New Faculty 2007-08

Jamie Newhard joins the department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages and Literatures in Arts & Sciences as Assistant Professor of Japanese. She was previously an Assistant Professor in the Department of Languages and Literatures at Arizona State University. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. in Japanese Literature from Columbia University, and her A.B. in Comparative Literature from Brown University. Her research interests include the history of literary scholarship, medieval and early modern reception of classical literature, history of reading, book and publishing history, gender issues in premodern Japanese literature, and classical Japanese language.

Asad Qadri Ahmed joins the Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages and Literatures in Arts & Sciences as Assistant Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies. His undergraduate training at Yale included western philosophy and literature; at Princeton, where he earned his Ph.D., he expanded his fields of interest to include Islamic intellectual history in its first four hundred years and early Islamic history. Dr. Ahmed's further interests include Arabo-Islamic philosophy and theology, with a special focus on logic and epistemology, classical Arabic poetry and poetics, Hadith studies, Tafsir, and Graeco-Arabica.

Ellen Damschen joined the Department of Biology in Arts & Sciences as Assistant Professor. She received her Ph.D. from North Carolina State University in Zoology and completed her postdoctoral studies at the University of California- Santa Barbara as a NSF Biological Informatics Postdoctoral fellow. Professor Damschen's research centers around how and when space matters for the diversity and composition of communities, especially under the ever increasing impact of humans on the globe. Her research not only tests ecological theory but also has applied relevance for conservation.

John Orrock joined the Department of Biology in Arts & Sciences as Assistant Professor. He received his Ph.D. from Iowa State University in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology as EPA STAR fellow. He was a postdoctoral research associate at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis. Professor Orrock's research centers around how individual-level behaviors can give rise to population and community-level patterns. His research utilizes a strong experimental approach to evaluate existing ecological theory.

Elizabeth Haswell joined the Department of Biology in Arts & Sciences as Assistant. Professor Haswell received her Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of California-San Francisco. Her postdoctoral work was done at Caltech as a DOE Fellow of the Life Sciences Research Foundation. Professor Haswell's lab looks at how physical force is converted into a biochemical signal capable of altering the state of the cell. The model plant Arabidopsis thaliana is being used in her research.

Bill Bubelis joins the Department of Classics in Arts & Sciences as Assistant Professor, having received his PhD from the University of Chicago. His field is ancient history, with a particular interest in Archaic Greece, finance and the ancient economy, and epigraphy. He has also published in the field of Greek numismatics, and is interested as well in the history and economy of the Achaemenid Empire.

Jeff Catalano joins the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences in Arts & Sciences as Assistant Professor. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2004, and his B.S. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1999. For the past three years, he has been the Harold Urey Postdoctoral Fellow in the Environmental Research and Chemistry Divisions at Argonne National Laboratory. His research interest centers on the structure and reactivity of mineral-water interfaces, the location of important environmental reactions that affect contaminant fate, the composition of natural waters, and biogeochemical element cycling. Professor Catalano is currently investigating the molecular ordering of interfacial water, the mechanisms through which arsenic adsorbs to mineral surfaces, and ferrous iron activation of dynamic structural changes of iron oxide surfaces.

Professor Haluk Ergin joins the Department of Economics in Arts & Sciences as Associate Professor. After completing his Ph.D. at Princeton in 2003, he joined MIT’s faculty as an Assistant Professor. Professor Ergin's research is on decision theory and matching theory. In his work on decision theory, he focuses on models where economic agents' choices do not obey the standard rationality principles. In his work on matching he has worked on mechanism design issues in school choice models.

Anne Newman joins the Department of Education in Arts and Sciences as Assistant Professor. She received her B.A. from the University of Chicago and her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2007. Her teaching and research interests lie at the intersection of political theory and education policy analysis, where she applies contemporary theories of justice and democracy to consider the ethical dimensions of policy issues. She is especially interested in the relationship between educational opportunity and political equality, and the role of rights discourse and political activism in advancing education reform in urban communities.

