosystem services and serve as a critical stabilizing force for the climate. Unfortunately, forests are currently facing unprecedented levels of stress from pest and disease outbreaks, frequent and intense disturbance, fragmentation and a changing climate. Assistant professor in environmental sciences and architecture, Meghan Blumstein takes an interdisciplinary approach to ask the question “How will forests survive the next century of stress?” She utilizes tools from genetics, genomics, physiology and modeling to understand how stress is shaping tree populations and how much potential they have to respond. 

Blumstein holds a Ph.D. in organismal and evolutionary biology from Harvard University and a bachelor’s degree in environmental studies from Middlebury College in Vermont. Most recently, she has served as an NSF postdoctoral research fellow in civil and environmental engineering at MIT and was a Bullard Fellow at the Harvard Forest before joining the UVA faculty. 

With her joint appointment with the Department of Environmental Sciences and UVA’s School of Architecture, Blumstein will develop courses with the potential for cross-registration aimed at introducing students to plant biology, physiology and the study of spatial patterns in natural landscapes.

Researching the unprecedented levels of stress that forests are currently facing from pest and disease outbreaks, frequent and intense disturbance, fragmentation and a changing climate, Meghan Blumstein takes an interdisciplinary approach to ask, “How will forests survive the next century of stress?” She seeks to determine how much potential they have to respond, utilizing tools from genetics, genomics, physiology and modeling to understand how that stress is shaping the tree populations that provide us with countless ecosystem services while serving as a critical stabilizing force for the climate.  

Blumstein was the recipient of graduate research and postdoctoral biology research fellowships from the National Science Foundation and recently won an American Journal of Botany (AJB) Synthesis Prize recognizing perspective papers by early-career scientists summarizing recent research and providing new insights advancing the field. Her work emphasizes the importance of integrating both ecology and evolution when considering forest response to climate change has recently been published in the AJB, New Phytologist, Nature Communications, and Nature Ecology & Evolution.  

Blumstein holds a Ph.D. in organismal and evolutionary biology from Harvard University and a bachelor’s degree in environmental studies from Middlebury College in Vermont.  

Before coming to UVA, she served as a Bullard Fellow at the Harvard Forest. Holding joint appointment with the Department of Environmental Sciences and UVA’s School of Architecture, Blumstein will develop courses with the potential for cross-registration aimed at introducing students to plant biology, physiology and the study of spatial patterns in natural landscapes. 

A scholar specializing in African American, African diaspora and African history, Nemata Blyden is the author of African Americans and Africa: A New History (Yale University Press, 2019), and West Indians in West Africa, 1808-1880: The Diaspora in Reverse (University of Rochester Press, 2000), among other publications.  Her teaching and scholarship center the experiences of African descended people, thinking about this history in insightful ways by looking at their history through an often-neglected lens of “Global Black” history.  Her principal thematic interests have included nineteenth-century African American history, African American engagement with Africa and African and American and Caribbean migrations to Africa.

Her current project reflects her continuing interest in African American history and the connection between the African continent and its diaspora. A family biography of a black Atlantic family, the project attempts to tell the history of various spaces in the Atlantic world through the eyes of an extended family.

Blyden holds a Master of Philosophy degree and a Ph.D. in history from Yale University and a bachelor’s degree in history and international relations from Mount Holyoke College. Formerly a professor at George Washington University, Blyden joins the faculty of the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies and will teach a variety of courses on the Black experience.

A philosopher of science and mind, Trey Boone conducts research at the intersection of philosophy, psychology and neuroscience. He has two main research programs, the first of which focuses on foundational issues related to explanation and causation in complex systems, particularly in the context of neuroscience. The second focuses on issues related to consciousness and perceptual representation and involves ongoing interdisciplinary collaborations.

His work has been published in top philosophy journals, including Philosophy of Science, Synthese, British Journal for Philosophy of Science and Philosophical Psychology. His research has been supported by grants from the Templeton Foundation and the National Science Foundation.

Trey received his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in 2019, and he trained at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh’s joint Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition. He joins the Department of Philosophy following a postdoctoral appointment at Duke University housed in its philosophy department and the university’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience.

As an assistant professor, Trey will be teaching courses at both the graduate and undergraduate level on a variety of topics in philosophy of science and philosophy of mind, as well as introductory courses on scientific reasoning. His research will be focused on interdisciplinary work investigating conscious experience and the precision of visual representation, a set of projects focused on conceptual issues in network neuroscience, and work building off his dissertation research that focuses on reduction, emergence and causation in complex systems.

A 2023-2024 fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Lauren Bridges researches the sociotechnical, political economic and environmental politics of big data infrastructures. Her academic writing has been published in journals such as Information Communication & Society, Big Data & Society and New Media & Society. Her work has received academic awards and honorary mentions from the International Communication Association, the National Communication Association and the Association of Internet Researchers. In addition to her academic writing, Bridges has written for The Guardian, and she has been interviewed on PRX The World (NPR Boston), CBC Spark, BBC Newsday, NPR's 1A, the Anti-Dystopians podcast and NBC. 

Bridges is co-PI of a grant awarded by the Internet Society Foundation, for “Geographies of Digital Wasting,” a global collaborative project tracing the global flows and practices of digital wasting throughout the tech supply chain. She holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in communication from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, an M.A. in creative writing, publishing and editing from the University of Melbourne, and a B.A. in business from Queensland University of Technology. Prior to academia, she worked in academic publishing and the nonprofit sector with a focus on social policy. She is currently writing a book on the limits of digital growth and the elemental politics of digital infrastructure expansion in Northern Virginia and Southern California.  

This Fall, Dr. Bridges will teach a course titled “Digital Media & the Environment.”

A scholar and poet who has been teaching writing at the college level since 2004, Tyler J. Carter spent seven years living and working in China before arriving at UVA. His research in writing studies examines how different kinds of knowledge are transformed by cultural, linguistic and disciplinary boundaries.   

His recent published work includes a contrastive historical account of writing and language studies, published in College English; a four-part podcast in collaboration with WTJU about the relationships between humans and deer; and a lyric essay about his early days living in China, published on Fence Steaming. 

Carter received his MFA in literary arts from Brown University and his Ph.D. in rhetoric and composition from Purdue University. He also holds a certificate in second language studies from Purdue.

Carter is currently working on two projects, the first is a book-length essay about the phenomenon of foreignness, and the second is a comparative case study of writing program administration at Sino-foreign joint venture universities in China. The latter project is an on-going collaboration with his former colleagues at Duke Kunshan University. This academic year he will teach introductory and advanced writing courses. 

Julia Cassaniti is an anthropologist of mind and culture in contemporary religious contexts of transnational Asia. Her work examines relationships between social, mental and physical influences on health and well-being and the patterned approaches by which people construct reality through idiosyncratic implementations of cultural ideologies. Dr. Cassaniti has specialized in Theravāda Buddhist interpretations in Northern Thailand, with ethnographic emphases on embodiment, including issues of gender and sexuality, and ideology, both from past texts and popular media. Her books include Remembering the Present: Mindfulness in Buddhist Asia (Cornell U. Press); Universalism Without Uniformity: Explorations in Mind and Culture (U. Chicago Press); and Living Buddhism: Mind, Self, and Emotion in a Thai Community (Cornell U. Press), which won the American Anthropological Association’s Stirling Prize for Best Book in Psychological Anthropology. Her current interests include temporality, attention and perception, and the effects of their different considerations for everyday life and mental disorder in Thailand, Japan and around the world.

Dr. Cassaniti received a B.A. in cognitive psychology from Smith College and a Ph.D. from the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. She has conducted postdoctoral research as a Culture and Mind Fellow at Stanford University and has held previous faculty positions at Cornell University; Chiang Mai University; the University of California, San Diego; and Washington State University. 

As an incoming professor of religious studies at UVA, Cassaniti will be teaching graduate and undergraduate courses this year on Buddhism, gender, mental health and ethnographic fieldwork. 

A poet and a scholar, Sumita Chakraborty has received praise from The New York Times for poems described as “full of life and joy even when she is thinking through violence and grief.” As a scholar, she specializes in 20th- and 21st-century poetry and poetics, with a particular interest in the relationship between poetics and ethics. 

Chakraborty is the author of the poetry collection Arrow [Alice James Books (U.S.)/Carcanet Press (U.K.), 2020]. She is currently working on a scholarly book project titled Grave Dangers: Poetics and the Ethics of Death in the Anthropocene (under advance contract with the University of Minnesota Press) and a second poetry collection, titled The B-Sides of the Golden Record. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, the Best American Poetry series, the Academy of American Poets’ “Poem-a-Day” series, and elsewhere. Her articles have appeared in Cultural Critique, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, Modernism/modernity, and Verge: Studies in Global Asias, among other journals. She has received fellowships, honors and residencies from the Poetry Foundation, Kundiman, the Forward Arts Foundation and the National Humanities Center.

Chakraborty holds a Ph.D. in English with a certificate in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies from Emory University and a B.A. in English and creative writing from Wellesley College. Before coming to the University of Virginia, she taught at Emory as a visiting assistant professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies, at the University of Michigan as the Helen Zell Visiting Professor in Poetry and at North Carolina State University, where she was an assistant professor in the Department of English and won the Outstanding Junior Faculty in the Humanities award.

Chakraborty will teach undergraduate and graduate courses in poetry and poetics. 

Danielle Charette studies how 18th-century debates over globalization continue to shape our views of liberty, political economy, and the nation-state. As a political theorist, she focuses on tensions between republican institutions and the emergence of political economy during the Scottish Enlightenment, especially in the work of David Hume.

Her research has appeared in journals such as the American Political Science Review, Political Studies, History of Political Thought, and History of European Ideas, as well as several edited volumes. Her essays for the broader public have been published in outlets like The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Point, and The Hedgehog Review. She is also the book review editor for American Political Thought. Her current book project explores Hume’s understanding of the modern commercial state.   

Charette earned a B.A. in English from Swarthmore College (2014) and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought (2021). Her dissertation research was sponsored by the Mellon Foundation, the Nicholson Center for British Studies, and the David Hume Society. 

Charette moved to Charlottesville two years ago for a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Politics and is looking forward to serving as an assistant professor of Politics in the General Faculty and as the Associate Director of the Program on Constitutionalism and Democracy. She will teach the program’s two flagship courses, “The American Political Tradition” and “American Political Economy” this fall.      

A historian of South Asia, Indrani Chatterjee researches the intersections of gender, religion and politics between the late 17^th and 20^th centuries. 

She is the author of Gender, Slavery and the Law in Colonial India (Oxford University Press, 1999), editor of Unfamiliar Relations: Family and History in South Asia (2006) and co-editor with Richard Eaton of Slavery and South Asian History (2007). With the aid of two grants from the American Council of Learned Societies and a fellowship at the Yale Agrarian Studies Colloquium, she published Forgotten Friends: Monks, Marriages and Memories of Northeast India (Oxford University Press, 2013), which won the Srikanth Dutt award from the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (New Delhi, India). She has also contributed chapters to edited volumes, essays to print and electronic journals. 

An alumna of St. Stephen’s College, New Delhi and Jawaharlal Nehru University, Chatterjee earned her Ph.D. from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. She has also taught for varying lengths of time in colleges of Delhi University (India), SOAS (UK), University of California, Davis; Rutgers-New Brunswick University; and the University of Texas at Austin before joining UVA. 

Currently, she is revising a manuscript on the intersections of caste, gender and wealth and how they shaped subjectivities in South Asian pasts. Beginning next spring (2024), Chatterjee will teach an annual seminar on the social roots and challenges of electoral democracy in India for the Karsh Institute of Democracy as well as Dept. of History courses on the cultural histories of early and late modernity in South Asia. 

A water systems scientist, Frederick Cheng is interested in understanding how we can use freshwater ecosystems as nature-based solutions to protect and improve water quality for societal use. Using a combination of data synthesis, computational modelling, machine learning and geospatial analysis, Cheng aims to quantify and optimize the ecological and environmental functions of these ecosystems at landscape scales.   

Cheng’s research spans various ecosystems, including streams, wetlands and lakes across agricultural and urban settings. His research on the role of small and disconnected wetlands on improving landscape water quality has appeared in Nature, Water Resources Research, and Environmental Research Letters and has been featured in national news publications and on radio reports. His work has also been recognized by Water Resources Research with an Editor’s Choice Award and was awarded a Horton Research Grant by the American Geophysical Union. 

Cheng received a bachelor’s degree in environmental engineering (2015) at the University of Waterloo in Canada and continued there to earn a master’s (2017) and Ph.D. (2022) in civil engineering. Before arriving at UVA, he conducted postdoctoral research at Colorado State University. 

During his first year at UVA, Cheng is looking forward to expanding his research group and using deep learning models in his research in the interest of predicting algal bloom formation in reservoirs, as well as quantifying trade-offs between water quality enhancements, greenhouse gas emission and hydrologic functions in wetlands.

A documentary filmmaker, scholar, and creative writer, Jodie Childers is interested in 20th-century transnational American studies, Icelandic literature, cultural McCarthyism and Cold War political rhetoric. Her creative work explores the psychic and environmental effects of extractivism and deindustrialization on Rust Belt Appalachia.  

Her film Down by the Riverside, which premiered at the Woodstock Film Festival in the fall of 2023, examines the environmental legacy of American folk musician Pete Seeger. In 2018, she received the Leifur Eiríksson Foundation Fellowship to pursue independent research and language study in Reykjavík, Iceland, and her work on the Icelandic novelist Halldór Laxness and the American influence on his fiction has been published in Comparative American Studies and Resources for American Literary Studies.  

Jodie holds a Ph.D. in English with a concentration in American studies from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Brooklyn College. Most recently, she was a visiting assistant professor at Tulane University where she taught first-year and expository writing.  

She is currently working on a book project that analyzes the rhetoric of dissent in HUAC testimonies. At UVA, she will be teaching writing courses on the theme of social imagination, and her pedagogical areas of focus include interdisciplinary research, digital composition and engaged learning. 

(Editors note: Biography is currently being finalized on July 25-26)

Juyeon Chung studies how learners' native language phonetics and phonology systems can interfere with their ability to acquire a second language, both in terms of how they produce and perceive the sounds of the second language. She is also interested in how the amount of exposure to a second language can help learners acquire it more effectively.

Chung has focused her research on the English production and perception of Korean adult learners of English, who had varying amounts of experience with the language. Before coming to UVA, Chung also participated in database creation from low-resource languages such as Xibe and analyzed data using Universal Dependences, an annotation scheme for annotating grammar across different languages.

She has published articles in journals such as Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Universal Dependencies, The Linguistic Society of Korea, Journal of the Korea Contents Association, and English Language and Linguistics.

Chung earned her M.A. and Ph.D. from Indiana University. Prior to joining the UVA faculty, she was an associate Korean/Japanese language instructor at Indiana University. This fall, Chung will teach beginner-level and advanced-level Korean language courses.

An award-winning scholar-teacher, Robin R. Means Coleman is the director of the Black Fantastic Media Research Lab as well as an accomplished, prizewinning administrator. Her research focuses on media studies and the cultural politics of Blackness.  

Coleman is the author of Horror Noire: A History of Black American Horror from the 1890s to Present, 2nd ed. (2023); Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present (2011); and  African American Viewers and the Black Situation Comedy: Situating Racial Humor (2000). She is co-author of The Black Guy Dies First: Black Horror from Fodder to Oscar (2023) and Intercultural Communication for Everyday Life (2014). Coleman also is the editor of Say It Loud! African American Audiences, Media, and Identity (2002) and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Black Horror Film (2024) and Fight the Power! The Spike Lee Reader (2008), among many other academic and popular publications. 

Coleman also is featured in and co-executive producer of the award-winning documentary film Horror Noire. The film features a ‘who’s who’ cast of horror experts, including Jordan Peele (Get Out), Tananarive Due (The Reformatory), Ashlee Blackwell (graveyardshiftsisters.com), William Crain (Blacula), Rusty Cundieff (Tales from the Hood), Rachel True (The Craft), Ernest Dickerson (The Walking Dead), Keith David (The Thing) and Mark Harris (The Black Guy Dies First). 

