2013-14 New Faculty

Allen, Kris
Biro, Michael
Blackwood,Julie
Boychenko,Leanna
Breslin,David
Caldwell, Mary Channen
Campbell,Corinna
Carter, Matthew
Chang, Jinhwa
Clowes, Dan
Contreras, Danilo
Davis, Eisa
Enck, Joshua
Engel, Alex
English, Darby
Eqeiq, Amal
Escudero, Kevin
Fippinger, Allison
Fisher, Jessica
Friedlander, Holley
Gotanda,Neil
Hanson, Edward
Heggeseth, Brianna
Hernández, Jesús
Hoey, Nate
Honecker, Scott
Israel, Jeffrey
Johnston, Walter
Kapadia, Aparna
Kelanic, Rosemary
Kolb, Anjuli Raza
Koné,Christophe
Krens, Thomas
Kurnick, David
Ladygina, Yuliya
Leight, Jessica
McCammack, Brian
Mirseyedi, Sarah
Moher, Mariko
Monaville, Pedro
Moodie, Erin
Naeem, Fuad
Njoya, Nimu
Oehlrich,Kristen
Rajak,Tessa
Ringer-Hilfinger,Kathryn
Romero, Marcela
Sachet, Alison
Seshia Galvin, Shaila
Sheetz, Mark
Sockol, Laura
Spindler, Frederika
Taurog, Rebecca
Thompson, David
Thorhallsson, Baldur
Tudda, Chris
Urban, Elizabeth
Waterston, Darren
Ye, Weibing
Zorach,Rebecca

Kris Allen

Artist-in-Residence in Jazz Activities and Lecturer in Music

Kris Allen is a jazz saxophonist, composer and recording artist. He has previously taught at the Hartt School (University of Hartford), Trinity College, and Southern Connecticut State University. His debut album as a bandleader ” Circle House” was released in September of 2012 on Truth Revolution Records. For more information please visit Jazz

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Michael Biro

Visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics

My research focuses in discrete and computational geometry, a field on the boundary between mathematics and theoretical computer science. I received my Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics and Statistics from Stony Brook University in Spring 2013, with a dissertation that developed a novel approach to routing and guarding in sensor networks using a variant of greedy geographical routing. I am interested in a wide variety of geometric problems, especially those with algorithmic properties. I am looking forward to being a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Mathematics Department at Williams for the 2013-2014 academic year.

Julie Blackwood

Assistant Professor of Mathematics

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Leanna Boychenko

Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics

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David Breslin

Lecturer in the Graduate Program in Art History, Fall ’13

David Breslin is the Associate Director of the Research and Academic Program and Associate Curator for Contemporary Projects at the Clark Art Institute. He has curated exhibitions on the work of El Anatsui and Juan Muñoz and has published essays on, among others, Paul Thek, Valentin Carron, and Jenny Holzer. Breslin currently is completing a manuscript on public art, feminism, and language-based practices in the United States in the 1980s. He holds a doctorate in the History of Art and Architecture from Harvard University, a master’s degree in the History of Art from Williams College, and a bachelor’s degree in English from Amherst College.

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Mary Channen Caldwell

Visiting Assistant Professor of Music

Born and raised in Ontario, Canada, Mary Channen Caldwell received a Bachelor of Music degree at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, before heading to the University of Chicago where she completed her PhD in Music History and Theory. Her work focuses on devotional song in pre-modern Europe and, more specifically, the sacred Latin refrain in its musical, poetic, and cultural contexts. She has taught courses on music history from antiquity to the twenty-first century and on popular song in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

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Corinna Campbell

Assistant Professor of Music

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Matthew Carter

Assistant Professor of Biology

I am a neuroscientist interested in how the brain controls innate behaviors such as food intake, sleep, and thirst. At Williams, my lab will use cutting-edge tools to study neuroanatomy and neural function by stimulating and inhibiting neurons in the brain while measuring changes in animal behavior and physiology. I am very excited to return to a liberal arts college after completing my undergraduate degree in biology from Whitman College in Walla Walla, WA. After Whitman I received my doctorate in neuroscience from Stanford University and conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Washington. In 2011 I won the Young Investigator Award from the Sleep Research Society and I love talking to middle school, high school, and college students about the science of getting a good night’s sleep. In addition to teaching and research, I love writing and have published books on neuroscience techniques and designing scientific presentations. Coming with me to Williamstown are my lovely wife Ali and my three-year-old son Liam. Outside the lab and classroom, I’m a movie buff and enjoy everything from Citizen Kane to Ghostbusters. I also like The Daily Show, trying to convince my wife about the merits of Star Trek, and BBQing for a crowd.

