New Tenure Line Faculty 2008

 

African American Studies

 

Eric Tang has conducted a great deal of ethnographical and historical research on Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees who have resettled in urban America. Within these communities, he also has served as an activist organizing and working alongside Vietnamese and Cambodian war refugees to increase their access to public health services and advancing their rights within the welfare state. Dr. Tang has taught various courses in Asian American studies, Africana studies, urban studies, and labor studies at Queens College’s Worker Education Center, Hunter College, and New York University. He has published several articles on urban community activism, social movement theory, and the intersection of race and work in the global economy. His article, “Boat People: The Vietnamese Community and Katrina” in Colorlines (March 2006) won the Best Katrina Coverage Award 2006, New American Media. Dr. Tang will continue his research and analysis of the shifting racial and gendered landscapes of urban America. His current project focuses on the lives of Cambodian refugees in urban America, exploring the ways in which their resettlement to postindustrial cities intersected with the struggle of African Americans and Latinos in the throes of the urban crisis of the 1970s and ’80s. In addition, Dr. Tang will lead the ongoing efforts to formalize an Asian American studies program on campus. Dr. Tang played a key role in the development of Asian American studies programs at New York University and Columbia University. Professor Tang received a BA in Africana and American History and a PhD in American Studies from New York University

 

Johari Jabir received his PhD in Religious Studies with an emphasis in women’s studies from the University of California at Santa Barbara. He specializes in black religion, black masculinity, black sacred music, cultural historical studies, religion and the arts, and women’s studies. He holds a BA degree in music from Fontbonne University in St. Louis, Missouri. Dr. Jabir earned a Masters of Divinity degree from the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California and while there served as the coordinator of the African American Roundtable Project for the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry. His PhD dissertation, entitled “One More Valiant Soldier Here: Music, Masculinity, and Manhood in the Black Religious Imaginary,” examines a catalog of spirituals sung by the South Carolina Volunteers. Currently, he is working on a research pilot project that will explore the role of religion and spirituality in the lives of HIV positive black gay men, as an Andrew Mellon postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University.

 

Corey Capers will officially join the faculty of African American Studies in Fall 2008. Prior to this, he held an appointment as an assistant professor in History and affiliate of African American studies at UIC. Dr. Capers teaches Early American History from contact to the antebellum period on topics including race making, nationalism, popular culture and religion. His research draws on interdisciplinary methodologies (including history, literary studies, anthropology, feminist and woman’s studies, and African American Studies) to examine the relationship between the construction of race, popular performance and nationalism in the northern United States between the War for American Independence and 1830s. He is currently revising the manuscript and working on two articles: “Race, Printing and Society in Boston’s Early Republic, 1816 - 1824” and “Black Voices/White Print: Towards a Genealogy of Public Blackness.

 

Anthropology

 

Vincent La Motta is an archaeologist who specializes in the evolution of complex societies, historical archaeology, ethno zoology, ceramic analysis and the anthropology of religion. Professor La Motta has carried out extensive research on the Native American societies of the Southwestern United States. He received his PhD in 2006 from the University of Arizona, and his most recent project was funded by the National Science Foundation.

 

Biological Sciences

 

Dr. Emily Minor earned her BS and PhD degrees from Central Florida University and Duke University, respectively. Emily is a landscape ecologist with a special interest in urban ecology. Her research has focused on the effects of human development and habitat fragmentation on a number of ecological issues including the distribution of forest birds, the spread of non-native plants, and conservation planning for a variety of species. She spent two years as a National Parks Ecological Research (NPER) postdoctoral fellow at the University of MD Center for Environmental Science (UMCES) Appalachian Laboratory before joining the UIC faculty in 2008.

 

Dr. Liang-Wei Gong received his PhD in Physiology and Neuroscience from South Medical College in China in 2000, and was a research associate scientist at Yale University before joining the Department of Biological Sciences at UIC in 2008. For his post-doctoral training he worked in the laboratory of Professor Pietro De Camilli at Yale University University before joining the Department of Biological Sciences at UIC in 2008. He studies ion channels and vesicle release in mammalian neurons. He is interested in mechanisms involved in neurotransmitter release and synaptic vesicle recycling using biophysical, cell biological and genetic methods.

