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Northwestern University

New Faculty 2022-2023

New Faculty 2022-23

Elsa Anderson

Elsa Anderson

Assistant Professor of Instruction

  • PhD institution: University of Illinois at Chicago
  • Previous title and institution: Postdoctoral Researcher at Chicago Botanic Garden
  • Home program: Environmental Science
  • Joint program: Plant Biology and Conservation
  • Profile
Elsa Anderson is an urban ecologist, specializing in the social-ecological foundations of plant communities in cities. She is an expert in geospatial analysis of urban landscapes, and focuses on underlying questions of environmental justice, ecosystem services, and human effects of ecological form and function. Her work focuses primarily on the Chicago region, with additional expertise as part of the Baltimore Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) through the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies and in Berlin, Germany, where she completed a Fulbright Fellowship.  Anderson additionally holds a Certificate in College Teaching from the University of Illinois.
Mark Aparece

Mark Aparece

Assistant Professor of Instruction

  • PhD institution: Boston College
  • Previous title and institution: Assistant Teaching Professor at Northeastern University
  • Home department: Chemistry
Mark Aparece’s graduate research focused on the development of new transition metal-catalyzed reactions of organic molecules. During his master’s studies at DePaul University, he developed the synthesis of spirocyclic esters using gold catalysis. During his doctoral studies at Boston College, he worked on palladium-catalyzed conjunctive cross-coupling reactions. Currently, Aparece is focused on chemical education, particularly the implementation of mechanism-driven pedagogy and project-based laboratories in the undergraduate organic chemistry curriculum.
Abigail Barefoot

Abigail Barefoot

Assistant Professor of Instruction

  • PhD institution: University of Kansas
  • Previous title and institution: PhD Candidate at University of Kansas
  • Home program: Center for Legal Studies
Abigail Barefoot earned her PhD in Women. Gender, and Sexuality Studies from the University of Kansas. Her research and teaching interests explore questions of justice, safety, and accountability through the lens of prison abolition and critical carceral studies. Barefoot’s current book project entitled "Beyond Carceral Responses: Transformative Justice, Prison Abolition, and the Movement to End Sexual Violence" examines transformative justice practices for sexual violence. Transformative justice builds upon prison abolition frameworks and uses community-based methods to offer immediate safety for survivors while developing nonpunitive accountability measures. Using an ethnographic approach, Barefoot unpacks the tensions, contradictions, and possibilities of practicing transformative justice as experienced by survivors, facilitators, and people who cause harm.
Corey Barnes

Corey Barnes

Assistant Professor

  • PhD institution: University of Memphis
  • Previous title and institution: Assistant Professor at University of San Diego
  • Home department: Philosophy
Corey L. Barnes specializes in Africana Philosophy, the philosophy of race, and social and political philosophy. His first book, which is entitled: Alain Locke on the Theoretical Foundations for a Just and Secure Peace, begins to systematize many different parts of Alain Locke’s philosophy. It shows how his democratic theory, philosophy of race, and value theory provide theoretical answers for problems facing the establishment of a cosmopolitan community. And it sets the stage for a second book that will show how his philosophies of education, art, and religion provide implementable strategies to move us towards the establishment of a cosmopolitan community. Taken together, the two books show that what connects the different parts of Locke’s philosophy is an underlying commitment to cosmopolitanism. Additionally, Barnes’ current research focuses on early Black intellectuals such as Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, Alexander Crummell, Edward Blyden, and others, issues surrounding stereotyping, the historical development of race as a concept, and the metaphysics of race.
Kathleen Belew

Kathleen Belew

Associate Professor

  • PhD institution: Yale University
  • Previous title and institution: Assistant Professor of U.S. History and the College, University of Chicago
  • Home department: History
  • Profile
Kathleen Belew is a historian, author, and teacher. She specializes in the history of the present. She spent ten years researching and writing her first book, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Harvard, 2018, paperback 2019). In it, she explores how white power activists created a social movement through a common story about betrayal by the government, war, and its weapons, uniforms, and technologies. By uniting Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi, skinhead, and other groups, the movement mobilized and carried out escalating acts of violence that reached a crescendo in the 1995 bombing of Oklahoma City. This movement was never adequately confronted, and remains a threat to American democracy. Her next book, Home at the End of the World, illuminates our era of apocalypse through a history focused on her native Colorado where, in the 1990s, high-profile kidnappings and murders, right-wing religious ideology, and a mass shooting exposed rents in America’s social fabric, and dramatically changed our relationship with place, violence, and politics (Random House).
Emre Besler

