This fall, Arts & Sciences welcomes 34 tenure-track and teaching-track faculty to departments and programs across the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities! Meet the newest members of our faculty community.
African and African-American Studies
Samuel Shearer, PhD, has accepted an assistant professor position with the Department of African and African-American Studies. Most recently, Shearer was in residence with the Center for the Humanities at Washington University as a postdoctoral fellow. There, he edited his dissertation, “The Kigali Model: Making a 21st Century Metropolis,” into a book manuscript. For that project, Shearer did 27 months of fieldwork in Kigali, Rwanda, examining the relationship between urban design and everyday life. In a separate project, he is following the lives of Rwandans who have recently left Kigali for other cities in the region. Shearer earned his doctorate in 2017 from Duke University.
Anthropology
Natalie Mueller, PhD, joins the Department of Anthropology as an assistant professor. Mueller is an archaeologist and paleoethnobotanist who specializes in the historical ecology of North America and the origins of agriculture. Her research also concerns the development and spread of social institutions related to food production and food security. Mueller returns to Washington University after earning her doctorate here in 2017. From 2017-19, she was a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University. While at Cornell, her work was published by outlets including Nature: Plants, the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, and the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology.
Stephen McIsaac, PhD, joins the Department of Anthropology as a lecturer in sociocultural anthropology. McIsaac is a sociocultural and medical anthropologist who has conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork on mental health and psychiatry in South Africa. Earlier this year, he earned his doctorate in medical anthropology with a designated emphasis in critical theory at the University of California, Berkeley. Grounded in critical studies of medicine and science, postcolonial theory, and theories of violence and subjectivity, his work explores emerging therapeutic experiments in South Africa that attempt to care for the psychic and structural afterlives of apartheid.
Biology
Swanne Gordon, PhD, joins the Department of Biology as an assistant professor. Gordon is an evolutionary biologist and behavioral ecologist whose research is built around the underlying question: why is there diversity in nature, and how is it maintained? Her work is interdisciplinary and focuses on the evolution and maintenance of color polymorphisms in warning coloration, rapid evolution, and the interaction between sex linkage and adaptation. To study these topics, she uses a combination of field, laboratory, mathematical, and behavioral experiments. Prior to her appointment at Washington University, Gordon was an Academy of Finland Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Jyväskylä. She earned her doctorate at the University of California, Riverside.
Michael Landis, PhD, joins the Department of Biology as an assistant professor. Landis is interested in learning how evolutionary processes behave and how Earth's biodiversity has changed over time. His lab at Washington University develops statistical models and scientific software to search for evolutionary patterns in biological and simulated datasets. In particular, he is interested in inferring phylogenetic relationships among species, estimating historical patterns of biogeography, and learning how phenotypes evolve over millions of years. Landis earned his doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, and most recently was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University.
Andrés López-Sepulcre, PhD, joins the Department of Biology as an assistant professor. López-Sepulcre is interested in a variety of ecological and evolutionary questions, especially involving the relationship between both disciplines. Within the framework of eco-evolutionary theory, he asks questions on topics like: the relationship between adaptation on ecosystem processes (e.g. nutrient cycling), density- and frequency-dependent selection, rapid evolution, or the regulation of populations in space and time. Prior to his appointment at Washington University, López-Sepulcre was a researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CRNS) and the University of Jyväskylä in Finland.
Chemistry
Thomas Bakupog, PhD, joins the Department of Chemistry as a general chemistry lecturer and director of peer-led team learning (PLTL). Bakupog earned his doctorate from the University of Wyoming, Laramie. He has taught general chemistry for more than seven years, including in his previous position at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland. Bakupog’s goal in working with students in general chemistry is to make chemistry more relatable to everyday life. He hopes this approach will allow students to overcome some of the anxiety that traditionally surrounds chemistry.
Comparative Literature
Matthias Goeritz, PhD, joins Comparative Literature as a professor of practice. Goeritz is an award-winning poet, novelist, and translator. His first book of poems, Loops, was published in 2001, and he has since published three novels, two novellas, three collections of poetry, and numerous translations. Goeritz came to Washington University in 2015 as a doctoral candidate in comparative literature’s international writers track and was named the William H. Gass Fellow. Before completing his doctorate earlier this year, he served as a peer mentor for other international writers and co-instructed the “Literature in the Making” course. Goeritz’s latest novel, Parker, was published in 2018.
