2009 Faculty Additions

2009 Faculty Additions

Ivan Arreguin-Toft

Ivan Arreguin-Toft (Ph.D., Political Science, University of Chicago, 1998) will join the Department of International Relations as an assistant professor with a major focus on security studies. Most recently, he has been teaching at Wellesley College and the Kennedy School at Harvard. His first book, How the Weak Win Wars: A Theory of Asymmetric Conflict, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2005. A book review in Perspectives on Politics describes it as “one of the most sophisticated book-length treatments to date of the subject on why a weaker actor, be it a state or nonstate actor, can win.” His second book, The Futility of Barbarism, also under contract with Cambridge University Press, focuses on the utility/futility of killing civilians in war.

Taylor Boas

Taylor Boas (A.B.D., Political Science, Berkeley), will be an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science. His fields of study include comparative politics, Latin American politics, and methodology, with special research foci on electoral campaigns, parties, political communication, and the political impact of the Internet in developing countries and authoritarian regimes. Among his many publications are Open Networks, Closed Regimes: The Impact of the Internet on Authoritarian Rule (with Shanthi Kalathil, published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace), “Television and Neopopulism in Latin America: Media Effects in Brazil and Peru” (Latin American Research Review, 2005), “Conceptualizing Continuity and Change: The Composite-Standard Model of Path Dependence” (Journal of Theoretical Politics, 2007), and “Neoliberalism: From New Liberal Philosophy to Anti-Liberal Slogan” (with Jordan Gans-Morse in Studies in Comparative International Development, forthcoming).

David Bronstein

David Bronstein (Ph.D., Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, University of Toronto, 2008), has accepted a position in the Department of Philosophy in the field of ancient philosophy. His specialization is the work of Aristotle, particularly his philosophy of scientific investigation. Bronstein’s dissertation is titled, “Learning and Meno’s Paradox in Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics.” In 2007 he won a prestigious three-year post-doctoral fellowship at Balliol College of Oxford University, where he is currently a Lecturer in Philosophy. His research languages include Ancient Greek, French, German, and Latin.

Laurent Bouton

Laurent Bouton (Ph.D. candidate in the European Centre for Advanced Research in Economics and Statistics, Université Libre de Bruxelles) will join the Department of Economics this fall. He also served as a pre-doctoral fellow last year at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. Laurent is an applied game theorist whose main fields of interest are political economics, voting theory, microeconomics, and public economics. His co-written paper, “Redistributing Income under Fiscal Vertical Imbalance,” recently appeared in the European Journal of Political Economy. In the paper he presented at BU, he analyzed the efficiency and stability of voting mechanisms when voters disagree not because they have different preferences, as in the standard model, but because they have different information.

Luis Carvalho

Luis Carvalho (Ph.D., Brown University, 2008), has accepted a position as assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. His major fields include Bayesian statistics, computational biology, and statistical inference. His research brings a diverse set of skills to problems at the frontier of high-dimensional data analysis and computational biology. To date, the research has focused on the estimation of high-dimensional discrete parameters, for example involving DNA sequences, RNA secondary structure, genetic traits, and phylogenetic trees.[ (unusual in that most statistical methods assume continuous parameters), such as arise frequently in the modeling and analysis of high-throughput biology data,]

Emily Hudson

Emily Hudson (Ph.D., Emory, 2006), is one of two new members of the Religion Department, filling a position in Religion and Literary Studies. Currently a lecturer at Harvard, Emily lists her fields as comparative literature and religion, history of religions, religious ethics, Hindu Studies, and Islam in South Asia. She has already published three articles stemming from her dissertation, “Disorienting Dharma: Ethics and the Poetics of Suffering in the Mahabharata, a very important, fascinating Sanskrit epic from ancient India that is very central in Hindu culture and religion. She will help the Religion Department maintain its strength in literary studies, build stronger linkages with Modern Languages and Comparative Literature, and add to Arts & Sciences’ increasing presence in South Asian Studies and Asian Studies more generally.