Emre Besler

Assistant Professor of Instruction

  • PhD institution: Northwestern University
  • Previous title and institution: Teaching Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University
  • Home department: Statistics and Data Science
Emre Besler's research interests lie at the intersection of Machine Learning and biomedical signal processing. Besler's ongoing projects in collaboration with Feinberg School of Medicine and the Department if Biomedical Engineering aim to help medical specialists for more accurate diagnosis and prognosis while decreasing the physical and equipment cost of the entire process. In an NSF-funded entrepreneurial collaboration with the Breast Surgery department at Northwestern University, the team developed a system that uses machine learning inference for accurate, automatic, low-cost control in the ablation (destruction) of benign and cancerous tissue, which allows community hospitals with less funding to afford targeted ablation therapy. Currently, Besler leads a project to develop novel algorithms to localize the Atrial Flutter (AFL) in the cardiac tissue using ECG data and ML models, so that the part that causes AFL can be ablated accurately and with as few complications as possible after non-invasive diagnosis.
Ryan Bethel

Ryan Bethel

Associate Professor of Instruction

  • PhD institution: Texas A&M University
  • Previous title and institution: Senior Lecturer at Texas A&M University
  • Home department: Chemistry
Ryan Bethel's research interests lie in the field of bioinorganic chemistry. His graduate research focused on biological systems utilizing low valent iron bound with the diatomic ligands: CO, NO, and CN. His work involves synthesis and characterization of small molecule mimics of the active site of [FeFe]-Hydrogenase enzymes. Through synthetic route adjustments, he developed a series of symmetric and dissymmetric molecules featuring a non-innocent diiron-nitrosyl redox-active core. His work also includes computational determination of the reaction mechanism for the CO induced reduction of a dinitrosyl iron complex.
Daniele Biffanti

Daniele Biffanti

Assistant Professor of Instruction

  • PhD institution: Stanford University
  • Home department: French and Italian
Daniele Biffanti's research interests include post-WWII Italian literature, cinema, and political history, and second language acquisition. He is currently working on a book manuscript analyzing how the founding myth of the Italian Republic - the Resistenza against Nazi-Fascism and subsequent Liberazione - has generated different narrative legacies in literature and cinema, and how their development can be interpreted as a form of mythologization. Biffanti is a passionate language instructor: striving to weave genuine cultural materials into language classes, he seeks to provide students with a nuanced understanding of Italian culture, beyond its stereotypical elements.
Estilita Cassiani Obeso

Estilita Cassiani Obeso

Assistant Professor of Instruction

  • PhD institution: The Pennsylvania State University
  • Previous title and institution: Assistant Professor of Instruction at Northwestern University
  • Home department: Spanish and Portuguese
  • Profile
Estilita Cassiani Obeso is a member of the Palenquero community who speaks and does research about her ancestral language. Her research primarily focuses on the study of morphological aspects of the Palenquero language, an Afro-Hispanic creole language spoken in San Basilio de Palenque, Colombia. Through a broadly usage-based and variationist approach, Cassiani Obeso examines sociolinguistic variation and generational language change. She also studies second language acquisition, language ecology, language revitalization and language planning. Cassiani Obeso has published findings in peer reviewed general linguistics journals including Language Variation and Change, and Languages. In the latter, she contributed to a special issue on “Instructed Heritage Language Acquisition in Diverse Contexts”.
KB Dennis Meade

KB Dennis Meade

Assistant Professor

  • PhD institution: Princeton University
  • Previous title and institution: Postdoctoral Research Scholar, Columbia University
  • Home department: Religious Studies
  • Joint department: African American Studies
  • Profile
KB Dennis Meade is scholar of Africana Religions and Caribbean Studies. Her research areas include the study of the modern African diaspora, religious cultures and politics in the Caribbean, ethnographic methods, and the digital humanities. Dennis Meade’s current book manuscript explores the role of religion in the history of social change in Jamaica from the late 19th century to the present. Through ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, her study argues the constitutive role of religion in everyday life and in shaping national politics.
Domenic DeSocio

Domenic DeSocio

Assistant Professor of Instruction

  • PhD institution: University of Michigan
  • Previous title and institution: Visiting Assistant Professor at Vassar College
  • Home department: German
  • Profile
Domenic DeSocio is a language pedagogue and literary scholar whose research looks at queer modernism and aesthetics, both in Germany and across the Atlantic West in the 20th century. He has published on a variety of topics, including feminist temporalities and literature in 1920s Germany, gay male genealogies and literary networks, and the history of queer reading cultures in early 20th-century Europe. Alongside this scholarship, he is interested in innovating language pedagogy through the use of new technologies and queer approaches to knowledge production and acquisition.
Jeff Eden