Environmental Studies
Karen DeMatteo, PhD, joins Environmental Studies as a lecturer. DeMatteo has a long relationship with Washington University; she has lectured with Environmental Studies on a part-time basis since 2008 and has been a research scientist in the Department of Biology since 2014. She now serves as a full-time lecturer focusing on geographic information systems. DeMatteo earned her doctorate from Saint Louis University and holds adjunct appointments at the WildCare Institute - Saint Louis Zoo and the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Her research is focused on the biology and ecological interactions that occur at species and community level, and her research methods include ecological genetics, GIS technology, behavioral ecology, physiological ecology, and reproductive physiology.
David Webb joins Environmental Studies as a lecturer. Webb teaches courses on sustainability in business, ecological economics, and community engagement for sustainable development. From 2015-19, he directed the Emerson Leadership Institute at St. Louis University (SLU). Also at SLU, he earned a master’s degree in sustainability, served as executive co-chair of the St. Louis Climate Summit, and had leadership roles within the university’s Center for Sustainability. Since spring 2018, Webb has taught individual courses with Environmental Studies; he now works with the program on a full-time basis. He is certified through the International Society of Sustainability Professionals.
Film and Media Studies
James Fleury, PhD, joins Film and Media Studies as a lecturer. Fleury’s research focuses on the increasing overlap between the American film and technology industries. He is working on a monograph about the history of Hollywood studios in the video game business, with an emphasis on Warner Bros. and its conglomerate owners. He is the co-editor of the anthology The Franchise Era: Managing Media in the Digital Economy (Edinburgh University Press, 2019) and has served as a research fellow in UCLA's Digital Incubator and Think Tank. Earlier this year, Fleury earned his doctorate in Cinema and Media Studies at UCLA.
Chang-Min Yu, PhD, joins Film and Media Studies as a lecturer. Yu earned his doctorate earlier this year from the film studies program at the University of Iowa. His dissertation, titled “Corporeal Modernism: Transnational Body Cinema since 1968,” considers the body as a medium—not as mere representation in cinema—to examine the relationship between the bodies on screen and before the screen. Other work has been published in such journals as Film Criticism and Quarterly Review of Film and Video. His research interests lie in corporeal cinema, figural studies, sci-fi cinema, and contemporary Hollywood blockbusters.
Germanic Languages and Literatures
Mary Allison, PhD, joins the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures as a lecturer. Allison has served as a mentor to teaching assistants and as graduate supervisor of beginning-level German courses, and she is passionate about strengthening pedagogical practice and curriculum development. Additionally, she researches topics in Germanic linguistics, and her main interests lie in the growing subfield of historical sociolinguistics. Allison’s doctoral thesis, "Immigration and dialect formation in Nuremberg: The role of koineization in the development of the diminutive suffix system," investigates the intersection of historical events and language change. She earned her doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
André Fischer, PhD, joins the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures as an assistant professor. A scholar of German literature, European cinema, and visual arts as well as intellectual history, he specializes in interwar and postwar modernism in artistic practice and aesthetic theory. In his current book project, he examines artistic myth-making practices in German postwar art, cinema, and literature. He has published articles on Werner Herzog, Peter Weiss, Bertolt Brecht, and Hans Henny Jahnn. Prior to Fischer’s appointment at Washington University, he was an assistant professor at Auburn University. He earned his doctorate from Stanford University in 2017.
History
Kristoffer Smemo, PhD, joins the Department of History as a visiting lecturer. Smemo is a historian of the United States specializing in social movements, political parties, public policy, and urban spaces in the long twentieth century. He teaches introductory survey courses and specialized classes on the social and political histories of the United States and the world. Smemo’s current book project, Making Republicans Liberal: Social Struggle and the Politics of Accommodation in Twentieth Century America, is under contract at the University of Pennsylvania Press. He earned his doctorate from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies
Flora Cassen, PhD, joins the Department of Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies and the Department of History as an associate professor. Most recently, Cassen served on the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her 2017 book, Marking the Jews in Renaissance Italy: Politics, Religion, and the Power of Symbols, published by Cambridge University Press, offers an analysis of the discriminatory marks that the Jews were compelled to wear in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy. Her second book project studies how Italian Jews became subjects of the Spanish Empire in the sixteenth century, and how they understood the empire’s colonial endeavors in the Americas. She is also working on a short textbook on antisemitism, which is under contract with Routledge.
