2012-13 New Faculty Appointments
October 25, 2012
The College of Arts and Humanities welcomes new faculty cohort to UMD.
The College of Arts and Humanities welcomes new faculty cohort to UMD.
Art | American Studies | Classics |English | History | Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Studies | Music | SLLC | TDPS| Women's Studies
FALL 2012 NEW FACULTY: American Studies
JAN M. PADIOS: Assistant Professor, American Studies
Jan Padios’ work combines critical cultural studies and political economy with emphasis on transnationalism, neoliberal globalization, media and communication, cultures of consumption, and U.S. empire. She is currently at work on her first book, which is based on her dissertation "Listening Between the Lines: Culture, Difference, and Immaterial Labor in the Philippine Call Center Industry." She earned her Ph.D. in American Studies from New York University.
JANELLE WONG: Associate Professor, American Studies
Janelle Wong, whose tenure home is American Studies, serves as the new Director for the Asian American Studies Program. She comes to us from the University of Southern California where she has taught since 2001 in the Departments of Political Science and American Studies and Ethnicity. Her research interests include race, ethnicity and politics; political participation and mobilization; and public opinion. She is author of Democracy's Promise: Immigrants and American Civic Institutions. She has published articles on race, ethnicity and politics in Political Behavior, American Politics Review, Social Science Quarterly, and more.
AMANDA BAILEY: Associate Professor, English
Amanda Bailey is an early modernist specializing in the drama of the English Renaissance. Her extensive scholarly publications examine social and political issues arising out of questions of property, economics, the law, and gender as they relate to literary and theatrical practice. Her scholarship thus evokes original readings of familiar texts such as Marlowe’s Edward II, and Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. She co-edited an anthology of essays on urban culture, gender and sexuality, Masculinity and the Metropolis of Vice, and a 2007 monograph, Flaunting: Style and its Subversive Male Body in Renaissance England. She comes to us from the University of Connecticut.
SCOTT A. TRUDELL: Assistant Professor, English
Scott Trudell earned his Ph.D. from Rutgers this past spring, with a dissertation entitled “Literary Song: Poetry, Drama, and Acoustic Performance in Early Modern England.” He traces the development of verse with a musical dimension from Sidney and Shakespeare to Jonson and Milton. He argues that song was an essential part of the literary canon. His article, The Mediation of Poesie: Ophelia's Orphic Song, was published in Shakespeare Quarterly.
KELLIE ROBERTSON: Associate Professor, English
Kellie Robertson, formerly of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, specializes in the relationship between material culture and literature in the late Middle Ages. She is, best known for her 2006 monograph, The Laborer’s Two Bodies: Labor and the Work of the Text in Medieval Britain. Her current book, Love and Physics in the Age of Chaucer, traces genealogy of medieval materialism up through late 14th century England and links its development with the birth of a particularly Chaucerian poetics.
SHARADA B. ORIHUELA: Assistant Professor, English
Sharada Orihuela comes to us from Kenyon College where she was a Marilyn Yarborough Dissertation and Teaching Fellow. She is interested in 19th through 21st century literature of the Americas and is working on her first book, From Flags to Freeways: Hemispheric Routes of Exchange, Marginalized Economies, and Liberal Rights, tracing genealogy of piratical American economic exchange. She argues that narratives depicting trade allow us to understand liberal subjectivities operating outside the scope of national rights. Her Ph.D. was earned at the University of California, Davis.
EMILY MITCHELL: Assistant Professor, English
Novelist Emily Mitchell is author of The Last Summer of the World, which was a finalist for the 2008 Young Lions Award for fiction. Her essays and shorter fiction have appeared in The Indiana Review, AGNI, The Nation, the UTNE Reader, and the New England Review, among other venues. She has taught for the past two years at Cleveland State University, prior to which she taught at West Virginia University. She earned her M.F.A. from Brooklyn College.
LEE KONSTANTINOU: Assistant Professor, English
Lee Konstantinou spent the last year as an ACLS New Faculty Fellow at Princeton University. His research interests include world literature debate, the legacy of theory and sociological approaches to the study of literature and culture. He is currently at work on a critical book, an outgrowth of his 2009 dissertation, “Wipe that Smirk off Your Face: Postironic Literature and the Politics of Character,” which explores the politics of irony in postwar American fiction and intellectual life. He earned his Ph.D. from Stanford University.
AHMET KARAMUSTAFA: Professor, History
Ahmet Karamustafa specializes in the social and intellectual history of pre-modern Islam, with special emphasis on the history of religion, history of science and literary history. He comes to us from Washington University in St. Louis, where he has taught since 1987 and also served as Chair of the Department of Jewish, Islamic, and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. He is author of Vahidi's Menakib-i Hvoca-i Cihan ve Netice-i Can: Critical Edition and Historical Analysis, God’s Unruly Friends: Dervish Groups in the Islamic Later Middle Period, 1200-1550 and Sufism: The Formative Period. He is also the Assistant Editor of The History of Cartography, Volume 2, Book 1 and Cartography in the Traditional Islamic and South Asian Societies.