Jeff Eden

Assistant Professor

  • PhD institution: Harvard University
  • Previous title and institution: Pandion haliaetus (Seahawk Honorary) Assistant Professor of History at St. Mary’s College of Maryland
  • Home department: History
  • Profile
Jeff Eden is a historian of Russia and Central Asia. His books include God Save the USSR: Soviet Muslims and the Second World War (Oxford, 2021) and Slavery and Empire in Central Asia (Cambridge, 2018). He is currently working on two book projects: one is about the Pugachev Rebellion in Russia (1773-1775), and the other is about the Soviet Caucasus during the Second World War.
Eider Etxebarria

Eider Etxebarria

Assistant Professor of Instruction

  • PhD institution: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  • Previous title and institution: Lecturer at Northwestern University
  • Home department: Spanish and Portuguese
Eider Etxebarria is a linguist and educator who specializes in bilingual language acquisition, child language development, and minority language maintenance. Her research explores parental, educational, and communal linguistic practices to ensure optimal dual language development in bilingual children, which is essential for the survival of endangered and minoritized languages. She is also a translator whose last translation and adaptation project, “Basque for English speakers” (2021), reflects her mission to disseminate Basque language and culture with the aim that English-speakers can inquire more into and come to appreciate her cultural treasure and linguistic heritage.
Rebecca Ewert

Rebecca Ewert

Assistant Professor of Instruction

  • PhD institution: University of Chicago
  • Previous title and institution: Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago
  • Home department: Sociology
  • Profile
Rebecca Ewert's teaching and research interests lie at the intersection of sociology of the environment, health, gender -- especially masculinity -- inequality, and culture. In her current book project, Ewert uses qualitative methods to study the ways that social categories like gender, class, race, and age influence how people recover -- financially, socially, and emotionally -- from a wildfire disaster in Northern California. She has published in Environmental Sociology about how rumors are created and persist after environmental disasters, and in Social Science and Medicine about the gendered terrain of suicide prevention in a rural community in Northern California where masculine norms of self-sufficiency and independence are dominant.
Irene Finestrat-Martínez

Irene Finestrat-Martínez

Assistant Professor of Instruction

  • PhD institution: University of Illinois at Chicago
  • Previous title and institution: Teaching and Research Assistant at the Univeristy of Illinois at Chicago
  • Home department: Spanish and Portuguese
Irene Finestrat-Martínez is interested in understanding the unique cognitive-linguistic, cultural, and affective backgrounds learners bring into the classroom when acquisition occurs in the learners’ home country as well as in the study abroad setting. This research informs inclusive language teaching pedagogies that leverage students’ strengths for effective teaching and learning.

Tsachik Gelander

Professor

  • PhD institution: The Hebrew University
  • Home department: Mathematics
Gelander studies Lie groups, topological groups, symmetric spaces, arithmetic groups, lattices and discrete subgroups (of Lie groups as well as general locally compact groups). He is interested in algebraic, analytic, topological and geometric invariants of manifolds of large finite (as well as infinite) volume. In recent years he applies probabilistic methods to study these invariants, such as IRS (invariant random subgroups) and SRS (stationary random subgroups).
Reza Gheissari

Reza Gheissari

Assistant Professor

  • PhD institution: New York University
  • Previous title and institution: Miller Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley
  • Home department: Mathematics
  • Profile
Reza Gheissari's research interests are in probability theory, typically entailing rigorous analysis of problems arising from the interface of statistical physics and theoretical computer science. He specializes in understanding the equilibrium and off-equilibrium (dynamical) behavior of spin systems (e.g., percolation, the Ising model, and spin glasses). He is also interested in relations to the theoretical study of inference and learning problems in high-dimensional statistics.
Tara Gonsalves

Tara Gonsalves

College Fellow

  • PhD institution: University of California, Berkeley
  • Previous title and institution: Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology at University of California, Berkeley
  • Home department: Sociology

Broadly, Tara Gonsalves' research focuses on how social categories are created and contested. More specifically, Gonsalves' research examines the contested processes through which gender and sexuality categories emerge and transform as well as the social consequences of classification processes. Gonsalves has three streams of research: (1) An investigation of how the category “transgender” is coming to articulate global gender variance; (2) An exploration of how medical experts produce new gendered and racialized understandings that are inscribed in the body; and (3) An analysis of an original data set of LGBT organizations worldwide, examining regional influences on their emergence and integration into advocacy networks.

