Faculty 2016-17 Dear Colleagues, This Fall Semester, We Welcome a Talented New Group of Faculty to the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences
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New Faculty 2016-17 Dear Colleagues, This fall semester, we welcome a talented new group of faculty to the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. This is an exciting time in Arts & Sciences, as we continue to reap the rewards from the efforts of faculty search committees, department chairs, program directors, associate deans, and other faculty who collaborate on recruiting and retaining the best and brightest scholars, researchers and educators. We are in the midst of a generational turnover of distinguished faculty, and the faculty joining us this academic year represent an ambitious campaign that has brought more than 175 new faculty members to the College in the last three years. By the end of this decade, nearly half of the Arts & Sciences faculty are projected to have begun their UVA appointments within the last 10 years. We aim to continue recruiting at the highest level of excellence as we seek a diverse faculty supporting a spectrum of emerging cross-disciplinary initiatives. The University of Virginia’s longstanding reputation for excellence in undergraduate education and graduate study is based on exceptional teaching and research, and this time of transition within the College only serves to strengthen this world-class institution. Arts & Sciences welcomes 67 new faculty members this year, and the biographies included in this booklet provide a snapshot of the varied gifts and talents each of them brings to the College. They all represent a key step forward in the College’s efforts to expand our vibrant and flourishing community. On behalf of the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, I celebrate the arrival of our new colleagues and look forward to the collective and singular impacts they will have, on the University of Virginia and beyond. Letter Sincerely, Ian Baucom from the Dean Buckner W. Clay Dean College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences University of Virginia MARLENE DAUT TALITHA LEFLOURIA Associate Professor of African Diaspora Studies Associate Professor Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies/American Studies and African Studies Specializing in early and 19th-century Specializing in the study of African- American and Caribbean literary and American women and convict labor culture studies, Marlene Daut examines in the post-Civil War South, Talitha the relationship among slavery, LeFlouria is the author of Chained in revolution, and literary/intellectual Silence: Black Women and Convict history in the Americas. Her first book, Labor in the New South (UNC Press, Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary 2015). The book won the 2016 History of the Haitian Revolution in the Darlene Clark Hine Award from the Atlantic World, 1789–1865 (Liverpool Organization of American Historians University Press, 2015) explores what she and the 2016 Philip Taft Labor History calls the “transatlantic print culture of Award from the Cornell University the Haitian Revolution” throughout the School of Industrial and Labor 19th century. Her second book, Baron de Relations & Labor and Working-Class Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic History Association. Chained in Silence Humanism (forthcoming, Palgrave also earned her the 2016 Malcolm Bell, Macmillan) will be the first book-length Jr. and Muriel Barrow Bell Award from exploration of the 19th-century Haitian the Georgia Historical Society, the author and politician. 2015 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians’ (First) Book Prize, the Several other projects are centered on creating more access to Haitian archives 2015 Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Prize from the Association of Black and on encouraging more conversation about the relationship between Haitian Women Historians, and the 2015 Ida B. Wells Tribute Award from the Charles H. studies and the digital humanities. This spring, she co-founded, along with Wright Museum of African American History. Julia Gaffield, a new H-Net network called H-Haiti; she also runs a website: haitianrevolutionaryfictions.com. Her work has been supported with grants from LeFlouria was appointed to the board of directors for Historians Against Slavery the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment in the Humanities, and the National last year. Before her faculty appointment, LeFlouria was a postdoctoral fellow in the Humanities Center (Research Triangle Park). Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies (2015–16). LeFlouria received her Ph.D. in history from Howard University and taught at Florida Daut earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in English at the University of Notre Dame. Atlantic University (2009–2015) previously. She completed her B.A. in English and French at Loyola Marymount University. Previously, Daut was an associate professor of English and Cultural Studies at LeFlouria is working on a second book project, Doctoring Captivity: Prison Claremont Graduate University, where she served as Director of the Graduate Physicians and Incarcerated Patients in the post-Civil War South. LeFlouria is Certificate Program in Africana Studies. teaching two new courses this year: “Black Women and Work” and “Slavery Since Emancipation.” Daut looks forward to teaching multilingual literature and history courses in French and Haitian Kreyol. One of her long-term goals is to institute a study-abroad program to Haiti and potentially to other areas of the Caribbean as well. 3 4 KWAME EDWIN OTU KASEY KEELER Assistant Professor Lecturer/Postdoctoral Fellow Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American American Studies and African Studies As a pre-doctoral fellow in the Carter A Native American Studies postdoctoral G. Woodson Institute last academic fellow, Kasey Keeler analyzes suburbs as year, Kwame Otu coordinated the historically Indian places. Her research African Studies Colloquium Series focuses on a demographic analysis of at the University of Virginia. His U.S. Census data, historical archives, research transects issues of sexual and an auto-ethnography based on citizenship, gender, human rights her experiences as a suburban Indian NGOs, and neoliberal racial formations to challenge common narratives in postcolonial Africa, traversing of suburbia and to underscore the the anthropology of Africa, race, participation of American Indians in the gender and sexuality, queer of color process of suburbanization. theorizing, critical human rights studies, revolutionary forms of Keeler is transforming her dissertation blackness and black aesthetics, and into a book project examining the Afrofuturist practice. suburbs of Minnesota’s Twin Cities— Minneapolis and St. Paul. Examining the The study of race in postcolonial Africa last decades of the 19th century and is central to Otu’s work, as are critical the start of World War I, as well as the inquiries about race in the African policies that shaped suburbia and Indian diaspora. Otu completed his Ph.D. in cultural anthropology at Syracuse University Country after World War II, her research reveals how the federal Indian policies (2016). In addition to his academic work, Otu has collaborated with Akosua Adoma of Relocation and Termination prevented American Indian suburbanization and Owusu, the award-winning Ghanaian-American filmmaker, to produce the film, homeownership, challenging traditional narratives of suburbia. Reluctantly Queer. It premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival earlier this year and was featured as part of the New Director New Films series held under the Keeler received her Ph.D. in American studies from the University of Minnesota auspices of the Film Society Lincoln Center and MoMA. (2016) and earned her B.A. in political science at the University of Wisconsin (2005). She has received fellowships from the University of Minnesota’s Institute for Otu is working on a book project, which is an ethnographic investigation of how self- Advanced Study and the American Indian Studies Department, as well as from the identified effeminate men (sassoi) navigate homophobia and the increased visibility Newberry Library in Chicago. While a graduate student she also held a dissertation of LGBT human rights politics in postcolonial Ghana, titled Amphibious Subjects: doctoral fellowship and participated in the Newberry Library’s Consortium in Sassoi and the Contested Politics of Queer Self-Making in Neoliberal Ghana. American Indian Studies summer institute. As she works on her book, Keeler will teach Native American Studies courses on federal Indian policy, literature, urban Indians, and popular culture. 5 6 MARK SICOLI ALAN O. BERGLAND Assistant Professor Assistant Professor Department of Anthropology Department of Biology Working in the field of linguistic An evolutionary biologist, Alan O. anthropology, Mark Sicoli studies Bergland studies the genetic basis of language through ethnography with rapid and cyclic adaptation in the wild. speakers of Native American languages His research uses genomic tools to and uses computational methods in understand the evolutionary dynamics historical linguistics for understanding of microevolution and adaptation, to human prehistory. His research has determine the ecological causes and mainly focused on indigenous languages consequences of rapid adaptation, and of Oaxaca, Mexico. to resolve the molecular genetic basis and physiological determinants of life- Sicoli’s current book project, Saying history traits that contribute to rapid and Doing in Lachixío, documents how adaptation. The National Institutes of a Zapotec language functions