This academic year, 30 scholars join 19 departments and programs in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
"I am awed by the diverse backgrounds and breadth of expertise our new faculty members bring to Dartmouth," says Elizabeth F. Smith, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. "It's exciting to see these accomplished scholars and artists engage with our students and enrich our academic community."
The esteemed group joins a cohort of 43 new tenured and tenure-track professors across Dartmouth.
"We are delighted to have so many accomplished, innovative new faculty members helping to drive research to new levels and knowledge to new fields at Dartmouth," said President Sian Leah Beilock, a cognitive scientist and a professor of psychological and brain sciences. "I look forward to working with them for years to come as we expand Dartmouth's impact on education and improve the world we live in."
Dartmouth's largest academic unit, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences encompasses more than 40 academic departments, programs, and centers.
Shaonta' E. Allen
Assistant Professor of Sociology
Education: BA, University of Washington; MA, Middle Tennessee State University; PhD, University of Cincinnati
"My research draws on race, social movements, and intersectionality literatures to examine how Black resistance to racial inequality varies across social institutional contexts. I specifically explore how religion, higher education, and pop culture and sport shape political ideologies and behaviors among Black emerging adults to theorize contemporary strategies for navigating racial and gendered hierarchies. I also study the theoretical, methodological, and epistemological legacy of Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Believing in the radical potential of sociology, I teach and produce research with the goal of facilitating social change."
Adam Breuer '09
Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Assistant Professor of Government; Meeting New Challenges of Cybersecurity Cluster
Education: BA, Dartmouth College; MA, Harvard University; PhD, Harvard University
"I am Harvard's first double PhD in the departments of government and computer science. My political science research focuses on how algorithms, AI, and new technologies are reshaping collective political behaviors via social media, social networks, and information/disinformation. My computer science research designs new algorithms for machine learning applications such as large-scale social network analysis, data summarization, and text analysis. I am also an academic collaborator with Facebook Research, where I design machine learning algorithms to help detect billions of fake social media accounts."
Herbert Chang '18
Assistant Professor in Quantitative Social Science
Education: BA, Dartmouth College; MSc, University of Edinburgh; PhD, University of Southern California
"I am a computational social scientist who studies social networks, online politics, and how artificial intelligence reshapes human relationships. My research considers how technology impacts political debate, such as how social bots share election misinformation on social media. More recently, I also applied social network analysis to wealth inequality and public health. My students and I use computational and mathematical approaches to investigate social behavior broadly and encourage students to find their core areas through research."
Alena Erchenko
Assistant Professor of Mathematics
Education: MA, Lomonosov Moscow State University; PhD, The Pennsylvania State University
"My research lies in the field of dynamical systems. Broadly put, I explore mathematical descriptions of systems that change over time. The field of dynamical systems is largely inspired by the many complicated systems in our physical world. Chaotic behavior in a dynamical system prevents us from explicit determination of the future from the present over long periods of time. I am interested in understanding the invariants of systems that characterize aspects of their behavior."
Rachel Feldman
Assistant Professor of Religion
Education: BA, Franklin and Marshall College; MA, The New School for Social Research; PhD, University of California, Davis
"I am a cultural anthropologist specialized in the study of Judaism, Israel/Palestine, messianic movements, and feminist and post-colonial studies. I am the author of Messianic Zionism in the Digital Age: Jews, Noahides, and the Third Temple Imaginary (Rutgers University Press, Spring 2024) and recently received a Jordan Schnitzer First Book Award (2023) from the Association for Jewish Studies. I am also the co-editor of Settler-Indigeneity in the West Bank (McGill-Queen's University Press, Fall 2023). My research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture."
Daniel Fetter
Associate Professor of Economics
Education: BA, Wesleyan University; MSc, London School of Economics; PhD, Harvard University
"My research interests lie at the intersection of economic history and public policy. In my work, I have studied the role of government in the mid-20th century rise in home ownership in the United States, as well as the effects of the introduction of social insurance programs such as Social Security."
Raquel Fleskes
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Education: BA, University of Maryland; PhD, University of Pennsylvania
"My research uses ancient DNA to understand histories of historic period archaeological populations in North America. Within this context, I focus on community engagement and scientific communication in collaboration with descendant communities and other community stakeholder groups to make science accountable to the communities it impacts. I am specifically interested in understanding the lived histories of European- and African-descended individuals by co-interpreting ancient DNA data with archaeological, osteological, archival, and oral history sources."
Steven Frankland
Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science
Education: BA, The College of Wooster; PhD, Harvard University
"I study the computational principles and neural systems that allow the human mind to be so flexible in some cases—for example, able to generate and understand an infinite number of possible sentences, able to quickly reason about new situations, and able to plan for uncertain futures—while, at the same time, being so profoundly limited in others—for example, easily forgetting names, dates, and phone numbers. What makes our minds this way? I approach these questions using information-theory, classic neural network formalisms, and cognitive neuroscientific methods, in pursuit of some general principles."