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Jinhwa Chang

Visiting Lecturer in Japanese

My name is Jinhwa Chang. Originally from South Korea, I am finishing my PhD in Japanese Applied Linguistics at Waseda University in Tokyo. My research focuses on student communication and the writing process in the Japanese language classroom. My most recent publication can be found here (March, 2013): recent publication
Before coming to Williams, I taught Japanese at Grinnell College and Waseda University.

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Dan Clowes

Visiting Lecturer in Art, Fall ’13

I am a LEED accredited architect with experience designing residences, schools and commercial spaces in the San Francisco Bay Area. I earned my BA at Swarthmore College and my Masters of Architecture at UC Berkeley’s School of Environmental Design, where I also taught a course in building science. I am also a visual artist, and spent the last year at the American Academy in Rome, where I drew and painted in that wonderful city. A native of the Northeast, I look forward to running and cross-country skiing in the Berkshires.

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Danilo Contreras

Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow in Political Science

Danilo Antonio Contreras is a PhD candidate in the department of government at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests focus on race and ethnic politics in Latin America at the individual and state levels of analysis. Danilo’s dissertation examines the effect of race on candidate evaluation in the Dominican Republic. He develops an explanation for the low salience of race in elections in the DR based primarily on experimental research and survey data collected during fieldwork in Santo Domingo. Prior to entering graduate school, Danilo worked in the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C. He obtained a B.A. in Government and Spanish from Georgetown University and was a member of the Georgetown University Jazz Band. Danilo is a native of the Dominican Republic and was raised in New York City.

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Eisa Davis

Arthur Levitt, Jr. ’52 Artist-in-Residence in Theatre, Fall ’13

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Joshua Enck

Visiting Lecturer in Art, Spring ’14

Joshua Enck was trained as an architect and furniture designer. He has taught since 2005 at the Rhode Island School of Design in Foundation Studies (Spatial Dynamics/3d Design) and the Furniture Department (Drawing and Design for Furniture Makers, Metalworking, and Woodworking). He is a sculptor and furniture designer/maker with a active practice. He is represented by Simon Gallery in New Jersey and Roan and Black in Michigan. His work has been recognized with a 2011 Fellowship in Three Dimensional Art from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. More

Alex Engel

Visiting Assistant Professor of Biology

Professor Engel’s scientific interests are the molecular and cell biological mechanisms that govern immune sensing and immune responses. The Engel lab investigates the membrane trafficking of intracellular Toll-like receptors, key sensors of viral infection that also have the potential to drive autoimmune disease. Professor Engel received a Ph.D. in Cell Biology from the University of California, San Francisco, and did postdoctoral training in the Immunology and Pathogenesis Division at the University of California, Berkeley.

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Darby English

Lecturer in the Graduate Program in Art History, Spring ’14

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Amal Eqeiq

Visiting Assistant Professor of Arabic

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Kevin Escudero

Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow in Latina/o Studies

As the Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow in Latina/o Studies I will teach courses that examine issues of race/ethnicity, law & social movements and immigration/citizenship. My work also includes a commitment to community engaged scholarship and careful, meaningful collaboration with community groups/organizations in conducting research. A native of Southern California, I have spent the last year as an exchange scholar at the University of Chicago in the School of Social Service Administration (SSA) working on completing my dissertation manuscript. In the dissertation I focus on the activism of undocumented immigrant youth activists to pass the federal DREAM Act looking in particular at instances of multi-racial coalition building and the use of legal tactics by a group rendered under the law as illegitimate. A chapter of the manuscript titled, “Organizing while Undocumented: Intersectional Identity as a Social Movement Strategy” is forthcoming in the University of Idaho School of Law’s Critical Legal Studies Journal. I am currently a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley and received my BA and MA degrees from UCLA.