William Huntting (“Hunt”) Howell

William Huntting (“Hunt”) Howell (Ph.D., Northwestern, 2005) will join the English Department in early American literature. He holds a Mellon postdoctorate degree at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is interested in the relationships between literature, politics, and material culture; his work draws on science and technology studies, gender theory, and social history as well as literary criticism. His book project, American Unexceptionalism: Imitation, Emulation, and Literary Culture in the Early United States, challenges longstanding paradigms of American uniqueness by showing how eighteenth-century Americans worked creatively within, not against, European traditions. His recent articles include “A More Perfect Copy: David Rittenhouse and the Reproduction of American Virtue” in the William and Mary Quarterly, “Spirits of Emulation: Readers, Samplers, and the American Girl, 1787-1810” in American Literature, and “Entering the Lists: The Politics of Ephemera in Eastern Massachusetts, 1774,” in Early American Studies.

Sanjay Krishnan

Sanjay Krishnan (Ph.D., English and Comparative Literature, Columbia, 2001) is currently an Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine, and will join the Department of English this fall in the field of Anglophone literature. Interested in postcolonial and world literatures, Professor Krishnan is the author of many articles, editor of two books, and most recently, the author of Reading the Global: Troubling Perspectives on Britain’s Empire in Asia (Columbia University Press, 2007). He is at work on a book titled, V. S. Naipaul and the Making of World Anglophone Literature. Among the courses he has taught are Literature and Decolonization, Literary and Cultural Analysis in the Era of Globalization, The Rise of the Novel, and Anglophone Literature and Theory.

David Liebesman

David Liebesman (Ph.D. candidate, Cornell University) has accepted an assistant professor position in the Department of Philosophy. His areas of specialization include philosophy of language and metaphysics and his areas of competence include epistemology, logic, philosophy of mind, semantics, and the history of analytic philosophy. He pursued a minor in cognitive science. He will add to the College’s strength in linguistics and will represent another connection between philosophy and the cognitive sciences.

Alisdair McKay

Alisdair McKay (Ph.D. candidate, Princeton University) is a macroeconomist who will join the Department of Economics this fall. He spent two years at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York where he won the President's Award for Excellence. His co-written paper, “The Brevity and Violence of Contractions and Expansions,” recently appeared in the Journal of Monetary Economics. In “Household Saving Behavior, Wealth Accumulation, and Social Security Privatization,” the paper he discussed while visiting BU, he finds that social security privatization has two effects: It pushes households to invest more in seeking out the best investments and, because it makes returns subject to the market—and in particular, their investment mistakes—it reduces their insurance against bad outcomes. In contrast with most models that ignore imperfect decision-making, McKay finds that Social Security privatization reduces well-being, and the magnitude of this loss is somewhat increased by the presence of investment mistakes.

Ashley E. Mears

Ashley E. Mears, a Ph.D. candidate at New York University, will join the Department of Sociology as an assistant professor. She expects to defend her dissertation, “Pricing Beauty: The Production of Value in Fashion Modeling,” in June. The dissertation is already under contract with University of California Press. Mears’ research centers on how culture is produced. Her work on fashion modeling examines how that industry creates ideas about beauty and what factors shape the social production of the resulting advertisements and popular media images. She also analyzes questions about culture from a variety of theoretical angles, looking especially at how gender and racial stratification shape the market. Her combination of cultural sociology with economic sociology also involves a comparative perspective across nations and regions of the world. Among the new courses she will introduce in the CAS curriculum is a 200-level introduction to the Sociology of Popular Culture.