Daisy Hernández

Daisy Hernández

Associate Professor

  • PhD institution: MFA, University of Miami and MA, New York University
  • Previous title and institution: Associate Professor at Miami University in Ohio
  • Home department: English
  • Profile
Daisy Hernández is an essayist, memoirist, and journalist whose work focuses on the intersections of race, ethnicity, immigration, class and sexuality. She is the author of The Kissing Bug: A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation’s Neglect of a Deadly Disease (Tin House, 2021), which examines how racial politics and big pharma impact health care access for Latinx immigrants who with a little-known zoonotic disease called Chagas. The book won the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and was selected as an inaugural title for the National Book Foundation’s Science + Literature Program. Her memoir, A Cup of Water Under My Bed (Beacon Press, 2014), chronicles, in collage form, coming of age and coming out queer in a Cuban-Colombian immigrant home. Her first book Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism (Seal Press) was first published in 2002 and has become a widely taught text in women’s and gender studies courses. She coedited a new edition in 2019, and the anthology has been praised by scholars and media outlets for its contribution to understandings of intersectionality.
Elham Hoominfar

Elham Hoominfar

Assistant Professor of Instruction

  • PhD institution: Utah State University
  • Previous title and institution: Visiting Assistant Professor at Northwestern University
  • Home program: Program in Global Health Studies
Elham Hoominfar is a Critical Sociologist whose research expertise focuses on intersections of environment and society and understanding of social inequalities and social movements with an interdisciplinary approach. Her doctoral project is a comparative study of Iranian and American environmental movements focused on water transfer projects. She has analyzed theories and narratives of neoliberalism and social movements. Hoominfar’s publications in Persian and English concern social inequalities and problems caused by development projects for local communities, impacts of environmental degradation on society, and the effects of natural disasters on marginalized groups. She also studies gender discrimination, social movements, and ethnic conflicts. She is currently researching environmental justice, water governance, the commodification of nature, and social resistance, emphasizing political economy in the Global South and North. She is working on another study about gender discrimination and women’s movements in Iran. She is also working on a book in Persian about language and educational justice in Iran.
Bryan Hunter

Bryan Hunter

Assistant Professor

  • PhD institution: California Institute of Technology
  • Previous title and institution: Rowland Fellow at the Rowland Institute at Harvard University
  • Home department: Chemistry
  • Profile
Bryan Hunter is an inorganic chemist whose interests align with the development and utilization of technologies that improve global sustainability. His research involves the synthesis of novel materials and molecules which can catalytically convert renewable resources into fuels and commodities. He also studies the process of electrocatalytic water splitting by solar-generated electricity.
Simone Ispa-Landa

Simone Ispa-Landa

Associate Professor

  • PhD institution: Harvard University
  • Previous title and institution: Associate Professor, Human Development & Social Policy, Northwestern University
  • Home school: School of Education and Social Policy
  • Joint department: Sociology
  • Profile
Simone Ispa-Landa’s scholarship concerns the sociology of education, race and gender, and youth peer cultures. She is interested in understanding how individuals and groups respond to stigma and discrimination, maintain the meaning systems that support it, and seek to overcome its negative consequences. She is currently working on two projects: first, how college men and women in historically white Greek life navigate gendered power dynamics and sexual violence. Second, she is working on a book about the strengths and challenges of various approaches to racial disparities in discipline in a self-consciously liberal suburban school district. Her areas of teaching include race and ethnicity, gender, sociology of education, sociology of youth and childhood, and qualitative research methods.
Elisa Jácome

Elisa Jácome

Assistant Professor

  • PhD institution: Princeton University
  • Previous title and institution: Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University
  • Home department: Economics
  • Profile
Elisa Jácome is an applied microeconomist working on topics in labor economics, public economics, and economic history. She is interested in questions related to criminal justice, immigration, and mental health, with a focus on understanding how low-income and immigrant communities in the U.S. interact with the criminal justice system. She is also interested in intergenerational mobility and has co-authored papers studying the economic mobility of immigrants and the extent to which economic mobility has changed over time in the United States.
Eun Hee Kim

Eun Hee Kim

Assistant Professor of Instruction

  • PhD institution: University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana
  • Previous title and institution: Assistant Professor at Michigan State University
  • Home department: Asian Languages and Cultures
Eun Hee Kim is a linguist and second language acquisition research as well as a language teacher. The overarching goal of her research is to advance our understanding of the challenges faced by various types of second language (L2) learners and help them become better language users of the target language, whether in an ESL/EFL classroom setting or in adult foreign language acquisition. Her recent research is more focused on finding effective pedagogical practices that can enhance adult language learning based on her experience in the classroom teaching of Korean as an L2. She is passionate about teaching and discovering new ways to enhance students’ engagement in learning that can lead to improving their language skills.
Diego Känzig

Diego Känzig

College Fellow

  • PhD institution: London Business School
  • Previous title and institution: PhD Candidate at London Business School
  • Home department: Economics
  • Profile
Diego Känzig’s research is in macroeconomics with a focus on climate change and inequality. In his work, he studies the role of energy and climate change for economic and financial fluctuations and how economic inequality and household finance matter for the transmission of macroeconomic shocks and policies. His research highlights that climate change and inequality also have important business cycle implications, above and beyond the significant long-run effects.

