New Faculty 2006-07

Derek Pardue joins the Department of Anthropology in Arts & Sciences as Assistant Professor, with a joint appointment in International and Area Studies. Derek received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2004, and his B.A. in German Literature and Music from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1991. He also holds a Master’s of Music in Ethnomusicology from the University of Texas, Austin. For the past two years, he has been a Visiting Assistant Professor at Union College. Derek’s research focuses on the representation of hip-hoppers as social and cultural agents. For the past 10 years, he has worked with with rappers, DJs, and graffiti artists in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Derek employs strategies of methodology and epistemology from urban anthropology, critical race theory, discourse theory, cultural studies, and ethnomusicology to his analyses.

Herman Pontzer joins the Department of Anthropology in Arts & Sciences as Assistant Professor. He received his Ph.D. in 2006 from Harvard University and his B.A. (with Highest Honors) from Penn State University in 1999. Herman is interested in linking functional morphology to ecology, and his research uses a combination of modeling and experimental approaches to test hypotheses linking limb design, locomotor performance (especially locomotor energetics), and ranging ecology. Herman also is participating in ongoing excavations at the Lower Paleolithic site of Dmanisi in the Republic of Georgia, where fossils dated to 1.8 million years ago provide evidence of the earliest human ancestors outside of Africa.

Alicia Walker joins the Department of Art History and Archaeology in Arts & Sciences as Assistant Professor of Medieval Art. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. from Harvard University and her B.A. from Bryn Mawr College. From 2004 to 2006 she was a Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Art and Architectural History at Columbia University. At Washington University, Alicia will teach courses about Byzantine, medieval Islamic, and western medieval art. Her primary fields of research include cross-cultural artistic interaction in the medieval world from the ninth to thirteenth centuries and gender issues in the art and material culture of Byzantium. She recently completed articles on the material and intellectual culture of divination in medieval Byzantium and the expression of romance culture in works of middle Byzantine courtly art. She is currently at work on a book length study of Islamic impact on middle Byzantine imperial imagery and is co-editing a volume of essays titled Negotiating the Secular in Medieval Art. In addition, she has published essays on the role of women in Byzantine art and culture, and the function and meaning of early Byzantine marriage jewelry. Alicia has participated in archaeological fieldwork in Carthage (modern-day Tunisia), excavating at two sites and publishing on stucco decoration from the early Byzantine pilgrimage complex at Bir Ftouha. She is currently co-publishing the recent excavation of a late Roman domestic site in Carthage. The recipient of numerous museum fellowships, Alicia has been a lecturer and curatorial assistant at several prominent American museums, including the Harvard University Art Museums, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Metropolitan Museum, New York, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

Robert E. Blankenship joins the Departments of Biology and Chemistry in Arts & Sciences as Professor. He received a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley and a B.S. from Nebraska Wesleyan University. Robert spent the past 21 years at Arizona State University and was Chair of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry from 2002 to 2006. His research interests center on the molecular mechanisms of energy storage in photosynthesis. Robert and his group investigate this process using an interdisciplinary approach that emphasizes studying the complete range of types of organisms that do photosynthesis, with the goal of discovering the essential aspects of how light energy is stored, as well as elucidating the origin and early evolutionary development of photosynthesis.

Costas Azariadis joins the Department of Economics in Arts & Sciences as Professor. Costas received his Ph.D. in 1975 from Carnegie Mellon, and has been affiliated with Brown, Penn, and UCLA. He was tenured in 1977 (Penn) and promoted to full professor in 1983 (Penn). He served as the Director of UCLA’s Program for Dynamic Economics from 1993 to 1997 and from 2000 to 2006. He has served as editor or co-editor for a number of top journals and has also been on journal advisory boards and NSF panels. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society. His research focus is on labor contracts, macroeconomic dynamics, and economic development.