Coleman came to UVA from Northwestern University, where she was the Vice President & Associate Provost for Institutional Diversity and Inclusion and Chief Diversity Officer, and the Ida B. Wells and Ferdinand Barnett Professor of Communication Studies. 

Previously, Coleman served on the faculty at Texas A&M University, the University of Michigan, the University of Pittsburgh and New York University. At Texas A&M, she was the Vice President and Associate Provost for Diversity. At Michigan, she served as the Associate Dean of Social Sciences in the Rackham Graduate School and chair of the Department of Communication Studies. 

An award-winning film director, screenwriter and former journalist from Senegal, Mamadou Dia was among the 171 scholars, writers, artists and scientists awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship this year by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to support his artistic work. Before accepting a new, tenure-track appointment this year, Dia taught at UVA as an assistant professor of practice in the Departments of French and Media Studies for the previous two academic years.

Before transitioning to making feature films, Dia was a newspaper and video journalist based in Dakar, Senegal, working for Agence France-Presse and other international news agencies in Africa and Europe. Dia moved to the United States to complete his MFA in writing and directing at New York University’s Tisch School for the Arts in 2017.

Co-founder of the production company Joyedidi, Dia explores the tension between fact and fiction, realism and abstraction in his award-winning films, which are often based on his life growing up in West Africa. Dia’s first feature film “Baamum Nafi/Nafi’s father” was Senegal’s 2021 Oscars entry for “Best International Feature.” His films have won numerous awards and have screened at major festivals, including Toronto, Lincoln Center and MoMA’s New Directors/New Films, Chicago and Venice.

Dia plans to use his Guggenheim Fellowship funds to support research for his new feature-length project, a period film based in part on the life of African-American photographer Augustus Washington. The son of a former slave, Washington embraced the abolitionist movement and was one of the few African American daguerreotypists — early photographers who produced their work on silver or silver-covered copper plates — whose 19th-century work has been documented. Washington moved to the West African nation of Liberia with his wife and two small children in 1853 and eventually opened daguerrean studios in Sierra Leone, the Gambia and Senegal, as well as Liberia.

A political theorist, Tom Donahue-Ochoa studies ideas such as “liberties”and “injustices” through trans-local lenses. That means he asks questions like, “What can we learn by looking at alike ideas in unlike places? Or by tracking a concept as it moves from one place to another? How does that movement change both the concept and those places?” 

Donahue-Ochoa is the author of Unfreedom for All: How the World’s Injustices Harm You (Oxford University Press, 2019). He has also published articles in the Journal of Social and Political Philosophy, the Review of Politics, the European Journal of Political Theory and Ethics & the Environment, among others. He has been a principal investigator or co-principal investigator on research grants from the American Political Science Association and the American Philosophical Association. 

Before joining UVA, he served as an assistant professor of political science at Haverford College; a lecturer in Yale University’s Program on Ethics, Politics & Economics; and a postdoctoral research fellow at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City. 

This year, Donahue-Ochoa will be teaching an Engagements seminar for first-year students titled “They Think WHAT? Visions of Politics” and a Department of Politics course titled “The Earth: Ethics, Politics & Economics.” He also will be writing a paper in transregional thought. Its working title is, “Democratizing Ideas: Creolizing, Fieldwork, and the Politics of Upending Categories.” 

Daniel Driscoll is a political economist of climate change. His work lies at the intersection of decarbonization, economic policy and finance. 

Before joining the faculty at UVA, Driscoll was a postdoctoral researcher at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. He has held visiting researcher positions at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany, and at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris, France. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego. 

Driscoll’s research has appeared in a variety of peer-reviewed journals, including Social Problems, Journal of Common Market Studies, Comparative Politics, Socius and Social Science Quarterly. It has received attention from the Financial Times and Bloomberg and he has received external funding from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy and the Institute of European Studies. 

He is currently writing a book titled Why Carbon Taxes Failed, and outside of academia, he has worked with various think tanks, organizations and governments.  In the upcoming academic year, Driscoll will teach “The Political Economy of Climate Change” and “Introduction to Graduate Statistics.”

An acclaimed poet with an interest in the intersections between literature, environmental action, history and culture, Camille T. Dungy is the author of the book-length narrative Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden. She has written four collections of poetry, including Trophic Cascade, and the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers. She also edited Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry and co-edited the From the Fishouse poetry anthology.  

Dungy is the poetry editor for Orion magazine and a University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University. Her recent honors include the 2021 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, and fellowships from the NEA in both prose and poetry. 

Dungy’s residency on Grounds as the Kapnick Distinguished Writer-in-Residence will take place this fall. In the tradition of William Faulkner’s legendary residencies at the University in 1957 and 1958, the Kapnick Foundation Distinguished Writer-in-Residence Endowment brings writers of international stature to Charlottesville for extended stays to teach and engage with the UVA student body, both at the graduate and undergraduate levels, and to leave a lasting mark on the literary community. Dungy’s residency coincides with the 10th Anniversary of this extraordinary endowment. 

As part of her residency, she will design and teach two creative writing courses through a combination of in-person and virtual programming. For undergraduates, Dungy will offer one section of “Advanced Poetry Writing I.” And for graduate students, she will teach one section of “Form & Theory of Poetry,” under the subtitle, "To Be Grounded: Understanding Space, Place, and Setting as Growth Templates for Poetry.” 

Aseel Farhat, an applied analysis mathematician, specializes in partial differential equations (PDEs) arising in fluid dynamics. Her research focuses on the mathematical analysis of the Navier-Stokes equations and geophysical models for oceans and atmospheres. Applications of her work include chaotic system prediction, data-driven analysis and data assimilation.

Farhat's publications appear in prestigious journals, including the Indiana University Mathematics Journal, Physical Review Fluids, Nonlinearity, SIAM Journal on Applied Dynamical Systems (SIADS) and the Archive for Rational Mechanics and Analysis (ARMA). Her research is supported by the National Science Foundation, and she is currently a principal investigator on an NSF research grant focusing on the impact of Earth rotation and stratification on the mathematical analysis of fluids.  She is also a principal investigator on an NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) grant on Mathematics in real-world applications with a focus on involving underrepresented minorities in STEM fields.

Farhat earned her Ph.D. at the University of California, Irvine, and has held postdoctoral positions at the University of Indiana, Bloomington, and the University of Virginia. Before returning to the University of Virginia, she was an assistant professor at the Florida State University. 

This year, Farhat's research will focus on developing and analyzing practical algorithms to model small-scale behavior in fluids, ultimately leading to more accurate predictions and improved accuracy of numerical simulations. She will also organize educational activities aimed at creating a welcoming and inclusive learning environment for a diverse range of students, early-career and underrepresented groups in mathematics. 

Parwana Fayyaz will be joining join the Department of Middle Eastern & South Asian Languages & Cultures as an assistant professor in January of 2025. Fayyaz’s research interests are deeply rooted in the interdisciplinary nature of pre-modern Islamic learning, particularly the narrative-poems that reflect the confluence of Greek, Arabic and Persian literary traditions 

Born in Kabul, Afghanistan, and raised as a refugee in Pakistan, Fayyaz completed her undergraduate studies in comparative literature with a minor in creative writing (poetry) at Stanford University in 2015. In 2016, she completed a master’s in religious studies at Stanford, and she completed her Ph.D. at Trinity College, Cambridge. Her dissertation, “Poetry and Poetics: the Sufi Eye and the Neoplatonic Vision in Jāmī’s Salāmān va Absāl,” explores the mystical teachings and philosophical underpinnings in Jami’s narrative-poem. 

In addition to her academic contributions, Fayyaz is a poet. Her debut collection, 40 Names, bears witness to the lives of Afghan women, both in their homeland and in exile. The title poem of the collection won the 2019 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, showcasing her ability to weave personal narratives with cultural significance. 

Lorena Albert Ferrando’s research lies in the intersection of philology, linguistics, and historiography in Spain and in the Americas. Her work has been published in Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica (2023) and Hispania (2019).

She received her Ph.D. from the multidisciplinary Spanish: Linguistics, Literature and Communication program at Spain’s University of Valladolid (2023). She also holds a master’s in teacher training in compulsory secondary and upper secondary school education, vocational training and languages from the University of Zaragoza (2017), a master’s in teaching Spanish as a second language from the International University Menéndez Pelayo-Cervantes Institute (2012) and an M.Phil. in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian languages and literatures from The Graduate Center, CUNY (2005). 

For over 20 years, she has taught Spanish language and culture at U.S. and European institutions, including the University of Florida, Princeton University, New York University, International University Menéndez Pelayo, and the University of St Andrews. Ferrando also has taught Spanish as a second language to immigrants and refugees in Spain.

She is currently working on a manuscript analyzing the relevance of the internationally known scholar Aurelio M. Espinosa, Sr. and his studies of “traditional Spanish” in the articulation of the New-Mexican identity at the beginning of the 20th century. This fall, she will be teaching “Introduction to Linguistics” and will be developing a new seminar titled “Untamed Spanish” planned for the spring semester. The seminar will cover language ideologies, with a special focus on how language is used to construct concepts related to power, knowledge, race, racism, and privilege (among other issues) and how these ideas influence language and language use.

Pierre-Christian Fink is a scholar of economic sociology and political economy, emphasizing historical methods and theoretical development. His work explores how financial elites create markets that are hidden from the public but powerfully influence citizens’ economic opportunities across the globe. 

In a recent article published in the American Sociological Review, Fink provided a new interpretation of the financial crisis of 1974 as a crucial moment in the emergence of the current economic system. An article scheduled for publication in Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics analyzes the Federal Reserve’s 2023 report on the failure of Silicon Valley Bank.  

Fink’s research has been funded by the Lyndon B. Johnson and Gerald Ford Presidential Foundations and a Henry Kaufman Financial History Research Fellowship.

Fink joins the University of Virginia from Harvard University, where he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Law School. He earned his Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia University. He has contributed to the building of a scholarly community on sociology and political economy by co-organizing two virtual events: a panel on recent bank failures and a book salon with new publications on finance. 

Jack Fisher is an economist and formerly a postdoctoral fellow at the Platform Lab within Harvard’s D^3 Institute, and he joins the Department of Economics this fall as an assistant professor. His research aims to better understand the gig economy using insights from applied microeconomics, and more broadly, he is interested in how technology shapes labor markets. 

Fisher holds a Ph.D. in economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science, an M.Phil. in economics from the University of Oxford and a B.Sc. in economics from the University of York. He will be teaching courses on econometrics and labor economics. 

Tatiana Flores is a scholar of the visual culture of the hemispheric Americas, specializing in modern and contemporary Latin American, Caribbean and Latinx art. She is the author of the award-winning monograph Mexico’s Revolutionary Avant-Gardes: From Estridentismo to ¡30-30! (Yale University Press, 2013). Committed to public-facing work, she has been active as an independent curator for over two decades. She curated the critically acclaimed Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago for the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative in 2017. A major survey exhibition described as having “seismic importance,” it featured over eighty contemporary artists with roots in the insular Caribbean. Through the framework of the archipelago, Relational Undercurrents located thematic continuities in a region that has been long been regarded as fragmented and incomprehensible.

A 2017-18 Getty Scholar, Flores received the 2016 Arts Writers book prize from the Andy Warhol Foundation and was the 2007-2008 Cisneros Visiting Scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. She previously served as president of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP) and was chair of the editorial board of Art Journal. Flores is senior editor and founding editorial board member of ASAP/Journal. Her co-edited volume The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History is forthcoming.

Through her research, teaching and service, Flores advocates on behalf of disenfranchised and marginalized communities, artists and historical actors. This fall, she will be teaching the art history colloquium “Caribbean Aesthetics.”

Piers Gelly is a writer, radio producer and writing instructor. After serving for four years as a lecturer in English at UVA, he is excited to take on a new role in the English department as assistant professor, general faculty. 

Gelly’s fiction, essays and reporting have been featured by n+1, The Dublin Review and 99% Invisible, among others. He is at work on two novel projects: a collaboration with the poet Peter Myers, titled Autofiction; or, the Author Function, as well as a solo undertaking set at an experimental liberal arts college in Wisconsin. Gelly’s teaching and research interests include community-engaged pedagogy, digital writing and critical university studies. His courses often draw on community partnerships with public-sector labor unions in the Charlottesville area. In 2022, he and his students worked with unionized graduate student workers at UVA to create the collaborative book Hoos Not Getting Paid: the voices of graduate student workers at the University of Virginia, forthcoming from the “Working and Writing for Change” series at Parlor Press. In 2023, he and his students partnered with unionized bus drivers at Charlottesville Area Transit to write and design the museum exhibition Collective Bargaining for the Common Good: two decades of organized labor at UVA and in Charlottesville, which ran in UVA’s Small Special Collections Library from March to June of 2024. 

Gelly holds a B.A. from the College of Letters at Wesleyan University and an M.F.A. in Fiction from UVA. During his time as a graduate student, his short fiction was awarded the 2019 Henfield Prize for Fiction, and his novel manuscript was awarded the UVA School of Architecture’s 2019 Richard Guy Wilson Award for “Excellence in the Study of Buildings, Landscapes and Places.” As postgraduate Lecturer, he was awarded the 2022-2023 Edgar F. Shannon Fellowship in recognition of his outstanding teaching record. 

This fall he will teach a first-year writing seminar called “You and A.I.,” which will ask students to think critically about writing instruction in the age of large language models, as well as an advanced writing seminar called “What is college for?” 

A scholar of modern and contemporary literature, Adrienne Ghaly specializes in environmental humanities, novel studies and theory, and using literature and humanities methods for public advocacy and policy change on climate and environmental justice. Her research interests include the transatlantic modern and contemporary novel and post-novelistic media, cultural histories and archives of biodiversity loss and species extinction, the literature of planetary crisis, and how literary critical methods can help us think through urgent global challenges.

Ghaly holds a Ph.D. in English from NYU (2014) and her BA is from the University of Chicago. From 2017 – 2022 she was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Arts and Sciences and then in the Environmental Humanities Labs at UVA. From 2022-2023 she was a Humanitarian Collaborative Practitioner Fellow at the UVA Global Policy Center where she was co-creator of a global initiative at the intersection of humanities research and public policy and advocacy challenges around climate, conflict, and humanitarian crisis in partnership with the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Her first book project is Novel Proximities: On Closeness and Relational Life. It explores extreme proximities between characters and nonhuman worlds in modern and contemporary novels of late realism. It argues that these texts’ cultural and philosophical significance is how they answer the most urgent question of our historical moment: how to envision, write, and bring to visibility complex relations to the nonhuman and material world? Emerging from a long term engagement with extinction studies, her second book project, Archives of Extinction: Mass Biodiversity Loss and the Aesthetics of Everyday Life, tracks the multi-scalar effects of ‘everyday’ practices and the documents that record them, reframing the biocultural significance of novels, songs, advertisements and art in the 20^th century.

As an incoming assistant professor with the Department of English, Ghaly will be a core member of the Environmental Humanities faculty and in the spring teach the graduate seminar for the graduate certificate program in Environmental Humanities. This fall she will teach “Literatures of the Nonhuman” for undergraduates and new English majors.

Rhiannon Goad’s work concerns the persuasive elements of communications that audiences often perceive as arhetorical. Her most recent publication, “The Problem with Police Recorded Video,” in Rhetoric Society Quarterly, details how judges and jurors misperceive dashcam and bodycam footage as neutral and objective, and she is currently working on a project that tracks how senators categorize information related to reproductive rights on their websites. She has also published on how competing political communities engage with the “Founding Fathers” trope as they seek to establish political authority.

As the visiting assistant professor of technical and professional writing and associated faculty member for women’s and gender studies at the University of New Orleans, Goad received the university’s Outstanding Graduate Instructor Award. At the University of Texas at Austin, where she earned a Ph.D. in English and an M.A. in gender studies, she received the John Slatin Prize for Mastery of Electronic Media in Education (MEME). Goad also holds an M.P.A. from the university’s Lyndon Baines Johnson School of Public Affairs.

In the classroom, Goad focuses on the rhetorical dimensions of professional communications. She uses a recursive approach to writing instruction that encourages students to approach workplace genre conventions through a rhetorical lens. At UVA, she will teach classes that explore the argumentative elements of drug policy and communications related to political identification.