Shuwen Li

Associate Professor of Instruction

  • PhD institution: University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
  • Previous title and institution: Lecturer at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
  • Home program: Cook Family Writing Program

 

Shuwen Li’s research interests include technical and professional writing/communication. Recently, she focused her research on tactical technical communication and technical writing pedagogy in intercultural contexts. Li’s doctoral research is centered in ethos and trust in intercultural professional communication, and she is continuing this research line.

Brian Libgober

Brian Libgober

Assistant Professor

  • PhD institution: Harvard University
  • Previous title and institution: Assistant Professor at University of California, San Diego
  • Home department: Political Science
  • Joint program: Institute for Policy Research and the Law School
  • Profile
Brian Libgober is a political scientist and legal scholar. His research focuses on the political economy of American institutions, with a special emphasis on the making of regulations by executive agencies. Thematically, he is interested in the relationship between economic inequality, interest group power, and the design of legal institutions. Methodologically, his work combines a variety of approaches, including formal models, quantitative empirics, and case studies.
Sonja Mapes

Sonja Mapes

Associate Professor of Instruction

  • PhD institution: Columbia University
  • Previous title and institution: Associate Professor of the Practice at University of Notre Dame
  • Home department: Mathematics
Sonja Mapes' research is in commutative algebra. Specifically Mapes is interested in understanding how to use combinatorics to compute free resolutions and associated invariants for classes of ideals like monomial ideals and toric ideals.
Charlayne Mitchell

Charlayne Mitchell

Assistant Professor of Instruction

  • PhD institution: Arizona State University
  • Previous title and institution: Visiting Assistant Professor, Global Health Studies, Northwestern University
  • Home program: Global Health Studies

Charlayne Mitchell’s research interests are the social, emotional, physical, and spiritual experiences of health care, health practices, and health beliefs in Black Americans (with a focus on women) in the Southeast of the United States. Her research intersects and parallels race, gender, and class and how these social divisions affect health. Mitchell is particularly attentive to how narratives can inform our research (fieldwork) and pedagogical (instructional and curriculum design) praxis’ in ways that assist in redefining and rebuilding what health looks like for certain bodies. Her ongoing work will include curriculum development focusing on the journey to health for ‘Othered’ bodies and research projects centering on decolonizing research methods and increasing Black health equity using community-engaged and community-based approaches.

Zachary Nissen

Zachary Nissen

Assistant Professor of Instruction/Academic Advisor

  • PhD institution: Northwestern University
  • Home department: Anthropology
  • Joint department: OUSA
Zachary Nissen (he/him/his) is a Weinberg College Adviser and Assistant Professor of Instruction in the Department of Anthropology. Nissen is trained as an Anthropological Archaeologist with a background in Gender and Sexuality Studies and a regional focus on the Maya of Central America. He received his BA in Anthropology from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and then his MA and PhD in Anthropology from Northwestern University. His research at the Ancient Maya city of Aventura, Belize has utilized archaeological investigations of ordinary people’s households to examine the relationship between inequality and urban longevity. In addition to this archaeological research, Nissen has co-organized community engagement events and worked with colleagues on the Aventura Archaeology Project to create inclusive, ethical, and collaborative research environments for students, scholars, and community stakeholders in Belize. In the classroom, Nissen takes an interdisciplinary and global approach to the study of cities, inequality, and issues pertaining to gender/sexuality throughout human history.
Julia Oliver Rajan

Julia Oliver Rajan

Associate Professor of Instruction

  • PhD institution: University of Illinois, Chicago
  • Previous title and institution: Associate Professor of Instruction at the University of Iowa
  • Home department: Spanish and Portuguese
  • Profile
Julia Oliver Rajan teaches different levels of Spanish and courses for Spanish heritage speakers. She is also an ACTFL-certified Spanish tester and rater. Oliver Rajan developed a digital archive about the coffee zone’s dialect of her native Puerto Rico, see website. Oliver Rajan’s other areas of interest include sociolinguistics and community engagement. Her service-learning textbook - Amigos de la comunidad: Curso de aprendizaje-servicio en español is available at Cognella Academic Publishing.
Sherwin Ovid

