As we welcome another talented, new cohort of faculty to Grounds this 2023-24 academic year, it is important to first recognize our colleagues who joined the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences in 2021 and 2022.
These 26 faculty members played a critical role in helping the A&S community and the University of Virginia address and overcome the challenges presented by the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. From accepting the challenge of teaching remotely via Zoom and other online tools to assisting with the transition back to the classroom as the University’s safety protocols adapted to mitigate the risks for faculty, staff and students alike, these recent additions to our faculty overcame hurdles and obstacles no one could have predicted would await them before the pandemic.
Their efforts paved the way for this latest group of new faculty beginning this August, as did the faculty search committees, department chairs, program directors, associate deans and the many other faculty and staff members who helped the College recruit such bright scholars, researchers, and educators to Grounds.
UVA’s reputation for academic excellence in undergraduate education and graduate study is based on exceptional teaching and research, and these faculty members who joined us in the 2021-22 and 2022-23 academic years have helped the University further strengthen this world-class institution during a most unique period.
Art
David J. Getsy, Eleanor Shea Professor of Art History
David J. Getsy works at the intersection of art history, queer studies, transgender studies and performance studies. His writings have addressed the ways in which non-normative genders and sexualities have shaped the narratives of art and performance history.
His newest book, Queer Behavior: Scott Burton and Performance Art (University of Chicago Press, 2022), examines an artist who drew from his queer experiences of public spaces and city streets to create a new version of democratic public art. His previous books include Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender (Yale 2015, reissued in paperback 2023); Rodin: Sex and the Making of Modern Sculpture (Yale 2010); and Body Doubles: Sculpture in Britain, 1877–1905 (Yale 2004). Getsy has edited an additional four books, including the widely-read anthology of artists’ writings, Queer (MIT 2016). In 2022, he received an Award for Distinction from the College Art Association. Getsy is on
the editorial board of American Art and the University of Virginia Press, and he has curated multiple exhibitions of performance art.
He received his Ph.D. from Northwestern University and his B.A. from Oberlin College. Getsy came to the University of Virginia from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he taught from 2005 to 2021 and was the Goldabelle McComb Finn Distinguished Professor of Art History for a decade. Getsy is currently working on a book about performance art’s geographic and social proximities to the Stonewall uprising and the modern LGBT rights movement in the United States.
Henry Skerritt, Assistant Professor
Henry Skerritt is a curator and art historian whose research focuses on the engagement of Indigenous peoples with museums, art history and the contemporary art world. As a researcher, Skerritt's work prioritizes collaboration with Indigenous knowledge holders and seeks to find new ways to amplify Indigenous voices in the museum sector.
Before being appointed assistant professor in the Department of Art, Skerritt was the curator of Indigenous Arts of Australia at the UVA’s Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection. He has curated over twenty exhibitions in the United States and Australia, including the major touring exhibitions Madayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala (2022-2024); The Inside World: Contemporary Aboriginal Australian Memorial Poles (2019-2021); and Marking the Infinite: Contemporary Women Artists from Aboriginal Australia (2016-19). Skerritt has edited five major exhibition catalogues and written extensively for museums, including Harvard Art Museums, the Hood Museum at Dartmouth, the National Museum of Australia and the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Skerritt holds a Ph.D. and master’s degree in art history from the University of Pittsburgh; a master’s of art curatorship from the University of Melbourne; and a bachelor’s degree with honors (first class) from the University of Western Australia.
Skerritt has taught both graduate and undergraduate courses at the University of Virginia since 2016. This academic year, he is teaching a lecture course titled “Sex Spirits and Sorcery” and a graduate seminar in ethics, theory and research methods as part of the Indigenous Studies interdisciplinary Ph.D. program. He is currently working on a book-length monograph titled Indigenous Peoples and the Institutions of Art.
Biology
Tracy Larson, Assistant Professor
Tracy Larson explores the origins, functions, and mechanisms underlying natural variation in neural degeneration and regeneration by integrating comparative genomics, behavioral neuroscience and cellular biology.
Larson’s current studies utilize the unique relationship between seasonal changes in the birth and death of neurons in the brains of songbirds and the ability of the songbird to sing high quality, “attractive” song. Her research explores questions such as:
- What are the mechanisms that promote regeneration of the adult brain?
