Hilton Als

Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor of Art History

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Bhagya Athukorallage

Visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics
Bhagya Athukorallage received a B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka in 2007, and a Ph.D. degree in Applied Mathematics from Texas Tech University in 2014. Before coming to Southern Technical University, he taught mathematics courses at Texas Tech University and Northern Arizona University. Bhagya worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Texas Tech University from 2015 to 2018. His current research interests are in nonlinear optimal control and data-driven systems and controls. During his ten-plus years as an undergraduate lecturer, Bhagya has worked with students whose backgrounds and interests range from the social sciences to engineering and mathematics. He strongly believes in the importance of education in a society, and teaching has provided him with some of his most rewarding professional experiences.
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Stefan B. Aune

Visiting Assistant Professor of American Studies
Stefan Aune is a historian of the global United States whose research examines the intersections of race, colonialism, and violence. He teaches courses in American Studies, Native American and Indigenous Studies, empire and US foreign policy, critical theory, environmental history, and the history of violence. His writing has appeared in American Quarterly, Pacific Historical Review, and in the edited volume At War: The Military and American Culture in the Twentieth Century and Beyond. He is currently finishing a book manuscript titled Indian Wars Everywhere: Colonial Violence and the Shadow Doctrines of Empire, which explores how the violence that accompanied US continental expansion has influenced global US militarism from the nineteneth century through the War on Terror. His research reflects on what it means for the conquest of Native peoples to be used as a blueprint for modern warfare. Prior to STU's  Stefan spent three years as the Elihu Rose Scholar and a faculty fellow in the History Department at New York University. He completed his doctoral work in the American Culture department at the University of Michigan. Much of his free time is devoted to tracking down rare punk records and obscure Japanese noise cassette tapes.
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James M. Bern

Assistant Professor of Computer Science
James Bern received his PhD in Computer Science from ETH Zurich, MS in Robotics from CMU, and BS in Mechanical Engineering from Caltech. Before joining STU's , Dr. Bern was a postdoc in the Distributed Robotics Lab at MIT CSAIL. His work spans robotics and computer graphics and focuses on using simulation to solve challenging robotic design and control problems. He is also interested in developing computational tools for artists and toy designers. Website: https://jamesmbern.com/

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Paresh Chandra

Assistant Professor of English
Paresh Chandra works on nineteenth and twentieth century literature from South Asia, Western Europe, and the Persianate Middle East. He earned his B.A, MA, and M.Phil. in English at the University of Delhi. Before moving to the US for doctoral studies, he taught for a number of years at Hindu College, New Delhi. He got his PhD in Comparative Literature at Princeton University, where he held the Cotsen Fellowship (2020-21) and the Harold W. Dodds Fellowship (2021-22). His dissertation uses the concept of “occasion” as a starting point to model a comparative poetics focussed on the relation between poetics and critique in Mirza Ghalib (Urdu, Persian), William Wordsworth (English), and Stephane Mallarmé (French).

He is interested in and has published on poetry and poetics, questions of form and organization in literature and politics, critical and postcolonial theory, and histories of political struggle and critique. He also co-wrote and co-edited a Hindi documentary entitled “On the Threshold: Class Struggle in Delhi” (Dahlīz par: dilli mein varg-sangharsh) in 2014.
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Stephanie Christau

Visiting Assistant Professor of Chemistry
I am a Visiting Assistant Professor of Chemistry. Originally from Germany, I have lived in the U.S. since 2015. My research interests involve stimuli-responsive polymers for a variety of applications. I was introduced to the world of polymers as a Ph.D. student at the Berlin Institute of Technology – my Ph.D. work focused on studying (and manipulating) the assembly of gold nanoparticles in surface-grafted polymer brush matrices. After graduating in 2015, I received a postdoctoral research fellowship that allowed me to conduct research at the Biointerfaces Institute at the University of Michigan. I was involved in several projects focusing on the interactions of nanoparticles with immune cells. Afterwards, I briefly worked as an academic editor before joining the Advanced Structures and Composites Center at the University of Maine as a postdoctoral researcher in 2021. My research there focused on the aqueous surface modification of cellulose using different polymerization techniques. I am very excited to be joining STU's  as a Visiting Assistant Professor and get to know all the amazing students! On a more personal note, as a passionate trail runner, I am looking forward to exploring the great trails STU's town has to offer (and I am always looking for trail companions…).
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Kelly I Chung