J. Dillon Brown joins the Department of English in Arts & Sciences as Assistant Professor. He received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Pennsylvania in 2006 and spent one year as an assistant professor at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, before joining Arts & Sciences here. His research interests include Anglophone postcolonial literature, postcolonial theory, modernism, and globalization, and he is currently working on a book manuscript that examines the interrelations between postwar Caribbean novelists and the British modernist tradition.

Vincent Sherry joins the Department of English in Arts & Sciences as Professor. He teaches and writes in the fields of modern British and Irish literature. Previously, he has been Distinguished Professor of English at Villanova University and Pierce Butler Professor of English at Tulane University. His publications include The Uncommon Tongue: The Poetry and Criticism of Geoffrey Hill (Michigan, 1987), Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism (Oxford, 1993), James Joyce; ULYSSES (Cambridge, 1995, rpt. 1997, 2000; 2d ed. 2004), and The Great War and the Language of Modernism (Oxford, 2003, rpt. 2004, 2006). He has edited the Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War (2005) and several volumes on post-Second World War British and Irish Poets for the Dictionary of Literary Biography (1984, 1985). He is currently writing the Blackwell biography of Ezra Pound and a book-length study of English Modernism and pan-European Decadence.

Cassie Adcock joins the department of History in Arts & Sciences as assistant professor, with a joint appointment in Religious Studies. She received a B.A. in Anthropology from Bard College in 1994, an M.A. in Religious Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1996, and an M.A. in the History of Religions from the University of Chicago in 1997. Professor Adcock’s Ph.D. was awarded this summer from the University of Chicago, where she completed a dissertation on modern religion and political culture in North India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her main research interests lie in the exploration of historically specific articulations of religion, secularism, and tolerance in colonial and postcolonial India. She will be teaching in the areas of South Asian history and South Asian religions.

Jean Allman joins the department of History in Arts and Sciences as the J.H. Hexter Professor in the Humanities. Since receiving her Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 1987, Professor Allman has held faculty positions at the University of Missouri in Columbia, the University of Minnesota, where she was tenured in 1996, and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, which she joined in 2001 as Professor of History—with appointments in African Studies and Gender and Women’s Studies—and where she served as Director of the university’s Center for African Studies from 2003 to 2007. A specialist in the social, cultural, and political history of West Africa, Professor Allman has received fellowships from the USIA, the ACLS, CIES-Fulbright, the SSRC, and the NEH. She is the author or editor of six books including, most recently, TONGNAAB: The History of a West African God (2005), as well as numerous articles and essays in the field.

Elizabeth Borgwardt joins the department of History in Arts & Sciences as Associate Professor. The holder of both a Ph.D. in History from Stanford University (2002) and a J.D., cum laude, from Harvard University (1990), Professor Borgwardt spent the 2006-07 academic year as a visiting scholar at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard. From 2002 to 2006 she was assistant professor, and then associate professor, of History at the University of Utah. Her teaching and research focus on the international dimensions to U.S. history, the history of human rights regimes and endeavors, international relations, and comparative constitutional history. Her recent book, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (2005), was awarded the Merle Curti Prize by the Organization of American Historians, the Stuart L. Bernath Prize by the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations, and the Phi Alpha Theta (History Honors Society) best first book award. Professor Borgwardt has received a Fulbright Distinguished Lectureship for research and teaching at the University of Heidelberg in the Spring semester 2008.

Daniel Bornstein joins the department of History in Arts and Sciences as the Stella K. Darrow Professor of Catholic Studies, with a joint appointment in Religious Studies. His research focuses on religious life in late-medieval and Renaissance Italy, on varieties of religious practice, the role of women in Catholic institutions, and, more broadly, on religion and civic culture. A recipient of the Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1985, Professor Bornstein spent three years the University of Michigan’s Society of Fellows and three years at the University of California, San Diego, before joining the department of History at Texas A&M University as assistant professor in 1989. He was promoted to associate professor with tenure at Texas A&M in 1994 and to full professor in 1999. He is the author or editor of six books including Women and Religion in Medieval and Renaissance Italy (1996) and, most recently, Medieval Christianity.