- Can mechanisms that are robust in songbirds be exploited to encourage the addition of new functional neurons in the poorly regenerating mammalian brain?
- What cellular mechanisms modulate adult neurogenesis, and how they have evolved?
Larson received her Ph.D. in biology at the University of Washington, where she also earned two Bachelor of Science degrees, one in neurobiology and another in cellular, molecular and developmental biology. Before her arrival at UVA, Larson led five first-author publications in The Journal of Neuroscience, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA and other journals and co-authored a paper for eNeuro and a book chapter in Neurogenesis (Cold Spring Harbor Press). Larson received the Distinguished Dissertation Award for Biological Sciences from the University of Washington and was a national finalist for the Council of Graduate Schools’ Distinguished Dissertation Award. Pursuing her interests in bioethics and the application of science in law, she also completed a Certificate of Law in international bioethics, social justice and health at the University of Washington’s School of Law.
Melanie I. Worley, Assistant Professor
As a developmental biologist, Melanie I. Worley aims to better understand how tissues regenerate. Her research combines experimental genetics, developmental biology and single-cell transcriptomics to investigate the molecular and cellular mechanisms that regulate regenerative growth and regenerative re-patterning. Her lab aims to uncover the genes and gene regulatory networks that are activated during regeneration with the long-term goal of positively informing how we heal our own bodies through regenerative medicine.
Worley’s postdoctoral research led to three first/co-first author publications in the journals of Current Biology and eLife. Worley also co-wrote a review for Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Biology. As a graduate student, Worley contributed to publications in Development, Developmental Cell and Annual Review of Genetics.
Worley received her her Ph.D. in molecular and cell biology from the University of California, Berkeley and performed her postdoctoral research at UC Berkeley within the Genetics, Genomics, and Developmental Division of the Molecular and Cell Biology Department. She earned her bachelor’s degree in biology, with a minor in chemistry, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
At the University of Virginia, Worley continues to investigate cellular and molecular mechanisms of regeneration in her Department of Biology lab. She looks forward to recruiting and establishing collaborations across the University.
Chemistry
Jelena Samonina, Assistant Professor
Jelena Samonina teaches organic chemistry courses as well as “Chemistry for Health Sciences” and “Biochemistry for Pre-Health.” A passionate teacher, she designs her courses to motivate and excite students, employing a teaching style that engages and encourage her students to develop into future thinkers, inventors, and researchers, whether it be in industry, academia, or public service.
Samonina’s research interests lie at the interface of organic and polymer chemistry, 
nanomaterials and medicine and include the development of new concepts in drug delivery, imaging and diagnostics.
She earned her Ph.D. and M.S. in organic chemistry at Warsaw University. After a 2012 appointment at the National Institutes of Health as a visiting research fellow, she completed postdoctoral training at the University of Virginia and at Stanford University. Samonina taught organic chemistry courses at Washington and Lee University before returning to UVA in 2019.
Among the courses she teaches in the College is “Chemistry of Life,” an introductory COLA seminar for first-year students that helps them understand how molecules are created, why they react, how they interact and their roles in living organisms. Focusing on the oxygen atom by investigating and tracing oxygen in processes that occur in nature and the human body, the seminar covers small to giant molecules such as DNA, RNA, proteins (natural polymers) and plastics (synthetic polymers) and their role in everyday life.
Creative Writing
Anna Martin-Beecher, Assistant Professor
Anna Beecher is a writer and theatre-maker from the United Kingdom. She writes fiction, creative nonfiction and performance texts. Her work is about love.
Beecher’s first novel, Here Comes the Miracle, was published in 2021 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson and nominated for the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitkin Trust Young Writer of the Year Award. She is now working on a memoir collection of essays called, We All Come Home Alive, also to be published by W&N. A winner of the Henfield Prize for Fiction, Martin-Beecher has written for Granta, The Guardian and other publications. Her performance work has been presented by venues including Lincoln Center, Barbican London, the Southbank Centre and Young Vic and has been supported by grants from Arts Council England.
An alumna of UVA, Anna acquired her MFA in Fiction in 2020. As an MFA student, she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow and National Geographic Scholar and the inaugural recipient of the Sydney Hall Blair Award for Teaching Excellence. She is also a graduate of the University of Westminster.