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Allison Fippinger

Visiting Artist-in-Residence in Dance

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Jessica Fisher

Assistant Professor of English

I am a writer, mostly of poetry—my first book, Frail-Craft, won the 2006 Yale Younger Poets Prize, and my second, Inmost, received the 2011 Nightboat Poetry Prize. My poems and translations appear in such journals as The American Poetry Review, The Believer, The Colorado Review, McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Threepenny Review, and TriQuarterly. For my work to date, I was awarded the 2012-2013 Rome Prize in Literature. I did my Ph.D. in English at University of California, Berkeley, where I was also the Holloway Postdoctoral Fellow in Poetry and Poetics.

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Holley Friedlander

Visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics

Originally from Ithaca, New York, I will complete my Ph.D. in mathematics in 2013 at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. I earned my B.A. in mathematics, minor in English, magna cum laude from the University of Vermont in 2007. My research interests are in number theory, particularly in topics with connections to arithmetic geometry and representation theory. My current work involves Weyl group multiple Dirichlet series over function fields.

When I am not studying or teaching math, I enjoy rock climbing and running. I am very excited to spend the 2013-2014 year in beautiful Williamstown. More information can be found here.

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Neil Gotanda

W. Ford Schumann Visiting Professor in Democratic Studies, Fall ’13

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Edward Hanson

Assistant Professor of Mathematics

I am currently (spring 2013) completing my Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I earned my B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2006. My areas of expertise include algebraic combinatorics, orthogonal polynomials, and linear algebra. Much of my research has involved exploring algebraic generalizations of results from graph theory. In my spare time, I enjoy puzzles, grilling, and making primitive electronic music.

Brianna Heggeseth

Assistant Professor of Statistics

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Jesús Hernández

Visiting Assistant Professor of Latina/o Studies

Jesús J. Hernández received his PhD from the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. His research areas include Latina/o Studies, 20th Century U.S. Ethnic Literatures and Histories, Cultural and Political Theory, and Diaspora Studies. His book project, Broken Homelands: Illegitimacy and Cultural Politics in the Cuban Diaspora, is an interdisciplinary study of the ways in which the experience and condition of U.S Cuban exile is structured by notions of abjection, disavowal, and failure through narratives of illegitimate familial and national relations.

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Nate Hoey

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

High energy motivator who’s research interest include training, adaptation and performance of the neuromuscular system as well as sports psychology and mental training. Has published numerous articles including: ‘Optimizing Performance’…developing multi-purpose athletes requires a periodized, systematic training plan. Previously associate professor of physical education and head track & field coach at Washington and Lee University teaching numerous classes focusing on aerobic and work capacity development as well as strength training.

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Scott Honecker

Assistant Professor of Physical Education, Head Coach of Wrestling

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Jeffrey Israel

Assistant Professor of Religion

Jeffrey Israel received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, where he studied religion, ethics, and modern Jewish thought. His research interests include: the ethical criticism of Jewish American popular culture, the role of religion in the capabilities approach to political justice, and theoretical approaches to religious conflict and “interfaith” politics. He has taught Jewish studies, religion, and philosophy at Goucher College, Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts, and Rutgers University. He is also involved in ongoing consultations with the United Nations Population Fund on the role of religion at the U.N. He recently published an article entitled “Why Portnoy’s Complaint Matters” in Social Research: An International Quarterly.

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Walter Johnston

Visiting Assistant Professor of English

Walter Johnston received his PhD in Comparative Literature from Princeton University, following a year as a Fellow in Critical Studies at the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program in New York. He has taught courses in literature, philosophy, and art from antiquity to the present at Princeton, New York University, Barnard College, and The Cooper Union. His research centers on English, German, and French literature and philosophy from the Enlightenment to the present, and has recently focused on German idealism, Romanticism, and literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He is currently writing a book on the intersection of aesthetics and politics in European letters around the time of the French Revolution, and is beginning research on a second project that examines the tension between consensus and dissensus in twentieth and twenty-first century aesthetic theory, political philosophy, literature, art, cinema, and protest movements.

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Aparna Kapadia

Assistant Professor of History

Aparna Kapadia received her PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London in 2010 and subsequently held a Mellon Post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Oxford. Most recently, she was Assistant Professor of History at Ambedkar, University Delhi. Her research interests are in the literary cultures of South Asia, the history of the Indian Ocean region and the history of food and culinary practices. Her publications include a co-edited a volume entitled The Idea of Gujarat: History, Ethnography and Text (2010) and several journal articles. She is currently working on a monograph exploring the mutually constitutive relationship between literary and political culture in western India. She looks forward to sharing her evolving ideas on South Asia’s diverse history and culture with the student community at Williams.