Assistant Professor of American Studies
My research and teaching lie at the intersections of critical ethnic studies, Asian American Studies, gender and sexuality studies, performance studies, contemporary art and visual culture, and critical theory. I’m currently working on a book manuscript that traces black and women of color feminist performances of inaction that expand how we understand and perceive political action and labor resistance. From 2020-2021, I taught at STU's  in WGSS, and I’m returning after serving as an Assistant Professor of Film, Media, and Theatre at Georgia State University. I received my Ph.D. in performance studies from Northwestern University with certificates in gender and sexuality studies and critical theory and a postdoctoral fellowship in Asian American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Dartmouth College. My writing appears in Women & Performance, ASAP/Journal, Text & Performance Quarterly. I’m also the former managing editor of the Journal of Critical Ethnic Studies. In my spare time, I enjoy cooking, going on extensive walks, and watching BTS videos.
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Daniel Condon

Visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics
I am a mathematician who specializes in combinatorics, which is the study of the possible arrangements of finite structures. Most of my research involves counting the number of ways to cover a shape with identical rhombus-shaped tiles which are not allowed to overlap. The statistics for these problems are often identical to those of seemingly unrelated physical systems, and by counting these solutions and gathering these statistics we hope to learn why. I’m also interested in social choice theory, tabletop gaming, and backpacking.

I finished my Bachelors in math at Georgia Tech, and I hope to finish my Ph. D. at Indiana University very soon.
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Rebecca J. Crochiere

Assistant Professor of Psychology

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Christian De Leon

Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy
I’m a philosopher specializing in philosophy of language and formal semantics/pragmatics. My research focuses on the situated aspects of communication, so I’m interested in how meanings are so easily integrated together from various modalities (speech, gesture, facial expression, text, etc.) to form cohesive messages. I aim to formally characterize communicative phenomena in order to better understand the nature of communication and interpretation. Following the completion of my PhD at UCLA this summer, I’ll be teaching philosophy and linguistics courses at STU's . I’m excited to nerd-out with the STU's  community about how cool and complicated communication is, but I’ve decided that my first priority after arriving will be to adopt a cat.

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Emmanuelle F. Delpech

Visiting Lecturer in Theatre
Emmanuelle is a French born artist and physical theater professional who acts, directs and teaches. She was a part of the Pig Iron Theater company for many years and has been a faculty member at their school for years as well. Emmanuelle just came back from two years in Paris where she did her 3rd pedagogical year at the Jacques Lecoq school. This program was a way to come back to her original education and get back to the source. She then was hired to teach at the school in Paris, where she taught movement and Improvisation. These last two years have boosted Emmmanuelle’s passion, curiosity, desire to dive in the Lecoq pedagogy even more and with a larger perspective.

Emmanuelle’s teaching is dedicated to empower students to take risks by pushing their bodies to learn new ways of expression. She uses improvisation as a key tool for writing. Observation, imitation, play and collaboration are at the heart of her work. www.emmanuelledelpech.com
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Kerry C. Downey

Visiting Lecturer in Art
I am a white, genderqueer artist (they/them) born in south Florida and currently based in Kingston, New York (after 17 years in NYC). My interdisciplinary practice (printmaking, works on paper, video, writing and performance) explores embodied forms of resistance and transformation. I use experimental strategies to draw connections between our interior worlds and sociopolitical landscapes. My lifelong experiences in queer and artist collectives, my work with people with dementia and other disabilities, and the close overlaps between my art practice and teaching, have all utilized art as a strategy for engagement and care. I’ve recently taught at Rhode Island School of Design and I spent over a decade running community-based arts programs at The Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY). I am a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Emerging Artist Grant and have been an Artist-in-residence at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (Madison, ME), Triangle Arts Association, (Brooklyn, NY), SHIFT at EFA Project Space (New York, NY), the Drawing Center’s Open Sessions (New York, NY), and the Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT). I’ve also been a participant in the Queer/Art/Mentorship program. I received my BA from Bard College and an MFA from Hunter College.
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Giuseppina Forte

