This fall, 22 new researchers and instructors join 10 humanities departments and programs in Arts & Sciences. You can also read about our new faculty in the natural sciences and social sciences.
Welcome to our incoming faculty!
African and African-American Studies
Thembelani Mbatha joins the Department of African and African-American Studies as an assistant professor after spending the 2023-2024 academic year as a postdoctoral fellow in the department. He is an interdisciplinary scholar of global Black thought, and the literary and cultural histories of Africa and the African diaspora. His work focuses on the histories of Blackness and the politics of memory in the postcolonial and Black Atlantic worlds. Mbatha earned his bachelor’s degree at the University of the Witwatersrand, his master’s degree at the University of Cape Town, and his doctorate at Princeton University.
Classics
Christopher Erdman joins the John and Penelope Biggs Department of Classics as an assistant professor. A specialist in Roman history, Erdman’s research examines the state institutions and political culture of the ancient Roman Republic. Prior to joining WashU, he spent a year at the American Academy in Rome as a Rome Prize recipient. Erdman received a bachelor’s degree at Cornell University and completed his doctorate at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Regina Loehr joins the John and Penelope Biggs Department of Classics as a lecturer. Loehr is interested in ancient Greek and Roman historiography, ancient popular politics and social movement, and emotion and empathy in ancient historical literature. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Truman State University and a master’s and doctorate from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
East Asian Languages and Cultures
Michael Crandol joins the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures as a lecturer. His teaching and research center on Japanese film, animation, and popular media, as well as traditions of the monstrous and supernatural in East Asian culture. Crandol specializes in the history of Japanese horror films and is particularly interested in how popular notions of genre are recontextualized across cultural-linguistic borders. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the College of William and Mary, and a master’s and doctorate from the University of Minnesota.
Yuan (Kevin) Gao joins the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures as a lecturer. He specializes in the cultural politics of technology in modern and contemporary China and his interdisciplinary research spans literature, film and media, environmental humanities, and queer studies from the early 20th century to the present. Before he joined the EALC faculty, he was a Center for the Humanities fellow. Gao earned his doctorate at WashU.
Jue Lu joins the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures as a lecturer, teaching courses in modern Chinese. Her teaching and research interests include modern Chinese literature with a focus on autobiographical writings and practices from the late Qing and early Republican periods, as well as language pedagogy, heritage cultural learning, and content-based curriculum development. Prior to joining WashU, she was a Chinese language lecturer at Princeton University. Lu earned her doctorate in Chinese and comparative literature at WashU.
Ayami Morita joins the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures as a lecturer, teaching courses in Japanese language. Prior to WashU, she taught at Franklin & Marshall College, Middlebury Summer Language School, and Bowdoin College. Morita has a master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Ayuka Suemasa joins the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures as a lecturer, teaching courses in Japanese language. Suemasa joins EALC after teaching Japanese for two years at Oberlin College and Middlebury Summer Language School. She has a master’s degree from the University of Utah.
English
Eduardo Corral joins the Department of English as an associate professor. His debut poetry collection, “Slow Lightning,” was chosen for the 2011 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. His second collection, “Guillotine,” was longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award. His poems have appeared in Ambit, New England Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, and Poetry. He has received a Whiting Writers' Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Hodder Fellowship, the National Holmes Poetry Prize, and the Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry. Before joining WashU, Corral taught in the MFA program at North Carolina State University. He has degrees from Arizona State University and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Julius Fleming joins the Department of English as an associate professor. Specializing in Afro-diasporic literatures and cultures, he has a particular interest in performance studies, Black political culture, diaspora, and colonialism, especially where they intersect with race, gender, and sexuality. He is the author of “Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation,” which reconsiders the Civil Rights Movement from the perspective of Black theater. His work has appeared in American Literature, American Literary History, South Atlantic Quarterly, Callaloo, and The James Baldwin Review. Fleming earned a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania.
Bernadette Myers joins the Department of English as an assistant professor. She is a scholar of early modern English literature and culture, specializing in theater, the environmental humanities, and the material culture of early modern London. Her research has been supported by the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Shakespeare Association of America, which awarded her the J. Leeds Barroll Dissertation Prize in 2022. Before joining WashU, she was a postdoctoral fellow at NYU Gallatin and Columbia University. Myers earned her bachelor’s degree at the University of Kansas and her master’s and doctorate at Columbia University.
Danielle Ridolfi joins the Department of English as a lecturer in children's studies. Ridolfi is a graphic designer, illustrator, and visual culture scholar. Her studio work includes children’s picture book illustration and her debut self-authored picture book “When the Dark Clouds Come” has been acquired by a major publisher. Her research centers on the pedagogical use of images, collage as an object-based practice, and the legacy of racism and colonialism in illustrated children's media. She currently serves as guest editor for The Journal of Illustration. She earned an MFA in illustration and visual culture from WashU’s Sam Fox School and a doctorate in clinical psychology from Kent State University.