Dipon Ghosh
Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences
Education: BS, Carnegie Mellon University; PhD, Yale University
"My laboratory studies how animals navigate complex and dynamic environments. We are particularly interested in exploring sensory systems that inform molecular and cellular physiology and organismal behaviors. I anticipate that my laboratory's work will increase our understanding not only of novel sensory biological phenomena but also of biomedically important processes involved in the homeostasis and maintenance of diverse cells and tissues."
Reighan Gillam
Associate Professor of Latin American, Latino and Caribbean Studies
Education: BA, University of Virginia; PhD, Cornell University
"I am an ethnographer of Black visual culture. My research examines media at the intersection of racial ideologies, anti-racism, and protest. Specifically, I focus on the ways that Afro-Brazilian media producers create images that render Black subjects and their experiences in complex ways. My next research project takes a transnational approach to the study of Black politics and culture. My second book, Diasporic Agency, examines how Afro-Brazilians engage African American people, culture, and performance.
Miguel I. Gonzalez
Assistant Professor of Chemistry
Education: BS, University of the Philippines, Diliman; PhD, University of California, Berkeley
"My research focuses on controlling the arrangement of molecules to define the outcomes of chemical reactions. Toward this end, my lab will design systems that confine molecules in specific orientations to realize highly precise heat- or light-driven reactivity. These efforts will address challenging transformations in fine-chemicals, industrial, and materials synthesis, which will ultimately accelerate the development of more efficient and sustainable chemical processes."
Christophe Hauser
Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Meeting New Challenges of Cybersecurity Cluster
Education: BS, University of Rennes; MS, University of Rennes; PhD, CentraleSupélec/Queensland University of Technology
"My research primarily focuses on software security, and in particular, on scaling reverse engineering and vulnerability discovery to address real-world security problems, as well as other aspects of systems security, including hardware security, embedded systems security, intrusion detection, usable security and privacy-preserving systems. I strive to develop new models leveraging program analysis, formal methods, and machine learning in order to reason about new cyber attacks and defenses across the software stack and hardware boundaries."
Matt Hooley
Assistant Professor, Native American and Indigenous Studies
Education: BA, Carleton College; MA, University of Wisconsin-Madison; PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison
"I work on cultures of colonialism and anticolonialism, paying special attention to intersections with the environment and poetics. Next year my first book will be published by Duke University Press, titled Against Extraction: Indigenous Modernism in the Twin Cities, and I'm currently working on a project on the cultural histories of drought."
Jodi Kim
Professor of English and Creative Writing
Education: BA, University of California, Los Angeles; MA, University of California, Berkeley; PhD, University of California Berkeley
"My research and teaching interests are at the broad intersections of Asian American literary and cultural studies; interdisciplinary feminist and decolonial critiques of the conjunction of imperialism, settler colonialism, and militarism; and critical race and ethnic studies. I am the author of two books, Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War and Settler Garrison: Debt Imperialism, Militarism, and Transpacific Imaginaries, and co-editor of Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader.
Kyungtae Kim
Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Education: BA, Hongik University; MA, Hongik University; PhD, Purdue University
"My research interests are in the area of systems and software security. I have been recently focusing on finding software bugs and mitigating their exploitation within various systems and embedded software."
Anjuli Raza Kolb
Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing
Education: BA, Columbia University; MA, Columbia University; PhD, Columbia University
"I teach postcolonial literature and theory and poetry. My academic research focuses on race and racialization in the history of science and the disciplines. My first book, Epidemic Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2021), uncovers the history behind the dead metaphor of the "terrorism epidemic" through the joined histories of epidemiology and Islamophobia in the British, French, and U.S. empires. I am also a poet, essayist, and translator."
Yi Lu
Assistant Professor of History
Education: BA, Amherst College; PhD, Harvard University
"I am a historian of modern China, with particular interests in the history of information, material culture, and digital humanities. At its core, my work explores how information technologies—from paper archives to AI tools—change what knowledge is, how it is made and used, and to whom it belongs. More specifically, I focus on 20th-century Chinese history, during which propaganda, censorship, and secrecy served as key instruments of bureaucratic governance and social control."
Ernesto Mercado-Montero
Assistant Professor of History
Education: BA, Complutense University of Madrid; MA, State University of New York Buffalo; PhD, University of Texas at Austin
"I am a historian of the African diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean. My book project, The Afro-Indigenous Caribbean: Slavery, Warfare, and Power in the Making of an Early Modern Archipelago, centers Afro-Indigenes in Caribbean history. This monograph examines how Afro-Indigenous people shaped Antillean geopolitics between the Spanish conquest of Puerto Rico in the 1510s and the French Revolutionary Wars in the 1790s."
John Murray
Gregg L. Engles Associate Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences
Breaking the Neural Code Cluster
Education: BS, Yale University; MS, Yale University; MPhil, Yale University; PhD, Yale University
"After completing a PhD in physics from Yale, I did postdoctoral research at New York University in the Center for Neural Science. I was primary faculty in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine from 2015 to 2023, with secondary appointments in physics and neuroscience. My research is in the areas of computational neuroscience and computational psychiatry."