This year, Beecher is teaching “Storytelling and Performance Prose," a class on creating texts to be spoken aloud. She also is teaching a fiction-writing workshop and a literature class for writers exploring dialogue in prose, plays and other texts.
Economics
Christopher Dylan McGee, Visiting Professor
Christopher McGee first started teaching economics during graduate school at the 
University of North Carolina, where he earned his Ph.D. in 2001. He was an assistant professor and then associate professor for 13 years at Assumption College in Massachusetts, where he taught and developed curriculum in the areas of macroeconomics, international finance, and corporate finance.
McGee also researched and published peer-reviewed articles in the fields of finance and open economy macroeconomics. After addressing some health issues, he resumed teaching at Piedmont Virginia Community College and the University of Virginia. He is currently teaching intermediate macroeconomics and corporate finance courses as well as one course on product markets for engineering students at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Julie Holland Mortimer, Kenneth G. Elzinga Professor in Economics and the Law
As an industrial organization economist, Julie Holland Mortimer studies the impact of competition and firms' strategic behavior on consumer well-being. Mortimer researches the impact of contractual arrangements that enable firms along a supply chain to better align their behaviors. Such "vertical" contracts between upstream producers and downstream distributors may enable economic efficiencies that benefit consumers, but they also have the potential to weaken competition.
Mortimer's research, which has been supported by the National Science Foundation, 
combines microeconomic theory and statistical methods with extensive data resources to empirically examine these issues in a wide range of contexts, including contracts between content producers and retailers in the motion picture industry, copyright infringement and enforcement in the market for digital images, price discrimination in the market for television advertising, and rebates from manufacturers to retailers in the confections industry. Mortimer is a research associate for the National Bureau of Economic Research and a co-editor of the Journal of Law and Economics.
Mortimer received her Ph.D. from UCLA and her bachelor’s degree from Carleton College. Before joining the University of Virginia, she worked at Boston College (2011-2022) and Harvard University (2001-2011). She is teaching a course on empirical approaches to antitrust enforcement this academic year.
Engagements Program
Liza Sapir Flood, Assistant Professor
Liza Sapir Flood is an ethnomusicologist specializing in vernacular and popular American music, with a regional interest in the U.S. South. Her work focuses on issues of public space and amateur music-making, gender and class identities, the cultural politics of country music, and feminism in popular culture.
Flood is completing a book examining public social life within the sonic landscapes of amateur country music-making in rural western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee. It shows how gendered personhood is dialogically articulated through country music performance, drawing on the affordances of participatory jam scenes. Flood’s peer-reviewed work has appeared in Ethnomusicology and Journal of the Society for American Music.
Flood earned her Ph.D. in critical and comparative studies in music at UVA in 2017. The following year, she was a lecturer in the College’s Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She then joined UVA’s Engagements program as a postdoctoral fellow. Flood continues to teach Engagements seminars in the College’s new curriculum and is a member of its leadership team. Flood is also the program coordinator for the Rising Scholars Postdoctoral Fellows program, an initiative aimed at supporting underrepresented scholars from across the arts and sciences, funded in part by the University-wide Race, Place, and Equity grant from the Mellon Foundation.
This year, Flood is excited to create a comic book-style introduction to the musicological concept of timbre for her students in a course called “Sounds of Resistance.”
English
Eric Rawson, Assistant Professor
Eric Rawson joins the Department of English from the University of Southern California. His research and teaching interests focus on American literature and rhetoric of the Cold War, subcultural rhetorics, poetics and sound studies.
He is the author of American Subcultures (now in its second edition), the novels Banana Republic and Any Better Than This, the poetry volumes The Hummingbird Hour and Expo, and numerous articles on detective fiction, soundscapes in literature and American poetry.
Rawson holds a Ph.D. in literature and creative writing from the University of Southern California, an MFA in fiction and poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Iowa. Before joining the Writing Program faculty at USC, where he taught for many years as a full professor, he taught at Occidental College.
Rawson continues to write about the soundscapes of literature. While his primary focus at UVA will be teaching undergraduate writing seminars, he is working to complete a critical study titled Alternative Landscapes in American Poetry.