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Rosemary Kelanic

Assistant Professor of Political Science, Spring ’14

Dr. Kelanic’s research focuses on energy security and international relations theory. Her book manuscript, Black Gold and Blackmail: The Politics of International Oil Coercion, examines whether countries can use the threat of oil disruption to coerce political concessions from their adversaries.

Dr. Kelanic holds a Ph.D. in Political Science and an M.A. in International Relations from the University of Chicago, and a B.A. in Political Science, summa cum laude, from Bryn Mawr College. Prior to Williams, she held academic positions at the Elliott School of International Affairs at The George Washington University and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

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Anjuli Raza Kolb

Assistant Professor of English

Anjuli Raza Kolb comes to Williams from Columbia University, where she completed both her undergraduate and graduate work in English and Comparative Literature. She has taught philosophy, writing, and literature at Columbia, New York University, Bard College, and the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Trained as a postcolonialist, her research focuses on 20th and 21st century literature in English and French from the former South Asian, African, and Caribbean colonies, particularly on narratives of insurgency, anti-colonialism and epidemic. In teaching and writing, she explores literary theory and poetics, the Gothic and horror in postcolonial literature, animal studies and ecocriticism, apocalypse fiction, race and ethnic studies, international law and security, women’s and gender studies, and literatures of public health. She hails from upstate New York by way of Boston, and thrilled to be returning to Massachusetts.

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Christophe Koné

Visiting Assistant Professor of German

Christophe Koné holds a Phd in German Studies from the Department of German, Russian, and East European Languages and Literatures at Rutgers University.
He holds an M.A. in German Studies from the University Lumière of Lyon 2, France. He taught German at the Lycée Français de New York and at Rutgers University.
His research interests include German Romanticism, Realism, and Modernism, German and French Cinema, as well as Art History, Modern Dance, Cultural Studies, Fashion Studies, and Gender Studies.
His publications include “The Key to Voyeurism: Haneke’s Adaptation of The Piano Teacher” in On Michael Haneke. Edited by Brian Price and John David Rhodes. Detroit: Wayne State University Press 2010 and “Aschenbach’s Homovisual Desire: Scopophilia in Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig” in Thomas Mann, Neue kulturwissenschaftliche Lektüren. Edited by Stefan Börnchen, Georg Mein, and Gary Schmidt. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2012.

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David Kurnick

Margaret Bundy Scott Visiting Professor of English, Fall ’13

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Thomas Krens

Distinguished Visiting Professor of Art

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Yuliya Ladygina

Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian

Originally from Ukraine, Professor Ladygina completed her M.A. in German and European Literature at Kyiv Shevchenko National University in 2001, and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Slavic Studies at the University of California, San Diego in 2013.

Her research and teaching interests revolve around 19th- and 20th-century Russian and Ukrainian literature; 19th-century Russian and German intellectual history; 20th-century literary and film theory (Formalism, Semiotics, Psychoanalysis, and Postmodernism); and Soviet revolutionary and Russian contemporary cinema.

Professor Ladygina’s article on Nikita Mikhalkov’s representations of the ongoing Russo-Chechen conflict in his film 12 (2007) appeared in Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture (2011). Her article on Olha Kobylianska, one of the most sophisticated Ukrainian women prose writers of the 20th century, along with a translation of the opening section from the German-language manuscript of her novel The Princess, will soon appear in the Harvard Journal of Ukrainian Studies.

Professor Ladygina has taught literature, film, rhetorical writing, and Russian language at the University of California, San Diego, and will teach Russian literature and Russian language at Williams College. In the classroom, she strives to lead her students ever deeper into the joys of intellectual discovery. She believes that learning should be an exciting and memorable experience.

In her spare time, Professor Ladygina enjoys hiking, camping, surfing, playing piano, and building sandcastles. She is a professional sand sculptor, and she looks forward to building a 12-foot sandcastle in Williamstown!