Interested in testing current theories in physics and astronomy education research to maximize the learning potential of undergraduate students, Rebecca Grouchy has a background in observational astronomy. Her research focus is in galaxy morphology and evolution via observations and N-body simulations. 

Grouchy is the lead author of papers published in the Astronomical Journal. She has made presentations on her research projects at meetings of the American Astronomical Society, the International Astronomical Union Symposium, the National Meeting of ESO Finnish Scientists and Students and other astronomy symposiums. 

She earned her M.S. and Ph.D. in Physics at the University of Alabama and her bachelor’s degree, also in physics, with a minor in zoology, from Louisiana State University. Grouchy was a visiting astronomer at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in La Serena, Chile, before serving as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oulu in Finland and as a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at L’Observatoire de Paris (France).  

She taught at the University of Virginia for the last two academic years as a lecturer and a general faculty member before being promoted to assistant professor for the 2024-25 academic year. 

With a decade of experience as a Chinese language educator, Wen Guo has developed Chinese language and culture curricula in diverse educational settings such as the University at Buffalo, Buffalo Seminary High School and Middlebury College, where she has actively supported and implemented community-engaged learning experiences. Over the course of nine semesters, she developed the “Global Reach” virtual exchange program, connecting over 100 students from Buffalo, New York, with more than 225 students from Capital Normal University in Beijing, China. Her students have been motivated to excel and have won a variety of national awards and scholarships for their proficiency and enthusiasm for learning Chinese, and she is dedicated to carrying forward and providing the same level of enriching and engaging transformative learning experiences for her students at UVA.

Guo’s research interests are focused on how community service learning, project-based learning and virtual exchanges can empower students to actively engage with cultural communities, cultivate a deeper understanding of different cultures and foster meaningful connections among students. As an active member of ACTFL, AAAL and CLTA, Guo has always sought professional development opportunities to improve her teaching and is committed to contributing to advancing foreign language education. Guo is the Vice-Chair for the ACTFL Teaching and Learning of Culture SIG, she serves as a reviewer for the "Chinese Language Teaching Methodology and Technology" journal, and she was the awardee of the 2022 ACTFL Global Engagement Initiative Award and the 2021 CLTA Tao-Chung Ted Yao Memorial Award.

This fall, Guo will teach elementary-level Mandarin Chinese courses in the fall, and she is looking forward to collaborating with her colleagues at UVA to create an immersive language learning environment for the students and build a diverse and inclusive community.

Julia Gutterman is an assistant professor in the Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures at the University of Virginia. Her research brings questions of gender, disability and multilingualism to a wide range of German literature and criticism from the nineteenth century to the present. She is also interested in German Jewish literatures and translation. 

In 2023, Gutterman published “A Secret Thing: Forgetting the Author in Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s ‘Das erste Gedicht’” in German Quarterly, and she has published translations of the work of 20th century German lyric poet Gertrud Kolmar and 17th century German poet and diplomat Georg Rodolf Weckerlin. 

Gutterman’s current research project concerns German literature and its intersections with disability studies. The project traces representations of epilepsy in literary productions from the 19th century to today. In placing the sociocultural history of meaning-making associated with epilepsy in conversation with disability studies, her project challenges preconceptions inscribed into the epileptic body, while also considering the place of epilepsy in disability studies.

Gutterman holds a Ph.D. in German literature from Yale University, an M.A. in comparative literature from the University of Amsterdam and her B.A. is from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She teaches such topics as transnational and multilingual literature, lyric poetry, Black German literatures and German-Jewish literature and culture. 

A labor economist, Emma Harrington researches remote work and systemic discrimination in the criminal justice system.  In her research, she has investigated remote work's consequences on workers' productivity, on-the-job training, and career progression in the context of a Fortune 500 retailer. In addition to remote-work topics, her current projects evaluate the extent to which prosecutors in criminal courts either check or pass through racial biases introduced by police.

Harrington is an affiliate of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab. Her research has been funded by the Lab for Economic Applications and Policy and the Bradley Foundation. Her research on prosecutors won the University of Chicago’s Donald M. Ephraim Prize in Law & Economics. Her research on remote work has been featured in The New York Times, The Economist, National Public Radio, Bloomberg, Vox, and other media outlets.  She has co-organized the Remote Work Conference at Stanford University and a session at the American Economic Association meetings.

She received her Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in 2021 and did a postdoctoral fellowship in Princeton University’s Industrial Relations Section for the 2021-2022 academic year. Before arriving at UVA, Harrington was an assistant professor of economics at the University of Iowa.

This fall, she will be teaching a course titled “Graduate Labor Economics.”

An accomplished Japanese language instructor, Yoko Hasegawa has experience working with a variety of innovative teaching approaches and instructional technologies, as well as in developing course curricula for university-level students. 

With more than eight years of teaching experience, Hasegawa has taught Japanese language skills to students from various countries. In recent years, she taught Japanese language courses at the University of Hawai’i at Hilo for four years and served as a junior instructor for a summer program at Beloit College in Wisconsin for one year.

The empowerment of students is central to her teaching philosophy. Aiming to foster their confidence and to create an inclusive and dynamic classroom environment, Hasegawa ensures her classes are student-centered with minimal lecturing and many opportunities for active language engagement. Her commitment to education has inspired many students to pursue further studies in Japanese, study abroad opportunities in Japan, and to teach English in Japan through the JET Program.

Hasegawa earned her master’s degree in linguistics of language teaching at the University of Oregon, where she served as a graduate teaching fellow for two years, and her bachelor’s degree in linguistics at the University of Hawai’i at Hilo.

Chang He is an economist working in the field of international finance and macroeconomics. She studies the determinants of exchange rates and sovereign risks and how they shape the cross-border movements of financial assets. Understanding these issues is crucial for designing effective monetary and fiscal policies in an open economy. Much of her work connects macroeconomic theory with rich micro-level data to empirically verify theoretical mechanisms.

Chang He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, Los Angeles, (2024). While at UCLA, she was a summer intern with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 2021 and was a dissertation fellow at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis in the summer of 2023. Prior to attending UCLA, she received her M.S. and B.S. in economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science. 

She will be teaching intermediate macroeconomics this fall and a graduate international finance course in the next academic year. 

Daryn Henry joins the permanent faculty of the Department of Religious Studies after having previously served as a postdoctoral fellow and a member of the general faculty. He specializes in studying the religious history of the Americas and how various contemporary Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox and Pentecostal Christian communities interact with modern and postmodern intellectual-philosophical, pluralistic-democratic, popular-aesthetic and scientific-technological cultures.

Henry’s most recent book, A.B. Simpson and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism, examines a leading figure in North American religion at the beginning of the 20th century. The book shows how Simpson crafted an “enchanted modernity” that both spurned aspects of Gilded Age modern developments and provided the highly devout with a supernaturalist pathway through modernity and played a role in key developments in Evangelical religious culture of the time. Henry’s first book, The Freedom of God: A Study in the Pneumatology of Robert Jenson, engaged a major contemporary Christian thinker’s interpretation of the symbol of the Holy Spirit against the backdrop of a range of 20th century Holy Spirit movements and discourses.

Henry holds a Ph.D. from Boston College (2016), a master’s from Yale University (2009) and a bachelor’s in History from the University of Western Ontario (2007).

Henry has taught a wide range of courses at UVA and in the first-year Engagements program, including: “Ethical Engagements: The Good Life Online?”; “Religious Bioethics”; “Evangelicalism”; “Eastern Orthodoxy;” “Global Christianity”; and “American Catholic History.” This year he will be teaching new courses on “Religious Americana” and “Christian Nationalism.”

A scholar of early medieval language and literature, Stephen Hopkins specializes in translations and adaptations of religious literature from Latin into the various vernaculars of the North Sea (Old English, Old Norse, Middle Welsh and Old Irish). His research interests include the reception, transmission and transformation of Christian apocryphal literature, heroic and epic adaptations of scriptural narratives, and tracing syncretic and imaginative literary moments in writings from Late Antiquity and beyond. His dissertation explored how translations of apocryphal narratives about hell allowed early medieval North Sea Christians to localize and customize their beliefs, carving out identity niches within a new and globalizing faith, offering an explanatory framework for reevaluating sources of religious and literary creativity in early medieval literature.

Hopkins holds a Ph.D. in English literature from Indiana University, Bloomington (2019), and a bachelor’s degree in Anthropology and Linguistics from Miami University (OH) (2011). As a doctoral student at IU, Hopkins was awarded a Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the Mellon Foundation and the ACLS (American Council of Learned Societies). From 2019 to 2023, he was an assistant professor of Old English and linguistics at the University of Central Florida. His book project, Translating Hell: Vernacular Theology and Apocrypha in the Medieval North Sea, is under contract with Manchester University Press, and will be supported in 2024 by a yearlong NEH Fellowship.

As an incoming assistant professor with the Department of English, Hopkins will assist with the Medieval and Renaissance studies minor, as well as the graduate certificate program in premodern cultures and communities. This fall, he will teach “Introduction to Old English Language and Literature” for graduate and advanced undergraduate students, as well as “The History of the English Language.”

Sebastian Jackson is trained as a historian and sociocultural anthropologist, and his research and teaching interests are concerned with questions of cultural continuity and transformation, histories of race and racism, interracial intimacy, indigeneity, and the unfolding legacies of settler colonial domination in the Atlantic world, especially in South Africa and the United States.

Jackson earned a Ph.D. in African and African American studies with a primary field in social anthropology from Harvard University (2022). He also holds an M.Phil. in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge (2014), a Master of Science degree in African studies from the University of Oxford (2013), and a bachelor’s in history and global studies from the University of Maine at Farmington (2012). Prior to coming to the University of Virginia, Jackson taught as a lecturer on social studies at Harvard (2022-23) and as a lecturer on history and anthropology at UMF (2014-15).

As an assistant professor at UVA, Jackson will teach “Race, Science, and the Law,” “Colonialism and Decolonization” and “History and Theory of Anthropology.”

Caroline Kahlenberg is a scholar of Jewish and Middle Eastern history. Her teaching and research interests center on the history of Israel/Palestine, the relationship between history and memory, gender and material culture, Mizrahi Jewish history and the history of minorities in the Eastern Mediterranean. Her current book project focuses on Arabic-speaking Jews in early 20th century Palestine. 

Kahlenberg earned her B.A. in History from Middlebury College and her Ph.D. in History and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University, and she is the author of several scholarly articles, including “How the Locals Grew an Accent: The Sounds of Modern Hebrew in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine” (Jewish Social Studies), “New Arab Maids: Domestic Work, ‘New Arab Women,’ and National Memory in British Mandate Palestine” (International Journal of Middle East Studies), and “The Star of David in a Cedar Tree: Jewish Students and Zionism at the American University of Beirut (1908-1948)” (Middle Eastern Studies). Kahlenberg's work has been supported by the Posen Foundation, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture and the Council of American Overseas Research Centers. 

This fall, Kahlenberg will teach two courses: “The Making of the Modern Middle East” for the Department of History and “Palestine/Israel Through Literature and Film” for the Department of Middle Eastern & South Asian Languages and Culture. 

As an education economist, Jessica Kripalani enjoys analyzing the implications of various educational policies on graduation rates, labor markets and student success. Her research interests include policies that affect education at every level, from early childhood through postsecondary levels. Most recently, she has studied the effects that community colleges have on graduation rates, wages and the labor market. She is also interested in pedagogical research related to economics education as well as collaboration with students. Recent publications include “Education Decisions and Labor Market Outcomes,” published in Applied Economics and “The Path to a Bachelor’s Degree: The Effect of Starting at a Community College,” published in The Journal of Higher Education Theory and Practice.

Kripalani earned her Ph.D. in economics from Rutgers University (2016). Prior to that, she earned her master’s in mathematics at the University of Vermont (2007), and her bachelors in mathematics and economics at Saint Michael's College (2005). She has also taught high school mathematics at a Boston charter school from 2007-2011, and after earning her Ph.D., she most recently earned tenure at the University of Lynchburg.

This year, she will be joining the Department of Economics department and will teach intermediate microeconomics and econometrics.

Brianna Kurtz is an expert in secondary and post-secondary mathematics education with experiences in teacher training, development and classroom engagement in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Her research interests focus on issues of global and international education, particularly in the recovery of education after interruptions due to natural disasters. She is also extensively published on issues of culturally responsive education within mathematics and statistics. 

Kurtz has received four teaching excellence awards, was the recipient of a Fulbright-Hays projects-abroad grant to engage in culturally response mathematics education in Botswana and Namibia, and served as Co-PI for an NSF grant focused on keeping students from underrepresented populations in STEM. Additionally, she was selected to receive specialized training through the United Nations UNA-USA in international diplomacy, focusing her contributions on global issues in STEM education. Currently, she serves as a board member at-large for the Comparative and International Education Society, prior to which she served as chair of its Global Mathematics Special Interest Group. She also currently engages with the research institute RTI International as they develop mathematics deliverables to be used in the Global South as a part of a new partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. 

Kurtz holds a Ph.D. in mathematics education from the University of Central Florida with an additional graduate certificate in global, comparative and international education. She received an M.S. in mathematics with concentrations in applied mathematics and statistics from the University of Nevada, Reno, and a B.S. in engineering science from Vanderbilt University. She has seventeen years of mathematics, statistics, and education collegiate teaching experience, including appointments at Daytona State College and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Stetson University and Mary Baldwin University. 

This year, Kurtz will serve as course coordinator for MATH 1220, a survey of calculus II, and will supervise the doctoral students and undergraduate learning assistants involved in the delivery of the course. With course redesign, she is working to make the calculus experience more culturally responsive and applicable to the student body. 

A new addition to the University of Virginia’s interdisciplinary Contagion Science program. Nicholas Landry is interested in understanding how complex network structure affects how diseases, information and ideology spread. He uses tools from network science, mathematical modeling, Bayesian inference and open software to explore these questions.

Nicholas earned his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2022 and his B.S. in mechanical engineering from the University of New Hampshire in 2014. In his previous career, he worked as an engineer at a manufacturing company in New Hampshire. Most recently, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Translational Global Infectious Disease Research Center (TGIR) in the Vermont Complex Systems Center at the University of Vermont.

This academic year, Landry will dive into data-driven modeling of social and epidemiological dynamics, combining theory, data and subject-matter expertise. Those efforts will include starting interdisciplinary collaborations on Grounds with colleagues in the Department of Biology, the Quantitative Collaborative, the School of Data Science and the Biocomplexity Institute.

A scholar of Korean literature and culture, HeeJin Lee’s research focuses on establishing connections between modern Korean literature and other literatures from across the world in ways that overcome colonial power dynamics inherent in various approaches to literary comparison.

Lee is currently revising a book manuscript that explores how sinsosŏl, a genre of popular vernacular fiction from early 20^th century Korea, allows for creating these new transnational connections. As part of her scholarly practice, Lee is also committed to introducing literary criticism and scholarship from Korea to a wider global audience. Her latest translation — a 1940 essay on James Joyce by Ch’oe Chae-sŏ, a Korean scholar of English literature — is forthcoming in the PMLA.

Lee received her Ph.D. from UCLA (2022), her J.D. from the University of Iowa College of Law (2009), and her Bachelor of Arts from Harvard University (2005). Before joining UVA, she was a Pony Chung Fellow and Research Professor at the Research Institute of Korean Studies at Korea University in Seoul, Korea.

This academic year, Lee will offer courses on modern Korean literature, Korean cinema, and advanced-level Korean language.

As a neurobiologist and scholar, Gwendolyn “Wendy” Lewis is interested in the design of high-impact educational experiences for undergraduates in neuroscience. Specifically, she is interested in how laboratory courses can be used to develop undergraduate research skills. Her work in course and curriculum development has been presented at the Society for Neuroscience and the Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience annual meetings and published in the Journal for Undergraduate Neuroscience Education.

Lewis earned her Ph.D. in biology from the University of Virginia, where she studied nerve regeneration and received the James Dent Dissertation Award. She was an associate professor and the undergraduate coordinator for the Interdisciplinary Program in Neuroscience at George Mason University. She received a Curriculum Impact Grant from GMU for the development of a course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE) in neural development, which improved the accessibility of undergraduate research at the university. She has developed courses in neural injury and disease, science writing and introductory neuroscience for non-scientists, among others, and in 2023, she received the Presidential Award for Faculty Excellence in Teaching from Mason. 