Global Studies
Huong T. M. Ngo, Assistant Professor
In her professional and academic work on international laws and human rights, Huong T.M. Ngo’s researches issues related to cosmopolitanism, human rights, comparative laws and governance, children’s rights, digital rights, migration and trafficking.
Ngo’s work has been published in Human Rights Education Review and the Journal of Southeast Asian Human Rights. She has presented papers at international conferences, including the International Organization of Educators and Researchers’ 2022 “Legal Cooperation, Harmonization and Unification: An ASEAN Perspective” conference and the 2020 Asian Constitutional Law Forum. She co-edited and was a chapter author for the 2019 book, Children’s Rights in the Tourism Industry: the cases of Vietnam and Myanmar, published with a research grant from the South East Asian Human Rights and Peace Research Network.
Huong holds a Ph.D. in human rights and peace studies from Mahidol University (Thailand), master’s degrees in public international law, and in human rights from the University of Oslo (Norway), and a master’s degree in Development Management from the Asian Institute of Management (Philippines). Ngo previously has served on the law faculty at Vietnam National University and has worked with international organisations and NGOs in Viet Nam and in other parts of Southeast Asia and Norway.
Ngo offered three new Global Studies courses covering international law, peace, security and international relations, business and human rights. This spring, Ngo is teaching several other courses, including “Law, Justice and Sustainable Development” and two capstone courses. Ngo also will co-direct a J-Term course for study abroad in Viet Nam titled “Vietnam: An Ecological-Economic Exploration” and a summer course titled “Hanoi’s Hong River: Development, Climate Change, and Rights to City.”
Spencer Phillips, Assistant Professor
An ecological economist with more than 30 years of experience at the intersection of economic development and environmental stewardship, Spencer Phillips brings a wealth of experience in academia, NGO leadership, business startups and policy-focused applied research. He likes to teach concepts and methods in ways that are grounded in, and applied to, real-world challenges such as climate change, waste management, food systems, biodiversity conservation and other pressing challenges and opportunities.
Before returning to Grounds to join the Global Studies faculty, the UVA alumnus founded Key-Log Economics in Charlottesville and its sister social enterprise, Key-Log Economics Vietnam, in Hanoi. These consultancies help government, business, and civil society organizations achieve their conservation, sustainable development and organizational goals. Previously, he was a staff economist at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, Executive Director of NorthWoods Stewardship Center, and senior economist and vice president for ecology and economics research at The Wilderness Society.
Spencer earned his Ph.D. and M.S. in agricultural and applied economics from Virginia Tech, and his bachelor’s degree in economics from UVA.
Since joining the Global Studies faculty, Phillips has developed new courses in sustainability policy, GIS for global sustainability, ecosystem services, and evidence for policy, has co-taught the Global Sustainability core course and advised students completing their Global Environments + Sustainability capstones. Next up are education abroad programs within UVA’s J-Term and Summer Session programs (“Vietnam: An Ecological-Economic Exploration” and “Hanoi’s Hong River: Development, Climate, and Rights to the City”) and new spring courses on ecological economics and applied research.
History
Emily Burrill, Associate Professor
A scholar of 20th-century West African history and the history of gender and sexuality in the French empire, Emily Burrill explores historical questions of gender and belonging in colonial and postcolonial communities, law and society, and rights formation.
Before arriving at UVA, Burrill taught for 12 years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies and the Department of History. She also served as director of the UNC-CH African Studies Center the previous six years.
Burrill’s first monograph, States of Marriage: Gender, Justice, and Rights in Colonial Mali (2015), won the 2016 French Colonial Historical Society Heggoy Prize. She is also the co-author of two edited volumes: Domestic Violence and the Law in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa (2010) and Legislating Gender and Sexuality in Africa: Human Rights, Society and the State (2021). Burrill has written articles and chapters on a range of topics. Her current book project is an episodic history that explores the gendered implications of citizenship for West Africans living in African territories of the French Union and postcolonial West Africa between 1946 and the mid-1960s.
Burrill holds a Ph.D. in history from Stanford University (2007) and a master’s degree in history from the University of Vermont (2001). She received her bachelor’s degree in anthropology and French from Mount Holyoke College (1997).
In addition to serving on the Department of History’s faculty, Burrill is a member of the University’s Karsh Institute of Democracy’s John L. Nau III History and Principles of Democracy Lab. As part of her two roles on Grounds, she is teaching classes on histories of gender and sexuality and modern Africa and developing programming for this core lab of the Initiative.