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Jessica Leight

Assistant Professor of Economics

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Brian McCammack

Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies

I received my Ph.D. from Harvard University’s American Studies department, and graduated from Purdue University with a M.A. in American Studies and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering. My teaching and research interests include interdisciplinary approaches to twentieth-century American environmental culture (especially with respect to climate change and environmental justice), African American history and literature, and urban history–and I’m excited to explore these areas with Williams students this academic year! During the 2012-13 academic year, I taught African American history at Tufts University, and I was a W.E.B. Du Bois Institute fellow and lecturer in History and Literature at Harvard University. My most recent publications are on the cultural resonance of the African American Great Migration (Journal of Social History) and the evangelical Christian response to climate change policy (American Quarterly). My work in progress is titled Recovering Green in Bronzeville: An Environmental and Cultural History of the African American Great Migration to Chicago, 1915-1940. Outside of the classroom, I’m an avid distance runner, and I’m looking forward to running Williamstown’s hills instead of Boston’s flatlands this year! more

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Sarah Mirseyedi

Visiting Lecturer in Art

Sarah Mirseyedi holds a Masters Degree in Art History from Williams College, and a Bachelors Degree in Art History and French from Hollins University. She was a Research Assistant for the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute from 2011 to 2013. Her research interests include nineteenth-century art and visual culture, Orientalism and global exchange, as well as the history of photography and early image technologies. She is currently working on projects on the Orientalist artist Eugène Fromentin, and on John Singer Sargent’s travels to Morocco.

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Mariko Moher

Assistant Professor of Psychology

My research investigates memory development in infants and children, such as how they might be able to overcome the limited capacity of short-term memory. During my undergraduate years at Yale, I entertained various species of primates – capuchins, rhesus, lemurs, chimpanzees, and humans – to examine their cognitive capacities, and I did my graduate work at Johns Hopkins where I played with infants while investigating their memory. In the last two years, I’ve been teaching and conducting research as a College Fellow at Harvard.
I’m looking forward to seeing you in class and around campus!

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Pedro Monaville

Visiting Assistant Professor of History

Pedro Monaville has studied African history at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on the Democratic Republic of the Congo. His current project investigates the history of Congolese student politics at the time of global 1968. He has also published articles and book chapters, in French and in English, about colonialism in the Congo, Belgian colonial memory, and African historiography.

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Erin Moodie

Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics

Erin Moodie studies comedy, satire, and the public uses of humor and laughter. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania with a dissertation on the intersection of social status and self-aware, metatheatrical moments in ancient comedy. She has also published articles on Aristophanes, Terence, and Juvenal, and is looking forward to an intensive study of world theater at the Mellon School of Theater and Performance Research this summer.

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Fuad Naeem

Visiting Lecturer in Religion

Fuad S. Naeem has a B.A. in Philosophy and English from the University of Delaware, an M.A. in the History of Religions- Hinduism and Islam from George Washington University and is currently completing a PhD from Georgetown University specializing in Islamic Studies. His dissertation is on a late nineteenth century South Asian Muslim theologian and scholar, his debates with Christian missionaries, Hindu revivalists, and modernists, and his re-articulation of classical Islamic theology in the emerging modern public sphere of late colonial British India. He has taught at Georgetown University and George Mason University and worked as a research associate at the Islamic Research Institute in Islamabad, Pakistan. His academic interests include the question of Islam, pluralism, and other religious traditions, the Muslim experience in South Asia, Islamic intellectual traditions, specifically philosophy, theology, and mysticism (Sufism), and the interface between Islam and modernity. He has published articles on Sufism and revivalism in South Asia, the imaginal world in the Islamic philosophical tradition, and Muslim intellectual responses to modern thought. He looks forward to a year of vibrant intellectual engagement and conversation with students at Williams.

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Nimu Njoya

Assistant Professor of Political Science

Nimu Njoya is a political theorist whose research focuses on dynamics of change in Enlightenment thought, with particular attention to the idea of progress and the centrality of aesthetic ideals in the work of Immanuel Kant. Following two years as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science here at Williams, Prof. Njoya begins the 2013-2014 academic year on familiar territory (albeit in a new role). Prior to coming to Williams, Prof. Njoya taught in the Department of Political Science and the Writing Program at Rutgers University. She received her B.A. from Macalester College, M.A. from the University of Amsterdam, and her Ph.D. in Political Science from Rutgers University. She loves ice cream and is partial to the color purple, so any cow that can mediate the two has a good chance of qualifying as her aesthetic ideal.