At UVA, Lewis will continue her efforts to develop high-impact experiences for undergraduates, beginning with the development of new laboratory and elective courses for the Program in Fundamental Neuroscience. 

With an enduring interest in anachronism and alternative theories of temporality and memory, art historian Wendy Ligon Smith uses archival research and object-based inquiry to investigate the intersections of photography, fashion, painting, literature and opera in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  Smith also teaches on the methodologies of art collectors and how objects are used to craft historical narratives. 

Her first book, Fortuny: Time, Space, Light was published with Yale UP in 2022 and is based on archival research in Venice, supported by several grants from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. Smith has published several other chapters in exhibition catalogues, journals and edited volumes on Mariano Fortuny’s designs and lighting inventions; Émile Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames’ (1883) depiction of feminized criminality and sensorial marketing techniques; leitmotifs in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-27); and the impact of Richard Wagner on visual arts and theatre technology. She has presented her research in conferences, workshops, invited seminars and interviews in a wide range of places, including Trinity College; the University of Cambridge; The Oxford Research Center in the Humanities at University of Oxford; the College Art Association; Università IUAV di Venezia; Jefferson Market Library (New York Public Library); and the Forschungsinstitut für Musiktheater, Thurnau (Universität di Bayreuth). 

Smith earned her Ph.D. in art history and visual studies from the University of Manchester (England) and was a postdoctoral fellow in the Engagements program for four years. In 2023-24 she was the Butler Engagement Fellow at UVA’s Fralin Museum of Art and is the curator of an exhibition of Torah pointers that will open in February 2025. This upcoming year Smith will continue to teach and develop curricula in the Engagements program. 

A behavioral economist, Po-Hsuan Lin uses a combination of theory and experiments to study bounded rationality in strategic environments. His theoretical work contributes to behavioral game theory, currently focusing on developing behavioral solutions such as the dynamic cognitive hierarchy solution and the cursed sequential equilibrium. His experimental research is closely tied to his theoretical work, exploring key methodological questions in experimental game theory. 

Lin’s research has been funded by a National Science Foundation doctoral dissertation improvement grant. His “Cognitive Hierarchies for Games in Extensive Form” paper won the California Institute of Technology’s John O. Ledyard Prize for Graduate Research in Social Science and was recently published in the Journal of Economic Theory. 

Lin earned his bachelor’s degree in economics with a minor in mathematics from National Taiwan University in 2016. After that, he joined MobLab as a data science research intern for a year before attending the California Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. there in social science in 2024. 

This year, Lin will be teaching graduate-level courses in experimental economics. 

In her practice-based research, Dana Little specializes in design faction — creating fictional digital media based on factual research into various areas, including artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, and social media. Her doctoral thesis, “Factions,” was a satirical, speculative website curated by her digital twin persona, an AI mystic called Dr. Wu. The site uses design faction, an outgrowth of design fiction, to examine elements of the transformative tech that can create a double helix of the facts and fictions permeating the Internet. Little developed the social media genre of “factions” to interrogate the means in which humans and computers communicate in digital spaces.

Little received her Doctor of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from the University of Glasgow, her Master of Arts in writing from Johns Hopkins University, and her bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Georgia. She comes to UVA from the University of Maryland Eastern Shore where she was the Acting Director and Assistant Professor of their Digital Media Studies Program.

At UVA, Little will continue her ongoing podcast project, “The-Channel-Show.” She will carry forward the research used in in completing her doctoral monograph, Factions: acts of worldbuilding on social media platforms, in her upcoming publications, which include an article for The Writer's Chronicle ("I Am Assimilation"), and the Kendall Hunt publishing company’s workbook, The Fundamentals of Contemporary Speech.

As a member of the College’s Writing and Rhetoric Program, Little will teach first-year “Writing and Critical Inquiry” courses, as well as “Special Topics” writing seminars that touch on issues of global media while developing the critical skills students need for media literacy.

Assistant professor Zach Lubberts is a data scientist working on the interplay of statistics and optimization, with an emphasis on statistics on graphs. Some of his recent publications concern accurate estimation of the eigenvectors of random matrices and the capture of relevant signal in various graph models, including time series of graphs.

Lubberts earned his Ph.D. in applied mathematics and statistics from Johns Hopkins University in 2019. His dissertation research focused on the application of real algebraic geometry to the construction of multivariable tight wavelet frames for use in signal processing. He also earned his bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics and statistics and philosophy from Johns Hopkins in 2013.

As an assistant professor in the College’s Department of Statistics, Lubberts plans to continue his research in optimization and statistics, especially as it relates to network data and random matrices. He will be teaching an early-graduate-level data mining course this fall and is eager to begin new research projects with students at all levels.

Xin Ma will join the Department of Chemistry as an assistant professor in January 2025.  At the forefront of Xin Ma’s research is the development of innovative mass spectrometry imaging (MSI)-based tools. These tools are crucial for metabolomics and disease screening, particularly in understanding neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s. His work focuses on creating a three-dimensional, high-sensitivity, laser-based platform for single-cell or tissue MSI studies and in-situ structural elucidations of metabolites, lipids and glycans. 

Xin Ma’s approach involves a gentler, matrix-free laser-based technique called laser-induced acoustic desorption, which promises to desorb intact molecules from tissue surfaces with minimal fragmentation. This technique is expected to revolutionize spatial omics studies by providing a broader compound coverage and deeper understanding of metabolic pathways and alterations involved in disease progression. 

Ma obtained his Ph.D. in chemistry from Purdue University in 2020 and his B.S. from Lanzhou University in 2013, and he recently completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the Georgia Institute of Technology.  At UVA, Ma will work with the Brain Institute of UVA through the Neuroscience Grand Challenge Initiative to explore questions related to the pathogenesis of various neurodegenerative diseases. 

With a visual art practice that encompasses interdisciplinary approaches to scenic design informed by historical contexts, abstraction and literature, Ant Ma has designed extensively across Taiwan and the United States. Her work explores the relationship between characters and the environment, immersing the audience and inviting their participation in storytelling.

Her designs have appeared in Off Broadway productions and in different forms of live performances, including the site-specific, immersive theater events of “The Walk.” Sponsored by the Amal Fund, “The Walk” is a parade procession that has been staged in cities, towns and villages around the world, featuring “Little Alma,” a 12-foot puppet of a 10-year-old Syrian refugee child serving as a global symbol of human rights.

Ma was awarded a Taiwanese Government Fellowship and a Tisch School of Art scholarship at New York University. Her theatrical installation work "Samuel" has been nominated for a Henry Hewes Design Award for Notable Effects. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in drama and Chinese literature from National Taiwan University; an MFA in theater design from New York University and is a proud member of Local USA829, IASTE.

Ant’s current projects include more Off Broadway and regional shows. This fall, she will be teaching introductory and advanced classes in scenic design in the Department of Drama.

An economist who combines theory and empirics, Alexander MacKay studies how equilibrium prices and markups are influenced by algorithms, long-term contracts and vertical restraints. He also studies dynamic consumer behaviors and their impacts in various contexts, including mergers, the adoption of new technologies and longer-run sectoral shifts. 

His research considers the broader implications for firms and antitrust authorities. His paper, “Rising Markups and the Role of Consumer Preferences,” was awarded the Robert F. Lanzillotti Prize for Best Paper in Antitrust Economics, and his academic papers have been cited by The New York Times, the Financial Times, TIME Magazine, National Public Radio and the Economic Report of the President.

MacKay holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago and a B.A. in economics from the University of Virginia. Following his Ph.D., he was a postdoctoral fellow for one year at Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School. He joins UVA from the faculty of Harvard Business School where he was an associate professor of business administration. 

This year, MacKay will continue research related to pricing algorithms, vertical integration and markups. As an associate professor of economics, he plans to teach classes on topics such as microeconomics, industrial organization and applied econometrics. He will teach “Principles of Microeconomics” this fall.

Amber Mackey studies race and ethnic politics, representation and public policy in the United States.  Her research examines when legislation about race reaches the political agenda and how these policies eventually impact existing racial inequalities. Through this work, she aims to document how variations in attention, responsiveness and policy outputs impact the lived realities of racial and ethnic minorities.  

In her book project, Symbols Over Substance: Legislative Attention to Race, Mackey deploys text analysis to track legislative attention to race across state legislatures and Congress. Paying careful attention to the different types of legislation, her work reveals an increasing reliance on resolutions to communicate ideas about race. 

Mackey holds a B.A. in political science and sociology from Barnard College of Columbia University, and she received her Ph.D. and master’s in political science from the University of Pennsylvania. She also recently completed a predoctoral fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Her work has earned her recognition as an American Political Science Association Minority Fellow, an Urban Leaders Fellow, a Fontaine Fellow and a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow. 
 
As an assistant professor at UVA, Amber is excited to teach, research and mentor students. She will be teaching two seminars in the Spring: “Race and Representation” and “Data at the Margins.”

A scholar of American religion, culture and politics, Laurie Maffly-Kipp primarily researches African American religions, Mormonism and U.S. religion in global contexts. 

Her publications include the 1994 book, Religion and Society in Frontier California, which explores the nature of Protestant spiritual practices in Gold Rush California; articles on Mormon-Protestant conflicts in the Pacific Islands, African-Americans in Haiti and Africa, and Protestant outreach to Chinese immigrants in California; Practicing Protestants: Histories of Christian Life in America, 1630-1965 (2006) with Leigh Schmidt and Mark Valeri; and Proclamation to the People: Nineteenth-Century Mormonism and the Pacific Basin Frontier (2008). Maffly-Kipp also authored Setting Down the Sacred Past: African American Race Histories (2010); American Scriptures, a Penguin Classics anthology of sacred texts (2010); and Women’s Work, a co-edited collection of writings by African American women historians (2010) with Kathryn Lofton.  

Maffly-Kipp has received fellowships and grants from the Lilly Endowment, Inc., the National Humanities Center and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The past president of the American Society of Church History and the Mormon History Association, Maffly-Kipp had her work in African American religion honored by the University of Heidelberg in 2014 with the James W.C. Pennington Award. 

She holds a B.A., summa cum laude, from Amherst College and an M.A. and Ph.D. with high distinction from Yale University in U.S. history. She previously taught at Amherst College, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Washington University in St. Louis. 

She is currently working on a survey of global Mormonism that will be published by Basic Books. 

An environmental data scientist, Antonios Mamalakis is interested in using data science tools like statistical and Bayesian analysis, machine/deep learning, and explainable AI to solve challenges in environmental applications. Among others, these challenges include improving predictive skill of hydroclimate and extreme events, understanding climate teleconnections and predictability, advancing climate attribution and causal discovery.

Before joining UVA’s faculty, he worked as a research scientist at Colorado State University, where Mamalakis pioneered the investigation of the fidelity of explainable AI tools for applications in the geosciences. Examples of his papers that garnered international attention and have been highlighted by publishers include "A new interhemispheric teleconnection increases predictability of winter precipitation in southwestern US", published in Nature Communications; "Zonally contrasting shifts of the tropical rain belt in response to climate change", published in Nature Climate Change; "Underestimated MJO variability in CMIP6 models", published in Geophysical Research Letters; and "Climate-driven changes in the predictability of seasonal precipitation", published in Nature Communications. Mamalakis also serves as an associate editor for the AMS journal Artificial Intelligence for the Earth Systems. 

Antonios holds a Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering from the University of California, Irvine and a master’s in the same discipline from Greece’s University of Patras.

Cristina Mantilla-Suárez is an experimental particle physicist joining the Department of Physics as an assistant professor. Mantilla-Suárez is broadly interested in two of the most relevant questions in modern particle physics: understanding the properties of the Higgs boson particle and studying whether dark matter has a particle nature just like ordinary matter. Her work is performed with accelerator-based experiments that use energetic and highly intense particle beams to generate huge numbers of particles.

Mantilla-Suárez is a collaborator in CERN’s Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, near Geneva, Switzerland, and in her most recent work, she and her collaborators studied interactions of the Higgs boson, including the interaction of the Higgs boson with itself, in a very energetic regime. This research uses artificial intelligence to dramatically improve the identification of particles produced in those collisions. Mantilla-Suárez will also be involved in the construction of the Light Dark Matter Experiment at UVA, an experiment that aims to produce and detect dark matter with a precise electron beam.

Mantilla-Suárez grew up in Quito, Ecuador, surrounded by the Andes mountains where she obtained her bachelor’s degree in physics. She was an intern at Fermi National Laboratory in Chicago before pursuing her Ph.D. and then later returned to Fermilab for her postdoctoral research. She obtained her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, during which time she was awarded the 2021 Mitsuyoshi Tanaka Dissertation Award in Experimental Particle Physics by the American Physical Society.

Besides teaching, Mantilla-Suárez looks forward to mentoring students at UVA, testing particle detector components for the LHC and building the LDMX experiment.

Aron Marie (he/they) is joining the College faculty as an Assistant professor of anthropology and American Sign Language. Drawing on over a decade working with deaf/disabled people in Vietnam and the United States, his research focuses on how disabled people and their allies create political movements and communicate in innovative, non-normative ways. His dissertation explored the development of sign language interpreting in Hanoi, Vietnam, and the way interpreting shapes the public perception of deaf voices.

Most recently a visiting professor with the Rochester Institute of Technology, National Technical Institute for the Deaf, Marie earned his Ph.D. in comparative human development from the University of Chicago and his B.A. in political science from UC San Diego. Marie’s publications include “Entangled Interdependence: Sign Language Interpreting without Recognition in India and Vietnam,” published in 2021 in the journal PoLAR, the Political and Legal Anthropology Review, and “Finding interpreters who can “OPEN-THEIR-MIND”: How Deaf teachers select sign language interpreters in Hà Nội, Việt Nam,” for the book Sign Language Ideologies in Practice. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, Wenner Gren Foundation, and Fulbright Program.

As an assistant professor at UVA, Marie will teach “Anthropology of Disability,” “Deaf Studies in the Global South” and “Sign, Gesture and Language.”

A social scientist specializing in technology policy and data governance, Aaron Martin studies how regulation can facilitate just, inclusive and secure digital societies. In addition to focusing on how transnational policy is established by international bodies and humanitarian organizations, he explores how users in historically marginalized communities, including refugees and other vulnerable people, understand and shape technology and its regulation.

Martin’s work has appeared in Big Data & Society, Media, Culture & Society, Telecommunications Policy, Global Policy, and Geopolitics, and has been featured in media outlets such as The Economist. His research has been funded by the European Commission, the UN Refugee Agency, the European AI & Society Fund, Luminate, European Parliament, and the Robert Bosch Foundation.

Martin received his Ph.D. in information systems and innovation from the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he also earned a Master of Science in new media, information and society. He was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society in the Netherlands (2018-2023), and before moving to UVA he led Maastricht University’s Humanitarian Action Program in partnership with the International Committee of the Red Cross. Martin has held tech policy positions at JPMorgan Chase and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

In addition to joining the Arts & Sciences faculty, where he will teach a course on media policy in the fall, Martin will hold a joint appointment in UVA’s School of Data Science.

A scholar of 20^th and 21^st-Century U.S. literature and visual culture, Joshua L. Miller studies migrant and multilingual literatures as well as their intersections with historical and contemporary photography. His teaching and research interests include experimental modernist and contemporary novels, language politics, immigration, race, and film.

Miller is the author of Accented America: The Cultural Politics of Multilingual Modernism (Oxford, 2011), editor of the Cambridge Companion to the American Modernist Novel (2015) and the Cambridge Companion to 21^stCentury American Fiction (2021), and co-editor of a special issue cluster of Modernism/modernity Print-Plus on "Translation and/as Disconnection" (2018) and Languages of Modern Jewish Cultures: Comparative Perspectives (Michigan, 2016). 

Miller received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago and M.A., M.Phil. and Ph.D. in English and comparative literature from Columbia University. He is currently completing a literary counter-history of 19^th and 20^th-century U.S. migrant narratives and at work on a comparative study of photography, race, and intermedial narrative from the 1960s to the present.

Miller will teach courses in 21^st-century U.S. novels, literary modernism, language politics and theory, migrant and refugee narratives, and the linked histories of photography and literature.

