2007-2008 New Faculty
Anthropology
Christine VanPool (PhD, University of New Mexico, 2003) is an archaeologists interested in archaeological method and theory, religion, iconography and symbolic analysis, and ceramic analysis. She works in the U.S. Southwest and northern Mexico.
Greg Blomquist (PhD, University of Illinois, 2007) is a biological anthropologist interested in the evolutionary genetics and demography of human and non-human primates.
Art
Cherie Sampson, assistant professor, received her MFA in Intermedia Art at the School of Art & Art History at the University of Iowa in 1997. Cherie works in the mediums of environmental sculpture, video and performance. She has exhibited her work, presented performances and participated in educational programs and conferences in the U.S. and abroad. Her international research and exhibitions have included a Fulbright Fellowship to Finland where she did a performance/installation at the Pori Museum of Contemporary Art in 1998 and an environmental sculpture and performance project at Sorsapuisto Park in Tampere in 2004. Cherie’s video-performance work has been most recently exhibited in Iowa, Michigan, St. Louis, Koli Mountain, Finland and at the Festival of the Water in Campagna, Italy.
Chemistry
Jason W. Cooley, assistant professor of Chemistry, received his PhD from Arizona State University working on the influence of metabolism and environment on photosynthesis and respiration in microorganisms. Jason recently completed two consecutive postdoctoral fellowships with Professor Fevzi Daldal at the University of Pennsylvania, funded by the NIH and subsequently the American Heart Association, examining the biophysical mechanisms by which respiratory proteins are prone to or avoid the deleterious production of radical oxygen species. Work in his lab will continue to address the regulatory role of protein dynamics in these large cofactor rich membrane protein complexes, which are the causative agents of a host of muscular and aging related disease syndromes.
Classical Studies
Richard Foley joins the faculty of the department of classical studies, coming to Missouri after having been an associate professor of philosophy at Eastern Illinois University. He received his B.A. from Yale University (1992) and Ph.D. from Northwestern University (2001). His scholarship centers on two major figures in the history of philosophy, Plato and David Hume, and he teaches on a wide variety of topics in ancient and modern philosophy. Current research projects include the philosophy of Socrates in Plato’s early dialogues, and Hume’s philosophy of religion.
Communication
Lissa Behm-Morawitz joins the faculty having recently completed her Ph.D. at the University of Arizona in Tuscan. Her dissertation examined the sexual objectification of female characters in video games. More specifically, she studied how men and women respond to the presentation of sexualize characters in a video game. Lissa adds breadth to the faculty with her teaching and research interests in mass communication.
Economics
Chao Gu received her Ph.D. in Economics from Cornell University in 2007, M.A. in Economics from the University of Missouri at Columbia in 2002, and B.A. in Economics from Fudan University in 1998. Her research and teaching interests are macroeconomics, money and banking, and monetary economics.
Cory Koedel is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Missouri. His research interests include the economics of education and labor economics. Professor Koedel’s current research focuses on value-added and the measurement of teacher quality. In recent work, he has examined the impacts of school choice policy and of intensive reading programs targeted at disadvantaged students. In 2005, he received the Spencer Foundation’s prestigious dissertation fellowship award. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, San Diego.
English
Aliki Barnstone is a poet, translator, critic, and editor. Her books of poems are Blue Earth (Iris, 2004), Wild With It (Sheep Meadow, 2002), a National Books Critics Circle Notable Book, Madly in Love (Carnegie-Mellon, 1997), Windows in Providence (Curbstone, 1981), and The Real Tin Flower (which was introduced by Anne Sexton and was published by Macmillan in 1968, when she was twelve years old). Other books are The Collected Poems of C.P. Cavafy: A New Translation (W.W. Norton, 2006) and Changing Rapture: Emily Dickinson’s Poetic Development (University Press of New England, 2007). She has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize twice. She edited A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now (Schocken, 1980; second edition, 1992), The Calvinist Roots of the Modern Era (University Press of New England, 1997), The Shambhala Anthology of Women’s Spiritual Poetry (Shambhala, 1999; 2003), and she introduced and wrote the readers’ notes for H.D.’s Trilogy (New Directions, 1998). Her poems and translations have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, New Letters, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, TriQuarterly, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She has recorded a collaborative C.D. with musician Frank Haney. She has a book forthcoming: Pique, a book of poems (the Sheep Meadow Press). Barnstone spent the fall of 2006 in Greece as a Senior Fulbright Scholar. Her Fulbright project is a book of poems in the voice of an imaginary poet, Eva Victoria Perera, a Sephardic Jew from Thessaloniki, who survives the Holocaust.