History
Steven B. Miles returns to the Department of History as a professor and interim director of Global Studies. Common themes in his research include the physical movements of people across space and the seasonality and rhythms of urban life in 19th-century Chinese cities. He is the editor-in-chief of the journal Late Imperial China and the creator and custodian of the database “Cantonese Migrant Networks: Stone Inscriptions from the West River Basin.” Miles earned his bachelor’s degree from Trinity University, his master’s degree from The University of Texas at Austin, and his doctorate from the University of Washington.
Marjan Wardaki joins the Department of History as an assistant professor. Previously at Yale University, Wardaki specializes in the history of science. She is a historian of the Global South with an interest in the history of knowledge, empire, and migration. Her research analyzes the formation of diasporic scientific communities, specifically the role of migrants in the circulation of scientific objects, ideas, and practices. She is working on a book titled “Decolonial Science: South Asian Migrants in Interwar Germany and the Making of Modern Afghanistan.” Wardaki earned her doctorate from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Music
Kimberly Jeong joins the Department of Music as a visiting lecturer. The Korean Canadian cellist is passionate about community engagement through performance mediums and promoting a more equitable music education for all. As a musician and an educator, her performances have been heard on CBC Radio, BBC, and Chandos Records, as well as in concert spaces and classrooms around the world. Jeong holds degrees from the Eastman School of Music and the Yale School of Music. She is a doctoral candidate at Northwestern University.
Performing Arts Department
Zachariah Ezer joins the Performing Arts Department as an assistant professor. He is a playwright whose work animates theoretical quandaries through theatrical forms. His plays include “The Freedom Industry,” “Address the Body!,” and “Legitime,” among others. His work has been published by Concord Theatricals/Samuel French, Smith & Kraus, American Blues Theater, and New World Theatre. He is a Dramatists Guild Foundation Catalyst Fellow, the winner of Kumu Kahua Theatre’s Hawai’i Prize, and a member of The Liberation Theatre Company’s Writing Residency. He is currently under commission from Theater J. Ezer earned his bachelor’s degree from Wesleyan University and his MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a Michener Fellow.
Philosophy
Marina DiMarco joins the Department of Philosophy as an assistant professor. Her primary research areas are the feminist philosophy of science, philosophy of biology, and philosophy of medicine. She is especially interested in big data biology, biotechnology, and biosocial science. Before joining WashU, DiMarco was an assistant professor at Northeastern University. She earned her bachelor’s degree at Middlebury College and her doctorate at the University of Pittsburgh.
David Kinney joins the Department of Philosophy as an assistant professor. His areas of specialization include cognitive science, philosophy of science, and formal epistemology, with a focus on both intuitive and scientific modes of causal cognition. He has also published on decision theory, digital humanities, and philosophy of race. Previously, he was a lecturer at Yale University and a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University and the Santa Fe Institute. Kinney earned his bachelor’s degree at Dartmouth College and his master’s and doctorate at the London School of Economics.
Luis Rosa joins the Department of Philosophy as a lecturer. His research probes things that muddle the mind and get in the way of its search for knowledge, including uncertainty, misleading evidence, ambiguity, doubts concerning our cognitive powers, disagreement, indeterminacy, incoherence, paradoxes, defective questions, and situations that call for suspension of judgment. He is also interested in logic, cognitive science, and literature. Prior to joining the Department of Philosophy at WashU, Rosa was an assistant professor of philosophy at CONCEPT, University of Cologne.
Romance Languages and Literatures
Allison Milner joins the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures as a lecturer. She is a Hispanic linguist specializing in sociolinguistics and phonetics with a focus on exploring and validating varieties of Spanish spoken in the United States. She is passionate about mentoring and teaching, with prior experience as an assistant professor of Spanish at the University of Central Florida. A St. Louis native, Milner received her bachelor’s degree at Wartburg College and completed her graduate studies at the University of Houston.
Paolo Scartoni joins the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures as a lecturer. His research focuses on the relationship between music and language in medieval Italian literature. He is the chief associate editor and encoder at Petrarchive, the first born-digital edition of Petrarch’s songbook. Before joining WashU, he designed and taught courses on Italian language and culture at Rutgers University and Vassar College. He earned his doctorate at Rutgers.
Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Allison S. Reed joins the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies as an assistant professor. She studies how health and disability shape political participation, especially among minoritized populations. Her peer-reviewed work appears in Mobilization: An International Quarterly and Social Science & Medicine. Reed earned her bachelor’s degree from WashU, where she was a John B. Ervin Scholar. She earned her master’s and doctorate from the University of Chicago.