 

Chemistry

 

Laura Anderson is a synthetic organic and organometallic chemist. Laura received her BA in chemistry from Knox College and her PhD from UC Berkeley where she worked with Bob Bergman and John Arnold on the development of new hydroamination methods. From there she went to UC Irvine, where she did postdoctoral studies with Keith Woerpel on silirene-mediated methods for the synthesis of allelic amines as an NIH Ruth L. Kirschtein NRSA Postdoctoral Fellow. Laura’s research interests are focused on the development of new synthetic methods. She is interested in improving and designing concerted reactions that rapidly increase molecular complexity and provide facile access to organic fragments that are commonly found in pharmaceutical targets.

 

Jung-Hyun Min is a biochemist who specializes in DNA repair. Jyng-Hyun received her BA in chemistry from Seoul National University and her PhD from University of Washington where she worked with Michael Gelb on the activation mechanism of membrane-bound plasma platelet activating factor acetylhydrolase. This work provided new insight into the role of the enzyme against inflammatory diseases such as asthma and atherosclerosis. From there she went to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, where she did postdoctoral studies with Nikola Pavletich on structural and biochemical understanding of multi-protein and protein-DNA complexes. She determined the crystal structures of two protein-protein and DNA-protein complexes, which provided important structural basis for the cellular response to the oxygen availability and the protection against radiation-induced skin cancer, respectively.

 

Communication

 

Sharon Meraz has a PhD in journalism at the University of Texas at Austin (Dec. 2007). She has an MA in Journalism from the University of Texas in Austin (2003). Her BA is in English and Economics from the University of West Indies. Her research focuses on political communication, citizen journalism and activism, and new technologies.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jungyan (Elaine) Yuan received the PhD in media, technology and society in the summer of 2007. She received a MA in Marketing Communication from the University of Connecticut in 2001 and a BA in English from Beijing International Studies University in 1996. Her dissertation on “The New Multi-Channel Media Environment in China,” received the NU School of Communication Dissertation Award in 2007. She has published studies on media innovation in China in such outlets as Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, one of the largest circulation and most cited journals in the discipline.

 

 

Zizi Papacharissi's work focuses on the social and political consequences of online media, and has been published in The Harvard Journal of International Press & Politics, The Communication Yearbook, New Media & Society, The Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, Journalism Quarterly, Journal of Communication Inquiry, Visual Communication Quarterly, and other journals and edited readers on online media and politics. She serves on several editorial boards, including New Media and Society and Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media. Featured in Who is Who of American Teachers 2007, she teaches courses on communication theory, political communication, the information society, digital democracy, and communication research methods. Her book, A Private Sphere: Democracy in a Digital Age (Polity Press, 2009) discusses how online media redefine our understanding of public and private in late-modern democracies, thus outlining new parameters for civic engagement in a digital age. Prior to joining the Communication faculty at UIC, she served as Associate Dean for Graduate Programs and Research for the School of Communications and Theater at Temple University, where she was also Associate (2006-2008) and Assistant Professor (2000-2006).

 

Criminology, Law & Justice

 

Bill McCarty earned his PhD in criminal justice from the University of Nebraska-Omaha in 2008. Bill received his MA degree in criminal justice from the University of Nebraska-Omaha in 2004 and a B.A. in sociology from Creighton University in 2002. His primary research interest involves how neighborhood characteristics affect opportunities for criminal activity. His dissertation examined levels of crime and calls for service in mobile home communities. His research interests also include quantitative methods, police organizations, and correctional staff and management. He spent three years helping to evaluate the Nebraska Serious and Violent Offender Re-entry Initiative.