Robert E. Murowchick

Robert E. Murowchick (B.A., Archaeology, Yale College; Ph.D., Anthropology, Harvard) has joined the Department of Archaeology as an assistant professor. He focuses on the archaeology of China and mainland Southeast Asia; the interplay of politics, nationalism, and archaeology; and the development of bronze metallurgy in the ancient world. Since 1999, he has served as founding director of BU's International Center for East Asian Archaeology and Cultural History (ICEAACH), which has developed a broad program of field research, teaching, and library resources, as well as numerous public outreach programs to bring archaeology and Asian Studies to a broad K–12 and museum audience. Prior to joining BU, Murowchick served at Harvard as associate director of the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning and the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, as well as the university’s Title VI National Resource Center for East Asian Studies. Currently, he is working with colleagues in China to prepare the Non-Ferrous Metallurgy volume of Joseph Needham's series, Science and Civilisation in China (Needham Research Institute and Cambridge University Press). He also is collaborating with ICEAACH colleagues and institutional partners across Asia to develop ARC/Base, a comprehensive, multi-lingual bibliographic database for East Asian archaeology, with major support from the Andrew Mellon Foundation.

Magdalena Ostas

Magdalena Ostas (Ph.D., Duke University, 2007) will join the Department of English. Currently an assistant professor in English at Florida Atlantic University, Ostas will join the well-known Romanticism group in English, Her major interests are British and European romanticism, lyricism, 19th-Century intellectual history, aesthetic and social theory, and the intersections of literature and philosophy. She brings a deep knowledge of nineteenth-century German philosophy to her research in Romantic poetry. She has two books under way, Romanticism and the Forms of Interiority: Poetry, Narrative, Theory and a study of Nietzsche’s aesthetics, one part has already appeared as “Rereading Nietzsche in Theory : Aesthetics and the Movement of Genealogy in the Early Work” in International Studies in Philosophy.

Teena Purohit

Teena Purohit (Ph.D., Religion, Columbia University, 2007) will join the Department of Religion as an assistant professor specializing in Islamic Studies. She works on the history of Islam in South Asia. Her book manuscript, Constituting Muslim Identity: Ismaili Sectarianism in Colonial India, examines the history and practices of South Asian Islam in a microcosm. Reading Gujarati devotional texts and community histories along with colonial archival material, including court judgments and newspaper articles, she explores how the vernacular poetic form of the ginan came to define Muslimness in the colonial state. Looking at the connections between the Ismaili ginans and contemporary non-Muslim traditions, she argues that the South Asian context calls for a new, more expansive definition of Islam. Purohit comes to CAS from the Program in Religious Studies at the University of California, Irvine.

Simon Rabinovitch

Simon Rabinovitch (Ph.D., Brandeis, 2007) is joining the Department of History as a specialist in Jewish history. His manuscript, Jewish Nationalism and Autonomy in Late Imperial and Revolutionary Russia, is under consideration for publication by a major university press. He blends political and cultural history and uses voting records and a wide range of documentary sources in Russian and Yiddish in this study of autonomism, a movement for Jewish communal and national self-government in Russia that represents an important, but largely overlooked, moment in Jewish history and Russian history. He also has published articles on Jewish folklore and ethnography in Victorian England articles on late nineteenth-century British Jewish anthropologists. Simon will also join the faculty of the Judaic Studies Center.

Dylon Robins

Dylon Robins (Ph.D. candidate, Princeton University and University of Sao Paulo) will join the Department of Romance Studies in the field of Latin American Literature. His areas of interest include Caribbean and Brazilian Culture, African Diasporas in the Americas, and Intellectual and Cultural History, among others. He has an extraordinarily diverse background. He has two BA degrees—one in Physics with a math minor and one in Spanish with a Music Minor. His thesis, “Music and Citizenship in Brazil and Cuba: Theme, Counterpoint, Variation,” represents some of this breadth. He will help the department continue to move beyond literature narrowly construed to other culture media, in his case, music and actually, film. [In addition, Dylon has performed in jazz groups, has composition experience, and has organized a film festival.]

