Introducing Our New Interdisciplinary Programs Faculty

Twenty-two scholars in 17 departments are joining the Faculty of Arts and Sciences during the 2022-23 academic year. Here, new faculty members in our interdisciplinary departments and programs describe some of their interests in academia and beyond.

Jorge Cuéllar
Assistant Professor of Latin American, Latinx, and Caribbean Studies

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Scholarly Interests
I am a scholar of politics, culture, and daily life in modern Central America. While I write on many topics—from financial experimentation in Latin America and Central American migration to social movements and authoritarianism—my primary work attends to the cultural and political strategies employed by ordinary groups of people in El Salvador. Despite living in conditions of extreme marginality, economic abandonment, and routine violence, these groups engage in critical practices of refusal and survivance that endeavor for restored and dignified social worlds. My work is fundamentally concerned with reshaping discussions about Central American communities.
 

For Fun
I like to ride my bike on Upper Valley trails, am presently reading Solito by Javier Zamora, and I recently curated an exhibition called "Bolas de Fuego: Culture and Conflict in Central America" that is on view at the Hood Museum. Go check it out!

Sujin Eom
Assistant Professor of Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages

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Scholarly Interests
I am an architectural historian with an ethnographic disposition working at the intersection of race, migration, and the built environment. I read across archives to study architectural histories of migration—ships, ports, Chinatowns, houses, highways, and cemeteries. In particular, my current research explores architectural histories of migration and death after the abolition of slavery, with a focus on the global movement of Chinese labor migrants.

Fun Fact
Whenever I go to a new city or town, I pay a pilgrimage to its cemeteries. 
 

Kianna Middleton
Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies

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Scholarly Interests
Broadly, my research is in African American studies, Black feminisms, and crip of color studies, with an emphasis on literary and archival research methods. I am also interested in critical pedagogy and transdisciplinary research with medical school programs towards equitable and imaginative medicine and practice. My in-progress manuscript examines intersex medical protocols in the United States, from the 1940s-1960s, as a process of sexual and racial 'correction' that worked in concert with other domestic changes in American sexual and racial character at the time. 

Recent Favorite Non-Academic Book
Jhumpa Lahiri's Whereabouts (2021).  I know that I love a book when I finish it and immediately want to read it again. 

Raymond Orr
Associate Professor of Native American and Indigenous Studies

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Scholarly Interests
My research centers on two approaches to Indigenous politics. The first examines institutions and attitudes internal to Indigenous politics. For example, my book, Reservation Politics: Historical Loss, Economic Development and Intratribal Conflict (2017), explores how tribes manage internal conflicts about economic development and past grievances. The second approach to Indigenous politics seeks to understand attitudes about Indigenous peoples from the perspective of settler societies. My research places these themes into contact with multiple fields, including tribal health policy, law, identity, trauma, and economic development.

For Fun
I enjoy hiking, tennis and, when possible, scuba. I look forward to exploring the Upper Valley and am curious as to how cold winter might get.