IAS Welcomes 11 New Faculty Members

ias welcomes 11 new faculty members

IAS has hired eleven new faculty members for 2016-17 across fields including arts practice, community psychology, ethnic studies, law & policy, literature, writing & rhetoric. Short bios for each are found below:

Anida Yoeu Ali received a BFA in Graphic Design from the University of Illinois in 1996, and an MFA in Performance in 2010 from the School of the Art Institute Chicago. She has taught as a visiting artist and adjunct professor at Northwestern University, at three institutions in Cambodia, and at Trinity College. Courses at Trinity include Art & Activism: Global Agitation, Muslim Contemporary Performance Artists, and Southeast Asian Hip Hop and Urban Arts. Ali’s performance career stretches back to the 1998 “I Was Born With Two Tongues.” Since 2007 she has more than 60 exhibitions, performances, and installations, most recently at the 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Brisbane. She won the 2014-15 Sovereign Asian Art Prize, and produced the 2015 film “Cambodian Son.” Her most recent publications are three poems in the Fall 2015 Asian American Literary Review.

Peter Brooks is completing his doctoral studies in Rhetoric & Composition at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His teaching, research, and service interests focus on community development, including creating communities of explorative/immersive learning, understanding how communities function, or contributing to cultural or creative community events. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing, Poetry from New Mexico State University, Las Cruces. His dissertation, “Content and Context: Objective Formation in FYC Activity Systems” attempts to better understand how First Year Composition (FYC) writing programs create, communicate, and evaluate writing objectives. He has extensive composition teaching experience, in both face-to-face and online formats. In addition, he comes with a background in Student Affairs and currently serves as lecturer/advisor at the Harlem Renaissance Museum, in Madison, Wisconsin.

Silvia Ferreira is completing her doctoral studies in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation, Prose Peddlers: Tarjamah Subjects and Immigrant Struggles in Brazil, uncovers a forgotten history of immigrant struggle and identity contestation in Brazil. It demonstrates how long before the emergence of the contemporary image of the terrorist, Arab immigrants were actively involved in contesting their representation in hegemonic discourses of identity in Brazil. Her current research trajectory is pursuing Rhetoric and Composition and different fields of literary study, in which she is interested in drawing on multilingual archives and digital technologies to draw attention to diverse voices. This research is concerned with two questions: “How can we increase participation from different types of learners in the writing classroom?”; “And how can we make writing classrooms spaces in which students multilingual and multicultural realities are valued?” She takes up these questions in her article, “Computer-Mediated Communication in the Face-to-Face Writing Classroom: The Synchronous Use of Online Discussion Forums” in which she using data from the classroom in order to reflect on contemporary best practices in writing pedagogy. She has a strong teaching record that includes nominations and awards for excellence in teaching.

Maryam Griffin is University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Davis. She earned a PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara and a JD from the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law, specializing in critical race studies. Maryam was a Palestinian American Research Center Fellow and is the author of “Freedom Rides in Palestine: Racial Segregation and Grassroots Politics on the Bus.” (UC Presidential Fellow in 2016-17, so starting in IAS in fall 2017.)

William Hartmann is completing his doctoral studies in Clinical Psychology at the University of Michigan, and a clinical psychology intern at the Institute for Juvenile Research, University of Illinois at Chicago. Mr. Hartmann received a BA in psychology from Washington and Lee University (2008), and an MS in clinical psychology from U of M (2012). His research employs community-engaged and ethnographically-informed methodologies to identify and address immediate problems facing rural and urban American Indian communities, and develop critical interventions in the deployments of culture in mental health for AI and other culturally marginalized communities. Mr. Hartmann is co-founder of the workgroup for Interdisciplinary Research with Native Peoples at the University of Michigan, and has published four first-author papers in top-tier journals, including “Advancing community-based research with urban American Indian populations: Multidisciplinary perspectives” (American Journal of Community Psychology, 2014).

