Penn Arts and Sciences Welcomes New Faculty

Penn Arts and Sciences has appointed 20 new members to its standing faculty for the 2013-2014 academic year. The School is pleased to welcome:

Erol Akçay, Assistant Professor of Biology (as of January 1, 2014): Emergence of cooperation in ecological and social systems; game theory and stochastic modeling applied problems in evolutionary ecology, psychology, linguistics, and economics. Ph.D. from Stanford.

Etienne Benson, Assistant Professor of History and Sociology of Science: History of technology and the environment; development of technology and public wildlife conservation in the context of the Cold War; urban wildlife and city infrastructure. Ph.D. from MIT.

Aislinn Bohren, Assistant Professor of Economics: Microeconomics and game theory; stochastic games played over a long term; effects of prior decisions on payoffs relevant to decision-making within corporations. Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego.

Mauro Calcagno, Associate Professor of Music (as of January 1, 2014): Musicology; cultural theory; Italian baroque opera studies; musical dramaturgy and theatricality; madrigal; performance studies; digital humanities; theory and aesthetics of music. Comes to Penn from SUNY Stony Brook. Ph.D. from Yale. 

Jean-Christophe Cloutier, Assistant Professor of English: Biographical criticism - archival and critical research methods applied to mid-20th century writers such as Kerouac, Wright, Ellison, and Highsmith, illuminating their aesthetic strategies as novelists and archivists; comics and graphic novels. Ph.D. from Columbia.

Eva Del Soldato, Assistant Professor of Romance Languages: Late Medieval and Renaissance Italian culture and intellectual history; examination of the 16th-century intellectual Simone Porzio; translation of Cardinal Bessarion’s In calumniatorem Platonis. Ph.D. from the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa.

Francis DiTraglia, Assistant Professor of Economics: Econometrics; model selection in statistical analyses aimed at establishing causal connections between variables; relevance and validity of variables as factors to improve inference. Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge.

Scott Francis, Assistant Professor of Romance Languages: Early Modern/Renaissance French literature and culture; representations of the author, reader, and book in 16th-century editions of Lemaire, Marot, and Rabelais; parallels to modern advertising among early print-era booksellers. Ph.D. from Princeton.

Julia Hartmann, Professor of Mathematics (as of January 1, 2014): Algebra, specifically differential Galois theory, invariant theory, the application of patching techniques to algebra, local-global principles. Comes to Penn from RWTH Aachen University. Ph.D. from the University of Heidelberg.
 
Sara Heller, Assistant Professor of Criminology: Preventive policies and programs to reduce delinquency and improve school outcomes and long-term welfare of children in poverty; evaluation of cognitive-behavioral therapy interventions to improve social-cognitive skills such as impulse control, emotion regulation, and future orientation. Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

David Young Kim, Assistant Professor of History of Art: Southern Renaissance art; cross-cultural exchange; material culture; art and architecture of southern Europe, the eastern Mediterranean, and the Portuguese-speaking world between the 14th and 19th centuries, particularly on the issues of geography and mobility. Ph.D. from Harvard.

Jianjing Kuang, Assistant Professor of Linguistics: Phonetics; the interplay between phonation and pitch as a way of understanding tonal states; experimental fieldwork and modeling of tonal states focused on Tibeto-Burman and Southwestern Chinese languages. Ph.D. from UCLA.

SangMok Lee, Assistant Professor of Economics: Economic theory; matching; revealed preference; game theory; law and economics; incentive compatibility of large centralized matching markets; social institution modeling related to plea bargaining in jury trials. Ph.D. from CalTech.

Daniel Mindiola, Presidential Term Professor of Chemistry: Synthesis of organometallic compounds with unusual reactivity; development and implementation of novel solutions to difficult applied and fundamental problems in inorganic synthesis. Comes to Penn from Indiana University. Ph.D. from MIT.

Emily Owens, Associate Professor of Criminology: Interdisciplinary examinations of legal, legislative, and policy changes on crime rates, offender behavior, and actions in the criminal justice system, notably by police, judges, and prosecutors. Comes to Penn from Cornell. Ph.D. from the University of Maryland.

Terenjit Sevea, Assistant Professor of South Asia Studies: South India and Malay Sufi and holy man religious networks; popular and hybrid religious forms across faiths; connections between spiritual practices and everyday life. Ph.D. from UCLA.

Emily Steinlight, Assistant Professor of English: Nineteenth-century British literature and political thought, particularly the changing political significance of population and of biological life; history and theory of the novel; the Victorian natural and social sciences; mass aesthetics and mass politics. Ph.D. from Brown.

Jim Sykes, Assistant Professor of Music: Ethnomusicology; ritual music and ethnic politics of the eastern Indian Ocean and Tamil music communities of Sri Lanka, Singapore, and Malaysia. Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

Rakesh Vohra, George A. Weiss and Lydia Bravo Weiss University Professor (joint appointment between the Department of Economics in SAS and Electrical and Systems Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science): Calibration and testing of expert predictions and forecasting; applied and methodological mechanism design, including studies of Internet search auctions and airplane landing rights allocations in airports and revenue equivalence, respectively. Comes to Penn from Northwestern University. Ph.D. from the University of Maryland.

Adelheid Voskuhl, Associate Professor of History and Sociology of Science: European and U.S. industrialization in the mid-17th to mid-20th centuries; human-machine boundaries; technological artifacts, modes of production, social relations, and historiographies of pre-industrial and industrial eras. Comes to Penn from Harvard. Ph.D. from Cornell.