The Faculty of Arts and Sciences has welcomed fifty-one new colleagues to the ladder faculty since fall 2016. The incoming cohort comprises seventeen new hires in the humanities (including one jointly appointed in social science), seventeen in social science, and seventeen in science and engineering and applied science. During this period, thirty-four members of the FAS ladder faculty departed, through retirement or for other positions, producing a net growth of seventeen for the year.
Detailed biographies of the new ladder faculty members can be found on the FAS website. A brief list appears below.
Humanities
Humanities
Of the fifty-one new ladder faculty, seventeen hold appointments in the Division of Humanities and one is jointly appointed in humanities and social science.
African American Studies
Rizvana Bradley is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies and African American Studies. Bradley’s research and teaching focus on the study of film and media at the intersections of contemporary art and performance.
Aimee Meredith Cox is jointly appointed as Associate Professor in the Departments of African American Studies and Anthropology. Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of anthropology, black studies, and performance studies.
American Studies
Daniel Martinez HoSang is Associate Professor in American Studies and Ethnicity, Race, & Migration. His teaching and scholarship examine racial politics and political culture in the United States.
Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas is Professor with appointments in American Studies, Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her research explores issues of social justice and the intersection of intimate worlds and political economic structures.
Classics
Jessica Lamont is Assistant Professor of Classics. Lamont specializes in Greek history, epigraphy, religion, and material culture.
Comparative Literature
Pericles Lewis is Professor of Comparative Literature and serves as Vice President for Global Strategy and Deputy Provost for International Affairs. His current research addresses liberal education in the United States and worldwide.
English
Joe Cleary is Professor of English. His major research interests include modernism, empire and world literature, postcolonial studies, twentieth-century Irish culture, critical theory and literary history.
Naomi Levine is Assistant Professor of English. She specializes in Victorian literature, poetic theory, and the history of literary criticism.
John Durham Peters is the inaugural María Rosa Menocal Professor of English and Professor of Film and Media Studies. He is a media historian and social theorist.
Ethnicity, Race, and Migration
Biographies for Daniel Martinez HoSang and Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas can be found under American Studies.
Film and Media Studies
Rizvana Bradley’s biography is listed under African American Studies.
John Durham Peters’s biography is listed under English.
Germanic Languages and Literatures
Katrin Trüstedt is Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures. Her research is situated at the intersection of literature, law, and philosophy and engages with early modern, modern, and contemporary German and English literature.
History
Sergei Antonov is Assistant Professor of History. He specializes in modern Russia after 1801, with particular interest in politics, culture, and society in the late imperial period.
Samuel Moyn is Professor in the Law School and the Department of History. His research concerns modern European intellectual history and the history of human rights, and he is interested in the law of war, legal theory, and various areas of contemporary historiography.
History of Science and Medicine
Deborah R. Coen is Professor of History and Chair of the Program in History of Science and Medicine. Her research interests include the history of the modern physical and environmental sciences, modern central European intellectual and cultural history, history of the family, and scientific internationalism.
Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations
Kevin van Bladel is Professor of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations. He is a philologist and historian studying texts and societies of the Near East of the period 200-1200 with special attention to the history of scholarship, the transition from Persian to Arab rule, and historical sociolinguistics.
Philosophy
Robin Dembroff is Assistant Professor of Philosophy. Robin’s principle area of research is social ontology, with a particular emphasis on the nature of gender, sexual orientation, and social identities.
Slavic Languages and Literatures
Edyta Bojanowska is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures. She specializes in nineteenth-century Russian literature and intellectual history, focusing on the topics of empire and nationalism
Theatre Studies
Elise Morrison is Assistant Professor of Theater Studies. Her current research focuses on theatrical performances that stage technologies of contemporary warfare in order to investigate how live performances intervene in ethics and aesthetics of war fought “at a distance.”
Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas’s biography is listed under American Studies.
Eda Pepi is Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her research focuses broadly on the cultural and historical processes through which gender, ethnicity, citizenship, sovereignty, and the state have been forged in Middle East and North Africa territories.
Social Science
Seventeen of the new tenured and tenure-track professors joining the FAS have appointments in the Division of Social Science, with one professor holding joint-appointments in the humanities and social science.
Anthropology
Aimee Meredith Cox’s biography is listed under African American Studies.
Lisa Messeri is Assistant Professor of Anthropology. Her research specializes in the anthropological study of science and technology.
Economics
Mira Frick is Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics. Mira is a microeconomic theorist interested in game theory, decision theory, information economics, and behavioral economics.
Ryota Iijima is Assistant Professor of Economics. He studies microeconomic theory, game theory, decision theory, information economics, and networks.
Mushfiq Mobarak is Professor of Economics with concurrent appointments in the School of Management and in the Department of Economics. Mobarak conducts field experiments exploring ways to induce people in developing countries to adopt welfare-improving technologies or behaviors.
Yusuke Narita is Assistant Professor of Economics. His areas of research interest include labor economics, market design, microeconomics theory, and applied econometrics.
Fabrizio Zilibotti is the Tuntex Professor of International and Development Economics. His research interests include economic growth and development, political economy, macroeconomics, and the economic development of China.
Political Science
Daniela Cammack is Assistant Professor of Political Science. She specializes in ancient Greek politics and philosophy, with a focus on both Greek democratic ideas and institutions and the political philosophy that arose in connection with them.
Daniel Mattingly is Assistant Professor of Political Science. His research focuses on the political economy of development, authoritarian rule, and Chinese politics.
Didac Queralt is Assistant Professor of Political Science. His research examines the origins of fiscal institutions from three different angles: war, trade, and political competition.