After graduating from the University of Virginia with a Ph.D. in English this May, John Modica returns to the University as an assistant professor of English, general faculty. He is a literary and cultural studies scholar who specializes in the politics of modern art and aesthetic experience; American culture; gay and lesbian writing; and feminist, queer and trans theory. He studies art and literature to understand the patterns of culture that structure our lives and the societies we build with them.

Modica is in the early stages of a manuscript on the role of the unconscious in the critique of political and libidinal economy in the contemporary United States. This past spring, he was awarded the Distinguished Teaching Award in the Arts and Humanities, the University’s highest honor for graduate instructors.

Before coming to UVA for graduate school, Modica received a Bachelor of Arts in English from Rider University, in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, in May 2018. This fall, he will teach a first-year writing seminar on notions of “the good life,” and an advanced writing seminar on queer theories and practices of writing. He looks forward to learning from his students and colleagues in this new capacity as a member of the faculty.  

Kevin Moffett is an award-winning fiction writer who is interested in formal experimentation, oral histories, and the short story. His most recent book, The Silent History, written and designed in collaboration with Eli Horowitz and Matthew Derby, first debuted as a serialized digital narrative for mobile devices. The core narrative is supplemented by over 400 location-specific entries that can only be accessed at various sites around the world. Referencing the novel’s bold storytelling experiment, The New York Times wrote, “This fascinating project manages to feel relentlessly thoughtful and new.”

Moffett is the author of two collections of short stories, as well as a pair of scripted podcasts for Gimlet Media: Sandra, starring Kristen Wiig and Alia Shawkat, and The Final Chapters of Richard Brown Winters, starring Catherin Keener and Sam Waterston. His honors include a National Magazine Award, a Pushcart Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Webby Award for digital innovation, and inclusion in four editions of The Best American Short Stories.

Moffett holds a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Florida and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He has taught writing and literature courses at Cal State San Bernardino, the University of Vermont, and most recently at Claremont McKenna College.

This fall he will teach courses in fiction writing and literary adaptation.

Shazrene Mohamed is computational stellar astrophysicist specializing in supercomputer simulations of single and binary stars in their final phases of evolution — systems that not only provide the raw material for planets but also play a central role in the evolution of galaxies. Together with her group, she investigates how stars exchange mass and momentum with each other and their surroundings and the profound implications these interactions have for our understanding of the origin and evolution of symbiotic and X-ray binaries, chemically peculiar stars, the progenitors of supernovae and highly structured circumstellar outflows with spirals, rings, arcs and jets.

A Rhodes scholar, Shazrene holds a Doctor of Philosophy degree in astrophysics from the University of Oxford (2009) and a bachelor’s degree in astrophysics and mathematics from Harvard University (2004). She spent two years as an Argelander Research Fellow at the University of Bonn in Germany before moving to Cape Town in South Africa where she held a joint position as an astronomer and associate professor at the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) and the University of Cape Town (UCT).  Most recently she was an associate professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Miami in Florida.

As an associate professor with the College, Shazrene looks forward to mentoring students in stellar astrophysics research and teaching introductory astronomy as well as more advanced courses on topics including astrophysical processes, computational astrophysics and stellar structure and evolution.

Naseemah Mohamed is an Assistant Professor at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia and a Batten affiliate. Her interdisciplinary research examines the relationships among education, media, technology, global politics, and violence in 20th-century.

Dr. Mohamed’s teaching explores education and conflict from a global perspective, with an emphasis on how systems of schooling are shaped by war, displacement, and political struggle. She teaches courses on education in conflict zones, transnational liberation movements during the Cold War, and Indigenous policymaking in the 21st century. She will also be teaching the foundational Introduction to African Studies course offered by the Woodson Institute and is developing a new course titled AI in Africa: Opportunities, Challenges and Realities, which explores the historical, ethical, and political challenges and opportunities posed by emerging technologies on the continent.

She also leads an advanced qualitative methods course in which students explore their ancestry through archival research, oral history, reflective writing, and, where relevant, genetic ancestry testing. The course encourages students to examine how personal and familial narratives intersect with broader historical processes while learning advanced qualitative methods.

Her current book project investigates how Zimbabwe’s liberation movements used education as a political, ideological, and military tool during the struggle for independence from the Rhodesian regime). Drawing on oral histories and archival sources, the project reveals how these movements envisioned postcolonial governance, citizenship, and the transformative role of education in building a new nation.

Dr. Mohamed earned her DPhil and MSc in Comparative and International Education Policy from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and a B.A. in Social Studies and African Studies from Harvard University.

Sethunya Mokoko is a scholar, writer, and filmmaker from Lesotho whose research focuses on the rhetorics of storytelling across media and cultures. Mokoko’s work specializes in teaching students to appreciate and value social justice rhetorics across media; to become rhetorically listening writers, readers, and viewers; and to understand how global rhetorics shape and define agency and identification. His research and teaching commitments involve rhetorical theory, composition studies, cultural rhetorics, business writing and creative writing.

His dissertation project, Storytelling in Motion: Rhetorical Approaches to Autoethnography, Critical Pedagogy, and African Filmmaking, and other publications expose the marginalization in the education systems of his country, Lesotho, in Southern Africa, which still survives long after the plague of Apartheid, intending to eradicate the residue of colonization. Mokoko’s work draws on the values in the African epistemologies of storytelling, describing and illustrating these principles by showing how storytelling can transform composition pedagogy.

Mokoko holds a transdisciplinary Ph.D. in rhetorics, communication, and information design from Clemson University (2023) and a Master of Fine Arts degree from California State University, Long Beach (2018). As a doctoral student at Clemson, Mokoko was the assistant director of the writing lab, and served on the Dean's Advisory Council. Before migrating to Clemson, he was an adjunct professor of creative writing, rhetoric and composition in Southern California. He likes reggae, rain and reading/writing. As an assistant professor in the Rhetoric and Writing Program, Mokoko will teach “Race, Rhetoric, and Social Justice” and “Writing about Culture and Society.” 

A literary and cultural studies scholar who specializes in 19th and 20th-century Iberia, Kelly Moore examines the relationship between labor, gender and the aesthetics of energy in discourses of secularism in Spain in her research. 

A former Fulbright Program grantee, Moore has recently been published in the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies as well as the anthology Indiscreet Fantasies: Iberian Queer Cinema. Her current book project, titled Family Sovereignty, considers the family’s exceptional structure alongside its enmeshment with energy imaginaries in modern Spain.  

Moore earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Wyoming and a Ph.D. in Romance Studies from Cornell University. At the University of Virginia, Moore looks forward to offering courses on modern Spanish literature and culture that emphasize interdisciplinary approaches. 

An ethnographer with extensive fieldwork experience in Cambodia and Indonesia, Erin Moriarty researches the intersection of mobility and languaging practices, focusing on deaf linguistic practices in transnational settings as they shape and are shaped by language ideologies. Her work examines language use, translanguaging, sign language documentation and the socio-cultural dynamics within deaf communities. 

Moriarty’s scholarly contributions include the recent co-edited volume, Deaf Mobility Studies: Exploring International Networks, Tourism, and Migration, published by Gallaudet Press, and notable articles include “Deaf Cosmopolitanism: Calibrating as a Moral Process”; “Filmmaking in a Linguistic Ethnography of Deaf Tourist Encounters”; and “‘Sign to me, not the children’: Ideologies of language contamination at a deaf tourist site in Bali.” Additionally, she has produced an ethnographic film, #DeafTravel: Deaf Tourism in Bali. Her research has been supported by fellowships and awards, including a Fulbright–National Geographic Digital Storytelling Fellowship and a recent award from the NEH to reimagine deaf studies for the future.  

For her dissertation, Moriarty documented the experiences of deaf people in post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia, their languaging practices and the development of Cambodian Sign Language by NGOs.  

Moriarty earned her Ph.D. in anthropology from American University, her M.A. in communications in contemporary society from Johns Hopkins University and a B.A. in art history and anthropology from Smith College. She has held a post-doctoral appointment at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, with the MobileDeaf research team, a 5-year European Research Council-funded project and recently was associate professor in deaf studies at Gallaudet University. 

This year, Moriarty Harrelson plans to continue her research on the impact of language ideologies on deaf communities and their languaging practices. She is currently completing an edited collection on Crip Linguistics, and she will be teaching courses on Deaf Mobility Studies, Crip Linguistics and the intersections of technology and disability. 

A professor of American Studies and Honors at Christopher Newport University and the Director of Academics for the federal government’s James Madison Memorial Fellowship Foundation, Jeffry Morrison has taught at Georgetown University, the U. S. Air Force Academy and Princeton University. He has lectured at colleges and historic sites throughout the United States and in England (Hertford College, Oxford) and made media appearances on radio, video (YouTube) and television (C-SPAN, BBC).   

He has published five books on American political thought and culture, as well as chapters, articles and reviews in scholarly publications in the fields of political science, history and religion. His monographs John Witherspoon and the Founding of the American Republic (University of Notre Dame Press), and The Political Philosophy of George Washington (Johns Hopkins University Press) afford new perspectives on the American founding, and his co-edited volumes deal primarily with religion and public life in early America.   

His articles and reviews have appeared in the Journal of American History, the Journal of Church and State, Perspectives on Political Science, Reviews in American History, and the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography.  

Morrison earned his Ph.D. (with distinction) and M.A. in government from Georgetown University. 

His principal research project this academic year, as a Visiting Professor of Politics at UVA, will be editing a one-volume collection, The Political Writings of John Witherspoon, for Cambridge University Press. 

A literary scholar and language teacher of Slavic languages (Russian, Czech and Bulgarian), Mira Nikolova explores environmental and spatial portrayals in the works of Indigenous Siberian poets such as the Khanty author Maria Vagatova. She is currently working on a manuscript focusing on the depiction of space and place in the works of exiled authors like Joseph Brodsky and the Czechoslovak singer-songwriter Karel Kryl.  

Nikolova co-authored with Kristen Ghodsee the 2015 Social Politics article “Socialist Wallpaper: Popular Education, Bitova Kultura and the Bulgarian Women's Committee, 1968-1990.” More recently, Nikolova was a recipient of the 2023-2024 Sze Family Faculty Fellows Award for Faculty Fellows at Bowdoin College. The award allows select faculty to participate in a year-long program focused on reflective pedagogical practices and course design improvements.  

Nikolova received her Ph.D., in Slavic studies from Brown University and her bachelor’s degree in Russian and psychology from Bowdoin College.  

Before joining the A&S faculty at the University of Virginia, she taught language, literature, film and culture courses for four years at Bowdoin College as a visiting lecturer in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies. This fall, Nikolova will teach first- and second-year Russian language courses. 

Paulina Ochoa Espejo is a political theorist who works at the intersection of democratic theory and the history of political thought. She focuses on popular sovereignty and borders. She has written about populism, the boundaries of the demos, migration and the right to exclude, the relation between democracy and territorial rights and borders’ moral relevance. She also works on Latin American political thought. She is the author of On Borders: Territories, Legitimacy and the Rights of Place (Oxford University Press, 2020), The Time of Popular Sovereignty: Process and the Democratic State (Penn State University Press, 2011); and is co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Populism (Oxford University Press, 2017). She has been a Visiting Fellow at the Princeton University Center for Human Values, a member of the School of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and an ACLS Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellow.  

Before joining UVA, she was the William Penn Foundation Professor at Haverford College, an assistant professor at Yale University and a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Notre Dame. She has also been a visiting professor at CIDE in Mexico City.  

At present, she is finishing the co-authored textbook Political Theory: A Global and Comparative Introduction (forthcoming with SAGE) and working on the monograph Rights of Place: Territory, Property, and Jurisdiction in the Americas. 

A scholar of African and Afro-diasporic religious traditions in Brazil and Nigeria, Ayodeji Ogunnaike has a keen interest in the ways each region has influenced the practice of religion in the other. He studied Ifa divination with high priest Ifarinwale Ogundiran in Modakeke, Nigeria, and while his main areas of research are Brazilian Candomblé and oriṣa worship in Nigeria, he also studies Islam and Christianity on the continent and in diaspora as well as other Afro-diasporic traditions.

His most recent book project, Forms of Worship: How Oriṣa Devotion Became Religion in Nigeria and Brazil, analyzes how the worship of traditional Yoruba deities originally differed greatly from Western notions of “religion” but eventually became the most widespread and celebrated indigenous African religion through experience in the Atlantic diaspora, contact with modernity and Christian mission activity. His work has been supported by grants from the Ford Foundation and the American Philosophical Society, among others.

Ogunnaike received his bachelor’s degree in African studies and Near Eastern languages and civilizations, a master’s in religious studies, and a Ph.D. in African and African American Studies from Harvard University. Most recently, he was an assistant professor at Bowdoin College.

He is currently working on Yoruba Mythology: Stories of the Oriṣa, Ijapa and Yoruba Heroes, the first major anthology of Yoruba mythology, with his brother and UVA faculty colleague, Oludamini Ogunnaike, and curates an online library of Ifa orature. This fall, Ogunnaike will teach courses on Afro-Brazilian religion and culture and the connections between Brazil and Africa.

A feminist scholar of disability, Sarah L. Orsak asks how understandings of what disability is and of who can be disabled are constitutively tied to race and nation. In this interdisciplinary research, Orsak focuses on the relationships between Blackness and disability. 

She is at work on her first book project, a theoretical and cultural analysis of how disability cohered as an identity in the United States through references to Blackness which contingently recognize, but also exclude, Black disability. Orsak’s research has been published in Disability Studies Quarterly and is forthcoming in Feminist Formations.  

 Orsak holds a Ph.D. in women's gender and sexuality studies from Rutgers University–New Brunswick and a bachelor’s degree in the study of women and gender from Smith College. Before joining the faculty at UVA, she was a Rising Scholar Postdoctoral Fellow in UVA’s Department of Women, Gender & Sexuality. 

 This fall, Orsak will teach core courses in WGS that draw on these scholarly interests: how categories of difference shape each other (“Race & Power in Gender and Sexuality”) and what these relations mean for knowledge production (“Research & Methods in Gender and Sexuality”). She also looks forward to continued collaborations as part of the UVA Disability Studies Initiative. 

Michelle Personick is a scholar of inorganic materials chemistry and catalysis. Her research focuses on the precision synthesis of metal nanomaterials and the use of these materials to enable fundamental research toward improved catalysts for resource-efficient chemical synthesis and the clean production of energy. The goal of this research is to contribute to transforming the overall energy landscape and offsetting the driving forces of climate change. Her work has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, the Army Research Office and the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund.

Personick holds a Ph.D. in chemistry from Northwestern University (2013) and a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Middlebury College (2009). From 2013 to 2015, she was a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University as part of the Integrated Mesoscale Architectures for Sustainable Catalysis Energy Frontier Research Center. She joins UVA from Wesleyan University, where she was Associate Professor of Chemistry and Associate Professor of Integrative Sciences.

As an associate professor of chemistry, Personick will teach courses on topics such as nanomaterials chemistry, catalysis, inorganic chemistry and general chemistry. This year, she will offer a course titled “Physical Characterization of Inorganic Nanomaterials.”

A pure mathematician, J.D. Quigley specializes in algebraic topology. He primarily focuses on the stable stems, which encode the possible relations between different high-dimensional spheres, and their applications to geometry, topology and algebra.

Quigley has published articles in a number of journals, including Geometry & Topology, Advances in Mathematics, and International Mathematics Research Notices. His research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the American Mathematical Society and the Simons Foundation. He is also co-Principal Investigator for an NSF Research Training Group grant supporting the development of an online research community centered around algebraic topology.

Before coming to the University of Virginia, Quigley earned his Ph.D. at the University of Notre Dame (2019). He has held postdoctoral positions at Cornell University, the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Germany, and the University of Oregon.

This year, Quigley is focused on understanding algebra-geometric analogues of the stable stems, as well as more classical geometric problems, like finding symmetries of “exotic spheres.” This fall, he will teach “Algebraic Topology II” and plans to co-organize the Topology Seminar and get involved with K-12 outreach.

Ahnaf Rafi is an econometrician whose research interests lie in the design and analysis of experiments and the econometric analysis of consumer demand. In his work on experiments, he characterizes efficient methods to analyze experiments as well as "small sample" issues in the optimal design of experiments. In his work on the analysis of consumer demand, he develops non- and semi-parametric inference methods for consumer welfare in the presence of unobserved heterogeneity. 