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Kristen Oehlrich

Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Graduate Program in Art History

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Tessa Rajak

Croghan Bicentennial Visiting Professor in Classics, Fall ’13

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Kathryn Ringer-Hilfinger

Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish

Kathryn completed her PhD in Spanish Linguistics from the University at Albany where she also taught courses in Spanish language and linguistics. She received her MA in Spanish Language, Literature and Culture from Middlebury College in Madrid, Spain and her BA in Spanish from the State University of New York College at Geneseo. Her research involves the intersection of two fields: sociolinguistics and second language acquisition. She is currently exploring how study abroad learners acquire regional dialect forms. She believes classroom learners can also benefit from this research, particularly those who interact with native speakers or hope to spend time in Spanish-speaking communities. Another area of interest to Kathryn is the incorporation of technologies into the classroom that enable students to become more immersed in the subject matter and make connections between the course material and real life issues.

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Marcela Romero

Visiting Assistant Professor of Romance Languages

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Alison Sachet

Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology

Alison Sachet is a developmental psychologist interested in social-cognitive development, focusing primarily on the development of imagination and pretend play and how children’s imaginations are related to their real life behaviors and abilities. Her other research areas include prosocial behavior, social understanding, and personality. She completed her graduate work at the University of Oregon, where she also taught courses such as Developmental Psychology, Imagination, and Research Methods.

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Shaila Seshia Galvin

Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Environmental Studies

Shaila Seshia Galvin comes to Williams from Yale University, where she completed a combined PhD degree in Anthropology and Forestry and Environmental Studies. At Williams, she will be a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Environmental Studies. Her dissertation research is based in the Indian Himalaya and examines the connections among the promotion of commercially-oriented organic agriculture and processes of state and market formation in the recently created state of Uttarakhand. Her broader research interests are in environmental and political anthropology, the anthropology of development, agrarian studies, and South Asia. She has worked at the UK Food Ethics Council, as a consultant for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, and at the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University in the UK. Always interested in bridging academic research with questions of policy and practice, she hopes to introduce this into the courses she teaches at Williams. She has published an article on organic certification in the journal Environment and Society, and as a postdoctoral fellow will work on further journal publications and on developing her dissertation into a book manuscript. With her family, she enjoys camping, hiking, canoeing, cycling and looks forward to enjoying the outdoors in the Berkshires!

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Mark Sheetz

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

Prof. Sheetz has been teaching international politics for over fifteen years.
At Williams, he will offer courses in American foreign policy and the Nuclear Age in World Politics. He has taught at Dartmouth College, Boston College, and most recently at Wesleyan University. He has also taught courses for career diplomats and military officers at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy in Switzerland. Prof. Sheetz received a Ph.D and an M.Phil in political science from Columbia University, an M.A. in international relations from The Johns Hopkins School of International Studies, and an A.B. in government from Dartmouth College. He was a Fellow in National Security Affairs at the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University, a Fellow in International Security Affairs at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, and a John M. Olin Fellow in International Security Studies at Yale University. He is currently a Research Associate in International Security at the John F. Kennedy School of Government of Harvard University. Prof. Sheetz has lectured at Yale University, the NATO Defense College in Rome, the Ecole Supérieure de Guerre in Tunis, the Ecole Royale Militaire in Brussels, the Slovak National Academy of Defense in Bratislava, and the Committee on National Security Policy of the Swiss parliament in Bern. His scholarly articles on American foreign policy, European politics, and international relations theory have appeared in journals such as International Security, Security Studies, Foreign Policy, H-Diplo, and the Journal of Cold War Studies. Prof. Sheetz is currently working on an article exploring the effects of prestige on nuclear proliferation, and on a book manuscript examining the origins of postwar European political and economic cooperation through the prism of Franco-German relations.

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Laura Sockol

Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology

Laura Sockol is a clinical psychologist whose research focuses on mental health and well-being during pregnancy and the postpartum period. She attended graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania and completed her internship in clinical psychology at the Alpert Medical School of Brown University. Laura’s most recent research explores cognitive risk factors for depression and anxiety among first-time mothers.

