Penn Arts and Sciences Welcomes New Faculty for 2016-2017

Penn Arts and Sciences has appointed 26 new members to its standing faculty for the 2016-2017 academic year. The School is pleased to welcome:

Christopher Atwood, Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations: History and culture of Mongolia and inner Asia. Special interests include lineage-building, state-building, and history-writing in the Mongolian empire; and demographic, economic, and climate historical methodologies applied to Mongolian history. Ph.D. from Indiana University. Comes to Penn from Indiana University.

Regina Baker, Assistant Professor of Sociology: Poverty and inequality at the micro and macro levels; social stratification; families and children; work/unemployment; race, gender, and class in the U.S. South; quantitative methods and longitudinal ethnographic data analysis. Ph.D. from Duke University.

Ericka Beckman, Associate Professor of Romance Languages: Nineteenth- and 20th-century Latin American literature and culture, with a focus on literature and economics; rural modernity and modernization; colonialism and neo-colonialism. Ph.D. from Stanford University. Comes to Penn from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

S. Pearl Brilmyer, Assistant Professor of English: Nineteenth-century British literature; history of European philosophy and science; queer theory; feminist science studies; realism; new materialism; natural history; description. Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. Comes to Penn from the University of Oregon.

Ryan Brutger, Assistant Professor of Political Science: International relations; international political economy; international institutions; international security; experimental design; formal and quantitative methods. Ph.D. from Princeton University.

Aaron Chalfin, Assistant Professor of Criminology: Criminal justice; economic demography; applied econometrics; predictive analytics; evaluation of crime control strategies. Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Comes to Penn from the University of Chicago.

Benjamin Connault, Assistant Professor of Economics: Econometrics and empirical microeconomics; dynamic discrete choice; dynamic programming models to understand choices made by households and companies over time; development of methods for parameter identification and inference. Ph.D. from Princeton University.

Alessandro Dovis, Assistant Professor of Economics: Macroeconomics and international macroeconomics; capital flows across countries and governments; dynamics of sovereign government debt and default. Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. Comes to Penn from Pennsylvania State University.

Sebastián Gil-Riaño, Assistant Professor of History and Sociology of Science: History and philosophy of the human sciences; postcolonial studies of science; twentieth-century history of scientific racial conceptions with a regional focus on Latin America and the Global South. Ph.D. from the University of Toronto.

Loren Goldman, Assistant Professor of Political Science: Political theory, history of political thought, and contemporary political philosophy; pragmatism; critical theory; democratic theory; German idealism; utopian thought. Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Comes to Penn from Ohio University.

Sarah Guérin, Assistant Professor of History of Art: Religious and material culture in the Middle Ages; examination of 13th-century gothic ivories in a social context; thing theory, anthropology of the image, and new materiality; inter-regional ivory trade that connected sub-Saharan Africa with Gothic Europe. Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. Comes to Penn from Université de Montréal.

Yue Hou, Assistant Professor of Political Science: Authoritarian institutions; business-state relations; the political economy of development; ethnic politics; accuracy and efficiency of survey-based measures; strategies used by Chinese private entrepreneurs to protect property from expropriation. Ph.D. in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Michael Jones-Correa, Visiting Professor of Political Science: Immigration and immigrant politics; ethnic and racial politics in the U.S.; Latino politics; urban studies. Ph.D. from Princeton University.

Dorothy Kronick, Assistant Professor of Political Science: Comparative political economy, with an emphasis on comparative political behavior, electoral politics of crime, and Latin American and Venezuelan politics. Ph.D. from Stanford University.

Ada Maria Kuskowski, Assistant Professor of History: Medieval, French, and legal history. Focus on social histories of knowledge; vernacular writing and translation; history of the book; court culture; the crusading movement; colonization and colonial law; and exploration, travel, and cross-cultural contact. Ph.D. from Cornell University. Comes to Penn from Southern Methodist University.

Allyson Mackey, Assistant Professor of Psychology: Child development from a cognitive neuroscience perspective; impact of environment on development; the role of targeted instruction in improving cognition. Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

Davi Maximo Alexandrino Nogueira, Assistant Professor of Mathematics: Nonlinear methods in differential geometry; partial differential equations; geometric topology. Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. Comes to Penn from Stanford University.

Kathleen Morrison, Sally and Alvin V. Shoemaker Professor of Anthropology: Archaeology and anthropology of South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Pacific, and the Southwestern U.S., with special interests in formation and transformation of anthropogenic landscapes; causes and consequences of agricultural change; and the interplay between political power, economic organization, and social strategies of production and exchange. Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Comes to Penn from the University of Chicago.

Sarah Moshary, Assistant Professor of Economics: Empirical microeconomics, industrial organization, and political economy. Interests include the impact of advertising regulation on election outcomes and voter welfare and the welfare consequences of importation policies, specifically with regard to textbooks. Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Aviv Nevo, George A. Weiss and Lydia Bravo Weiss University Professor, Professor of Economics and Marketing (joint appointment with the Wharton School): Empirical industrial organization and econometrics; real estate brokerage industry; estimating demand for consumer packaged goods and implications for price competition, mergers, marketing, and consumer welfare. Ph.D. from Harvard University. Comes to Penn from Northwestern University.

Megan Robb, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies: Social and cultural history of Islam in South Asia. Focus on modernity and print, gender and religion, and intersections of gender and media in South Asia; Hindi and Urdu public spheres; language and nationalism. D.Phil from Oxford University.

Nicholas Sambanis, Presidential Distinguished Professor, Professor of Political Science: Comparative politics and international relations. Special interests in self-determination movements, secessionist civil war, and peacebuilding; violent civil conflict; the interaction of economic development, political institutions, and civil war; uses of international organizations to prevent or resolve large-scale political violence. Ph.D. from Princeton University. Comes to Penn from Yale University.

Grace Sanders Johnson, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies: Modern Caribbean and Latin America with a focus on modern Haitian social and political history, social movements, transnational feminism, migration studies, African American and diasporic studies, and oral history. Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.

Fatemeh Shams Esmaeili, Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations: Social history of Persian literature; literary production in authoritarian states; poetry and cultural history of Iran since the Islamic Revolution of 1979. D.Phil from the University of Oxford.

Beth Simmons, Andrea Mitchell University Professor, Professor of Political Science and Law (joint appointment with Law School): International relations, international law, and international political economy; cooperative approaches to transnational crime; implementation of international human rights standards in domestic law. Ph.D. from Harvard University. Comes to Penn from Harvard University.

Davesh Soneji, Associate Professor of South Asia Studies: Religion in modern South India; history of performing arts in South India; feminist biography; social history of women in 19th- and 20th-century devadasi communities; social justice issues related to hereditary performing artists in South India. Ph.D. from McGill University. Comes to Penn from McGill University.

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