Martin Luther Chan joins the Department of Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies as a lecturer. Chan's fields of interests include Hebrew Bible, Arabic, and language pedagogy. His research is on the sociolinguistics of Biblical languages. This semester, Chan is teaching multiple levels of Modern Hebrew language courses. He is completing his doctorate at UCLA.
John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics
Tazeen M. Ali, PhD, joins the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics as an assistant professor. Ali’s research and teaching focus on Islam in America, women’s religious authority, and Islam, gender, and race. Her book-in-progress, Rethinking Interpretative Authority: Gender, Race, and Scripture at the Women’s Mosque of America, analyzes how American Muslim women negotiate the Islamic tradition to cultivate religious authority and build gender-equitable worship communities. Ali earned her doctorate in Religious Studies from Boston University in 2019. She was a visiting postgraduate student in Islamic Studies at the University of Edinburgh from 2017–18. Prior to that she earned a graduate certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Boston University, as well as a master’s degree in Islamic Studies from Washington University in St. Louis.
Mathematics and Statistics
Aliakbar Daemi, PhD, joins the Department of Mathematics and Statistics as an assistant professor. In his research, Daemi uses geometrical tools provided by gauge theory to study low dimensional objects. His interests include gauge theory, low-dimensional topology, and symplectic geometry. After earning his doctorate from Harvard University, Daemi served as a research assistant professor at Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook University. Most recently, he was a visiting assistant professor at Columbia University. His work is supported by the National Science Foundation.
Francesco Di Plinio, PhD, joins the Department of Mathematics and Statistics as an assistant professor. Di Plinio’s research interests include harmonic analysis and partial differential equations, and his current project "Singular integrals with modulation or rotational symmetries" is sponsored by the National Science Foundation. Prior to his appointment at Washington University, he served on the mathematics faculty at the University of Virginia and Brown University. He earned his doctorate in pure mathematics from Indiana University Bloomington. This semester, he will teach Calculus II.
Soumendra Lahiri, PhD, joins the Department of Mathematics and Statistics as the Stanley A. Sawyer Professor. Lahiri joined the faculty of NC State University in 2012 and was named a Distinguished Professor of Statistics in 2014. His research interests include resampling and computer intensive methods, financial statistics and econometrics, spatial and environmental statistics, asymptotic expansions, and social science and security applications of data analytics. Lahiri is the author of two books and more than 100 papers, and his work has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Security Agency, among others. He serves as an editor of Sankhya, Series A, and he earned his doctorate from Michigan State University.
Music
Esther Viola Kurtz, PhD, has accepted an assistant professor position with the Department of Music. After earning her doctorate in ethnomusicology from Brown University in 2018, Kurtz became a postdoctoral teaching fellow here at WashU. So far in the department, her courses have included “Music Ethnography and Fieldwork Methodologies” and “Ethnomusicology.” Kurtz’s research focuses on African diasporic sound-movement practices as sites for generating new ways of thinking about race, gender, and politics. Her current book project critically examines the political potentials and shortcomings of cross-racial affinity cultivated in a group of capoeira Angola, the Afro-Brazilian fight-dance-game.
Lauren Eldridge Stewart, PhD, joins the Department of Music as an assistant professor. Eldridge Stewart's research interests include the cultural uses of classical music, folklore, and material culture across the African diaspora. She earned her doctorate from the University of Chicago in 2016 after defending her dissertation, titled "Playing Haitian: Musical Negotiations of Nation, Genre, and Self." She has taught in the music departments of the University of Chicago, Columbia College Chicago, and Spelman College, and performed Haitian piano repertoire both in Haiti and across the U.S. Her work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the American Musicological Society.
Philosophy
Boyd Millar, PhD, joins the Department of Philosophy as a lecturer. Millar specializes in the philosophy of mind, and his present research concerns perceptual experience and the ethics of belief. His recent and forthcoming papers appear in journals such as Mind & Language, Episteme, and The Journal of Philosophy. Millar earned his doctorate from the University of Toronto, and he has previously held positions at the University of Buffalo and Northern Illinois University.
Janella Baxter, PhD, joins the Department of Philosophy as a lecturer. Baxter is a philosopher of the sciences, specializing in the history and philosophy of biology and technology. Her work falls under three related categories – the role of technology in causal explanation, the nature of technological innovation, and social, political, and ethical questions concerning the development and use of technology. After earning her doctorate at the University of Illinois, Chicago, she held postdoctoral research positions at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Minnesota. This semester, Baxter is teaching courses on biomedical ethics and environmental ethics.