Prior to joining the faculty of the University of Virginia, he obtained his Ph.D. in economics from Northwestern University. He also holds a B.Sc. in mathematics and economics and a M.Sc. in econometrics and mathematical economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

This fall, he will teach “Introduction to Econometrics” (Econ 3720).

A composer, sound artist and educator whose works range from opera, chamber and vocal music to acousmatic, electroacoustic works and interactive sound installations, Leah Reid researches the perception, modeling and compositional applications of timbre. 

Winner of a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship, Reid has also won the American Prize, first prizes in the International “New Vision” Composition Competition, the KLANG! International Electroacoustic Composition Competition, and Musicworks’ Electronic Music Competition. Other select awards include Sound of the Year’s Composed with Sound Award, the International Alliance for Women in Music’s Pauline Oliveros Award and second prizes in the Iannis Xenakis International Electronic Music Competition and the International Destellos Competition. She has received fellowships from the Copland House, Hambidge Center, MacDowell, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Ucross Foundation and Yaddo. 

Her compositions have been presented at festivals, conferences and in major venues throughout the world, including Aveiro_Síntese (Portugal), BEAST FEaST (England), Espacios Sonoros (Argentina), EviMus (Germany), Forgotten Spaces: EuroMicrofest (Germany), the International Computer Music Conference (United States, Ireland and Chile), IRCAM’s ManiFeste (France), the L.A. Philharmonic's “Noon to Midnight,” the Matera Intermedia Festival (Italy), the New York City Electronic Music Festival and the OUA Electroacoustic Music Festival (Japan), among many others. 

Reid received her D.M.A. and M.A. in music composition from Stanford University and her bachelor’s degree from McGill University. 

She joined the College as a general faculty member in 2017 and is transitioning to a tenure-track appointment this fall. As an assistant professor, Reid will teach courses in music composition and technology. For additional information, visit www.leahreid.com.

A clinical neuropsychologist and environmental epidemiologist, Aaron Reuben studies the interplay of the physical environment with brain health across the lifespan, focusing on environmental hazards like chemical toxicants or natural disasters and environmental amenities like parks, green-spaces and walkable neighborhoods.  

Reuben holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Duke University and a master’s in environmental management from Yale University. He is a former study coordinator for Columbia University's Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer's Disease and the Aging Brain, an environmental policy researcher at the Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy, a presidential policy intern at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, and a communications officer for the International Union for Conservation of Nature. He holds the Richard Merritt Jr. Memorial Award for Excellence in Science Journalism and is a 2023 winner of the Cozzarelli Prize of the Proceedings of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences for “major contributions” to the field. He is currently writing a book on the global history of lead for Harvard University Press.  

This year Reuben intends to recruit students to participate in a randomized-controlled trial of “nature exposure” and mental health in the Fall semester, and he will teach abnormal psychology in the spring. 

As a public-memory scholar, Sarah Richardson specializes in how cultural and religious views, death practices and materiality work together to create a public memory. Richardson earned her Ph.D. in rhetorics, communication and information design from Clemson University (2023), a master’s degree in rhetoric, writing and media from Clemson University (2018), and a bachelor’s degree in English from Stetson University (2012). As a doctoral student, Richardson was an assistant director of the first-year writing program at Clemson and won the university’s Douglass Teaching Award in 2022. She participated in a pilot program in community engagement in which her class partnered with Clemson’s Cemetery Preservation Committee to create materials for the undergraduate community detailing Clemson University’s history with enslavement and its use of convict labor.

Her research interests include the rhetorics of public memory, death rhetorics, cultural rhetorics, feminist and material theories, and community-engagement practices. Specifically, her dissertation examines how death practices are enacted materially and are gendered for women who were othered at the turn of the twentieth century. Richardson’s dissertation includes three case studies consisting of women who participated in sex work in Louisiana, were convicted of convict labor in Texas and were involuntarily institutionalized in New York. Through her research, Richardson connects institutional violences with cultural belief systems that are enacted on the materiality of graves, and she raises questions about rhetorical choices regarding death practices, remembrance and archival records.

Richardson’s article “After the Ink Dried but Before History was a Woman’s” was recently published in Peitho, and she is co-authoring a chapter titled “Reconsidering Expertise: Possibilities for Distributed Expertise and Horizontal Mentoring in Writing Pedagogy Education.” for the book (Un)commonplaces in Graduate Teaching Assistantship Training & Experiences.

As an assistant professor, general faculty, with the Writing and Rhetoric Program, she will teach two sections of ENWR 1510 focused on public memory, and she will teach one section of ENWR 2520, “Rhetorics of Personhood: Legality and Ethics.”

As a biogeochemist, Justin Richardson studies the movement of nutrient and toxic elements from rocks and soils to plants, animals and water resources. His research area mainly covers the forests and watersheds of the northeastern United States, from Virginia to Maine, with an aim to improve environmental quality in managed forests to agroecosystems through novel sampling and advanced analytical measurements.

Richardson has published more than 50 studies and book chapters, received nearly $1 million in federal research grants as the principal investigator or co-investigator, and served on federal panels for the United States Department of Agriculture, Environmental Protection Agency, and National Science Foundation.

Richardson earned his bachelor’s degree in environmental science from the University of California, Riverside, his Ph.D. in Earth science from Dartmouth College and served as a Critical Zone Observatory postdoctoral scholar at Cornell University. Before joining UVA, he served as an assistant professor of geosciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst for five years.

This coming year, Richardson will teach courses covering two of his favorite topics: “Fundamentals of Geology” and “Introduction to Soil Science.” He will continue his research on isotopic tracing studies to identify elemental sources and sinks. 

Fernando Riva's research investigates the process of appropriation and absorption of Arabic and Jewish knowledge in vernacular Iberian literatures in the Middle Ages. This process of appropriation and absorption has two distinct aspects. The first type appears as a tense reaction against the social and intellectual changes of the twelve and thirteenth centuries as portrayed in several cuaderna vía poems. The second type emerges as a conscious reinterpretation which seeks to support an imperial project such as that of King Alfonso the Wise. His first book, published in May of 2019 in Spain, which has been reviewed in top-tier international journals, concerns the first type of appropriation and absorption: it analyzes the concept of knowledge in the thirteenth-century Spanish work known as Libro de Alexandre (c. 1220-1235), where he studied the role played by intellectual curiosity and its relation with the deep cultural changes that began in the twelfth century throughout the Mediterranean. His current research project, which is under contract with the University of Toronto Press, is derived from his first book and deals with the second type of appropriation and absorption, i.e., the fruitful reinterpretation of magic, astrology, natural philosophy, the discourse of secrets, and their relation to a political project in the medieval Iberian Peninsula. As part of a solid continuity in his research, this second book will complement the first one and attempt to offer a whole analysis of the literary and cultural phenomena in thirteenth-century Christian Iberia. These dynamics of appropriation, in turn, will lay the foundation for the Renaissance and the Early Modern Period. In that sense, his research is relevant to debates on medieval intellectual history, religious studies, history of science, translation studies, and the growing field of Mediterranean studies.

LaRissa Rogers’ practice combines aspects of personal memory and history to forefront the capaciousness of blackness shaped by the experience of diasporas. Research and material become the entry point of broader social political interrogations, often asking the question, who and what survives?  

Earlier this year, Rogers was named to the Forbes' 2024 “30 under 30” list in the Art and Style category. Rogers has exhibited at Documenta 15 (Germany), the Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art (California), the California Museum of Photography, the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, California State University, Fullerton, and the Fuller Craft Museum (Massachusetts).  

She received the Visual Arts fellowship at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (2022) and the Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship (2023-2024). Rogers also held residencies at the BEMIS Center of Contemporary Art (2022) and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2024).  

Rogers received her Master of Fine Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles, and her bachelor’s degree in fine arts from Virginia Commonwealth University. 

Rogers is currently working on “Going to Ground,” a public sculpture commission at the Rose Kennedy Greenway, Boston. It is a site-specific installation interrogating the politics of home, mobility, arrival, sovereignty and freedom using soil as a conduit to conspire and speculatively engage with Zipporah Potter Atkins, the first-known Black woman to own a home in colonial Boston.  

As a discipline-based-researcher (DBER) in statistics education, Kristen Roland is interested in studying how people learn statistics, specifically on developing understanding of conceptualizations of confidence intervals at various levels. She has recently presented her work at the United States Conference on Teaching Statistics: Research Satellite and has conference proceedings published for the International Conference on Teaching Statistics and the Conference on Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education. Her paper titled “Brody and Jamie’s Colleague: The difference in confidence interval estimators and estimates” earned a 2022 Honorable Mention recognition from the International Association for Statistical Education for Best ICOTS Paper by an Early Career Researcher. Roland is part of the Association of Mathematics Teacher Educator’s Service, Teaching, and Research (STaR) fellowship program (2021 Cohort).

Kristen earned her Ph.D. in mathematics education, with a concentration in statistics education, at the University of Georgia after obtaining her master’s degree (M.S.) in statistics at the University of Rhode Island and her bachelor’s degree in statistics (BS) at Sonoma State University. Before joining UVA this year, Kristen taught at Appalachian State University and at the University of Rhode Island.

This year, Kristen will be teaching “Introduction to Data Science with R and Experimental Design.”

Roberto Rosado-Ramirez is an anthropologist specializing in the archaeology of the Indigenous cultures of Mexico and Central America. His research and teaching interests include Indigenous persistence and sustainability, decolonization, community and public archaeology, materiality and the politics of cultural heritage in the Americas. To study these topics, he applies methods and techniques from archaeology, historical anthropology and ethnography. Rosado-Ramirez’s dissertation research was an archaeological and historical study of a rural community living in the ruined Maya city of Ake, Yucatan, Mexico, in the context of political turmoil and environmental degradation in the 10th to 16th centuries CE. He is working on a new community-based project to examine how Indigenous communities continued to live in ancient Maya cities in northern Yucatan in the context of colonialism and capitalism. One of the main goals of his work is to create an infrastructure for Indigenous people to revitalize and reassess Indigenous knowledge in the Americas. He maintains long-term collaborations with colleagues and Indigenous communities in his home state of Yucatan, Mexico.

Rosado-Ramirez holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from Northwestern University (2021), a master’s degree in anthropology from Louisiana State University (2011) and a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from the University of Yucatan (2006). As an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at UVA, Rosado-Ramirez will teach courses on archaeology, Indigeneity and Latin American studies.

Gillet Rosenblith is a public historian interested in how race, gender, poverty and politics play out over physical space in the United States. She studies public housing policy and activism in the late 20th century, examining the relationships between housing policy and the politics of criminalization and empowerment. She also has developed expertise on the 20th- and 21st-century histories of Charlottesville and UVA. 

Gillet has written for  academic and public audiences. In May 2023, she responded to an investigation by The Washington Post into the use of AI in public housing with a piece about punitive policies initially enacted to protect public housing residents. In 2020, she wrote another column for The Washington Post historicizing the catastrophic rise in evictions resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic and their disproportionate impact on marginalized Americans. In June 2017, Slate.com published a piece Gillet co-authored that explored how Confederate statues in Charlottesville, Virginia reshaped the landscape. 

Gillet is currently writing a book examining the history of public housing.

Gillet earned her Ph.D. in history from the University of Virginia. She held two postdoctoral fellowships from the Karsh Institute of Democracy from 2020–2023. For the 2023–24 academic year, Gillet was a postdoctoral associate with UVA’s College Fellows. This fall, she will continue to teach while participating in the administrative leadership of the College’s Engagements program. Gillet will also work in the Office of the Provost, project managing and developing content for public history projects related to UVA.  

A scholar of global development, Muhammad Tayyab Safdar specializes in studying the impact of globalization on the local political economies of developing countries. His current research examines the implications of China’s rise in power on developing countries. Empirically grounded in South Asia, the research explores the strategies of cooperation and contestation that are used by the elite actors in smaller countries in their relations with emerging powers like China.

Safdar holds a Master of Philosophy degree and a Ph.D. in development studies from the University of Cambridge (2016). He holds an MBA (2008) from the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) and a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering from the University of Engineering and Technology (2004), Lahore, Pakistan. Safdar was the inaugural BRI Post Doctoral Researcher with UVA’s East Asia Center and has previously held positions at the University of Cambridge and the London School of Economics.

As an assistant professor with the College of Arts & Sciences, Safdar will teach courses in the global studies security and justice track, and this fall, he will teach a course titled “Dynamics of Great Powers: Views from the South.” He will also be part of the Engagements program at the College and will teach a course for first-year students titled “Global ‘Development’: The Great, the Good & the Ugly.”

A scholar of gender and globalization, Esra Sarıoğlu explores the ways in which emotions, bodies, and embodiment blend with markets, institutions, and systems as broad as global capitalism and sexism in the Global South, with a particular focus on Turkey. Her first book, The Body Unburdened: Violence, Emotions, and the New Woman in Turkey (Oxford University Press, 2022) examines global capitalist restructuring through a feminist lens, revealing an ensemble of emotional and embodied processes that invigorate Turkey’s neoliberal urban economy, women’s sociality and activism, as well as authoritarian politics. The book won the American Sociological Association's Body and Embodiment Section Best Book Award (2023).

Sarıoğlu’s work has appeared in Gender, Work & Organization, Women's Studies International Forum, Kadin/Woman 2000, and L'Homme: Europäische Zeitschrift für Feministische Geschichtswissenschaft. As a part of her research on emotions and embodiment in the Global South, Sarıoğlu also published work on J.M. Coetzee’s autofiction in Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies.

The Max Planck Institute, Ford Foundation, and Boğaziçi University have funded her research. Sarıoğlu received her Ph.D. in sociology from Binghamton University. Before her arrival at the University of Virginia, she was a research scholar at the History of Emotions Research Center at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and an assistant professor in the Gender Studies Division of the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at Turkey’s Ankara University. 

Sarıoğlu looks forward to offering courses on gender and labor that emphasize affect and embodiment.

Associate professor Paul Scherz studies the intersection of religious ethics, science, technology and medicine. His first book, Science and Christian Ethics (Cambridge, 2019), used Stoic virtue theory as a lens to examine the moral formation of scientists in light of the contemporary reproducibility crisis, an ongoing methodological crisis in which the results of many scientific studies are difficult or impossible to reproduce. His most recent book, Tomorrow’s Troubles: Risk, Anxiety, and Prudence in an Age of Algorithmic Governance (Georgetown, 2022), examines the role that quantitative risk analysis plays in contemporary life. He has published articles on many topics in bioethics, such as human enhancement, genetic technology and end of life ethics, with this latter interest leading to a co-edited volume, The Evening of Life: The Challenges of Aging and Dying Well (Notre Dame, 2020). He is currently working on projects on the ethics of artificial intelligence and a book on the ethics of precision medicine.

Scherz holds a Ph.D. and M.T.S. in moral theology from the University of Notre Dame (2014, 2010), a Ph.D. in genetics from Harvard University (2005) and a B.A. in molecular and cell biology from UC Berkeley (2001). Scherz has taught at the Catholic University of America, was a Helen Hay Whitney postdoctoral fellow at UCSF, and is a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at UVA.

Scherz will teach classes on bioethics, technology ethics and Christian ethics, including “Religion, Ethics, and Health Care” and “Death and Dying in the Christian Tradition.”

A scholar of 18th- and 19th-century British literature, Taylor Schey specializes in Romanticism and works at the intersection of poetics and critical theory, with a particular focus on how literary language both registers and participates in the historical production of race.  

Schey’s scholarship has appeared in journals such as Eighteenth-Century Fiction, ELH, MLQ, Studies in Romanticism and SubStance. He is co-editor of a special issue of Comparative Literature titled “The Point of Impasse” (2020). His current book project, The Rhetoric of Racialization: British Romanticism and Everyday Antiblackness, elucidates the subtle and quotidian figural operations through which logics of antiblackness were insidiously consolidated in the early 19th century.  

Schey holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Emory University and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Minnesota. Before coming to the University of Virginia, he taught at N.C. State University, the University of Michigan and Macalester College.   