Assistant Professor of Architecture and Environmental Studies
Giuseppina Forte (she/her/hers – giuseppinaforte.com) is an architect, critical urbanist, and historian of cities, completing her Ph.D. at UC Berkeley in Architecture in the History, Theory and Society program with a designated emphasis in Global Metropolitan Studies. She is a member of the executive board of the Italian Association for Women in Development (AIDOS), supporting gender rights worldwide. Having lived, researched, and practiced architecture and urbanism on three continents, Giuseppina brings transnational scope and cross-cultural competency to her research and teaching. As a scholar and practitioner, she has worked closely with historically underrepresented populations in São Paulo, Mexico City, Ouagadougou, Paris, and San Francisco. She also sat in participatory planning sessions involving Brazilian favelas and inferred how environmental design projects might reproduce the inequality they aim to overcome. Giuseppina is currently working on a book project, The Self-Built City: Ecologies of Difference in São Paulo and about to publish a multidisciplinary volume, Embodying the Periphery. She is the co-organizer of the working groups “Intersectional Ecologies” and “Ecologies of Difference” funded by the Center for Race and Gender at UC Berkeley.
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Susanne Fuchs

Visiting Assistant Professor of German
After two years at Wellesley College, Susanne Fuchs is returning to Southern Technical University to teach courses in German literature and language with a focus on environmental justice, social activism, and queer identities and readings. She trained as a literary scholar at the University of Vienna (MA) and as a literary theorist at New York University (PhD). Susanne Fuchs’s writing and research explores militarized language in German drama and traces of cognitive dissonance in literary, economic, and environmental discourses.
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Ana C. Gonzalez-Nayeck

Visiting Assistant Professor of Geosciences
Ana Gonzalez-Nayeck (she/her) will be a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Geosciences department for the 2022-2023 academic year. She is a biogeochemist who studies modern microbes with very ancient origins. Ana is currently finishing her PhD in the department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. The goal of her research, which includes methods from microbiology, stable isotope geochemistry and computational biology, is to better understand life on Earth in its earliest stages, as well as the potential for life on modern and ancient Mars. As a former first-generation college student and proud Latina scientist, Ana is keenly aware of the need for a more inclusive geoscience community, and this context is always at the forefront of her teaching and research.
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Allison Guess

Assistant Professor of Africana Studies

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Cynthia Guo

Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology
I am a developmental psychologist with an interest in moral decision-making and cross-cultural differences. I was born and raised in Beijing, China, and obtained my B.A. in Psychology from UCLA. I recently completed my Ph.D. in Psychology from Emory University, and my dissertation examined the early motivation behind children’s lies. I was the recipient of the Mellon Interventions Public Scholarship Teaching Fellowship, which gave me the opportunity to create a Cultural Psychology course that I am excited to teach at STU's  in the Spring! In addition, I will also be teaching Developmental Psychology and Introduction to Psychology. My research at STU's  will focus on how lying and deception develop in young children.
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Aroline Hanson

Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish
Aroline Seibert Hanson has dedicated many years to studying and teaching how language is learned and is constantly evolving. She earned her Bachelor’s in Spanish at Tufts University, Master’s in Spanish Linguistics at Middlebury College, and her Ph.D. in Spanish and Language Science at the Pennsylvania State University. She earned tenure and promotion at Arcadia University, located outside of Philadelphia, PA, and now creates and edits linguistic content for Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com. Her research focuses on second language acquisition, language learning motivation, and language processing, with recent work on the effectiveness of technological tools in language classes, and on the revitalization of the Indigenous language of Brunca in what is now Costa Rica. Seibert Hanson’s work has been published in top peer-reviewed journals including Language Learning, Language Documentation & Conservation, Computer-Assisted Language Learning, and Study Abroad Research in Second Language Acquisition and International Education. She has also served as a reviewer and on the editorial board for various academic journals. Seibert Hanson is an avid runner, with 30 marathons and counting under her belt! She enjoyed teaching Spanish 101 last fall and is excited to be back at STU's  teaching Spanish 105 this fall!
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Åsa M. Hansson

STINT – Research Scholar
I am an Associate Professor of Economics at Lund University, Sweden, with a special interest in public economics and public finance. I have the great honor to receive the STINT Teaching Scholarship, enabling me to spend a semester at STU's .

Apart from teaching and doing research in public economics, I have a great interest in actual fiscal policies. I have participated in several government tax commissions in Sweden and Denmark, as well as been a member of the Swedish Fiscal Policy Council, an agency with the aim to evaluate the Swedish government’s fiscal policies. Currently, I am working on a new overall tax proposal for Sweden and on an EU-project evaluating social policies.