Aseel Najib
Mellon Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor of History
Education: BA, Columbia University; MA, Harvard University; PhD, Columbia University
"I am a historian of premodern Islam specializing in the late antique and early Islamic periods. My interests lie at the intersection of Islamic law and politics, which I explore in conversation with contemporary debates in political, critical, and postcolonial theory. My current research focuses on the legal theory and historical practice of conquest and land jurisdiction in early Islam."
Anthony Romero
Assistant Professor of Studio Art
Education: BA, Texas State University; MFA, School of The Art Institute of Chicago
"My areas of expertise are spatial justice, public art, Indigenous studies, critical border studies, performance studies, food sovereignty, Indigenous cultural resurgence, sound studies, and sonic arts."
Alexandra Leewon Schultz
Assistant Professor of Classics
Education: BA, Brown University; MSt, University of Oxford; PhD, Harvard University
"As a literary critic and cultural historian of the Greco-Roman world, I study the politics of literature, the history of knowledge, and gender and sexuality in classical antiquity. I also examine how ancient ideas about the past have influenced modern ideas about classical antiquity, from fantasies about the Great Library of Alexandria to ideas about the origins of "Western Civilization."
Casey Stockstill
Assistant Professor of Sociology
Provost Faculty Fellow
Education: BA, Columbia University; PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison
"I am a sociologist and race scholar. My work focuses on race, class, and the microlevel of social life. Much of my research is focused on childhood. My new book, False Starts: The Segregated Lives of Preschoolers, is an ethnographic account of how young children experience segregated preschools. I also research how white observers interpret race markers and deploy racial prejudice."
Yu-Wing Tai
Associate Professor of Computer Science
Education: BE, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology; MPhil, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology; PhD, National University of Singapore
"My major research interests are in the broad areas of computer vision and machine learning, including low-level vision, segmentation, 3D reconstruction, human pose, and video analysis. I am also recently interested in AI-generated content, multi-modalities, and large generative pretrained models and their applications."
Shersingh Joseph Tumber-Dávila
Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies
E.E. Just Early Career Faculty Fellow
Education: BS, University of New Hampshire; MS, Stanford University; PhD, Stanford University
"I am a terrestrial ecosystems ecologist investigating the response of ecosystems to global environmental change. My research program addresses: 1) the above- to below-ground dynamics of plants, their influence on the global carbon cycle, and their interactions with the environment, and 2) the future trajectory of forest carbon and their policy implications. Additionally, rooted in my philosophy as a Puerto Rican scientist, I collaboratively foster diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, and belonging in the academy through my scholarship."
Smriti Upadhyay
Assistant Professor of Sociology
Education: BA, McGill University; LLM, University of Warwick; MA, Johns Hopkins University; PhD, Johns Hopkins University
"What I'm most interested in as a sociologist is the unexpected ways that power is produced and challenged by different social groups. I'm currently engaged in two research projects. One looks at some of the millions of workers who have joined the labor union of India's immensely powerful Hindu right-wing, and the other is a world-historical study of social protest in India, from the 19th century to the present."
Elsa Voytas
Assistant Professor in Quantitative Social Science
Education: BA, College of William and Mary; MA, Princeton University; PhD, Princeton University
"My research examines how experiencing, remembering, and confronting past violence influences contemporary political decisions. I study the individual-level impacts of engaging with historical memory and transitional justice policies. I apply a range of methodological techniques, including field and survey experiments, causal inference, focus groups, and interviews to ask how societies can advance social justice and build peace."
Charnan Williams
Assistant Professor of History
Provost Faculty Fellow
Education: BA, University of Southern California; MA, University of Michigan; PhD, University of Michigan
"My research examines the history of slavery, free labor, and race in California from the Gold Rush to the Civil War. In scholarship, California is often viewed as exceptional to the national conflict around slavery, the Civil War, and emancipation in 19th-century America. By examining underutilized archival records, my research complicates these narratives that exclude California from the national struggle between the North and the South around the question of slavery, freedom, race, and labor. My research has received several awards including fellowships from the Huntington Library, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, and the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History."
Heidi Williams '03
Professor of Economics
Education: BA, Dartmouth College; MSc, University of Oxford; PhD, Harvard University
"My teaching and research focus on how society can best support science and innovation, and how we can best ensure that science and innovation generate broad benefits to society."
Yang-Yang Zhou
Assistant Professor of Government
The Challenges and Opportunities of Globalization Cluster
Education: BA, New York University; PhD, Princeton University
"My research seeks to bring evidence to questions (and often misperceptions) about what happens when people migrate. I study the political causes and consequences of migration, such as how the presence of refugees affects local public goods provision and citizens' voting behaviors to how different government policies shape migration decisions, particularly in lower-income countries. My current book project theorizes under what conditions minoritized citizens will embrace versus reject migrants who share cultural and ethnic ties."
Link to source: New Faculty Expand Scholarship at Dartmouth