Deborah Kang, John L. Nau III Associate Professor of the History and Principles of Democracy
An immigration, borderlands and legal historian whose research focuses on the historical and contemporary aspects of U.S. immigration and border policy, S. Deborah Kang is UVA’s John L. Nau III Associate Professor of the History and Principles of Democracy.
Her first book, The INS on the Line: Making Immigration Law on the US-Mexico Border, 
1917-1954, traces the history of U.S. immigration agencies on the U.S.-Mexico border. It earned six awards and numerous accolades, including the Society for History in the Federal Government’s Henry Adams Prize, the Immigration and Ethnic History Society’s Theodore Saloutos Book Award, the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize, the Western History Association’s W. Turrentine Jackson Award, and the Américo Paredes Book Award for Best Nonfiction Book on Chicano/a, Mexican American and/or Latino/a Studies. It was also was recognized by the Western History Association as a finalist for the 2018 Weber-Clements Book Prize.
Kang is currently writing a second book about U.S. immigration legalization policies from the early 20th century to the present. She is also co-editing an anthology on the history of undocumented European migration to the United States. Kang’s historical research has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Huntington Library and the Clements Center for Southwest Studies.
Kang also serves as an immigration consultant for federal public defenders throughout the country, preparing research briefs on the laws criminalizing undocumented immigration. As a former Immigration Policy Fellow at the U.S. Immigration Policy Center at the University of California, San Diego, she co-authored journal articles, working papers, and briefs on the immigration enforcement policies of the Trump administration.
Kang holds a Ph.D. in United States history and an M.A. in jurisprudence and social policy from the University of California, Berkeley. She completed her B.A. in the College Scholar Program at Cornell University.
In her new role on Grounds, she is teaching classes on immigration, borderlands and legal history and launching programs for UVA’s Karsh Institute of Democracy that explore the relationship between migration and democracy.
Mathematics
Daniel James, Assistant Professor
Trained as a commutative algebraist, Daniel James is a mathematics educator interested in improving instruction in coordinated mathematics courses.
Daniel received his Ph.D. from Auburn University in 2017. From 2018 to 2020, he held a temporary assistant professor position at the University of Delaware, where he co-developed and implemented the first graduate teaching assistant professional development course in his department. Before joining the University of Virginia, he was an assistant teaching professor at the University of Kansas, where he redesigned high-enrollment STEM calculus courses to include online elements, including an integrated video quiz series. The redesigns helped to produce the best student outcomes observed in those courses.
This academic year, Daniel is teaching and coordinating STEM Calculus I and leading the Department of Mathematics’ graduate teaching assistant professional development program. His current research focuses on improving the experiences, opportunities and outcomes of students from minoritized groups in mathematics.
Media Studies
Anna Katherine Clay, Assistant Professor of Practice
A freelance writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, ESPN, Longreads, The Washington Post, and numerous other publications, Anna Katherine (Clemmons) Clay has traveled across the country reporting high-profile projects. She specializes in narrative, nonfiction storytelling, most often through written and digital storytelling but also through video projects. Her academic research and field reporting examine the impact and power of utilizing sport for social change in works frequently published in mainstream media publications.
She is currently authoring a textbook titled U.S. Sports Reporting for Routledge, scheduled to be published in early 2024. Clay assisted in editing the first draft of Keith Hernandez’s memoir, ‘I’m Keith Hernandez’; the feature film rights to her longform feature on a Houston high school men’s soccer team were optioned in January of 2019 by a production arm of FOX films.
Clay earned a Master's of Science in Journalism from Boston University in 2005 and earned her bachelor’s degree in English from Davidson College in 2001. She is an official member of the American Society of Journalists & Authors (ASJA) and the Association of Women in Sports Media (AWSM). She has served as a keynote speaker, session leader and panelist at many national conventions and gatherings of media members and storytellers, most recently the AWSM annual convention in Denver in August of 2022 and the ASJA annual convention in New Jersey in May of 2022.
Clay has taught at UVA since 2016 and was hired to the General Faculty in 2021. She loves inspiring students toward a passion for storytelling. In 2023, she is teaching courses in sports journalism and sports media production, as well as a seminar titled “Athletes, Activism & the Media,” and a Catalyst course focused on storytelling.