Sherwin Ovid

Assistant Professor of Instruction

  • MFA institution: University of Illinois at Chicago
  • Previous title and institution: Lecturer at Northwestern University
  • Home department: Art Theory and Practice
  • Profile
Sherwin Ovid is a visual artist born in Trinidad who’s painting and drawing practice explores the relationship between space and mapping. Channeling concepts of cultural transmission through the movement of mixed media, his work draws from the experience of immigration as a space of contingent exchange. He explores the paradoxical aspects of inherited colonial histories, their impact on contemporary spaces and the cultural memory of resistance. Applying a spectrum of transparent materials to dark grounds poses questions on the nuances of visibility and its operative reliance on and distinction within blackness. Ovid has collaborated with Demon Leg gallery in New York and exhibited at the Chicago Cultural Center, Lubeznik Center for the Arts, University of Illinois Springfield Visual Arts Gallery, 6018North, Randy Alexander Gallery, Goldfinch Gallery, Gallery 400, Prison + Neighborhood Arts Project, University of Wisconsin, Cleve Carney Art Gallery, Julius Caesar, Haitian American Museum of Chicago, and Iceberg Projects in Evanston. Sherwin was featured in New American Painters in 2016 and 2021 as a noteworthy painter and was listed as one of Newcity magazine’s “Breakout Artists” in 2020. His work was chosen as the protagonist’s artwork in the 2021 cinematic reboot of Candyman.
Kennetta Perry

Kennetta Perry

Associate Professor

  • PhD institution: Michigan State University
  • Previous title and institution: Associate Professor and Director of the Stephen Lawrence Research Centre, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK
  • Home department: African American Studies
  • Joint department: History
  • Profile
Kennetta Hammond Perry's research primarily focuses upon Black diasporic communities and political formations shaped by and within the imperial borderings of Britain. Her research interests include Black British history, transnational race politics, Europe and the African Diaspora and the political uses of history. Currently she is completing a second book examining the life, death and legacy of David Oluwale a Nigerian-born Black man thought to have been murdered by police in Leeds, England in 1969. The book raises critical questions about histories of racial violence, archives of imperiled Black life and the relationship between the welfare state and the carceral state in modern Britain.
Laura Pigozzi

Laura Pigozzi

Assistant Professor of Instruction

  • PhD institution: University of Minnesota
  • Previous title and institution: Visiting Assistant Professor at Northwestern University
  • Home program: Cook Family Writing Program
Laura Pigozzi's research stands at the intersection of the rhetoric of health and medicine, technical and professional communication, intercultural communication, and immigrant health. The focus of this work is the well-being of those in the immigrant Latinx community, with the goal of improving lives and health by improving communication. This work informs a broader understanding of how intercultural and technical communication function and how these fields can work toward social justice.
Miklos Racz

Miklos Racz

Assistant Professor

  • PhD institution: University of California, Berkeley
  • Previous title and institution: Assistant Professor at Princeton University
  • Home department: Statistics and Data Science
  • Joint department: Computer Science
  • Profile
Miklos Racz's research interests lie broadly at the interface of probability, statistics, computer science, and information theory. His work focuses on large random discrete structures, with the goal of understanding the interplay between structure and randomness. Much of his research centers on statistical network analysis, focusing on statistical inference questions in random graph models. He is also interested in applications in social networks and computational biology.
Eszter Ronai

Eszter Ronai

College Fellow

  • PhD institution: University of Chicago
  • Home department: Linguistics
  • Profile
Eszter Ronai is a psycholinguist who uses the tools of experimental psychology to investigate natural languages. Her primary line of research centers on meaning in communicative contexts. She is especially interested in how speakers and hearers coordinate non-literal language use. Ronai is secondarily interested in the grammatical structure of languages, what strategies humans use to process complex structures, and how a cross-linguistic perspective may inform our understanding of these.
Feng Ruan

Feng Ruan

Assistant Professor

  • PhD institution: Stanford University
  • Home department: Statistics and Data Science
  • Profile
Feng Ruan's research spans statistical learning, optimization, information theory and applied harmonic analysis. He has three driving goals: (1) Build rigorous statistical inferential procedures accounting for crucial resource constraints such as computation, privacy, etc. (2) Develop modeling and analytic tools that give a calculus for understanding generally solvable non-convex problems such as composite minimization where the objective takes the form of f = h(c(x)). (3) Designing new objectives beyond convexities so that local algorithms can attain guaranteed numerical performances in statistical settings. In general, his research agenda blends theoretical with practical considerations, and statistical with computational thinking.
Sarah Schulman

Sarah Schulman

Professor

  • PhD institution: BA Empire State College, State University of New York
  • Previous title and institution: Distinguished Professor of the Humanities, City University of New York, College of Staten Island
  • Home department: English
  • Profile
Sarah Schulman is a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, nonfiction writer and AIDS historian. Her 20 books include novels, nonfiction and plays. Currently Schulman is writing new novels, plays, musicals, films, and television scripts. She is on the Advisory Board of Jewish Voice for Peace.
Yuthika Sharma