 

Peter R. Ibarra received his PhD in Sociology from the University of California at Santa Cruz and was a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the UCLA Department of Sociology. Before arriving at UIC, Dr. Ibarra was an Associate Professor of Sociology at Syracuse University. He is currently involved in two collaborative projects: one is a study of neighborhood life and collective biographies in the Hollywood section of Los Angeles; the second examines the use of GPS technologies in response to domestic violence. Dr. Ibarra’s interests include social problems theory, policing, immigrant communities, emotion and everyday life, crime and deviance, technology and social control, and urban ethnography. He teaches courses on qualitative research methods, policing, race in criminal justice, and the sociology of crime and deviance.

 

Earth and Environmental Sciences

 

Andrew Dombard who was a senior professional staff member in the Planetary Exploration Group at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, is now a Associate Professor in the department. Andrew is a planetary scientist who specializes in numerical modeling of planetary tectonics and geodesy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

English

 

Anna Kornbluh received her BA from Macalester College (1999), an MA in Film Studies and Critical Pedagogy from UCLA (2001), and her PhD from UC Irvine (2007). She was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the English department at UIC from 2007 to 2008. Her areas of specialization include Victorian Literature and Culture, Film Studies, and Marxist Theory. She is currently at work on a book manuscript called “Ethics and Economies in Mid-Victorian Realist Form,” which studies the ethical engagements occasioned by the rhetorical and social uncertainties associated with finance capitalism. She has published several essays on Hollywood cinema, including an article on Boogie Nights and Blow, which appeared in Understanding Film: Marxist Perspectives (2005).

 

English/History

 

Sunil Agnani received his BA from the University of Michigan (1991), an MA from Magdalene College, Cambridge University (1994), and his PhD from Columbia University (2004). After receiving a fellowship from the Princeton Society of Fellows from 2003 to 2005, he was Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan from 2005 to 2008. His areas of interest include eighteenth century French and English literature, the philosophy of the Enlightenment, postcolonial literature, and postcolonial theory. He has published widely on these subjects in prominent journals including PMLA, Cultural Critique, and Postcolonial Studies. He is currently completing a book manuscript called “Enlightenment Universalism and Colonial Knowledge: Denis Diderot and Edmund Burke,” in which he reads the literature of the European Enlightenment through the lens of postcolonial theory.

 

Germanic Studies

 

Professor Patrick Fortmann was an assistant Professor at Tulane University from 2005 until 2008. He has also been a visiting professor at Harvard and the University of Augsburg. He has published widely in the field of German literature and culture, including several articles on Kafka and Büchner. He received his PhD from Harvard in 2005 and has an MAT in foreign language teaching from the University of Utah.

 

 

 

Latin American & Latino Studies

 

Xochitl Bada has a master’s degree from the New School for Social Research and one from the University of Chicago where she worked on questions of immigration and global cities. Her PhD is form the University of Notre Dame where she continued her work on the rise of home town associations and their relationship with homelands.

 

Mathematics

 

Alexey Cheskidov received his PhD from the University of Indiana in 2004. He has held postdoctoral positions at the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago. His research interests are in applied analysis, partial differential equations and fluid dynamics.

 

David Dumas received his PhD from Harvard in 2004. He held a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at Rice and Brown Universities and a postdoctoral position at Brown. His research interests are in Teichmuller theory, Kleinian Groups, and hyperbolic geometry.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Michael Greenblatt received his PhD from Princeton in 1998. He has held postdoctoral positions at MIT and the University of Wisconsin and an Assistant Professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He works in harmonic analysis applying resolution of singularities.

 

Alina Marian received her PhD from Harvard in 2004. Before coming to UIC she was a Gibbs Instructor at Yale and a member of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton. She works in algebraic geometry and connections to mathematical physics.

 

Mara Martinez received her PhD from Tufts University in 2008. Her specialty is mathematics education.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Irina Nenciu received her PhD from the California Institute of Technology in 2005 and held a postdoctoral position at the Courant Institute at NYU. Her research interests are in partial differential equations, integrable systems and random matrices.