Julide Etem, Assistant Professor
As a scholar of media history, documentary film, and race and ethnicity, Jülide Etem examines how institutions produce media with the intention of generating transformative social impact. She is currently writing a book about educational films as portable technologies for solving infrastructural problems communicating public service messages, delivering information campaigns, implementing foreign policy, spreading propaganda, and influencing social practices in Turkey and U.S.–Turkey relations during the Cold War era.
Her articles have appeared in the Journal of e-Media Studies, Global Perspectives, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, Review of Middle East Studies. She has presented her work at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS), Visible Evidence, the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), the International Studies Association (ISA) and the International Communication Association (ICA). She also was the Early Career Representative of the Communication History division at the ICA.
As a producer, Etem has created short documentaries, digital archives and multimedia platforms to document stories of marginalized communities. She filmed protests against authoritarian government leaders, anti-Islamophobia movements, human rights violations of refugees, and advocated for disability and abortion rights as well as immigration reform. She also worked for the Black Film Center & Archive, the City Lights Film Series and the In Light Human Rights Documentary Film Festival.
She holds a Ph.D. from Indiana University and earned her master’s and bachelor’s degrees at the University of Virginia.
Pallavi Rao, Assistant Professor
Pallavi Rao’s research interests in media and cultural studies have focused on contemporary South Asian media, and anti-caste and feminist media studies. Her ongoing work examines media ownership in India as demonstrated through caste and class clusters and the networked elitism embedded in its political economy of communication. Her writing on caste and patriarchy, popular Hindi films, and India's digital media and entertainment culture has been published in the Journal of Communication Inquiry, South Asian Film and Media, and Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies.
Rao has a Ph.D. in Media Studies from Indiana University (2021) and a master’s degree in writing and communication from Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. She taught media writing and social theory previously at a journalism school in India. At UVA, Rao teaches undergraduate courses on American comedy in popular culture, food media, creative labor, digital media studies and issues of diversity and representation.
Middle Eastern & South Asian Languages and Cultures
Kristina Richardson, John L. Nau III Professor of the History and Principles of Democracy
As a historian of the Islamic Middle Ages, Kristina Richardson has focused on non-elite groups, namely people with disabilities, users of sign language, Roma and Travellers (in Arabic, ghurabā’), craftspeople and enslaved female entertainers. Her current book 
project, Black Basra: Race, Labor and Piety in Early Islamic History, is a history of the riverine port city of Basra, Iraq, from its founding in 637 until c. 1000 CE, centering the lives and experiences of free and unfree black people (al-sūdān), who were broadly defined in this period as dark-skinned inhabitants of Africa, Asia and the southern Indian Ocean.
Richardson is the author of two monographs: Difference and Disability in the Medieval Islamic World: Blighted Bodies (Edinburgh, 2012) and Roma in the Medieval Islamic Word: Literacy, Culture and Migration (London, 2022). In this latest book she showed that itinerant groups had been printing religious texts in the Middle East from the 10th to the 15th centuries. As they migrated into central Europe in the 1410s, they may have introduced print technologies there, decades before Gutenberg invented the printing press. For this latest book she was awarded the prestigious 2022 Dan David Prize, which at $300,000 is the largest history award in the world, and the 2023 Monica H. Green Prize for Distinguished Medieval Research from the Medieval Academy of America. With Dr. Boris Liebrenz, she also co-published The Notebook of Kamal al-Din the Weaver (Beirut, 2021), an edition and study of an early Ottoman Aleppine weaver’s Arabic notebook.
Richardson holds a master’s and doctorate in Near Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan and a bachelor’s degree in history from Princeton University. At UVA, she teaches courses titled “Democracy and Literacy,” and “A Global History of Print before Gutenberg.” Before joining UVA’s faculty in 2022, she taught at Queens College and the Graduate Center of The City University of New York for 14 years.
Music
Elliott Tackitt, Assistant Professor and Director of Bands
Internationally active as an educator, clinician, and conductor, Elliott Tackitt joined UVA’s academic general faculty in 2021. He directs the Cavalier Marching Band, conducts the Wind Ensemble, teaches a course called “Creative Discovery” and provides artistic guidance to the entire band program. He has led classes in Vienna, Austria and has performed concerts nationally as well as in Baden-Württemberg, Germany.