 

Accepted Offers since March 2009

Peter Alrenga

Peter Alrenga (PhD in Linguistics, University of California at Santa Cruz) will join the Department of Romance Studies with a primary focus on Linguistics. His dissertation work on the syntax and semantics of identity and similarity predicates, of the highest caliber, has formed the basis for his current postdoctoral fellowship (supported by NSF) at the University of Chicago. His major research interests include intra- and cross-linguistic variation in the syntax and semantics of comparative constructions and the semantics of identity and similarity predicates, including equivalence, individuation, and classification. He has taught courses on linguistics, semantics, and language change.

Jonathan Appavoo

Jonathan Appavoo (PhD in Computer Science, University of Toronto) is one of three new members of the Department of Computer Science. He is currently a research staff member at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York, where he is working in the Advanced Operating Systems (OS) Group. Jonathan's research interests encompass multi-processor operating systems and “cloud computing” on large clusters of computers. He was central to the design and development of the Tornado Operating System at the University of Toronto. In particular, he contributed a technique called "Clustered Objects" that tackled inherent problems in the design of existing systems on large-scale multi-processing platforms. The Linux 2.6 kernel now features mechanisms based primarily on Jonathan's PhD work. His dissertation work was featured in one of the premier systems conferences, OSDI 1999, and is even described on Wikipedia.

Margaret Beck

Margaret Beck (PhD in Mathematics, Boston University) is one of three new faculty joining join the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. She is in the field of Dynamic Systems. She has been an NSF postdoctoral student for the past three years at the University of Surrey (UK) and Brown University. She created a number of powerful new mathematical techniques to solve long-open problems about the essential spectra of solutions, their long term stability, and their intermediate time asymptotics. Moreover, she used new ideas from the field of spatial dynamics to determine the stability of certain patterns in two and three space dimensions.

Jeremy DeSilva

Jeremy DeSilva (PhD in Biological Anthropology, University of Michigan) will become an assistant professor of biological anthropology in the Department of Anthropology this fall. His elegantly conceived and executed thesis research appears to have resolved 25 years of acrimonious debate concerning the amount of daily activity that “Lucy” and other early human ancestors in the genus Australopithecus were still spending in the trees. (Jeremy is personally acquainted with Lucy and hopes to offer a course on her that is like one he has offered before. As a graduate student (first at BU and then at Michigan), he made a second major contribution to the study of human evolution by developing a method for inferring the size of the brain at birth in extinct humans and other primates, thus allowing more reliable inferences concerning labor and its constraints on the anatomy and evolution of the pelvis. He has been invited to bring his expertise to bear on the study and analysis of the locomotor anatomy and behavior of two extraordinarily important unpublished fossils, which represent the earliest known skeletons belonging to the human family.

Sharon Goldberg

Sharon Goldberg (PhD candidate in Electrical Engineering, Princeton University) is one of three new members of the Department of Computer Science. She specializes in the use of formal techniques from cryptography and computational game theory to design and model secure protocols for data networking. The Internet, as it currently exists, makes it very difficult to know whether messages are getting to their destinations, what routes they are taking to get there, and which router may be responsible for delayed or undelivered data. Applying tools from cryptography and computational game theory, Sharon has ruled out entire classes of approaches that had been proposed for addressing this problem, mathematically proving that they will be either not secure enough or not efficient enough. For instance, she showed such problems with the core protocol for routing Internet traffic, BGP. Sharon’s results, which surprised many researchers, saved people from pursuing dead-end approaches. Equally important, she has also proposed her own approach that gives provable security guarantees.

Gisele Hocherl-Alden

Gisele Hocherl-Alden (PhD in German, University of Wisconsin – Madison) will join the Department of Modern Languages and Comparative Literature in 2010 and become assistant dean and director of language instruction. Currently an associate professor of German with tenure at the University of Maine at Orono, in her work in the field of German she has focused on transnationalism; multiculturalism and citizenship in film and television; intellectuals, writers and film makers in the Weimar Republic; and the history of Germanics in the United States. She is also an expert in the field of teaching and learning languages, second language writing, and community and place-based pedagogies. She is a successful grant writer and is internationally recognized for her work in language teaching and learning.