Charly Coleman joins the department of History in Arts & Sciences as assistant professor, with a joint appointment in the Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities. Professor Coleman received his B.A., summa cum laude, from Trinity University in San Antonio in 1998 and his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2005. For the past two years he has been a Harper Schmidt Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at the University of Chicago. The main lines of his research center on the intellectual and cultural history of eighteenth century France. In particular, Professor Coleman is interested in the influence of religious thought on a crucial strain of Enlightenment individualism. Tracing ideas of self-abnegation in Enlightenment political and "psychological" writing, he revises our understanding of the Enlightenment as an unequivocally secular movement. He will teach courses on the Ancien Regime, the European Enlightenment, and the rise of the European state.

Roya Beheshti Zavareh joins the Department of Mathematics in Arts & Sciences as Assistant Professor. She received her bachelor's degree from Sharif University of Technology, Iran, in 1999, and her Ph.D. degree from MIT in 2003. After completing the Ph.D, she did postdoctoral research at Max-Planck Institute in Germany, Queen's University in Canada, and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley. Her main area of research is algebraic geometry.

Todd Decker joins the Department of Music in Arts and Sciences as Assistant Professor, with a joint appointment in American Culture Studies. Professor Decker holds a Master of Music degree in Harpsichord Performance from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and received his Ph.D. in musicology from the University of Michigan in early 2007. He was visiting lecturer in musicology at the University of California, Los Angeles during the 2006-2007 academic year. His research has been supported by an Alvin H. Johnson AMS 50 Fellowship and a Presser Foundation Music Award for research in Europe. His publications include articles on keyboard composer Domenico Scarlatti in the journals Eighteenth-Century Music and Ad Parnassum. Professor Decker's current research centers on the American musical stage and screen in the twentieth century, with a particular interest in interracial performance. He is working on a book connecting Fred Astaire, popular song, musical film, and jazz from the 1930s to the 1960s.

John Turci-Escobar joins the Department of Music in Arts & Sciences as Assistant Professor. He earned a B.A. from Rutgers University and a Ph.D. from Yale University. From 2004 through 2007, Professor Turci-Escobar was Assistant Professor of Music Theory at the University of Georgia. His primary field of research is the late Italian madrigal. Secondary areas of interest include nineteenth-century chromaticism, classical form, the music of Astor Piazzolla, and broader issues in music and meaning. He has presented his work at regional and national conferences and is currently writing a series of articles on the music of Carlo Gesualdo. Professor Turci-Escobar is also preparing a book on chromaticism in the late sixteenth-century madrigal.

Peter Schmelz joins the Department of Music in Arts & Sciences as Assistant Professor. Peter received his Ph.D. (2002) and M.A. (1997) from the University of California, Berkeley, and his B.A. (1995) from The George Washington University. For the past four years he was Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University at Buffalo (SUNY). Professor Schmelz’s primary area of interest is twentieth-century music (and especially music after 1945), with a focus on the music produced in Russia and the Soviet Union, including that by Dmitri Shostakovich and Alfred Schnittke. His secondary areas of research include popular music and popular culture (both American and Russian), music and the cold war, and music and politics more broadly. He is currently completing his first book, Such Freedom if Only Musical: Unofficial Soviet Music and Society During the Thaw (Oxford, forthcoming), which is based upon archival research as well as extensive interviews he conducted with composers, performers, and listeners active in the “unofficial” Soviet musical culture of the 1950s and 1960s. His next project involves the intersections of jazz, rock, and “art” music in the Soviet 1970s.

Philip Sewell joins the Performing Arts Department and the Film and Media Studies Program in Arts and Sciences as Assistant Professor. Professor Sewell received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Communication Arts--Media and Cultural Studies in 2007, his M.A. at the University of Texas at Austin in 1996, and his B.A. at the University of Texas at Austin in 1993. For the past year, he has been a Lecturer at Washington University in the Film and Media Studies Program, where he has taught courses on the History of Electronic Media, Media Cultures, and Race and Ethnicity on American Television. Professor Sewell’s research focuses on the history of the concept of “quality” as it was used towards various ends in the early development of television in the U.S. By focusing on the development of television technology, practices, and standards in the period prior to 1946, he shows how definitions of “quality” intervened in diverse and distinctive ways to shape the medium.

