SAS Welcomes New Faculty Members
This year’s new appointments are:
Julia Gray, Assistant Professor of Political Science. Gray focuses on international relations and international political economy, with special interests in developing countries’ access to credit and the role of international institutions in international economic relations. She comes to Penn from the University of Pittsburgh and received her Ph.D. from UCLA.
Projit Mukharji, Assistant Professor of History and Sociology of Science. Mukharji studies science, technology and medicine in South Asia, with a focus on the intersection of Western medicine and indigenous healing traditions in Bengal after 1770. He comes to Penn from McMaster University and received his Ph.D. from the University of London.
Vanessa Ogle, Assistant Professor of History. Ogle’s research interests include the transnational history of modern Europe, with a special focus on interactions between Europe and the Middle East, cultural notions of time and the transnational history of capitalism in the Eastern Mediterranean. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard.
Mallesh Pai, Assistant Professor of Economics. Pai studies microeconomic theory, with a focus on mechanism design/auction theory and statistical decision theory. He received his Ph.D. from Northwestern.
David Spafford, Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. Spafford’s research interests include the history of late medieval and early modern Japan, and his latest project addresses land use, place and power in eastern Japan from 1450 to 1525. He comes to Penn from the University of Washington and received his Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley.
Ramya Sreenivasan, Associate Professor of South Asia Studies. Sreenivasan studies the literary cultures of north India from 1200 to 1950, and the history of early modern and colonial South Asia. Her interests include religion and caste in early modern Rajasthan, colonialism and modernity, and gender history. She comes to Penn from SUNY- Buffalo and received her Ph.D. from Jawaharlal Nehru University.
Yuhua Wang, Assistant Professor of Political Science. Wang’s research interests include comparative politics and the political economy of development, with a focus on domestic Chinese politics. His current work examines the development of judicial systems in authoritarian regimes, and he received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.
Brian Weber, Assistant Professor of Mathematics. Weber studies geometric analysis, including spin, quantum, and symplectic geometry and moduli space of extremal metrics. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin.
Julia Wilker, Assistant Professor of Classical Studies. Wilker’s research interest include late classical Greece, the Near East in the Hellenistic and Roman era and Jewish history in the Graeco-Roman period. Her work has included the negotiation of power by client kings in the early Roman empire and international diplomacy in the classical and Hellenistic world. She received her Ph.D. from the Freie Universität Berlin.