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Fredrika Spindler

Richmond Visiting Professor of Philosophy, Spring ’14

Fredrika Spindler, PhD, Associate professor of philosophy at Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden.
Originally from Sweden, I studied philosophy in Montpellier and Paris in France, where I also wrote my PhD thesis on Spinoza and Nietzsche (Philosophie de la puissance et détermination de l’Homme chez Spinoza et chez Nietzsche, Université de Montpellier III 1996; later published by Glänta Produktion, 2005). In 2000, I started working at the Södertörn University in Stockholm, Sweden. My main areas of teaching are modern and contemporary political philosophy, history of philosophy, French and German rationalism, aesthetics, theory of knowledge and post structuralist French philosophy. In my research, I have mainly focused on Spinoza, Nietzsche and Deleuze from out of several different questions: corporeality, knowledge, power, subjectivity, temporality, the political, among others.

Recent publications:
Deleuze. Tänkande och blivande (Deleuze. Thinking and becoming); Gothenburg: Glänta produktion 2013; Nietzsche: Kropp, konst, kunskap (Nietzsche: Body, creation, knowledge) Gothenburg: Glänta Produktion, 2010; Spinoza: Multitud, affekt, kraft (Spinoza: Multitude, affect, power), Gothenburg: Glänta Produktion 2009; Estetik och Politik (Aesthetics and Politics) (ed, with Cecilia Sjöholm), Gothenburg: Glänta Produktion 2008.

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Rebecca Taurog

Assistant Professor of Chemistry

Becky Taurog received her B.S. in biochemistry from Brandeis University.
She went on to earn her Ph.D. studying enzyme mechanism at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Her fascination with proteins and the relationship between structure and function prompted her to do postdoctoral research at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, CA, where she did learned to determine protein structure by both X-ray crystallography and cryo-electron microscopy. At Williams Professor Taurog will continue to study interesting protein structures and mechanisms, initially focusing on the conformational changes of proteins in the biologically important folic acid and one-carbon metabolism pathways. Prof. Taurog spent 2012-2013 teaching biochemistry, as well as a class for non-science majors on HIV/AIDS, at Middlebury College. She spends whatever free time she can spare practicing, studying and teaching yoga, haunting farmer’s markets, cooking, reading, bicycling, hiking, and making or listening to music.

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David Thompson

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

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Baldur Thorhallsson

Class of 1955 Visiting Professor of International Studies, Fall ’13

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Chris Tudda

Stanley Kaplan Visiting Professor of American Foreign Policy, Fall ’13

Chris Tudda is a Historian in the Declassification Division in the Office of the Historian, Department of State. He received a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Vermont in 1987 and a Ph.D in History from American University in 2002. He is the author of The Truth is our Weapon: The Rhetorical Diplomacy of Dwight D. Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles (Louisiana State University Press, 2006) and A Cold War Turning Point: Nixon and China, 1969-1972. (LSU, 2012) He has been an Adjunct Professor of History at George Washington University since 2007, where he teaches courses on U.S. Foreign Policy since 1945 and the International History of the Cold War.

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Elizabeth Urban

Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Middle Eastern History

I study the first two centuries of Islamic history (approx. 600-800 CE), which witnessed the advent of Islam as a religion and the spread of Islamic hegemony throughout the Middle East. I investigate how outsiders joined the growing Islamic community (through birth, slavery, and conversion) and how they expressed their identities within that community. I received my PhD from the University of Chicago in 2012, and I have also taught classes on early Islamic history, political thought, and slavery at Brandeis University. I was born and raised in Amarillo, Texas, where I taught myself the Arabic alphabet and used it to write secret messages to my friends, such as: “Would you like to go cow tipping tonight?”

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Darren Waterston

Visiting Lecturer in Art, Spring ’14

Weibing Ye

Visiting Lecturer in Chinese

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Rebecca Zorach

Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor of Art History

I am visiting Williams this coming year from the University of Chicago, where I teach in the Art History department. I’m originally from Maine, so I’m happy to be closer to home for the year. My interests include early modern European art (1400-1700), theories of gender and sexuality, and activist art since the 1960s. I’m currently finishing a book on the Black Arts Movement in Chicago (a cultural component of the Black Power movement). The seminars I’m teaching at Williams relate to a new research project on the issue of intention in art and I look forward to exploring this and other questions with students.

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