Lucy Hutyra

Lucy Hutyra (PhD in Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University) will join the Department of Geography and Environment as a specialist in Carbon Cycle Science. Her thesis research examined a suite of challenging questions related to the how forested ecosystems in Amazonia interact with climate to control large scale carbon budgets in tropical South America. Upon completing her PhD, she pursued a postdoctoral program at the University of Washington with the specific goal of broadening her training to better understand how humans are influencing ecosystem function and carbon at multiple time and space scales. She already has numerous published papers.

Ramesh Jasti

Ramesh Jasti (PhD in Organic Chemistry, University of California at Irvine) will take up his position in the Department of Chemistry in the field of Organic Materials Chemistry. He is a postdoctoral researcher in Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division. He has conducted his research at the Molecular Foundry, a U.S. Department of Energy User Facility located at Berkeley Lab that provides support to nanoscience researchers around the world. Ramesh has successfully addressed a longstanding and challenging problem in chemical synthesis and materials science through the synthesis of the basic building blocks of carbon nanotubes. His recent work is expected to have a profound impact on the field of design and synthesis of carbon based materials.

Mark Kramer

Mark Kramer (PhD in Applied Physics, University of California at Berkeley) is one of three new assistant professors in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. He will be part of the Computational Neuroscience Group. The major research interests of his research group include neural rhythms (What paces brain rhythms? Do rhythms serve functional roles?); brain diseases (What mechanisms support epilepsy? Can data analysis reveal precursors to Alzheimer's disease?); dynamical systems (What dynamical mechanisms govern neural activity and rhythms?); and data analysis (How do we quantify interacting rhythms? How do we make sense of high-density data?).

Timothy Longman

Timothy Longman (PhD in Political Science, University of Wisconsin – Madison) will join the Department of Political Science and will become the next director of the African Studies Center. Currently an associate professor with tenure in Political Science and Africana Studies at Vassar College, Tim’s work focuses on African politics, with specializations in religion and politics, ethnicity and politics, state-society relations, and genocide and human rights. He has also served in many consultancy positions relating to human rights in Africa, working with USAID, the International Center for Transitional Justice, and Human Rights Watch. His book, Commanded by the Devil: Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda, will be published by Cambridge University Press later this year.

Sunil Sharma

Sunil Sharma (PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago) will join the Department of Modern Languages and Comparative Literature as a specialist in Persian language and literature. In his research, Sunil works effortlessly across ancient and modern periods (1200–1967); Persian, Hindi/Urdu, and Gujarati; and empires from Ghaznavid to Moghul to British. He was originally a scholar of classical Persian poetry, but his courses are impressively wide-ranging, including areas such as literature and film and Women’s Studies.

Evimaria Terzi

Evimaria Terzi (PhD in Computer Science, University of Helsinki) is one of three new members of the Department of Computer Science. She is currently a research staff member at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose. Her research interests are data mining and very large- scale data analysis. She has developed data mining algorithms and techniques to analyze and summarize large sequential datasets, analyze and rank query results in databases, and analyze graph data. For example, she has developed new algorithms for segmentation problems of large sequential data, such as time series, web logs, or biological sequences (e.g., DNA). In her most recent work, she has focused on problems of analysis of graph data, including social networks and biological networks.

Andrew West

Andrew West (PhD in Astronomy, University of Washington) will join the Department of Astronomy. He currently holds a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT. His major research interests center around M- and L-type dwarf stars (the smallest yet most numerous stars in the Milky Way). He is interested in what we can learn about their internal structure and generation of magnetic fields, as well as how we can use them to understand the structure and evolution of the Galaxy. He uses the vast Sloan Digitial Sky Survey to help assign ages to old stars by using measurements of their velocities. Older stars will have had more chance encounters with other stars, and because of these encounters are boosted to higher speeds. This technique is a novel approach that may solve a long-standing problem. He has worked on both stars and galaxies, using both observational and theoretical studies.