 

Christian Rosendal received his PhD from Universite Paris VI in 2003. Before coming to UIC he was a Bateman Instructor at CalTech and an Assistant Professor at UIUC. He works in descriptive set theory and connections to dynamics and functional analysis.

 

Junhui Wang received his PhD from the University of Minnesota in 2006. Before coming to UIC he held a postdoctoral position at Columbia University. He works in statistics, specializing in statistical learning theory.

 

Stefan Wenger received his PhD from ETH in Zurich in 2004 and then postdoctoral positions in Basel and the Courant Institute at NYU. His research is in geometric measure theory.

 

Philosophy

 

John Whipple ’s area of specialization is early modern philosophy. He is interested in fundamental metaphysical and epistemological issues such as causation, theories of finite substance, self-knowledge, and the relation between finite substances and God. His current research focuses on Leibniz’s mature philosophy, particularly the theory of monads, his account of intra-substantial causation, and his views on creation, conservation, and concurrence. He is also working on arguments for dualism and the mental status of sensible qualities in Malebranche and Descartes, and on the relations between Hobbes’s mechanistic conception of nature, his political philosophy, and his philosophical theology. His publications include “The Structure of Leibnizian Simple Substances,” forthcoming in the British Journal for the History of Philosophy; “Hobbes on Miracles,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly (2008); “The Dustbin Theory of Mind: A Cartesian Legacy?” Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy (2006) (co-author Lawrence Nolan); and “Self Knowledge in Descartes and Malebranche,” Journal of the History of Philosophy (2005) (co-author Lawrence Nolan).

 

Physics

 

Richard Cavanaugh Assistant Professor with the joint appointment at UIC and Fermilab specializes in High Energy Particle Physics. After graduating with honors in physics and mathematics from Southern College of SDA he went on to pursue his PhD at the Florida State University working on measurement of the W boson mass. After graduating with PhD in 1999 he worked as scientist in Heidelberg, Germany before joining University of Florida as Research Professor where he supervised a number of graduate students. Since 2001 he has been a member of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Collaboration, one of four experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, where he investigates prospects to discover supersymmetry in the future experiments and leads efforts to develop diagnostic and data quality monitoring tools for software and physics validation of missing transverse energy reconstruction. He is actively involved in projects aimed at developing Grid technologies for particle physics projects that must collect and analyze petabyte-scale datasets. He routinely collaborates with theorists on projects using supersymmetry to predict the mass of the Higgs boson.

 

Political Science

 

Yue Zhang will defend her PhD dissertation in September at Princeton. Her dissertation is “The Fragmented City: Politics of Urban Preservation in Beijing, Paris, and Chicago.” She is an outstanding hire at her level with already five published journal articles and tow manuscripts in program, and 10 grants as a graduate student. She has delivered 12 conference papers and invited lectures.

 

Psychology

 

Mary Murphy is NSF Minority Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University, a position she took after earning her PhD from Stanford in 2007. Her research examines the ways in which subtle situational cues involving inter-group settings affect people's sense of identity, motivation, thinking processes, and performance. For example, a recent first-author publication in Psychological Science, psychology's leading publication outlet for empirical research reports, documents the effects of such cues on women in science, mathematics, and engineering. Though at a relatively early career stage, Dr. Murphy has been awarded numerous honors, including an NSF graduate fellowship, a College Board National Hispanic Scholar Award, and an Outstanding Teaching Award at Stanford. She also has longstanding interests in political psychology and public policy, which give her overall scholarly work a highly valuable interdisciplinary focus.