Michele Boldrin joins the Department of Economics in Arts & Sciences as Professor. Since he received his Ph.D. from Rochester in 1987, Michele has been affiliated with UCLA, Northwestern, and Minnesota. He was tenured in 1990 (Northwestern) and promoted to full in 1999 (Minnesota). Michele has served as editor or associate editor for many top journals and is currently an associate editor of Econometrica. He served as Vice President and President of the Italian Economic Association and is currently a research associate of the Center for Economic Policy Research. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society. His research focuses on economic theory, economic growth, and macroeconomics.

Sebastian Galiani joins the Department of Economics in Arts & Sciences as Associate Professor. He received his Ph.D. degree from Oxford in 2000 and has been affiliated with Universidad de San Andrés in Argentina, promoted to the associate rank there in 2005. Sebastian is currently the Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Network of Inequality and Poverty, sponsored jointly by LACEA, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the World Bank. His main research focus is on development economics, particularly on evaluating public policies being undertaken by developing countries.

David K. Levine joins the Department of Economics in Arts & Sciences as Professor. After completing his Ph.D. at MIT in 1981, he joined UCLA’s faculty as an Assistant Professor, and was there later tenured and then promoted to full Professor. He has served on the editorial board of many top journals and is currently co-editor of Econometrica. He is currently the President of the Society of Economic Dynamics. He has served on the NSF economics panel and on the American Economic Association’s Committee on Honors and Awards. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society. His research is on game theory, general equilibrium theory, and macroeconomic theory.

Werner Ploberger joins the Department of Economics in Arts & Sciences as Professor. Since he earned his Ph.D. in applied mathematics at Vienna University of Technology in 1981 and his Habilitation in Econometrics there in 1993, he has been affiliated with Vienna University of Technology (Austria), the University of St. Andrew (Scotland) and the University of Rochester. He was tenured in 1993 (Vienna University of Technology) and promoted to full in 1995 (University of St. Andrews). He had been at the University of Rochester since 1997. His research focus is in the areas of statistics, econometric methodology, and time-series econometrics.

Stephen Williamson joins the Department of Economics in Arts & Sciences as Professor. He received his Ph.D. from Wisconsin (Madison) in 1984 and has since then been affiliated with Queen’s, Western Ontario, the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, and Iowa. He was tenured in 1989 (Western Ontario) and promoted to full in 1992 (Iowa). He served as department chair at Iowa (2000-03). He is currently co-editor for Economic Theory and associate editor for Journal of Monetary Economics and Review of Economic Dynamics. His research is mainly on macroeconomics, monetary economics, and financial economics.

Anca Parvulescu joins the Department of English and the Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities in Arts & Sciences as Assistant Professor. Anca received her Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. Teaching and research interests include 20th-century American literature, literary and cultural theory, feminist theory and women’s literature, Eastern European cinema, and the history of the university. She is currently working on a book project titled "Laughter’s Burst: Seriousness, Manners, Feminism." The book traces the emergence of the modern subject as a serious subject formed by and through a prohibition on laughter. It argues that the spirit of the subject’s seriousness permeates modernity’s projects, lending them a certain gravity and immutability. As a result, the deployment of laughter becomes a crucial strategy for philosophers, writers, and artists who hope to challenge modernity and its projects. Laughter offers the promise of a new kind of subject and another kind of community.

Jimin Ding joins the Department of Mathematics in Arts & Sciences as Assistant Professor. Jimin received her Ph.D. in statistics from the University of California at Davis, under the guidance of Professor Jane-Ling Wang. She currently works in a modern form of Survival Analysis using techniques that will be applicable to many other areas of statistics.

Xiang Tang joins the Department of Mathematics in Arts & Sciences as Assistant Professor. He was previously a Visiting Research Professor at University of California at Davis. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley, where he worked under Alan Weinstein. His areas of expertise are noncommutative geometry, symplectic geometry, and quantization. He worked on mathematical problems in statistical thermodynamics while still an undergraduate at Peking University.