In the fall, Schey will teach “Literatures of Revolutionary Hope and Radical Pessimism,” an intermediate undergraduate course that explores how diverse artistic and intellectual movements have imagined the possibility of social transformation. In the spring, he will teach a graduate seminar titled “Race-Making and Romanticism,” as well as an introductory seminar on poetry. 

Influenced by her cross-disciplinary training in clinical psychology, developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience, Stefanie Sequeira studies how social threat and reward processes develop during adolescence and are linked to mental health. Stefanie integrates ecologically-valid methods at multiple levels of analysis into her work, including ecological momentary assessment (EMA), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), eye-tracking and passive sensing. Sequeira’s goal is to identify novel and modifiable social threat- and reward-related processes, measured at the levels of brain and behavior, that contribute to anxiety disorders and suicidal thoughts and behaviors in youth with anxiety disorders.

Sequeira received her Ph.D. in clinical-developmental psychology from the University of Pittsburgh in 2023. As a doctoral student, Sequeira also trained in the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, and she completed a pre-doctoral clinical internship at Brown University. Sequeira’s doctoral work was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and a Society for a Science of Clinical Psychology grant.  Sequeira completed her undergraduate studies in psychology at the University of Maryland (2014). 

As an assistant professor at UVA, Sequeira will continue doing what she loves: research, teaching, mentoring and service, including launching a new study funded by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention this fall that will examine longitudinal associations between social anhedonia and suicidal thoughts and behaviors in adolescents. Sequeira will teach child psychopathology in the spring in addition to a graduate course on psychological intervention. She will also be engaged in clinical training and supervision of graduate students in UVA’s Clinical Psychology program.

A cultural anthropologist and scholar of Jewish Studies, Sam Shuman researches Hasidic Judaism within a global context to rethink larger questions in political theology about race and religion, global capitalism, gender and sexuality, sovereignty and empire. Their work often toggles between different methodologies: fieldwork, archival research and text analysis. 

Shuman is currently working on their first book manuscript, Of Mice and Hasidic Men, which explores the various forms of saintly mediation performed by Reb Shayele, a Hasidic miracle-worker (1851-1925). Though long considered a protector against the infestation of mice, Shayele has reemerged in the last decade as a patron saint of hospitality and protection against “intruders.” Shuman’s earlier fieldwork research, which examined the crisis of middlemen in the diamond industry, received competitive funding from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Fulbright Program. 

Shuman earned their Ph.D. and M.A. in sociocultural anthropology, with a graduate certificate in Judaic Studies, from the University of Michigan. They received their B.A. in sociocultural anthropology from Columbia University and a B.A. in Jewish gender and women’s studies from the Jewish Theological Seminary. Most recently, they taught in the Department of Anthropology at Davidson College. From 2021-2022, they held the Rabin-Shvidler joint postdoctoral fellowship in Jewish Studies at Fordham University and Columbia University. 

This academic year, they will teach two new courses at UVA: “Jews, Race and Religion” and “Jewish Economic Thought & Practice.” They will also co-teach “Questions in the Study of Religion” with Prof. Karl Shuve. 

Andreja Siliunas is a qualitative researcher who uses archival, interview-based and ethnographic methods to study inequality, memory politics and nationalism in a globalizing world. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in Lithuania and the United States. In one line of inquiry, she examines the relationship between art and nationalist politics, particularly in the context of decolonial movements in post-Soviet Eastern Europe.  In another, she considers how relational dynamics between employees of public and non-profit agencies reproduce and mitigate inequalities in the delivery of public services in the U.S. 

Prior to coming to UVA, Siliunas earned a Ph.D. in sociology and social policy from Harvard University in 2023. Her research has been funded by the Minda de Gunsburg Center for European Studies and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, both based at Harvard. Her work has been published in Cultural Sociology and the Journal of Organizational Ethnography. 

As a faculty member in the Global Studies and the Engagements programs, Siliunas will teach courses such as “Global Systems of Inequality” and “The Politics of Public Art.”  She is currently working on a book project about public art and how it has been used as a tool for adjudicating decolonial and democratic aspirations in post-Soviet Lithuania. In collaboration with scholars working in other post-imperial contexts, she will also continue to expand her research on the relationships between liberatory politics, democracy and material culture.  

A historian of the 19th and 20th-century United States and the Caribbean, Shelby Sinclair specializes in the history of U.S. empire, military occupation, visual culture, gender, labor and resistance. Her current book project uses a broad range of archival material to investigate women’s lives during the 20th-century U.S. military occupation of Haiti (1915-1934). 

Sinclair’s work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation, the American Historical Association, the Social Sciences Research Council, the Coordinating Council of Women Historians, the National Humanities Center and other organizations. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International and The Caribbean Review of Gender Studies. She is also an award-winning mentor and educator. 

A Presidential Fellow, Sinclair earned her Ph.D. in history, African American studies and gender and sexuality studies from Princeton University. She also holds an M.A. in history from Princeton and a B.A. (with honors) in comparative ethnic studies and history from Stanford University, where she was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow. Prior to joining UVA’s faculty, Sinclair was the Thurgood Marshall Postdoctoral Fellow in African & African American Studies at Dartmouth College.  

Sinclair looks forward to introducing students to the history of race, gender and U.S. empire in the Caribbean. She will also offer more advanced seminars on Black women’s history and critical archival methods.  

A cultural anthropologist with fieldwork experience in Colombia, and Trinidad and Tobago, Fatima Siwaju researches Islam in the Americas, citizenship and the politics of belonging, and Africana intellectual traditions.

She is currently working on her first book manuscript, which explores the nexus of race, religion and citizenship as they pertain to the spiritual and sociopolitical trajectories of Afro-descendant Muslims in the Colombian Pacific. Her research has been supported by the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, the International Institute of Islamic Thought, and the Crossroads Project on Black Religious Histories, Communities, and Cultures in collaboration with the Henry Luce Foundation. Siwaju also served as a 2022-2023 Dissertation Scholar in the Department of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. 

Originally from Trinidad and Tobago, Asst. Prof. Siwaju earned her Ph.D. in anthropology with a concentration in African American studies from Princeton University in 2023. She holds a Master of Arts in religion from Syracuse University and a Master of Philosophy in development studies from the University of Cambridge. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in modern and medieval languages (French and Spanish) from the University of Cambridge. 

This academic year, she will teach “Introduction to Afro-Latin America” and courses titled “Black Islam in the Americas” and “Caribbean Intellectual Traditions.”

Utilizing his training in statistics and computer science, Slawski combines perspectives and skill sets unique to each field to address contemporary data science challenges in engineering, society and health.  

Slawski has published broadly in leading statistics and computer science venues on a variety of topics, including high-dimensional data analysis, data compression, dimensionality reduction, biometric recognition and data integration. The National Science Foundation and other federal agencies such as the National Institute of Justice and the National Institutes of Health have funded his research. He was a Summer at Census Scholar in 2019 and 2024 and currently serves as an associate editor of the Electronic Journal of Statistics. 

Slawski holds a Diplom degree (equivalent to a combined bachelor’s and master’s degree) in statistics from Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich and a doctoral degree in computer science from Saarland University (Germany). His academic career in the United States began with a postdoctoral fellowship at Rutgers University. Before joining the University of Virginia, Slawski was an assistant and then associate professor in George Mason University’s Department of Statistics and held visiting positions at Columbia University and Baidu Research USA. 

A current focus of his research concerns methodology and computational tools for data integration and record linkage in the presence of linkage uncertainty and connections to data privacy. This fall, Slawski will teach a graduate course covering advanced topics in optimization and computational statistics.   

As a sociologist, Mona Sloane studies the intersection of technology and society, specifically in the context of AI design, use and policy. She also convenes the Co-Opting AI series, a public speaker series focused on all aspects of AI technology and its application, ranging from security to food, games, and more, and serves as the Technology Editor for Public Books.

The Women in AI Ethics (WAIE) global initiative added her to its “100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics Hall of Fame” in 2020. A frequent public speaker and commentator, Sloane has written for The Guardian, MIT Technology Review, The Hill, Nature, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, OneZero Medium and other outlets.

Her work includes the development of new methods for AI auditing and AI transparency, innovating AI procurement, AI in hiring and talent acquisition, AI participation and public education, new AI tools for investigative journalism, global AI policy and local governance innovation on AI, and a range of different responsible AI topics.

Sloane holds a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and Political Science and has completed fellowships at the University of California at Berkeley, at the University of Cape Town and at the Weizenbaum Institute Berlin. Before joining UVA, Mona was a research assistant professor at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering, a senior research scientist at the NYU Center for Responsible AI, and the founding director of the *This Is Not A Drill* program, which develops public pedagogy on art, equity, technology, and the climate emergency.

Since 2021, she has served on the board of the Artificial Intelligence & Equality Initiative of the Carnegie Council for Ethics and International Affairs. Sloane currently is a Fellow with the NYU Institute for Public Knowledge and The GovLab, and is affiliated with the Tübingen AI Center in Germany where she recently completed a 3-year federally funded research project on the operationalization of ethics in German AI startups.

At UVA, she runs the Sloane Lab which conducts empirical research on the implications of technology for the organization of social life. Its focus lies on AI as a social phenomenon that intersects with wider cultural, economic, material, and political conditions. The lab spearheads social science leadership in applied work and research on responsible AI, public scholarship, and technology policy.

An American Sign Language instructor whose research interests include language development in deaf and hard-of-hearing children in mainstream school settings, Miranda Slusser examined the impact of the 2019 coronavirus pandemic on the language acquisition of those student groups in school settings.

She earned a master’s degree in deaf education from Flagler College and has eight years of teaching experience. Slusser taught K-12 students in Sarasota, Florida and Lynchburg, Virginia, tailoring their instruction to their individual needs and preferences while helping them make progress toward their IEP goals. 

For the last five years, Slusser was an American Sign Language (ASL) instructor at the University of Lynchburg, where she also served as a first-generation college student mentor and worked on developing a new curriculum and textbook for introductory-level ASL courses. She also collaborated with the University of Lynchburg’s Special Education Department to create and develop a master’s program in deaf education. 

Vladimir Smirnyagin is a macroeconomist whose research interests lie at the quantitative nexus of macroeconomics and finance. In his work, he combines large, comprehensive datasets with quantitative models to answer important questions in macro-finance. Vladimir's current research focuses on the macroeconomic analysis of supply chain disruptions and environmental regulations. Prior to joining the University of Virginia, he was a postdoctoral associate at Yale University.

Smirnyagin holds a B.A. in economics from Russia’s Higher School of Economics, an M.A. from the New Economic School and a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. As a doctoral candidate, he worked as a research analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, and he spent several months at the Bank of England as an academic visitor. His work has been supported by the Heller-Hurwicz Economics Institute and by the Tobin Center for Economic Policy at Yale.

This fall, he will teach Graduate Macroeconomics (Econ 7020) for the College’s Department of Economics.

Alexandria Smith works in the areas of Black feminist and queer literature and theory. She writes and thinks about the roles of embodiment in life writing and theory, the ways that Blackness interacts with and disrupts conceptions of gender and sexuality, and how gendered discourses are constructed in Black cultural work. She is at work on her first book project, an exploration of the distinct and sometimes competing conceptions of Black womanhood produced within Black feminist, queer and trans studies.

Alexandria earned a Ph.D. in women’s, gender and sexuality studies from Rutgers University and a bachelor’s in comparative women’s studies and international studies from Spelman College. She was a 2021-2023 postdoctoral fellow in the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies, where she is excited to continue as an assistant professor.

Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, The Journal of Feminist Scholarship, Cultural Studies, Black Perspectives, The New Inquiry and elsewhere.

This fall, Alexandria will teach “Life Writing in the Black Diaspora” and “Black Genders,” both of which she adapted from courses she taught as a postdoctoral fellow. She looks forward to continuing to develop classes that teach students to engage the productive intersections of lived experience and knowledge production.

Justin Snedegar is a philosopher specializing in ethics and the theory of rationality. He is interested in the ways we think about what to do, both individually and together. His research investigates the role of alternatives in making rational decisions, why it is sometimes okay not to take the morally best option and the moral and social norms surrounding our practices of giving and receiving criticism. 

His book, Contrastive Reasons (2017), argues that our reasons for action are fundamentally contrastive — reasons for acting in one way rather than another — and explores the consequences of this for rational decision-making. More recently, he has published articles on the ethics of criticism, examining how one might lose the right to criticize others, how moral and social norms of criticism are negotiated and how our relationship to the wrongdoer bears on whether and how we should criticize them. 

Snedegar received his bachelor's degree in mathematics and philosophy from West Virginia University and his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Southern California. He comes to UVA after spending eleven years at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. 

As the new Director of the Program in Political Philosophy, Policy, and Law, Snedegar will teach the program’s gateway class, “Morality, Law, and the State,”, as well as classes in ethics, social philosophy and rationality.

As an interdisciplinary political science specialist, Sophia Solomon uses multiple qualitative methods to research political violence across various fields such as sports, military, civic society, international relations and the digital space.  

After completing her master's thesis, which analyzed football fans' violence in Israel under the socio-political concepts of “Hooligans” and “Ultras,” the Israeli newspaper The Marker selected Solomon for its “40 under 40” of 2020. Her doctoral thesis compares three cases from Canada, Britain and Israel of public support of army combatants who used excessive force during battle and their resonance with internal socio-political conflicts and international warfare norms. 

Between 2020 and 2021, Solomon worked with researchers from the University of Cologne and contributed a chapter to Democracy under Corona (published in Germany) that won the best paper award from the Adenauer Foundation.  

Between 2021 and 2024, she researched political radicalization and deradicalization in the European Union's HORIZON 2020 project, focusing on social media and AI. Following this project, her latest publication investigated two decades of ethno-religious and nationalist violence in Jerusalem. 

Solomon received her B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from the Ben Gurion University of the Negev in the Southern District of Israel. Within its Department of Politics & Government, she taught courses on political theory, modern history and international relations as a teaching assistant and as a lecturer after 2015.  

Solomon currently is involved in research at Ben Gurion University’s Sports and Diplomacy Center, focusing on the Middle East region. 

Erica Sterling is an incoming assistant professor in the Corcoran Department of History. Her research explores the intersection of African American education, philanthropy and local and federal policy in the latter half of the twentieth century. Her forthcoming book project, focused on Washington, DC, aims to historicize the contemporary education reform movement, examining how K-12 reformers' reliance on innovation from the 1950s to the 1990s perpetuated inequity. 

Sterling earned her B.A. in history and psychology from Emory University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in history from Harvard University, and her work has been published in the Journal of African American History and Black Perspectives. She is also the curator for a forthcoming exhibit on the history of African American schooling in the nation’s capital. 

Sterling’s research has been supported by multiple entities, including the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard, the Lyndon Johnson Presidential Library and the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation, which award her a dissertation completion fellowship in 2021.

Before joining the faculty, Sterling spent two years as a Rising Scholars Postdoctoral Fellow in the history department at UVA, and next year she will complete the manuscript for her book as a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow and will then resume her teaching duties with classes on the history of African American education, civil rights and historical methods.  

A scholar of Slavic literature with an emphasis on the intersection between literature, medicine and mental illness, Madelyn Stuart explores the function of the mental institution in 19^th- and 20^th-century Russian literature. Partially supported by the Fulbright-Hays program, her research has explored the transcendent character of mental institutions and the gendering of evil within the works of Russian authors such as Vsevolod Garshin, Anton Chekhov, Mikhail Bulgakov, Viktor Pelevin, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Evgeniya Tur.

Stuart also researches the applications of digital pedagogy and instructional design in the language and literature classroom. As a digital pedagogy consultant for the College’s American Sign Language and Slavic faculties in 2020, Stuart began developing new applications for technology in literature pedagogy, which she continued to explore as an Ignite Scholar at the UVA Center for Teaching Excellence.

Since 2018, Stuart has taught a variety of literature and language courses at UVA, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Brigham Young University and Southern Virginia University. Stuart seeks to enable students to explore and utilize the extensive resources at UVA, identify and challenge their perspectives and biases, connect content and ideas across disciplines, and engage deeply with course material while recognizing its interplay with and advantages in the world and their lives beyond the University.

Stuart received her Ph.D. and master’s in Slavic languages and literatures from UVA and her B.A. from the University of Delaware.