Yuthika Sharma

Assistant Professor

  • PhD institution: Columbia University
  • Previous title and institution: Assistant Professor, University of Edinburgh
  • Home department: Art History
Yuthika Sharma works on the visual culture of South Asia in the early modern and colonial periods.  Sharma’s research has focused on the artistic culture of the Late Mughal empire during the rise of British colonialism. Her research addresses the multi-lingual and cross-cultural contexts of pictorial knowledge, the work of native artists, art and ethnography, and artistic labor in the long 18th century. Sharma’s research has been supported by the Aga Khan Foundation, Dumbarton Oaks, Arts and Humanities Research Council UK, The Leverhulme Trust UK and the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art.
Lizhen Shi

Lizhen Shi

Assistant Professor of Instruction

  • PhD institution: Florida State University
  • Previous title and institution: Assistant Professor at Florida Polytechnic University
  • Home department: Statistics and Data Science
  • Profile
Lizhen Shi's research bridges the areas of Computer Science, Bioinformatics, and Biology and centers around using state-of-the-art Big Data and Machine Learning technologies to address the challenges in DNA sequence analysis. Specifically, her recent research explores how advances in Natural Language Processing could be used for scalable metagenome analysis. To better solve the issue, she has also done some research in graph clustering algorithms.
Audrey Silvestre

Audrey Silvestre

College Fellow

  • PhD institution: University of California, Los Angeles
  • Home program: Latina/o Studies
Audrey Silvestre (she/her/hers) is an interdisciplinary scholar and community organizer from Southeast Los Angeles, CA. Silvestre received her BA in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at California State University, Long Beach and a PhD in Chicana/o and Central American Studies from University of California, Los Angeles. Has research and teaching interest in aesthetics and politics, sound studies, feminist and queer studies, and audio cultural studies.
Bradly Stadie

Bradly Stadie

Assistant Professor

  • PhD institution: University of California, Berkeley
  • Previous title and institution: Research Assistant Professor at Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC)
  • Home department: Statistics and Data Sciences
  • Profile
Bradly Stadie is interested in developing machine intelligence. This research sits at the intersection of reinforcement learning and statistics, and focuses on how we can use statistical tools to improve generalization in reinforcement learning.
Allison Strom

Allison Strom

Assistant Professor

  • PhD institution: California Institute of Technology
  • Previous title and institution: Carnegie-Princeton Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University
  • Home department: Physics and Astronomy
  • Joint program: CIERA (Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics)
Allison Strom is an observational astronomer who uses some of the largest telescopes on the ground and in space to study how galaxies form and evolve in the early universe. Specifically, she is interested in understanding how and why baryonic processes determine the growth of galaxies within dark matter halos, despite the fact that visible matter is only a small fraction of the total mass in the universe. These phenomena include accretion from the cosmic web, winds and feedback from massive stars, and large-scale outflows. Strom is an expert in using deep rest-UV and rest-optical spectroscopy of star-forming galaxies across cosmic time to trace changes in their physical conditions and chemical abundances.
Eli Suzukovich III

Eli Suzukovich III

Assistant Professor of Instruction

  • PhD institution: University of Montana-Missoula
  • Previous title and institution: Professor of Instruction
  • Home program: Environmental Policy and Culture Program
  • Joint program: Center for Native American and Indigenous Research, Anthropology
Eli Suzukovich III is an anthropologist with a focus on cultural resource management, ethnography, religion, oral history, and ethno-biology. Suzukovich is a research scientist in the Negaunee Integrative Research Center at the Filed Museum of Natural History and works in curation with the North American Collections Team. Suzukovich's master’s researcher focused on contemporary Cree and Ojibwe health and illness concepts and his dissertation focused on identity and the sacred in urban Native American communities. Through his academic and professional careers, Suzukovich's work has included community level research, archival and special collections management, applied ethnography, forensic entomological and osteological recovery and assessment, cultural resource management, and state level agricultural pest management. On a national level, Suzukovich sits on the National Urban and Community Forestry Advisory Council, which is a FACA committee that advises the U.S. department of Agriculture on urban forestry practice, programs, and funding protocols.
Gabor Szekelyhidi

Gabor Szekelyhidi

Professor

  • PhD institution: Imperial College London
  • Previous title and institution: Notre Dame Professor of Mathematics at University of Notre Dame
  • Home department: Mathematics
  • Profile
Gabor Szekelyhidi specializes in complex geometry and geometric analysis. His research is aimed towards understanding the interplay between complex geometric properties of manifolds, and the solutions of certain partial differential equations. Often these partial differential equations originate in mathematical physics, such as general relativity or string theory, but they have taken on a life of their own in pure mathematics. Szekelyhidi's current interest is special Lagrangian submanifolds, which play an important role in mirror symmetry.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Professor