Bruce Durazzi joins the Department of Music in Arts & Sciences as Assistant Professor. Bruce holds bachelor’s degrees in Music Composition and English Literature from Oberlin College, and a Ph.D. in Music from Yale University. His doctoral dissertation investigates music and politics in the work of Luigi Nono. Other research interests include politics and musical modernism more generally, the music and aesthetics of Arnold Schoenberg and his school, and gender studies in music. Before joining the music faculty at Washington University, Bruce taught music theory at the University of Arizona and at Northwestern University. Bruce’s current research in music theory emphasizes the relationship between music analysis and broader social, cultural and historical issues. He has presented papers at the Archivio Luigi Nono and the Fondazione Cini (Venice), the fifth Feminist Theory and Music conference (London), the MidAmerican Center for Contemporary Music (Bowling Green State University), and at meetings of the Society for Music Theory, the New England Conference of Music Theorists, and Music Theory Southwest. His research has been supported by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Yan Mei Wang joins the Department of Physics in Arts & Sciences as Assistant Professor. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2002 and spent the next four years as a postdoctoral researcher in biological physics at Princeton University. In her research, she applies quantitative experimental methods pioneered in physics to address fundamental biological questions at the molecular level. At Princeton, she performed the first single-molecule imaging of LacI repressor protein and observed that LacI diffuses along DNA, thereby resolving a decades-old puzzle in DNA targeting by this protein. Here at Washington University, she will continue to explore gene regulation mechanisms by real-time tracing of single-gene regulator proteins in vitro and in vivo, seeking answers to such questions as whether DNA-binding proteins diffuse along the nonspecific DNA by sliding or hopping, and how proteins find their targets in the complex physiological environment of the cell.

Matt Gabel joins the Department of Political Science in Arts & Sciences as Associate Professor. He earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Rochester and his master’s degree in Advanced European Studies at the College of Europe in Brugge, Belgium. He spent 1996 to1998 at the University of Michigan as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar in Health Policy Research. His research interests include the political consequences of electoral laws, comparative democratic processes, and American health policy.

James Spriggs joins the Department of Political Science in Arts & Sciences as Professor. He holds a courtesy appointment as Professor of Law and also serves as Fellow in the Center for Empirical Research in Law. His research interests are in American politics, with a specific emphasis on the scientific study of law and judicial process and politics. He is especially concerned with how institutions (i.e., formal rules or informal norms) shape the choices that judges make. This perspective focuses on how, in attempting to craft law consistent with their policy preferences, judges are constrained by institutional rules endogenous and exogenous to courts. For instance, his book (with Paul Wahlbeck and Forrest Maltzman) Crafting Law on the Supreme Court: The Collegial Game (Cambridge University Press) examines how internal rules on the Court lead justices to act strategically and bargain, negotiate, and compromise.

Melanie Jean Springer joins the Department of Political Science in Arts & Sciences as Assistant Professor. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University in 2006 and specializes in American politics and quantitative methods. Her teaching and research interests include voting and elections, political institutions, state politics and policymaking, American political development, Congress, political parties, and quantitative methods.

Robert Walker joins the Department of Political Science and the Center for Applied Statistics in Arts & Sciences as Assistant Professor. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Rochester in 2005. His general research interests are political methodology, international relations, and political economy. A peripheral research project examines the political economy of European football (soccer) with a focus on industrial organization and the intertwined national and European regulation of sport.

Ignacio Miguel Sánchez Prado joins the Department of Romance Languages & Literatures in Arts & Sciences as Assistant Professor, with a joint appointment in International and Area Studies. He received both his M.A. and Ph.D in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from the University of Pittsburgh. His B.A. in Literature comes from Universidad de las Américas-Puebla. Ignacio is the author of 14 articles on Latin American literature and cultural studies, all in referred journals. He also has published two books, in addition to being an accomplished translator and creative writer. Areas of research include Mexican literary, film and cultural studies, canon theory, world literature theory, Latinamericanist theory and criticism, and Latin American film.