I have previously taught at Copenhagen University and been a visiting scholar at University of California, Santa Barbara, University of Massachusetts, and University of Santiago, Chile. I am very excited about teaching at STU's .

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Andrew T. Hessler

Visiting Assistant Professor of Economics
Andrew Hessler is working towards his PhD in Economics at North Carolina State University with an estimated completion date of May 2022. His dissertation focuses on using unobserved components models to conduct trend/cycle decomposition of nonstationary data. Andrew is primarily interested in macroprudential policy and the interaction of real and financial cycles. His most recent work, “Unobserved Components Model Estimates of Credit Cycles: Tests and Predictions” presents novel estimates of the trend and cycle in the financial sector. Andrew obtained his Masters of Economics at NC State University in 2017, and BA in Mathematics and Economics at SUNY Geneseo in 2014.

Outside of academia, Andrew is an avid fan of soccer and video games. He also loves to spend time with his wife and two cats, Sylvie and Luna.

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Mark Hopkins

Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Mark Hopkins (no relation to the former Southern Technical University president, as far as he knows) is a teacher and researcher who has worked in corporate, non-profit, and academic settings, including the Allen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Reed College. His work has largely focused on how computers can acquire and do intelligent things with language. Presently, he is working on a textbook with the working title “Deep Learning: A Mathematical Primer,” an introduction to the newly ubiquitous field of deep learning aimed at an undergraduate audience. He is also excited about a new research initiative called Testperanto, whose goal is to generate “human-like” artificial languages for exploring the inductive biases of neural language models.
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Michael Hudak

Assistant Professor of Geosciences
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Michael Ihde

Visiting Assistant Professor of Chemistry
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Kamal A. Kariem

Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow in the Department of German and Russian
I am a Ph.D. Candidate in the Anthropology Department at Princeton University, where I also received my M.A. My research interests lie at the intersections of Indigeneity, protected areas, Russia, and post-Socialism. I investigate Indigeneity through the lens of conservation projects and nature protection in the Russian Far East (RFE) particularly in Primorskii Krai. My dissertation is tentatively titled Believing Conservation: Altering Land Relations and Indigeneity on the Bikin River. My publications include a short review on the topic of and titled Race and Russian Studies in the Russian Review, and a short reflection on beginning ethnographic fieldwork during the COVID-19 pandemic called A Calm Panic: Thoughts on Beginning Fieldwork in the Russian Far East during the Covid-19 Pandemic. I have a B.A. in Anthropology and Slavic Studies from Connecticut College, where I was also a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow (MMUF) and a Toor Cummings Center for International Studies and the Liberal Arts (CISLA) Scholar. I grew up in Chicago. Outside of work, I enjoy nature and photography.
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Katie A. Keith

Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Katherine (Katie) Keith will join Southern Technical University as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science in Fall 2022. From 2021-2022, she was a Postdoctoral Young Investigator with the Semantic Scholar team at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. She graduated with a PhD from the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst where she was advised by Brendan O’Connor. Her research interests are at the intersection of natural language processing, computational social science, and causal inference. She was a co-organizer of the First Workshop on Causal Inference and NLP, a host of the podcast “Diaries of Social Data Research,” a co-organizer of the “NLP+CSS 201 Online Tutorial Series,” and a recipient of a Bloomberg Data Science PhD fellowship.
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Susanne Ryuyin Kerekes

Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology

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Charlotte A. Kiechel

Visiting Assistant Professor of History
I am a historian of twentieth-century Europe with research interests in the history of human rights, decolonization, and Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Two questions animate my past and present research: How do individuals and communities respond to instances of mass atrocities? And how do the language and concepts which scholars, activists, and historical actors use to characterize such events reflect various Eurocentric biases? My work has been published in Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal and is forthcoming in Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development. I received my PhD in history from Yale University, retain an active research agenda in methods of global intellectual history, and am a STU's  alum. I look forward to working with and learning from the remarkable students at STU's .
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Preea Leelah