Communication
ANITA ATWELL SEATE: Assistant Professor, Communication
Anita Seate earned her Ph.D. in Mass Communication from the University of Arizona this summer. Her dissertation was entitled, “Understanding the Role of Emotions in Mediated Intergroup Threat: A Cultivation and Appraisal Theories Approach.” Her interests include the intersection of gun ownership, social identity and the news coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting; physiological responses to racial humor in the media; and the framing of criminal behavior in sports news coverage, with special emphasis on racial stereotyping.
ERICH SOMMERFELDT: Assistant Professor, Communication
Erich Sommerfeldt specializes in social network analysis, activist group public relations and the evaluation of relationships that build social capital in communities. Last year he taught at Towson University. His article, A social capital approach to improving public relations’ efficacy: Diagnosing internal constraints on external communication, can be found in Public Relations Review. He earned his Ph.D. in Mass Communication from the University of Oklahoma.
FRANCISCO BARRENECHEA: Assistant Professor, Classics
Francisco Barrenechea is a specialist in ancient Greek drama, and since earning his doctorate in Classics from Columbia University in 2005 has held short-term appointments at the University of Chicago, Bryn Mawr College and the University of Texas at Austin. His forthcoming book entitled New Devotions: A Study of Aristophanes' Wealth will be included in the American Philological Association’s monograph series. A native of Mexico, he has also published essays on Mexican adaptations of classical Greek drama, such as Alfonso Reyes's Cruel Iphigenia, a play which proposes Greek tragedy as a way to work through personal trauma.
JORGE J. BRAVO, III: Assistant Professor, Classics
Jorge Bravo is a scholar and field archaeologist focused on the archaeological remains of a shrine dedicated to the infant hero Opheltes at Nemea in Greece as an example of ancient Greek hero cult. He earned his doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley in 2006 and has since taught at Carleton College, Wesleyan University and Bowdoin College. His essay Recovering the Past: The Origins of Heroes and Hero Cult was published by the Walters Art Museum as part of the exhibition catalogue Heroes: Mortals and Myths in Ancient Greece.
ROBERT A. DiLUTIS: Associate Professor, Music
Robert DiLutis comes to Maryland from Louisiana State University where he has taught since 2009. Prior, he taught at the Eastman School of Music for 13 years. He has also enjoyed extensive orchestral experience as a member of the Baltimore Chamber Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, the Rochester Philharmonic
Orchestra, and more. He is widely known for his expertise as a maker of clarinet barrels and shaper of clarinet reeds.
FERNANDO RIOS: Assistant Professor, Music
Fernando Rios is an ethnomusicologist specializing in Latin American music, especially the music of the Andean region. He has served the past two years at UMD as Visiting Assistant Professor. He has published several peer-reviewed articles, including Bolero Trios, Mestizo Panpipe Ensembles and Bolivia's 1952 Revolution: Urban La Paz Musicians and the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement, in Ethnomusicology and La Flûte Indienne: The Early History of Andean Folkloric-Popular Music in France and its Impact on Nueva Canción, in Latin American Music Review.
GRAN WILSON: Associate Professor, Music
Gran Wilson has served in an adjunct role for the past decade at both UMCP and Towson University. He has distinguished himself as an interpreter of the bel canto repertoire throughout a performing career spanning three decades and four continents. He has sung with companies such as the New York City Opera, Boston Symphony and the Teatro di San Carlo Lisboa, and more. He has appeared on "Live from Lincoln Center" and on "CBS with Charles Kuralt." On radio, Mr. Wilson has been heard on NPR affiliates with The Baltimore Choral Arts Society, Seattle Opera, Miami Opera, St. Louis Opera, Central City Opera, Boston Symphony, Pittsburgh Symphony, and Richmond Symphony.
ANDREW SCHONEBAUM: Assistant Professor, School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Chinese Culture specialist Andrew Schonebaum comes to us from Bard College. He earned his Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University in 2004, and has held appointments at Barnard College, the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia and the State University of New York at New Paltz. He is author of Approaches to Teaching The Story of the Stone, and is finishing Novel Medicine: The Curative Properties of Chinese Fiction.
FATEMEH KESHAVARZ-KARAMUSTAFA: Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute Chair in Persian Studies & Professor; Director, Roshan Center for Persian Studies, School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Fatemeh Keshavarz-Karamustafa holds a Ph.D. from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, and comes to us from Washington University in St. Louis where she has taught since 1988 in the department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages and Literatures. A highly respected interpreter of Persian Literature and Culture, she has published an important catalog of Medieval Persian manuscripts and three single-authored scholarly studies, including: Reading Mystical Lyric: The Case of Jalal al-Din Rumi, a study of Persian mediaeval poetry; Recite in the Name of the Red Rose: Poetics of Sacred Making in the Twentieth Century Iran, an examination of the array of religious impulses in recent Persian verse; and recently Jasmine and Stars: Reading more than Lolita in Tehran.
SHANNON COLLIS: Assistant Professor, Art
Shannon Collis holds a M.F.A. in Printmaking from the University of Alberta in Canada and just completed a Special Individualized M.A. at Concordia University in Montreal. Her research interests lie in the area of auditory perception and the role of sound in shaping our experience of the environment. She developed a strategy to subtly intervene in the ways our bodies interact in the sonic world, highlighting forms of listening and sensory engagement and slightly skewing and manipulating the sound space and the listener’s role, to better understand this relationship.