Jeff Rice received his PhD from the University of Florida in 2002. He was previously Assistant Professor of English and Director of Writing at The University of Detroit Mercy (2002 - 2004) and Assistant Professor of English at Wayne State University (2004-2007). He is the author of The Rhetoric of Cool: Composition Studies and New Media (SIUP 2007), Writing About Cool: Hypertext and Cultural Studies in the Computer Classroom (Longman 2002) and the co-editor of New Media/New Methods: The Turn from Literacy to Electracy (forthcoming Parlor Press 207). He has also published numerous essays on pedagogy, rhetoric, writing, and new media.
Jenny Edbauer Rice specializes in rhetorical theory, writing studies, and new media. She received her PhD in English from The University of Texas at Austin in 2005. Her work has appeared in Rhetoric Society Quarterly, JAC, College Composition and Communication, and Postmodern Culture. She is currently working on a book project addressing rhetoric and cultural affect. When not working, she is either running, blogging, or spending quality time with her new daughter.
Alexandra Socarides received her PhD in English from Rutgers University. Her dissertation, "Emily Dickinson and the Problem of Genre," examines the handmade books of poems that Dickinson made between 1858 and 1864, and situates their production in relation to other nineteenth-century compositional practices. Sections of it have appeared or will appear in the Emily Dickinson Journal, Blackwell's Companion to Emily Dickinson (eds. Mary Loeffelholz and Martha Nell Smith) and Dickinson's Fascicles: A Spectrum of Possibilities (eds. Paul Crumbley and Eleanor Heginbotham). She teaches American Poetry.
History
Michael Bednar, assistant professor, earned his M.A. in South Asian Studies from the University of Wisconsin and his Ph.D. in South Asian History at the University of Texas in 2007. During this time, he received University fellowships, a Fulbright-Hays DDRA fellowship, and a number of Title VI (FLAS) fellowships to study Hindi, Urdu, and Persian. His research focuses on Hindu–Muslim interactions during the Delhi Sultanate, South Asia’s first pan-Indic Muslim empire, from 1206 to 1526. His current project examines how Muslim and Hindus promoted emerging Indo-Muslim and Rajput social identities within established literary traditions, changing both the historical perception and the literary aesthetic of these texts.
Ilyana Karthas, assistant professor, earned her M.A. and Ph.D. from Brown
University. She specializes in modern European history with a particular
interest in the cultural politics of ballet in France. Prior to joining the department she was a lecturer in the department of history at the University of Ottawa. Dr. Karthas will teach courses in French history and European intellectual and cultural history.
Michelle Morris, assistant professor, received her PhD from Harvard University. She specializes is early U.S. women’s history. 'Her dissertation, "Under Household Government: Family and Sex in Massachusetts, 1660-1700,' is a community study that challenges conventional understandings of how Puritan social control worked." Prior to joining the department, Dr. Morris was a lecturer at Harvard, and has been a Fellow at the Charles Warren Center. Dr. Morris will teach courses in US women’s history and early American history.
Philosophy
Dr. Philip Robbins joins the Philosophy Department as an associate professor, having previously taught at Washington University in St Louis. He was educated at Harvard University and the University of Chicago. He has published widely in the philosophy of mind and psychology and the philosophy of language, integrating empirical findings from the sciences of the mind with philosophical analysis.
Political Science
Peverill Squire, Hicks and Martha Griffiths Chair in American Political Institutions, received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1986. He is co-editor of Legislative Studies Quarterly. Professor Squire has been a visiting professor at Meiji University in Tokyo, Japan, and a Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer, holding the John Marshall Chair in Political Science at the Budapest (Hungary) University of Economic Sciences. His recent books include 101 Chambers: Congress, State Legislatures, and the Future of Legislative Studies, Legislatures: Comparative Perspectives on Representative Assemblies, Who Runs for the Legislature?, and the fifth edition of Dynamics of Democracy. His articles have appeared in American Political Science Review, Annual Review of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, Congress & the Presidency, Legislative Studies Quarterly, Journal of Politics, Political Behavior, Political Research Quarterly, Polity, Public Opinion Quarterly, State Politics and Policy Quarterly, and other journals. Professor Squire previously was on the faculty at the University of Iowa where he was the recipient of a Collegiate Teaching Award, a Special Recognition for Mentoring Award from the graduate college, and a Regents Award for Faculty Excellence, from the Board of Regents, State of Iowa.