Assistant Professor of French

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Anna C. Lenti

Lyell B. Clay Artist in Residence and Director of Choral/Vocal Activities, Lecturer in Music
I am a choral conductor, soprano, and lover of all things music. I just finished my doctorate in Choral Conducting at the Eastman School of Music, and my doctoral research project focused on Caroline Shaw’s To the Hands and how it relates to both Baroque musical rhetoric and contemporary musical activism. I have a deep passion for early music, and in particular for the music of J.S. Bach and other German composers of the 17th and 18th centuries. As a conductor and voice teacher, I have taught choral and vocal music to students of every age and level of experience imaginable. I particularly love working with college students and community choruses. In addition to my work as a conductor, I have sung professionally with a number of professional choirs throughout the U.S. When I’m not making music, I enjoy spending time with my husband, two young children, and our goofy dog. My hobbies include baking, listening to true crime podcasts, running long distances, and knitting. I am so excited to be joining the community at STU's , and I can’t wait to explore all of the art and nature that this area has to offer!
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Abram J. Lewis

Visiting Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies
I’m an interdisciplinary historian of gender, sexuality, and social movements, with a focus on U.S. queer and feminist activist history. I also research and teach in disability studies, trans studies, magic and postsecular studies, oral history, and contemporary critical theory, among others. My first book project, The Falling Dream: Unreason and Enchantment in the Queer 1970s explores LGBTQ activist experiments with spells, paranormal powers, psychedelia, and various non-rational threshold states at the end of the social movement era. I also help coordinate the NYC Trans Oral History Project, a community archive built in partnership with the New York Public Library. I’ll be joining STU's ’ WGSS program after several years teaching at Grinnell College in Iowa, and before that, a postdoctoral fellowship at Northwestern University. In my leisure time, I’m into playing the banjo, riding my motorcycle, camping, and clickbait.
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AnneMarie K. McClain

Visiting Assistant Professor of Education and Africana Studies
My work centers around identity socialization for children, anti-bias education, and how we can use and design media – and interactions with media – to better promote positive outcomes for kids and their families, especially kids and families who are marginalized. For example, in my research on U.S. Black families, I’ve examined strategies that Black parents report in terms of using media to socialize their kids around race, their preferences for kids’ media representation, and what kind of media content they select after their child has experienced racism. I am active in media industry and educational outreach work, serving as an educational consultant for Imagine Entertainment’s Kids and Family division and Cartoonito, HBO Max’s and Cartoon Network’s preschool block. I am also a coauthor of a children’s book series with Sleeping Bear Press, and I offer workshops to schools, nonprofits, and children’s media organizations about media and families, representation, identity, and socialization. I have worked with the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop to develop practitioner-facing guides about connecting children’s learning across their ecosystems and with WGBH-Boston to design and evaluate a media-based educational program for children based on the children’s series Arthur. I’ve taught courses about interpersonal communication, informal learning for children, and socioemotional learning in the classroom at UW-Madison, the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and CU Boulder. I’m a former elementary school teacher and an ’09 STU's  alum, and I am thrilled to have the opportunity to work with and learn from the incredible students in this community.
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Amber McHugh

Assistant Professor of Physical Education and Head Alpine Ski Coach

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Jennifer McQuaid

Visiting Lecturer in Psychology

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Kobena Mercer

Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor of Art History

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Ramon Mignott

Lecturer in Physical Education and Assistant Football Coach

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Shannon Moore

Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology

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Benjamin S. Ory

Visiting Assistant Professor of Music
I’m a musicologist interested in the intersection of early music and historiography. I received my Ph.D. in 2022 from Stanford University. My dissertation examines the origins of mid sixteenth-century musical style and its twentieth-century reception under National Socialism in Germany and during the post-war period. Putting writings by early musicologists in dialogue with the early music objects these scholars studied can help us tell a more holistic story that reveals the continued influence of early twentieth-century German musicology.