Before coming to UVA, Tackitt taught undergraduate instrumental conducting, graduate conducting seminars, advanced rehearsal techniques, marching band techniques, and directed athletic and concert bands on the faculties of Northern Arizona University, Arizona State University, and the University of Michigan. While in Arizona, Tackitt also directed the Curry Summer Music Camp for seven summers and presented at the Arizona Music Educators Association state conference.
Tackitt completed his Doctor of Musical Arts degree in wind conducting at the University of Michigan and his Master of Music degree in wind conducting at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He completed a bachelor’s degree in trombone performance, as well as a bachelor’s degree in instrumental music education at the University of Michigan.
Tackitt is a member of the College Band Directors National Association (CBDNA), the National Association for Music Education and the Virginia Music Educators Association.
Philosophy
Alex Motchoulski, Assistant Professor
Alex Motchoulski’s research primarily focuses on the morality of social status relations and its implications for the organization of social and political life. His work spans a number of topics in political philosophy, including liberalism, distributive justice, political authority, egalitarianism, and democratic theory, among others.
Some of Motchoulski’s work occurs within the growing politics, philosophy, and economics (PPE) research tradition, which seeks to integrate insights and methods from the social sciences and political philosophy to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the social world.
Motchoulski completed his Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Arizona. He wrote his dissertation on the morality of social status. His work has appeared in such venues as the Journal of Philosophy and Journal of Political Philosophy.
Politics
Albert Rivero, Assistant Professor
Albert Rivero studies judicial politics in the United States, with particular interests in the lower federal courts and public attitudes toward the judiciary. One of his ongoing project is examining how the U.S. federal court system shapes the decision-making of lower court judges, focusing on how judges on the U.S. Courts of Appeals change their behavior when the composition of their circuits changes. His current research also considers topics such as judicial behavior in voting rights cases, the public's attitudes toward the courts and judicial nominees, and the effects of judicial appointments and the diversification of the bench on judicial decision-making.
Rivero’s work has appeared in Justice System Journal and the Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy. He also is working on a book project with Andrew Stone on how Americans view the legal principles judges invoke to justify their decisions and how elites communicate about these principles to the public.
Rivero earned his Ph.D. and J.D. from Harvard University and his bachelor’s degree from Marquette University.
Among the undergraduate courses taught by Rivero are seminars titled “Judicial Policymaking” and “The Courts and American Democracy” (Spring 2022). In addition to his faculty appointment in the College’s Department of Politics, Rivero is affiliated with the John L. Nau III History and Principles of Democracy Lab in UVA's Karsh Institute of Democracy.
Kirill Zhirkov, Assistant Professor
Kirill Zhirkov studies political psychology and public opinion, mostly in the United States but also in Europe. His core research interests are in political methodology with an emphasis on the measurement of politically relevant beliefs and attitudes beyond standard survey self-reports. Zhirkov uses these methods to address substantive questions in the field of political psychology, such as the role of cognition in politics: how people perceive the social world and how these perceptions affect political preferences and behaviors.
Zhirkov’s research has been published in major disciplinary journals, including Political Analysis, the Journal of Politics and Public Opinion Quarterly. His doctoral dissertation used innovative techniques to measure stereotypes about immigrants and demonstrate their importance for public attitudes toward immigration, earning the 2021 Best Dissertation Award from the International Society of Political Psychology.
Zhirkov holds a Ph.D. in political science and a master’s degree in statistics from the University of Michigan. Before his appointment at the University of Virginia, he was a postdoctoral fellow in Vanderbilt University’s LAPOP Lab, a research institute specializing in the development, implementation and analysis of public opinion surveys, with a principal focus on governance and democracy in Latin America.
At UVA, Zhirkov is teaching courses in political methodologies, such as advanced regression modeling and statistical measurement. He continues to develop his research agenda, focusing on the use of conjoint experiments to measure political beliefs and preferences.
