The faculty welcomed 18 new colleagues last week. They include (with more to be listed next week):
English: Katherine Lynes, visiting assistant professor, earned her Ph.D. from Rutgers University with a thesis on “Expectations of Authenticity: Ethnographic and Autoethnographic Poetics in the Harlem Renaissance.” She has held numerous administrative and teaching positions at Rutgers. Her teaching interests include poetry and poetics, African-American literature, ethnic literatures of the United States, modernism, environmental writing and ecoliterature, and stylistics/grammar.
History: Brian Peterson, assistant professor, earned his Ph.D. from Yale University with a dissertation, “Transforming the Village: Migration, Islam and Colonialism in French Southern Mali (West Africa), 1880-1960.” His research interests include West African history, slavery and emancipation, labor migration, Islamic history, and women's and gender history. He has taught at the College of William and Mary, Yale and the University of California at Santa Cruz. Denis Brennan, visiting assistant professor, holds a Ph.D. from the University at Albany. His dissertation was titled, “The Printer's Stand: William Lloyd Garrison and the Liberator.” He has taught at Union, the University at Albany and the State University of New York College at Oneonta.
Mechanical Engineering: Michael Macri II, visiting assistant professor, earned his Ph.D. from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with a dissertation, “On the Development of Novel Domain Discretization, Numerical Integration and Enrichment Strategies for the Method of Finite Spheres.” He has taught at Rensselaer and held positions at NYSERDA and Plug Power.
Modern Languages: Michele Ricci, assistant professor of German, holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University with a dissertation titled, “Lyrical Cardiograms of An Age: German Love Poems, 1895-1924.” She has held teaching positions at Oberlin College, University of Miami and Stanford. Her interests include 20th century German literature, expressionism in fiction and the fine arts, exile culture, postwar fiction, and visual arts and literature in 20th century Berlin. Rose Marie Brougham, visiting assistant professor of Spanish, is completing a Ph.D. from the University of Colorado at Boulder with a dissertation titled, “Mother, Can You Hear Me?: Daughters Forming Subjectivities in Spanish-American Poetry.” She has held teaching positions in the Graduate Teacher Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her professional interests include 20th Century Spanish-American poetry and narrative fiction, Spanish-American poetry written by women, Women's Studies, gender studies and relational psychoanalysis. Yuwen Hsiung, visiting instructor of Chinese, is completing his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Purdue University with a dissertation titled, “Expressionism and Its Deformation in the Contemporary Chinese Theatre.” He has held teaching positions at Purdue, National Institute of Technology in Taichung, Taiwan, National Taiwan Normal University and Michigan State University. His teaching interests include traditional and modern Chinese drama, modern Chinese literature, culture and film studies, Asian-American literature, Semiotics, and Bakhtian and Burkian theories.
Physics and Astronomy: Samuel Amanuel, visiting assistant professor, earned a Ph.D. from Southern Illinois University with a dissertation titled, “Structural, Mechanical, Thermal and Thermomechanical properties of Phenolic Silica Nanocomposites.” He has held teaching positions at Brehm Preparatory School and Southern Illinois University.