 

Benjamin Storm received his PhD in Cognitive Psychology from the University of California at Los Angeles in 2008. His research is focused on issues of encoding, forgetting and retrieval, the most central concepts in the psychology of memory. In particular, he has investigated the relation between retrieval and forgetting. He brings expertise in the central areas of memory research to the department, and his interest in enhancing encoding strategies fits with the cognitive division's theme of combining basic and applied research. His future research plan emphasizes the application of memory research to education, which provides a point of contact with several faculty in psychology and other departments. He has six publications in peer-reviewed journals (five first-authored). These articles have appeared in excellent journals, including JEP: LMC, the Journal of Memory and Language. He has given many presentations at conferences and he has taught Introduction to Psychology. Robert Bjork at UCLA, a leading memory researcher, writes, "Across my career I have had a great good fortune to work with a large number of outstanding graduate students…and Ben is in the top several of that impressive group."

 

Ellen Herbner is a member of the Psychosis clinical program and the First Episode Psychosis programs in the Department of Psychiatry. Dr. Herbener’s research program investigates abnormalities in emotional functioning and affect regulation in individuals with schizophrenia and other major psychiatric disorders. Her primary work focus is on understanding decreases in positive emotional experience and motivation in individuals with schizophrenia. Her lab uses affective neuroscience strategies to target particular aspects of cognitive-emotion integration using both behavioral tasks and functional MRI. Dr. Herbener’s work has received research funding from NARSAD and NIMH.

 

Sociology

 

Claire Laurier Decoteau received her MA and PhD (expected 2008) in Sociology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Decoteau conducted her dissertation research on the bio-politics of HIV/AIDS in post-apartheid South Africa. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research conducted in formal and informal settlements on the outskirts of Johannesburg, the project analyzes the political economy of the post-apartheid health system, the symbolic struggle over the signification of HIV/AIDS taking place in the public sphere, and the ways in which communities profoundly affected by the epidemic incorporate culturally hybrid subjectivities, informed by both indigenous and biomedical healing paradigms. She has recently published an article in Sociological Theory, entitled "The Specter of AIDS: Testimonial Activism in the aftermath of the Epidemic.” Reports on a study of activists living with HIV/AIDS who give testimonials of their experiences with the disease in various educational settings in the US. This paper employs the notion of 'haunting' as a means of analyzing the effect of social justice activism in the aftermath of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Decoteau has also participated extensively in organizations dedicated to HIV/AIDS activism and support in the US, Europe and South Africa. Her areas of interest include: social theory, cultural sociology, sociology of health, globalization, ethnography, and critical gender and race studies.

 

Paul-Brian McInerney joins the faculty at UIC as an assistant professor of sociology. He received his PhD in sociology from Columbia University in 2006. From 2005 to 2008, McInerney was an assistant professor in the sociology department with a joint appointment with the Program on Informatics at Indiana University South Bend. His research focuses on economic and organizational sociology, social studies of technology, social movements and collective behavior, and qualitative methods. McInerney is the author of several journal articles including “Technology Movements and the Politics of Free/Open Source Software,” and “Showdown at Kykuit: Field-Configuring Events as Loci for Conventionalizing Accounts.” He is currently writing a manuscript about how social movement actors inadvertently lay the institutional groundwork for markets to develop. McInerney is also working on a project studying civic engagement and activism among political canvassers. In the summer 2008, McInerney was a faculty fellow at the NSF-funded Research Institute for the Science of Socio-Technical Systems at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is currently a faculty affiliate at the Center for the Study of Social Movements at the University of Notre Dame and the Center for Organizational Innovation at Columbia University.

 

Spanish, French, Italian & Portuguese

 

Steven Marsh teaches film and Spanish cultural studies. Prior to moving to the US he lived in Madrid for nearly 20 years and continues to spend several months each year in the city. His first single-authored book was entitled Popular Spanish Film under Franco: Comedy and the Weakening of the State (Palgrave: 2006) while previously he had jointly edited the anthology, Gender and Spanish Cinema (Berg: 2004). He is currently working on a counter-history of Spanish sound cinema (under contract with I.B.Tauris) and he is one of the co-authors of the international collaborative book/CD-Rom “Cinema and the Mediation of Everyday Life: an oral history of film-going in 1940s and 1950s Spain”. His teaching and research interests lie in the areas of Hispanic film, cultural theory, urban studies and Spanish politics.