Alka Kurian received an MA (1986) and M.Phil (1988) in French from Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, a Maîtrise in French Language and Literature from the Université Stendhal in 1992, and a Ph.D. in Film, Media and Cultural Studies from the University of Sunderland in 2009. At Sunderland, she was an Assistant and then Associate Professor of French from 1991-2000, and an Associate Professor of Film, Media, and Cultural Studies from 2000 to 2007. She taught at U. Mass. Boston in 2008, and has taught at UW Bothell since 2010. Recent courses address South Asian cinema, postcolonial literature, and gender studies. She has taught a range of 100-level courses for CUSP. Her book Narratives of Gendered Dissent in South Asian Cinema was published in 2012 by Routledge; she has published a number of articles and book chapters.

Jed Murr received a BA in English and Philosophy from Northwest Missouri State University, an MA in American Studies from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2006, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Washington in 2014. As a sole instructor he has taught for more than a decade at U.Mass., UW Seattle, and UW Bothell. Recent courses range from 100- to 400- level, and include American Ethnic Literatures, Introduction to Cultural Studies, Cultural Movements and Social Change, and a number of writing courses. His dissertation, “The Unquiet Dead: Race and Violence in the ‘Post-Racial’ United States” “investigates some of the ways histories of racial violence work to (de)form dominant and oppositional forms of common sense in the so-called “post-racial” United States.” He has presented work and organized sessions at dozens of events over the last decade.

Alice Pedersen received a BA in English and Hispanic Studies from Macalaster College in 2005, and an MA (2009) and Ph.D. (2014) in English Language and Literature from the University of Washington. After teaching more than a dozen courses at UW Seattle from 2007-2012, she started at IAS in 2012 as a PIP fellow. She has taught a range of IAS and CUSP courses, including three sections of 499, upper level literature and research courses, and introductory writing courses. Courses she has developed include “Human Rights and Literature” and “Slave Narratives and their Legacies.” Her dissertation, “The Romance of Solidarity: A Long History of Sentiment, 1861- 2009,” “examines the sentimental novel, and explores the continuing popularity of sentimentalism in the 20th and 21st century texts.” She published a review in the Journal of American History in September 2015, and is an active conference presenter.

Thea Tagle received a BA in Political Science and Human Rights Studies from Barnard College in 2004, and an MA (2010) and a Ph.D. (2015) in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, San Diego. She has taught since 2008 at UCSD, the San Francisco Art Institute, and San Francisco State University. Recent courses include Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Mobility and Asian American Public Art, Performance, and Politics. She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research “focuses on the politics of Filipino/American contemporary art and performance alongside the state’s reorganization of urban space.” Her dissertation is titled “After the I-Hotel: Material, Cultural, and Affective Geographies of Filipino San Francisco”; she has revised its chapter on poet Barbara Jean Reyes for a forthcoming anthology on Southeast Asian Diaspora and Transnational Cultural Studies.

Deirdre Vinyard has a PhD in Composition and Rhetoric from the University of Nevada, Reno with a specialization in second language writing and college composition and a Master’s Degree in Linguistics (Teaching English as a Second Language) from the University of Iowa. Her current research project, The Language Repertoires of First Year Writers: A Cross Institutional Study of Multilingual Writers, is a collaborative project funded, in part, by the Conference on College Composition and Communication. It focuses on the diverse language backgrounds of multilingual student writers in efforts to better support their writing strategies across languages. She is currently an assistant professor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design and is involved in faculty development, leading workshops on writing and working with second-language students for both faculty and graduate students. Prior to her appointment at Emily Carr she was the director of the Basic Writing Program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (2005-13) and as a graduate student, she was the Director of the English as a Second Language Program at the University of Nevada, Reno. In this capacity she oversaw both the intensive English program and the credit bearing ESL courses for matriculated students. She has teaching experience in both first-year composition and in ESL writing courses. In addition, her teaching focuses on building unified learning communities for monolingual and multilingual students.

Lee Ann Wang is University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the UC Berkeley School of Law. She was previously a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in the Department of Women’s Studies. Lee Ann earned her PhD from the University of Michigan’s Program in American Culture, Asian Pacific Islander American Studies. She is author of “Of the Law, but Not Its Spirit: Immigration Marriage Fraud as Legal Fiction and Violence Against Asian Immigrant Women.” (UC Presidential Fellow in 2016-17, so starting in IAS in fall 2017.)