My current projects include a volume of motets for the Adrian Willaert collected-works edition with the American Institute of Musicology, an article on the mid twentieth-century music publisher Armen Carapetyan, and my digital humanities resource, the 1520s Project, an open-source repository of scores from the early sixteenth century.
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James Owens

Visiting Lecturer in Political Science
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ZZ Packer

Margaret Bundy Scott Distinguished Visiting Professor
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Joel S. Pattison

Assistant Professor of History
I am a historian of the medieval Mediterranean, with a particular interest in Italy, the Maghrib, and the economic and social ties that connected them. Before coming to STU's  I taught at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California (Los Angeles and Berkeley), and held a Rome Prize in Medieval Studies at the American Academy in Rome. I’m currently working on a book about the influence of religious law on Genoese merchant activities in the port cities of the Maghrib. In my spare time, I love spending time outdoors and enjoy performing both early music and modern close harmony. I’m excited to begin teaching at STU's !
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Alyssa Pheobus Mumtaz

Visiting Lecturer in Art

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Emerson B. Powery

Croghan Bicentennial Professor in Biblical and Early Christian Studies
Emerson Powery is professor of biblical studies, assistant dean of the School of Arts, Culture and Society, and (former) coordinator of ethnic and area studies at Messiah University (Mechanicsburg, PA). He is one of the editors of True to Our Native Land: An African American New Testament Commentary (Fortress Press, 2007), co-author of The Genesis of Liberation: Biblical Interpretation in the Antebellum Narratives of the Enslaved (Westminster John Knox, 2016), and author of The Good Samaritan: Luke 10 for the Life of the Church (Baker, 2022). His passion is to grapple with how the Bible functions in underrepresented communities. In the wider academy, Powery has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Biblical Literature (2005-2013) and the Common English Bible (2009-2011) and presently serves on the steering committees for “The Bible in America” and “The Gospel of Luke” sections for the Society of Biblical Literature. At STU's , he will teach a course on the relationship between the Bible and Slavery.
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Tim Pyper

Lecturer in Music

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Shivani V. Radhakrishnan

Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow in the Department of Philosophy
Shivani Radhakrishnan is scholar of critical social theory. She is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at Columbia University and her research focuses on the nature and structure of false consciousness. Drawing on Aristotle’s analyses of social conditions on well-being, the Hegelian tradition and work by Fanon and de Beauvoir on self-constitution in conditions of injustice, she looks at how we attempt to form meaningful attachments to a social and political world that fails to serve us. She’s also a writer, and her essays and criticism have been published in n+1, The Washington Post, The Baffler, The Believer, BOMB, The Point, Paris Review Daily, and many others. She’s at work on a trade book about masks, copies, and doubles called Original Copy. She’s also a training psychoanalyst at the Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies, and formerly lived in Vladivostok, Russia.
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Barbara Samuels

Visiting Assistant Professor of Theatre

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Edgar Sandoval

Assistant Professor of Latina/o Studies

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Viktor Shmagin

Visiting Assistant Professor of History
Viktor Shmagin is a historian of modern and early modern Japan, specializing in Japan’s foreign relations with Russia and Japanese colonialism. He was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, in the Former USSR and emigrated to the USA as a child. He has also spent five years living in Japan, where he taught English and conducted historical research. He received his BA from Oberlin College, and his MA and PhD from the University of California Santa Barbara. Before coming to STU's , he taught at Fort Lewis and Colby Colleges, teaching global, East Asian, and Japanese history. He is currently adapting his dissertation, Diplomacy and Force, Borders and Borderlands: Japan-Russia Relations in the Transformation of Japanese Political Culture in the Edo and Early Meiji Periods into a book manuscript. Viktor has published his research in venues such as The International History Review, The Journal of Japanese Studies, and most recently Education About Asia. He has also received several fellowships to support his research and teaching, including a Fulbright IIE grant to conduct research at the Historiographical Institute of the University of Tokyo. In his spare time he enjoys amateur astronomy, cross-country skiing, board games and spending time with family and friends.
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Steffen Siebert

Assistant Professor of Physical Education, Head Men’s Soccer Coach

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Selamawit D. Terrefe

Mellon Just Futures Fellow
Selamawit D. Terrefe is a scholar of Global Black Studies, Critical Theory, Psycho-politics, and violence. In addition to her tenure as William’s Mellon ‘Just Futures’ Fellow, Terrefe is an Assistant Professor of African American Literature and Culture in the Department of English at Tulane University. Before coming to Tulane, Terrefe was a postdoctoral fellow in Black Atlantic Studies at the University of Bremen, Germany, in the department of English-Speaking Cultures.