Sociology
Angel Adams Parham, Associate Professor, and Senior Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture (IASC)
Angel Adams Parham’s research is in the historical and comparative-historical sociology of race. She is the author of American Routes: Racial Palimpsests and the Transformation of Race (Oxford, 2017), which examines changes in race and racialization in New Orleans under the French, Spanish and Anglo-American administrations. The book was co-winner of the Social Science History Association’s Allan Sharlin Memorial book award (2018); co-winner of the American Sociological Association’s Barrington Moore book award in comparative-historical sociology (2018); and recipient of an Honorable Mention from the Thomas & Znaniecki Best Book Award, International Migration Section, American Sociological Association (2018).
She is currently at work on a book manuscript tentatively titled Reckoning and Reconciliation: On Race and Memory in Civic Life which compares and contrasts the social histories of three key sites in New Orleans over a 300-year period as a way of examining transformations in race, gender and power.
In addition to this research, she is active in public-facing teaching and scholarship where she provides training for K-12 educators who are looking to better integrate Black writers and Black history into their teaching. A book related to this work came out in 2022 titled, The Black Intellectual Tradition: Reading Freedom in Classical Literature (Classical Academic Press) She serves on the editorial board for Cambridge Studies in Historical Sociology, a new series housed at Cambridge University Press and is an associate editor with the forthcoming journal Principia: A Journal of Classical Education which is devoted to bringing insights of writers from classical antiquity into dialogue with contemporary issues in education and society.
She completed her Ph.D. and M.S. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her B.A. in sociology at Yale University. She has been a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, as well as the recipient of a Fulbright grant.
Spanish, Italian & Portuguese
Gabriela R. Dongo Arévalo, Lecturer
Gabriela R. Dongo Arévalo seeks in her teaching and research to make connections between Latin American literature and ecology under the umbrella of cultural studies and the digital humanities. She aims to demonstrate how analyzing classical pieces of literature, through the prism of “Mother Nature” at their core, increases the value of the narrative presenting a new, contemporary meaning of pro ecology. This study is intended to open up a discussion about the role of literature in creating ecological awareness in the 21st century.
Dongo Arévalo completed her Ph.D. studies in Arizona State University’s Spanish program in Latino American Literature and Cultural Studies and is scheduled to defend her dissertation this year. As a graduate student at Arizona State, she earned a Teaching Excellence Award, and Outstanding Mentor Award. She also was nominated for ASU’s Graduate and Professional Student Association Social Justice Spotlight.
Dongo Arévalo earned her bachelor’s degree in education from the Catholic University of Lima (Peru), a master’s degree in Spanish teaching methodology and second language acquisition at the Antonio de Nebrija University of Spain, and a second master’s degree in liberal arts–Spanish at Ohio University.
She has taught at the university level as a Spanish instructor at various U.S. institutions, including the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse, Ohio University and Arizona State University. She also co-founded and served as academic director o El Sol – Spanish School in Lima.
At UVA, she is interested in setting up a Spanish-English language partnership between the Languages Center at the Catholic University of Lima del Perú and the Department of Spanish, Italian & Portuguese. This program would offer instruction to students at the intermediate level of the two languages at both universities.
Jennifer Hogg, Lecturer
Jennifer Hogg brings more than two decades of experience in the fields of education and legal editing to UVA. She has training in translation and interpretation in community, medical and legal settings. Her work in language pedagogy has included teaching in high-school classrooms, adult GED preparation classes in Spanish and in English for English language learners, as well as Spanish courses for medical professionals.
She has provided editing and translation assistance to the Philip S. Hench Walter Reed Yellow Fever Online Collection maintained by UVA’s Claude Moore Health Sciences Library and for the Spanish translation of What Your Kindergartner Needs to Know by UVA professor emeritus E.D. Hirsch, Jr. In addition, she worked as a bilingual editor for the Code of Puerto Rico and the Opinions of the Supreme Court of Puerto Rico. Throughout her distinguished career, Hogg has received awards for outstanding teaching along with fellowships to pursue professional development in teaching.
After earning a bachelor’s degree in international relations from the College of William and Mary, Hogg pursued studies in literature at both the University of Guadalajara (Mexico) and the University of Virginia. She earned a master’s degree in special education from the University of Virginia. She holds K-12 teaching endorsements in Spanish, social studies, special education, technology education and business education.
Since joining UVA in Fall 2019, Hogg has served as a course coordinator for Accelerated Elementary Spanish, a major advisor for Spanish and as a technology support contact for the Institute of World Languages’ speaker series.