  • PhD institution: Northwestern University
  • Previous title and institution: Professor at Princeton University
  • Home department: African American Studies
  • Joint program: Institute for Public Research
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s scholarship examines racism, inequality, Black politics, radical politics and social movements in the United States, both in historical and contemporary contexts. She is especially interested in manifestations of inequality and discrimination in public policy, including U.S. housing policies. Taylor also writes about social movements and political organizing that develop in response to social and political inequality. Her work also includes research of Black politics and Black radical movements, including the politics and practice of Black feminism. Taylor was selected as a Guggenheim Fellow and MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 2021.
Peter van Elswyk

Peter van Elswyk

Assistant Professor

  • PhD institution: Rutgers University, New Brunswick
  • Previous title and institution: Associate Professor at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
  • Home department: Philosophy
  • Profile
Peter van Elswyk's expertise is the philosophy of mind and language. In his work, he aims to understand how conversation works by integrating the critical and historical perspective of philosophy with contemporary developments from cognitive science (especially psychology, linguistics, sociology). He has recently been trying to make sense of hedging in communication. This has him writing on everything from the compositional semantics of parenthetical verbs to the cognitive processes that underwrite multi-party conversation.
Jason Wang

Jason Wang

Assistant Professor

  • PhD institution: University of California, Berkeley
  • Previous title and institution: 51 Pegasi b Postdoctoral Fellow at Caltech
  • Home department: Physics and Astronomy
  • Joint program: CIERA (Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics)
  • Profile
Jason Wang is an astronomer who takes images and spectra of exoplanets, planets orbiting other stars. He develops and utilizes cutting-edge technologies to suppress the glare of the host stars and see faint planets in orbit. He traces out the orbits of these planets to piece together their dynamical histories and performs spectroscopy of their atmospheres to determine their composition. Wang uses these measurements to answer questions about how planets form and how typical our Solar System is. He also develops these technologies with an eye towards placing them on future ground- and spaced-based telescopes to look for Earth-analogs orbiting other stars.
Michal Wilczewski

Michal Wilczewski

Assistant Professor of Instruction

  • PhD institution: University of Illinois at Chicago
  • Previous title and institution: Visiting Lecturer, Northwestern University
  • Home department: Slavic Languages and Literatures
Michał Wilczewski is a historian of modern East-Central Europe who specializes in Poland and Polish culture. A historian of everyday life, he is interested in telling the stories of ordinary people and marginalized populations in their quest to gain recognition and access to state power. His current book project traces the daily activities of rural people in interwar Poland as they rebuilt the countryside and helped build the fledgling state. In addition to his research, he is at work on three pedagogy-related projects. The first is in partnership with linguists at the University of Białystok to create Polish-language teaching materials. The second is a Polish Native Speaker recording project to enhance Polish language students’ listening comprehension. And the last is the Poland in Chicago Digital Mapping Project that maps Polish and Polish-American spaces in the Chicagoland area.
Nick Winters

Nick Winters

Postdoctoral Fellow

  • PhD institution: Duke University
  • Previous title and institution: Visiting Assistant Professor at Union College
  • Home department: Classics
Nick Winters (PhD Duke University) is a classicist and former physicist specializing in ancient mathematics and science. His dissertation, "Schools of Greek Mathematical Practice" (2020), proposes a major revision to the history of Greek mathematics, organizing ancient texts into networks of information transmission and methodology. He is currently at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, working on a book based on this research. Outside of mathematics, Winters' work has included projects in ancient medicine, music, engineering, and practical sciences such as surveying and accounting, weaving and textile arts, timekeeping, and navigation.
Yan Zhou

Yan Zhou

Assistant Professor of Instruction

  • PhD institution: University of California, Los Angeles
  • Home department: Asian Languages and Cultures
Yan Zhou is a linguist and a conversation analyst who studies linguistic and conversational practices in various types of social interactions such as everyday conversations, classroom interactions, and political communication. Her current projects explore the timing and multimodal design of speech acts in Chinese conversations. As an instructor of the Chinese language and culture, Zhou enjoys teaching and helping students improve their language skills and intercultural competencies.
Tianlong Zu

Tianlong Zu

Assistant Professor of Instruction

  • PhD institution: Purdue University
  • Previous title and institution: Assistant Professor at Jacksonville State University
  • Home department: Physics and Astronomy
  • Profile
Tianlong Zu is a DBER (discipline-based education research) researcher in physics. His research is mainly about exploring different ways to improve physics education at the college level. For example, he has studied how to use retrieval practice to improve physics students’ problem-solving skills. He has also studied how to use eye-tracking technology to measure cognitive load(s) which have profound impacts towards learning. His current research is funded by NSF to explore how to use scientific argumentation and retrieval practice to help college students improve physics problem-solving skills in class.