Fredrik Savje is Assistant Professor of Political Science. His research focuses on the intersection of political methodology, statistics and computer science with a particular focus on causal inference in non-standard settings.
Ian Turner is Assistant Professor of Political Science. His research focuses primarily on American political institutions and democratic accountability.
Psychology
Molly Crockett is Assistant Professor of Psychology. Her research explores self-deception and moral hypocrisy; the development of trust in healthy people and psychiatric disorders; moral outrage and political polarization; and how technology transforms social emotions.
Julian Jara-Ettinger is Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology. He studies the fundamental representations and computations that underlie our ability to navigate the social and physical world, with a primary focus on early childhood.
Nick Turk-Browne is Professor of Psychology. Turk-Browne’s research works to understand how different cognitive processes and the underlying brain systems that support them interact in order to help elucidate the constraints and functions of individual systems and to produce a more integrated understanding of mind and brain.
Sociology
Grace Kao is Professor of Sociology, Faculty Director of Education Studies, and Director of the Center for Research on Inequalities and the Life Course. Her research focuses on race, ethnic, and immigrant differences in educational outcomes among children and adolescents.
Statistics and Data Science
John Lafferty is Professor in the Department of Statistics and Data Science, with a secondary appointment in Computer Science. Lafferty’s research area is machine learning, with a focus on computational and statistical aspects of learning algorithms, high-dimensional data, graphical models, and text modeling.
Science and School of Engineering & Applied Science
Seventeen of the new ladder faculty members joining the FAS have appointments in the Division of Science or in the School of Engineering & Applied Science.
Applied Physics
Vidvuds Ozolins is Professor of Applied Physics and a member of the Energy Sciences Institute at West Campus. His research interests are in the field of first-principles computational modeling of high-performance materials.
Peter Schiffer is Professor of Applied Physics and the university’s inaugural Vice Provost for Research. Schiffer’s research has focused on artificial spin ice, geometrically frustrated magnets, magnetoelectonic materials, and the physics of granular materials.
Biomedical Engineering
Michael Mak is Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering. Mak’s research is focused on multiscale mechanobiology in cancer and development, aiming to bridge the gap between molecular signatures and mechanical phenotypes, especially in cancer metastasis and tissue morphogenesis.
Chemical and Environmental Engineering
Amir Haji-Akbari is Assistant Professor of Chemical & Environmental Engineering. He studies the application of the modern theoretical and computational tools rooted in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics to study the thermodynamics and kinetics of phase transitions in soft matter systems.
Computer Science
Rajit Manohar is the John C. Malone Professor of Electrical Engineering and Professor of Computer Science. He primarily works on asynchronous very-large-scale integration design and architecture.
Dragomir R. Radev is the A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor of Computer Science. Radev’s research focuses on Natural Language Processing, information retrieval, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.
Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Casey Dunn is Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. He studies animal evolution, with a particular focus on better understanding our most distant animal relatives and the earliest events in the animal tree of life.
Erika Edwards is Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Edwards’s research focuses on problems in plant evolution, and combines the fields of ecology, plant physiology, and phylogenetic biology to understand evolutionary innovation in plant form and function.
Electrical Engineering
Rajit Manohar’s biography is listed under Computer Science.
Geology and Geophysics
Alan Rooney is Assistant Professor of Geology & Geophysics. His research is focused on understanding the interactions between tectonics, climatic processes and geochemical cycles on a range of time scales.
Mathematics
Stefan Steinerberger is Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics. His research is in the field of mathematical analysis with emphasis on complex analysis, harmonic analysis, spectral theory and the geometry of partial differential equations.
Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science
Rebecca Kramer-Bottiglio is Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science. Her research lies at the intersection of materials, manufacturing, and robotics and she has innovated in the areas of soft sensing, stretchable electronics, and digital fabrication with soft materials.
Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry
Wendy Gilbert is Associate Professor in the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry. Gilbert’s current research investigates translation efficiency determinants, alternative 5’ untranslated regions, ribosomes, snoRNAs, and regulated RNA modifications.
Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology
David Breslow is Assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology. Breslow’s work applies new systematic approaches to address fundamental questions in cell biology, with a current emphasis on the regulation and functions of the mammalian primary cilium.
Stavroula Hatzios is Assistant Professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology and a member of the Microbial Sciences Institute. Hatzios uses chemical and biological tools to study enzymes and other proteins that shape host-microbe dynamics in gastrointestinal infections.
Physics
Meng Cheng is Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics. His research focuses on the interplay between global symmetry and topologically ordered phases in quantum condensed matter.
Nir Navon is Assistant Professor of Physics. Navon uses the “tunable” nature of trapped ultracold atomic gas systems to study fundamental many-body physics.
Laura Newburgh is Assistant Professor of Physics. Newburgh is involved in building a large radio interferometer to measure neutral hydrogen trapped in galaxies to be used as a tracer for the expansion of the Universe and a mechanism for understanding dark energy.
In addition to these fifty-one distinguished hires, three new ladder faculty are already committed to joining Yale in January, 2018. Sharon Hammes-Schiffer, the inaugural John Gamble Kirkwood Professor of Chemistry, Benjamin Machta, Assistant Professor of Physics and member of the Systems Biology Institute, and Candice Paulsen Assistant Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, will all begin their terms next semester.
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ investment in hiring new scholars and teachers in the Humanities, Social Science, Science, and Engineering and Applied Science is a crucial component of creating a thriving university. These excellent new hires drive Yale forward in its commitment to being, in the words of President Peter Salovey, “the research university most committed to teaching and learning.