As teaching faculty, Stuart looks forward to identifying new opportunities to engage in the culture of lifelong learning at UVA. She gains joy from working closely with undergraduate students as they uncover knowledge not only related to Slavic languages, literatures, and cultures, but also to themselves and our contemporary reality. This academic year, Stuart will be teaching “Second-Year Russian Language,” “19^th-Century Russian Literature,” “20^th-Century Russian Literature,” “Introduction to Russian Culture,” and “Tolstoy in Translation."

As a scholar of comparative U.S. ethnic studies, Ruby C. Tapia's work treats the intersections of photography theory, feminist and critical race theory and critical prison studies. She is co-editor of Interrupted Life: Experiences of Incarcerated Women in the United States (University of California, 2010), co-editor of the University of California book series Reproductive Justice: New Visions for the 21st Century, and author of American Pietàs: Visions of Race, Death and the Maternal (University of Minnesota, 2011).  Her current book project, The Camera in the Cage (forthcoming, Fordham University Press), interrogates the intersections of prison photography and carceral humanism and puts forth an argument and methodology for abolitionist aesthetics. She has facilitated creative writing workshops via the Prison Creative Arts Project at Women's Huron Valley Correctional Facility in Michigan, is a member of the Theory Group Think Tank at Macomb Correctional Facility for men and remains the lead faculty member of the Critical Carceral Visualities component of the Documenting Criminalization and Confinement project founded and supported by grants from the University of Michigan Humanities Collaboratory and the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. Tapia also writes creative non-fiction, and you can read some of her more recent work online at Avidly, a channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Tapia holds a Ph.D. (2002) and M.A. (1998) in ethnic studies from the University of California, San Diego, and a B.A. in English and Africana studies from Cornell University (1995).

As an associate professor in American studies at the University of Virginia, Tapia will teach courses on "Carceral Visualities,” "Gender, Race, and Incarceration," and "The Prison in Literature, Photography, and the Moving Image" and collaborate with faculty and researchers across the university to expand and deepen studies of the carceral state. 

As a chemist, Jetze Tepe has over 20 years of experience in academic drug discovery. Research in his laboratory is primarily focused on the synthesis of small molecules to targeting “undruggable proteins” to treat cancer and neurodegenerative disorders. By developing new synthetic methodologies, drug-like molecules are prepared and evaluated for their clinical significance in his lab. His research group has published in journals such as the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, Cell Chemical Biology, and ACS Chemical Neuroscience.

He has received awards from the American Cancer Society (2003), the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation (2008 and 2010) and the International Myeloma Foundation (2013 and 2019). Tepe also has been recognized with the AbbVie Innovation Midwest Award (2021) and Michigan State University’s Innovator of the Year Award (2022). His current research is funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health. In addition to his academic drug discovery effort, he was the founder of two biotechnology companies.

Tepe received his bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Jacksonville (Fla.) University (1992). He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia under the guidance of Timothy L. Macdonald (1997) and completed his postdoctoral studies at Colorado State University (1998-2000) with Robert M. Williams. Before joining UVA, he was an assistant, associate, and full professor at Michigan State University (2000-2023). At UVA, he hopes to foster an inclusive and highly collaborative research environment with UVA’s Comprehensive Cancer Center. In addition, he will continue his passion for teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in organic chemistry. 

Professor Tepe will be starting at UVA in January 2024.

Paul Torrey is a computational astrophysicist with a research focus on the formation and evolution of our cosmos. Torrey’s research group builds, runs and analyzes large scale cosmological simulations that allow us to probe how assumptions about our Universe, such as the nature of Dark Matter, impact what astronomers observe in the night sky through instruments such as the James Webb Space Telescope.

Prior to joining the College faculty, Torrey obtained his bachelor’s in applied physics from Cornell and his Ph.D. in astrophysics from Harvard. Torrey also conducted postdoctoral research at MIT and Caltech, including 2 years as a NASA Hubble Fellow, and he spent five years on the faculty of the University of Florida.

As a faculty member at UVA, Torrey will teach classes ranging from introductory astronomy to graduate-level astrophysics.

Voted the most relevant Spanish-language poet born since 1970 by a panel of nearly two hundred critics and university researchers, Fernando Valverde has received some of the most significant awards for poetry in Spanish, among them the Federico García Lorca, the Emilio Alarcos del Principado de Asturias and the Antonio Machado. For 10 years, he worked as a journalist for the Spanish newspaper El País as he built his reputation as a young poet.

His critically acclaimed work — including two recent books on the last days of the Romantic poets John Keats, Percy B. Shelley and Lord Byron, published in Mexico and Spain — have been published in various European countries and in North America. His last book, The Insistence of Harm, topped the poetry bestsellers list in Spain for months and received the Book of the Year Award from the City University of New York’s Latino American Writers Institute.

Valverde’s other awards include a 2014 Latin Grammy nomination for the lyrics he wrote for a collaborative work of fusion between poetry and flamenco with singer Juan Pinilla titled “Jugar con Fuego.” He is currently finishing a new book of poetry, scheduled for release this fall by the Spanish publisher Visor.

The director of the College’s Distinguished Spanish Major program, Valverde is teaching two semesters this fall, “Spanish Romantic Poetry and Europe” and “Global Spanish-Language Poetry.”

Amrit Venkatesh is an experimental physical chemist and will join the Department of Chemistry as an assistant professor in spring 2025. He uses nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy to develop materials that address the rising global energy demand and climate change. His research specializes in expanding solid-state NMR spectroscopy to elements across the periodic table using indirect detection and dynamic nuclear polarization techniques. 

Following his early education in Chennai, India, Dr. Venkatesh obtained his master’s degree in chemistry at the Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning. He received his Ph.D. from Iowa State University where his research was recognized with the 2021 Zaffarano award. Subsequently, he conducted postdoctoral research funded by a prestigious Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. After his postdoc, he moved to the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (Maglab) at Florida State University as a Research Faculty. His current research involves applying solid-state NMR spectroscopy at high magnetic fields to materials. 

At the University of Virginia, Dr. Venkatesh will lead a research group that will develop and apply solid-state NMR spectroscopy to catalysts and other energy-relevant materials in collaboration with researchers in the UVA Catalysis Initiative for Clean Energy and Chemicals. The state-of-the-art, solid-state NMR equipment in his laboratory will be supported by the UVA Grand Challenges Initiative. In addition to teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in physical chemistry and magnetic resonance, he is interested in mentorship and building an inclusive environment. 

As a cultural historian of Medieval Europe, Melissa Vise researches the legal, political and religious choices that the peoples and communities in the late Middle Ages made regarding the category of violence, specifically in the republics of Northern Italy. Her first book, The Unruly Tongue: Speech and Violence in Medieval Italy (University of Pennsylvania Press), scheduled for release in January 2025, investigates the nexus of speech and violence by asking how “what words do” changes as a cultural concept in the 13th century. Processes of peacemaking, understandings of vendetta, developments in law and literature, and the choices that constructed documentary forms remain fascinating sites of historical inquiry for her. 

Her articles have appeared in Speculum, Viator and the American Journal for Legal History. Her article “Compositio: Horizons of Truth in The Decameron, the Notarial Register, and Civic Peace Pacts” (2021) won an honorable mention from the Society for Italian Historical Studies. Her research has been funded by the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, the Mellon Foundation, the Lauro De Bosis Fellowship at Harvard University, the Medieval Academy of America, and the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, among others. 

Vise received her Ph.D. in medieval and early modern history from Northwestern University (2015) and her master’s in theological studies from the University of Notre Dame (2008). Vise previously held positions at Washington and Lee University and New York University, as well as fellowships at Harvard University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  

Her current research reconstructs the role of informal talk and gender in peacemaking processes and their failures in medieval republican life. Her teaching plans this academic year include a course on the Black Death.   

Levi Vonk is a medical anthropologist and creative nonfiction author who conducts ethnographic research with Central American migrants traveling through Mexico. His work centers around questions of the human and the body in relation to technological milieus, especially technologies that allow for border militarization and externalization.

His first book, Border Hacker (2022), is a work of literary nonfiction and was a national finalist for the prestigious Chautauqua Prize; it was also shortlisted for Duke University’s Juan E. Méndez Book Award. His second book, The Body Migrant (forthcoming), is a work of ethnographic and critical theory investigating a secret border militarization pact between the United States and Mexico known as the Southern Border Program, which seeks to dismantle the international asylum system by physically immobilizing migrants as they travel. Vonk’s work also has been published in Dialectical Anthropology, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, Literary Hub and National Public Radio. He has received funding from the Fulbright-García Robles Scholarship program, the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad program, the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy, Rotary International, and the UC Berkeley Center for Human Rights.

Vonk holds a Ph.D. from the joint program in medical anthropology at UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco and spent a year as a visiting scholar at CIESAS-Mexico City. He earned his Master of Arts from the University of Sussex’s Anthropology of Development and Social Transformation program. He additionally holds an affiliation with the Mexican research institution, Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE).

At UVA, Volk will teach courses related to migration, Latin America and medical anthropology, as well as creative nonfiction and journalism seminars.

As an educator, Caelan Wang has experience supporting students from a variety of backgrounds in the United States and Canada. The primary focus of their career is providing quality and personalized teaching to students. In addition to developing their teaching skills, Wang is interested in understanding the impact of cultural and environmental factors in one’s mathematical learning.  

One of their current research projects involves exploring whether there is any correlation between the language background of students and their performance in a first-year proof-based math course. Incorporating their love of playing games, Wang has developed an in-class game for students to learn curve sketching for Calculus 1. One of their long-term goals is to develop a game or activity for students to learn each topic in Calculus 1. 

Wang earned their Ph.D. degree from the University of Waterloo and brings five years of experience in the field. They received specific training to teach university-level mathematics via the University of Waterloo’s Certificate in University Teaching program and the University of Florida’s Master’s in Education program. Before coming to UVA, they worked in a variety of teaching positions at the University of Waterloo, the University of Florida, the University of Toronto and the University of Manitoba.  

As the new course coordinator for Calculus I classes this fall, Wang is excited to meet their students and take them on a fun mathematical journey. 

A statistician with interdisciplinary backgrounds in survey research, biostatistics and epidemiology, Lingxiao Wang applies statistical methods to public health and population science topics. One of her major research interests is generalizing results from epidemiologic studies to the general U.S. population by integrating data from national health surveys and disease registries.

Wang's Ph.D. dissertation won the Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellowship awarded by the University of Maryland, as well as the American Statistical Association’s Edward C. Bryant Scholarship for an Outstanding Graduate Student in Survey Statistics. Her postdoctoral work received the National Cancer Institute’s Fellows Awards for Research Excellence. She has published 10 papers in well-recognized journals of statistics, survey research and epidemiology.

Wang earned her Ph.D. degree (2020) in survey methodology (with a focus on statistics) from the University of Maryland, College Park. Before joining UVA, she served as a research fellow at the National Cancer Institute/National Institutes of Health.

During her first year at UVA, Wang will continue her ongoing research of building nationally representative lung cancer risk models and pursue more collaborative work with her new University colleagues. This fall, she also will be teaching courses on linear regression models.

As a statistician with interests in theoretical analysis and motivation from practical applications, Jingming Wang focuses primarily on addressing high-dimensional problems in complex data using random matrix theory and spectral methods. Her recent research topics include network analysis, topic modeling and high-dimensional clustering.

Wang has published her work in leading journals like the Annals of Statistics and at meetings such as the International Conference on Learning Representations. During her Ph.D. studies, she was awarded the Hong Kong Fellowship Scheme by the Hong Kong Research Grants Council. She also won the HKSS-John Aitchison Prize in Statistics — awarded by the Hong Kong Statistical Society — for her excellent Ph.D. research in statistics.

Wang received her Ph.D. in mathematics from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2021 where she focused on probability and statistics, and prior to joining the faculty at UVA, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Statistics at Harvard University.

In her first year at UVA, Wang will continue her research in network analysis from both theoretical and practical perspectives. Additionally, she will explore the applications of random matrix theory in machine learning problems, with a particular emphasis on variations of sample covariance matrix models. This fall, she will be teaching introductory courses in mathematical statistics.

David Williams is an intellectual historian focusing on the literature and philosophy of archaic and classical Greece. He is particularly interested in Athenian drama, Socrates and the Sophists, and Plato. 

Williams's current book project focuses on the comic playwright Aristophanes' engagement with contemporary intellectual culture. He has published articles related to this project in TAPA and Classical World. He is also a co-editor of and contributor to a collaborative volume on the Sophist Hippias of Elis, which is currently under contract with Oxford University Press. Finally, he has conducted and presented initial research toward a comprehensive study of gnomic statements in Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. 

Williams received a joint Ph.D. (2022) and M.A. (2016) from the Department of Classics and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. During his graduate studies, he also spent a year as a Regular Member of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, where he held the Lucy Shoe Meritt Fellowship (2018-19). Before arriving at UVA, he was a Solmsen Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (2023-24) and a visiting scholar in the Department of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania (2022-23).

As an incoming assistant professor with the Department of Classics, Williams is looking forward to teaching ancient Greek and Latin, as well as courses focusing on the literature, history and ideas of ancient Greece. This fall he will offer an introductory course on ancient drama ("Tragedy and Comedy") and an advanced Latin course on the Roman historian Livy. 

Ying Yue is a foreign/second-language educator and language-teacher educator. Her research centers on foreign-language pedagogy, with a particular emphasis on high-leverage teaching practices, cultural dimensions of foreign language teaching and foreign-language teacher education. Her work has been published in various academic journals, including an article titled "Teaching Chinese in K-12 Schools in the U.S.: What Are the Challenges?" in the journal Foreign Language Annals.

Yue holds a Ph.D. in foreign and second-language education from the State University of New York at Buffalo, an M.A. in teaching Chinese as a foreign language from Middlebury College and an M.A. in British and American literature from Wuhan University. Throughout her academic journey, she has been honored with numerous awards, including tuition scholarships from the Graduate School of Education at the University at Buffalo, a scholarship from the "Confucius China Study Plan" by the Confucius Institute at Buffalo and the Stephen A. and Ruth H. Freeman Scholarship from Middlebury College.

This coming academic year at the University of Virginia, she will be teaching second- and third-year Chinese courses, contributing her expertise to the language program. She also plans to continue her research on high-leverage teaching practices and the development of effective foreign-language education methodologies. 

Yifan Zhou is an observational astronomer focusing on studying the formation and atmospheric properties of exoplanets. Utilizing advanced space and ground-based telescopes, he conducts research to search for protoplanets, characterize planetary atmospheres and map the evolutionary pathways of planetary systems. His dissertation primarily revolves around using Hubble Space Telescope time-resolved observations to understand the patchy clouds in planetary atmospheres. During his postdoctoral years, he developed new high-contrast imaging techniques that enabled direct constraints on the mass accretion rates of protoplanets.

Zhou earned a Ph.D. in astronomy and astrophysics from the University of Arizona in 2019 and holds a bachelor’s degree in astronomy from Peking University (2014). He conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Texas at Austin with support from the Harlan J. Smith and 51 Pegasi b fellowships. He is the author of nearly 40 scientific publications.

As an assistant professor of astronomy, Zhou is enthusiastic about leading his team at the College to explore exoplanets using advanced instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope. He is also committed to sharing knowledge and will teach the “Alien Worlds” course for undergraduate students.

A scholar of German literature and visual studies, Chrisann Zuerner specializes in 21^st-century transnational German literature and theories related to trauma, memory and futurity.

Her dissertation explores the intersection of history and memory in the works of three female, contemporary German-speaking authors who come from multiethnic and multilingual backgrounds. Examining the role of literary objects, her dissertation considers the ways these objects serve as vehicles to disrupt and shatter past narratives for current and future generations. In many cases, the objects are dislocated from their original spaces following relocation and migration, thus taking on significance and meaning that they previously did not possess. Ultimately, her dissertation questions whether the presence and ongoing conservation of the material objects is significant for the remembrance of events and individuals as conceptualized in selected works.

Zuerner holds a Ph.D. in German and visual studies from the Pennsylvania State University (2023) and a bachelor’s degree in German and social work from Luther College (2015).

As an assistant professor of German, Zuerner will contribute to the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures through teaching German language and culture courses and various service initiatives.