Physics
Manel Errando, PhD, transitions into the role of assistant professor in the Department of Physics. Errando first came to Washington University in 2015 as a research scientist, and in 2017 he became a lecturer. His research interests include the study of X-ray and gamma-ray emission from accreting black holes and stellar-mass binaries, as well as developing new high-energy astrophysics instrumentation. He has won numerous grants and awards from NASA, including the Nancy Grace Roman Technology Fellowship for Early Career Researchers in 2018. Errando teaches introductory physics and solar system astronomy; earlier this year, he won ArtSci Council’s Excellence in Teaching Award in Science. He earned his doctorate from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
Augusto Medeiros da Rosa, PhD, joins the Department of Physics as a lecturer. Medeiros does research on models of particle dark matter and their astrophysical implications. This semester, he is teaching introductory physics and honors problem solving. He earned his doctorate from Washington University earlier this year.
Political Science
Taylor Carlson, PhD, joins the Department of Political Science as an assistant professor. Carlson studies political communication, political psychology, and race/ethnicity in American politics. With coauthors Marisa Abrajano and Lisa García Bedolla, Carlson’s book Talking Politics: Political Discussion Networks and the New American Electorate is under contract with Oxford University Press. Her work has also been published in the Journal of Politics and American Political Science Review, among other journals. Carlson is also working on a book funded by the National Science Foundation with Jaime Settle. She earned her doctorate from the University of California, San Diego, in 2019.
William Nomikos, PhD, joins the Department of Political Science as an assistant professor. Nomikos’s research focuses on international efforts to reduce post-conflict fragility in developing settings, particularly in West Africa, where he has conducted fieldwork. He manages a geocoded dataset on UN peacekeeping deployments to Africa covering 1999-2018. Nomikos earned his doctorate from Yale University in 2018 with a dissertation titled “Local Peace, International Builders: How the UN Builds Peace from the Bottom Up.” His work has been published in the Journal of Politics, International Security, and the Journal of Peace Research.
Carly Wayne, PhD, joins the Department of Political Science as an assistant professor. Wayne’s research lies at the intersection of security studies, modern warfare, terrorism, and the psychology of political violence. She is particularly interested in exploring the strategic and psychological dimensions of terrorism. Her work is published or forthcoming at a number of journals, including the Journal of Conflict Resolution and Journal of Peace Research. Her book, The Polythink Syndrome (with Alex Mintz), was awarded the 2016 Alexander George Book Award by the International Society of Political Psychology for best book in the field of political psychology. Wayne earned a doctorate from the University of Michigan in 2019.
Psychological & Brain Sciences
Wouter Kool, PhD, joins the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences as an assistant professor. Using a broad range of tools and perspectives from experimental psychology, neuroscience, behavioral economics, and machine learning, Kool focuses his research on questions that lie at the intersection of decision making and cognitive control. Recently, his work has been published in Psychological Science, Nature Human Behaviour, and other outlets. Kool earned his doctorate from Princeton University in 2015 and went on to become a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. In 2017, he earned the best talk award for the Meeting of the Society for Neuroeconomics.
Sociology
Patrick Ishizuka, PhD, joins the sociology department as an assistant professor. Ishizuka specializes in demography and social inequality at the work-family intersection, including research on parenting norms, how money and work affect couples’ relationship outcomes, and employment discrimination against mothers. One recent article, “Social Class, Gender, and Contemporary Parenting Standards in the United States: Evidence from a National Survey Experiment,” was covered by The New York Times, The Atlantic, and other national outlets. Ishizuka most recently served as the Frank H.T. Rhodes Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University, a position he accepted after earning his doctorate at Princeton University in 2016.
Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Heather Berg, PhD, joins the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies as an assistant professor. Berg’s research explores sexuality, work, and social struggle. Her book Porn Work, under contract with UNC Press, draws on ethnography and policy analysis to explore precarity and resistance in the U.S. porn industry. Berg earned her doctorate from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2016 and has taught at the University of Southern California. At Washington University she will be teaching classes in sexuality studies and feminist theory.
René Esparza, PhD, joins the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies as an assistant professor. Currently, Esparza is working on a book manuscript, From Vice to Nice: Race, Sex, and the Gentrification of AIDS, which analyzes how the racial, sexual, and geographic coordinates of the Upper Midwest bore upon privacy-based approaches to LGBTQ equality that emerged in response to the AIDS epidemic. Esparza earned his doctorate in American Studies from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Most recently, he was a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.