Leslie Schwindt-Bayer is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Missouri. She joined the department in the Fall of 2007 after four years as an assistant professor of political science at the University of Mississippi. She holds Ph.D. (2003) and M.A. (1999) degrees from the University of Arizona and a B.A. (1996) degree from Virginia Tech. Dr. Schwindt-Bayer's subfield is comparative politics with a regional concentration on Latin America, and her research interests include political institutions, legislative representation, and gender and politics.
Psychological Sciences
Hans-Friedrich Koehn received his PhD in quantitative psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2007. His current research focuses on applications of combinatorial data analysis to scaling/unfolding, clustering/tree-fitting and order-constrained matrix decomposition for the analysis of individual differences based on three-way proximity matrices, as might be observed in the context of cross-sectional or longitudinal studies.
Kristy vanMarle received her PhD in developmental psychology at Yale University in 2004, then went on to complete a 3-year postdoctoral fellowship at Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Her research interests include the development of numerical and object cognition, naive physics, and cognitive representations of quantity.
Robert J. Rydell received his PhD in Social Psychology at Miami University in 2005. For the past 2 years he has served as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research focuses on how quick, non-deliberative evaluations and thought out, deliberation evaluations differ in terms of formation, change, representation, and expression. Further, he is interested in how people deal with or regulate instances when non-deliberative and deliberative evaluations are inconsistent (i.e., of opposite valence).
Religious Studies
Rabia Gregory earned her PhD in Religious Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2007. Her research focuses medieval women's religious literature from Germany and the Low Countries. She will be teaching classes in the history of Christianity.
Romance Languages and Literatures
Daniel Sipe, assistant professor of French, received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 2003. His research interests include nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century visual culture, literature and intellectual history. He has published several articles on French symbolism and utopia, and he is currently working on a book project titled Technologies of Being: Culture, Society and Science in Fin-de-siècle France. This project seeks to define more broadly the intellectual and historical intersections between aesthetics and technology, art and science. It analyzes several prominent cultural figures in order to show how their representational practices reproduce, mimic, co-opt or otherwise engage the forces and mechanisms behind the technical reorganization of the everyday. Daniel has presented his research at several international, national, and regional conferences, and his scholarhip has appeared in such journals as Nineteenth Century French Studies, and the Review of the International Association on Epistolary Research.
Asier Alcázar, assistant professor of Spanish, received his Ph.D. in Spanish Linguistics from the University of Southern California in 2007. His research interests include syntax and its relation to semantics and morphology; computational linguistics; sociolinguistics; and dialectology. He has published several articles on various aspects of Spanish, Basque and Romance syntax, and edited two conference proceedings volumes. In addition, Asier has developed software tools to work with the online corpora of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language. He is currently doing research in Phase Theory, and the typology of phrases and clauses in the following languages: Spanish and the Romance family, Basque, Medieval and Renaissance Italian, and Latin. Morever, he creates electronic texts for use in computational investigations. Asier has presented his research at several international, national, and regional conferences, and his scholarship has appeared in such journals as the Journal of Basque Linguistics, and the Journal of Cognitive Science.
Sociology
Brian Colwell received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2006. His research and teaching interests are in the areas of social psychology, group processes, social order, social control, and research methods.
Rebecca Scott received her Ph.D., with a parenthetical notation in Feminist Studies, in 2007 from the University of California-Santa Cruz. Her research and teaching interests include gender, race and class formations, cultural studies, environmental inequality, nature and society, and feminist ethnography.
Theatre
Dr. Judith A. Sebesta's research specialty is musical theatre history and theory; her essays have appeared, or are forthcoming, in numerous journals and anthologies, including the Cambridge Companion to the Musical, Studies in Musical Theatre, the Contemporary Theatre Review, New England Theatre Journal, Theatre Journal, and The Sondheim Review. Her co-edited anthology on women in musical theatre is forthcoming from McFarland Press. Sebesta also is co-author of an innovative digital i-text for Theatre Appreciation courses to be published by Allyn & Bacon. She serves as Secretary of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), as well as Chair of the Electronic Technology Committee and Performance Review Editor for Theatre Journal. She was the recipient of the College of Fine Arts Outstanding Teacher Award for 2004-05 where she previously taught at the University of Arizona.