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May 2013  

Dear HArCS Faculty,
I have the pleasure of announcing the following new faculty members who will be joining our division pending the completion of the appointment process. To all of you who served on the hiring committees, a special thanks. Please join me in welcoming our new colleagues.

With best wishes,
Jessie Ann Owens,
Dean, HArCS
African American and African Studies 


Laurie Lambert is a recent Ph.D. in English literature from New York University who joins AAS as an assistant professor. She will teach in the areas of African diaspora studies and media studies, with a specific focus on the Caribbean. She has received numerous awards, including the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship, and her research interests include Caribbean literature and cultural history, postcolonial theory, African diaspora studies, and literatures of freedom and slavery.

Elisa White, before joining the UC Davis faculty, was most recently an associate professor of ethnic studies at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa. She holds a Ph.D. in African diaspora studies from the University of California at Berkeley, and her research interests and publications address lesser-examined African diaspora sites, Black European studies, the social and cultural dimensions of globalization, the construction of racial and ethnic identities, and new media studies. Dr. White's book, Modernity, Freedom and the African Diaspora: Dublin, New Orleans, Paris, was published by Indiana University Press (2012).
Classics

Anna Uhlig joins the Classics Program following our search for a Hellenist. Dr. Uhlig completed the Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2011 and most recently held the position of research fellow at Sydney Sussex College, University of Cambridge. A book manuscript based on her dissertation, "Script and Song in Pindar and Aeschylus," is now in the final stages of revision.  Her MPhil thesis at the University of Cambridge (on Homeric simile) and her extensive teaching experience at Princeton and Cambridge combined make her a welcome new colleague.
East Asian Languages & Cultures

Nobuko Koyama is a specialist in Japanese discourse analysis and language pedagogy. She received her Ph.D. from University of Hawai'i in the Department of Linguistics and has an excellent record as the language coordinator in the Japanese Program and Critical Languages Program at Temple University Japan Campus, overseeing Japanese, Chinese and Korean programs. She devoted her time and energy to establishing a Japanese major at Temple University and teaches all levels of Japanese language courses and literature in translation. She has also taught Japanese, Japanese linguistics, and English linguistics at both graduate and undergraduate programs at Taiwanese universities.
French

Claire Goldstein is a well-respected scholar in the field of seventeenth-century French literary and cultural studies. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 2000. Her interdisciplinary work engages literature, landscape, material culture, gender studies, the visual arts, and early modern astronomy. Her first book, Vaux and Versailles: The Appropriations, Erasures and Accidents that Made Modern France (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), explores questions of aesthetic style in the context of the highly politicized court of Louis XIV. Her current project, Challenging the Sun King's Cosmos: Comets Before Halley and the Problems of Circulation and Epistemology in Early Modern France, explores the relationship between political ideology and the advancement of scientific knowledge under Louis XIV's absolutist rule.
German

Sven Erik Rose received his Ph.D. in comparative literature and literary theory from the University of Pennsylvania in 2003. His first book, entitled The Philosophical Politics of Jewish Subjectivity in Germany 1789-1848, is forthcoming with Brandeis University Press. It explores how Jewish intellectuals such as Karl Marx and Berthold Auerbach positioned themselves in the German philosophical tradition. Professor Rose is currently working on a second book project titled The Holocaust and the Archive from the Cold War to Postmemory. In addition, Professor Rose has served as guest editor for a special issue of New German Critique, one of the premier journals in German Studies, and has published numerous articles in a diverse range of journals.
Native American Studies

Jessica Bissett Perea (Dena'ina/Scottish American) received her Ph.D. in musicology from UCLA in 2011. She specializes in traditional and contemporary Alaska Native and circumpolar Inuit performance art cultures, Indigenous research ethics and methodologies, modern jazz cultures, and the histories of music and race in the United States. Her research is grounded in the concrete situations of the Indigenous performance artists with whom she works, and her methodological framings are informed by a commitment to social change and social justice. Her innovative dissertation research and dedication to community outreach were recognized with a 2010 Alaska Native Visionary Award. She performs as a double bassist and vocalist in jazz, classical, and Native American music contexts.

Justin Spence received his Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2013. He works on language and dialect contact, language documentation, and Athabaskan languages. His current research is on the Hupa language of northwestern California, and his broader interests include language variation, the role of archival language documentation in research, and the revitalization of endangered languages within Native American and Australian Aboriginal communities. He combines a strong background in theoretical linguistics with a successful track record of supporting communities in efforts to strengthen or to reintroduce the use of their heritage languages. He will assume the directorship of the NAS Native American Language Center.
Religious Studies

Mairaj Syed received his PhD in religious studies from Princeton University in 2011, where he was trained in the history of early Islam. His areas of specialization are early Islamic ethical theory and the use of hadith traditions to reconstruct the early history of the Islamic world, and he is currently completing a manuscript on coercion in classical Islamic law and theology. Syed will teach undergraduate and graduate courses in Islamic studies, pre-modern Mediterranean religions, and Religious Studies theory and method. The recipient of numerous awards, he was recently awarded a Fulbright grant to support his research in Egypt.
Visiting Assistant Professors

 

Ryan Lee Cartwright received his Ph.D. in American studies from the University of Minnesota in 2012. His dissertation "Peculiar Places: A Queer History of Rural Nonconformity" analyzes the queer history of gender, sexual, and social nonconformity in the twentieth-century rural U.S. The project contends that over the course of the twentieth century, rural U.S. gossip about queer and peculiar white neighbors was transformed into a popular discourse of white social degeneracy: the anti-idyll. Cartwright joins the American Studies Program for two years as an American Council of Learned Societies New Faculty Fellow.

 

Kristopher Fallon will receive his Ph.D. in film and media from the University of California, Berkeley in May 2013. His dissertation "Where Truth Lies: Digital Media and Political Documentary Film, 2000-2010" focuses on the emergence of digital documentary in the contexts of the ideological shifts and social conflicts of the early 21st century. Fallon will hold a two-year position as Andrew W. Mellon Visiting Assistant Professor in Cinema and Technocultural Studies and will contribute to the activities of the Mellon Research Initiative in Digital Cultures

 

Susy J. Zepeda received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2012 with a dissertation titled "Tracing Queer Latina Diasporas: Escarvando Historical Narratives of Ancestries and Silences." Her research interests include women of color feminist epistemologies, theories and studies of race and colonialism, queer historical methodologies, and transnational politics and culture with an emphasis on México and U.S. relations. Zepeda will hold a two-year position as Andrew W. Mellon Visiting Assistant Professor in Women and Gender Studies and will contribute to the activities of the Mellon Research Initiative in Social Justice.

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Please help us share news about research, creative work, and awards by sending announcements to Erin Hendel, graduate assistant to Dean Owens, at eehendel@ucdavis.edu.