Mariska Leunissen joins the Department of Philosophy in Arts & Sciences as Assistant Professor. She earned a master degree in Philosophy (2002) and Classics (2003), and a Ph.D. in Philosophy (2007), all at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands. In the past three years, she has also been a visiting scholar in the joint ancient philosophy program at the University of Texas at Austin. Her interests are in ancient natural philosophy and philosophy of science (mainly Aristotle, but also the Pre-Socratics and the ancient medical tradition), and in contemporary philosophy of biology.

Thomas Sattig joins the Department of Philosophy in Arts & Sciences as Assistant Professor. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Oxford University in 2002. He remained in Oxford for the following three years as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow and a Junior Research Fellow at Brasenose College. Before joining the philosophy faculty at Washington University, Professor Sattig held a visiting position at UCLA and a tenure-track position of Assistant Professor of philosophy at Tulane University. His primary research interests fall in the areas of metaphysics and philosophy of language. He currently works on topics in the metaphysics of material objects.

Jeff Gill joins the Department of Political Science and the Center for Applied Statistics in Arts & Sciences as Professor. He received his B.A. from UCLA, his M.B.A. from Georgetown, and his Ph.D. from American University. He served as post-doctoral fellow at Harvard. His major areas of research include: political methodology, American politics, statistical computing, research methods, and public administration. Professor Gill's current research is focused on projects such as Bayesian hierarchical models, Markov chain Monte Carlo theory, bureaucratic behavior in national security agencies, and issues in political epidemiology. He recently completed “Essential Mathematics for Political and Social Research,” with Cambridge University Press and is the author of five other books including the forthcoming second edition of “Bayesian Methods for the Social and Behavioral Sciences” (Chapman & Hall/CRC), which is the leading Bayesian text for these disciplines. His journal work has appeared in various leading journals. Currently he serves as Director of the Center for Applied Statistics at Washington University and is Vice President of the Society for Political Methodology.

Clarissa Rile Hayward joins the Department of Political Science in Arts & Sciences as Associate Professor. A political theorist, Professor Hayward’s research and teaching focus on political theories of power, justice, identity, and democracy. She received her B.A. from Princeton and her Ph.D. from Yale. Prior to joining the faculty at Washington University, she was Associate Professor of Political Science at Ohio State. Professor Hayward’s publications include “De-Facing Power” (Cambridge University Press, 2000), as well as articles in various volumes and journals. She is currently completing a second book which focuses on the ways democratic state actors shape political identities through institutions that racialize and privatize urban space. This project has been supported by the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Ian MacMullen joins the Department of Political Science in Arts & Sciences as Assistant Professor. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University in 2004, then served Washington University for three years as Assistant Dean in the College of Arts & Sciences. A political theorist whose primary research and teaching interests lie in the politics of education and of religious and cultural pluralism, Professor MacMullen’s first book, "Faith in Schools? Autonomy, Citizenship, and Religious Education in the Liberal State" (Princeton University Press, 2007), articulates a vision of liberal government in a pluralist society through a consideration of the fundamental principles of public education policy.

Ian G. Dobbins joins the Department of Psychology in Arts & Sciences as Associate Professor. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California- Davis and conducts research on human memory, specifically investigating the role of prefrontal cortex (PFC) during deliberate recovery of memories using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scanning techniques. He is also interested in non-strategic rules of thumb and implicit learning mechanisms that may govern memory attributions.

Simine Vazire joins the Department of Psychology in Arts & Sciences as Assistant Professor. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 2006 and conducts research on the accuracy of self- and other-perceptions of personality. Her current work examines differences between how people see themselves, how they are seen by others, and how they behave. The overall goal is to understand the limits and function of self-knowledge and how feedback affects self-knowledge and personality. She is also interested in methodological issues involved with measuring behavior, self-reports, and peer reports.

Julie Singer joins the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures in Arts and Sciences as an Assistant Professor of French. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Romance Studies from Duke University and two B.A.’s from the University of Maryland - College Park. She was previously appointed as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Italian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Professor Singer's primary fields of research include medieval French and Italian lyric, particularly intersections of lyric and medical-scientific discourse, as well as the cultural history of science, medicine, and technology.