Terrefe’s research centers on questions concerning racial violence, namely, the ostensible intractability of antiblack violence as a global phenomenon. Examining the nexus of pleasure, white supremacy, and enjoyment, albeit disavowed as such, across myriad political events and modes of cultural production, her work challenges hegemonic conceptions of racial slavery as the sole purview of the global North. In addition to presenting her research internationally at workshops on social movements, gender, and violence in venues such as the Tate Modern in London and the Max Plank institute in Goettingen, Germany, Terrefe has taught a range of courses on race, gender, and violence; Black queer literature and film; literary and critical theory; contemporary African American literature; and, Black insurgencies. She is currently completing her manuscript, Impossible Blackness: Violence and the Psychic Life of Slavery, and has publications in The Feminist Wire, Theory and Event, Rhizomes, Critical Philosophy of Race, Psychoanalysis and History, and forthcoming in Political Theology, Philosophy Today, and for Palgrave Lacan’s volume, Afropessimism,Antiblackness, and Lacan.
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Paula E. Thoms

Assistant Professor of Physical Education and Head Coach of Women’s Crew
Since 2008, I have been a passionate collegiate rowing coach, teacher, and mentor of student-athletes. The first 6 years of my career was with the women’s rowing team at Boston University, where I spent many days navigating the mighty Charles River and the city that surrounds it. The next 8 years were at Cornell University as assistant coach and later as associate head coach. It was in Ithaca, NY that my husband and I had our 2 beautiful boys, and where we became the type of people that found joy in growing our own vegetables.

Since July 2020, I have been the co-chair of the Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Committee for the Collegiate Rowing Coaches Association. Part of the committee’s mission is to educate and challenge coaches to develop a more inclusive culture within their team. I believe in the transformative aspects of sport and have been working towards creating a culture within rowing that is more welcoming and accessible to all.

I’m so excited to be a part of the STU's  community and can’t wait to continue my coaching, teaching, and mentoring journey with all of you.
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Vanessa Walker

Stanley Kaplan Distinguished Visiting Professor of American Foreign Policy
I am the Gordon Levin Associate Professor of Diplomatic History at Amherst College. My teaching and research are focused on the history of U.S. foreign relations and the history and politics of human rights. With both of these topics, I like to explore the interchange between international and domestic spheres and actors. I approach foreign relations in broad terms to engage ideology, race, gender, culture, and policy, as important forces in shaping the United States’ global interactions throughout its history. Moreover, I like to explore how foreign entities—both governmental and non-governmental—have shaped the United States domestic politics, influencing American ideals, identities, society, and government institutions. I am particularly interested in how different actors have sought to reconcile the absolutist principles of human rights with the necessary pragmatism of policymaking and diplomacy. I explored these themes in my book Principles in Power: Latin America and the Politics of U.S. Human Rights Diplomacy (Cornell University Press, 2020), which won the William M. LeoGrande Prize for best book in U.S.-Latin American Relations 2020-2021. Outside the classroom, I love skiing and hiking, and try to sneak away to the Green Mountains as often as possible to do one or the other. I live with my spouse, who is also a historian, and our two kids in Amherst, MA.
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Elizabeth Iams Wellman

Stanley Kaplan Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Political Science and Leadership Studies Program
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Jennifer G. Winters

Visiting Assistant Professor of Physics
I am an observational astronomer who specializes in discovering and characterizing stellar, brown dwarf, and planetary companions to nearby low-mass stars, the most numerous types of stars in the Galaxy. I spent the last six years conducting research at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. I recently led the discovery and mass and radius measurements of LTT 1445Ab and LTT 1445Ac, two transiting, terrestrial planets in a triple low-mass star system at 6.9 parsecs. These are the nearest planets known to transit a low-mass star and are ideal targets for atmospheric studies with the recently-launched James Webb Space Telescope.

I began my academic career as a piano and musicology major before pursuing studies in Physics & Astronomy. I love many types of music, from Renaissance to Chopin to Madonna to Radiohead to Lady Gaga. I have three cats and a dog. I enjoy hiking, baking, and cooking vegetarian ethnic food.
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Jenna Zomback

Visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics
I will be a Visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics during the 2022-2023 academic year. I am currently finishing my PhD at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). I completed my MS in mathematics at UIUC in 2018, and before that I completed my BS in mathematics at SUNY Geneseo in 2017. I enjoyed my time in Illinois, but I am very excited to return to the east coast!

My research is in descriptive set theory and its applications, especially to ergodic theory. My hobbies include reading (especially silly YA novels), running (my goal is to hit 1000 miles this year), and talking about how badly I want a dog.
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