Colgate Welcomes New Faculty for the 2020 Academic Year

Ramesh Adhikari, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy (BA, Berea College; PhD, University of Massachusetts–Amherst) 

Adhikari comes to Colgate from Jacksonville University where he served as an assistant professor of physics. His dissertation title is “Study of Charge Transport Mechanism in Microbial Nanowires.” His teaching specialties include teaching physics core courses at all levels. He is also interested in integrating active learning pedagogies to make learning physics more interactive. His research interests include working on projects that involve using biodegradable and sustainable materials for construction of electronic components and energy harvesting.

Genevieve Alorbi, A. Lindsay O’Connor Chair of American Institutions in the Department of Economics (BA, Economics, University of Ghana; MA, Economics, Western Illinois University; PhD, Economics, Southern Illinois University)

Alorbi comes to Colgate from State University of New York at Potsdam where she served as a faculty member in the business department. Her dissertation title is “Essays on Hospital Reimbursement and Quality of Healthcare Provision.” Her teaching specialties include health economics, microeconomics, industrial organization, game theory, development economics, international economics, and applied econometrics. Her research interests include applied microeconomics; health economics, health systems and policy, game theoretical modeling of health care production, health disparities and minority health, global health, behavioral and mental health, labor economics, human capital development,
international trade/finance, effects of foreign aid, and development economics, education/health care.

Noah Apthorpe, Assistant Professor of Computer Science (BA, Princeton University; MA, Princeton University; PhD Candidate, Princeton University)

Apthorpe comes to Colgate from Princeton University. His dissertation title is “Network Privacy and User Protection in the Internet of Things.” His research interests include privacy and security, human-computer interaction, applied machine learning, and computer networks. 

Fatima Aqeel, Assistant Professor of Economics (BA, Brown University; PhD Candidate, Boston University)

Aqeel comes to Colgate from Boston University. Her teaching specialties include introductory economics and gender economics. Her research interests include development economics, labor economics, and gender economics.

T. Dionne Bailey, Assistant Professor of Africana and Latin American Studies (BA, Liberal Studies, Reinhardt University; MA, History, University of Mississippi; PhD, History, University of Mississippi)

Bailey comes to Colgate from at the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia where she served as a teaching and research postdoctoral fellow. Her dissertation is titled “‘Please don’t forget about me:’ African American Women, Mississippi, and the History of Crime and Punishment in Parchman Prison, 1890–1980.” Her teaching specialties include racial and social injustice, history of mass incarceration, black girls and women in the Southern prison system, Black feminist theory, gender and hip hop, Southern culture, and politics of respectability. Her research interests include African American women’s history, carceral studies, critical race studies, the South in the 20th century, and Black feminist theory. 

Xena Becker, Special Collections Librarian, University Library (BA, New York University)

Becker comes to Colgate from the University of Illinois library where she served as a graduate assistant. Her teaching specialties include primary source literacy and object-based instruction. Her research interests include Queer history and archives and climate justice in libraries.

Chloe Blackshear, Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion and Jewish Studies (BA, Williams College; PhD, Comparative Literature, University of Chicago)

Blackshear comes to Colgate from the University of Chicago where she served as a humanities teaching fellow in the Department of Comparative Literature and the college. Her dissertation is titled “Between the Figure and the Text: David Stories in Late 20th-Century Prose.” Her teaching specialties include Hebrew Bible, reception studies, adaptation studies, religion and literature, and modern Jewish literatures. Her research interests include Hebrew Bible, the Deuteronomistic history, biblical reception, philology, post-war Jewish fiction, Hebrew Bible and nationalism, gender studies, and theories of character. 

Christopher Briggs, Visiting Assistant Professor of Biology (BS, Virginia Tech; MSc, University of Nevada; PhD, University of Nevada)

Briggs comes to Colgate from Hamilton College. His dissertation title is “Seasonal Interactions and Plumage Polymorphisms in Swainson’s Hawks.”

Mimmo Cangiano, Visiting Assistant Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies (PhD, Duke University)

Cangiano comes to Colgate from Harvard University having served as an assistant professor.

Sunghee Cho, Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science (PhD, Syracuse University)

Cho comes to Colgate from Syracuse University. Her teaching specialties include international relations, East Asia, and China.

Yi Cui, Assistant Professor Art and Art History (MFA, York University)

Cui comes to Colgate from Simon Fraser University where she served as a visiting assistant professor. Her dissertation title is “YING, an experimental film.” Her teaching specialties include film and video. Her research interests include independent filmmaking and autoethnographic cinema.

Jessica Davenport, Post-doctoral Fellow/Teaching Faculty, Department of Religion (BA, Spelman College; MA, Rice University; MDiv, Emory University; PhD, Rice University)

Davenport comes to Colgate from the University of Houston where she served as a lecturer. Her dissertation title is “Appositional Black Aesthetics: Theorizing Black Religion in the Visual Art of Carrie Mae Weems.” Her teaching specialties include Black religion (history, theory, and methods); aesthetics of Black religion; religion in film; race and religion in the United States; religion, gender, and sexuality. Her research interests include theories of Black religion; religion in art and visual culture; religion, gender and sexuality; Black feminist contemporary art and aesthetics; Black critical theory; Queer theory.

Nicholas Diana, Assistant Professor of Computer Science (BS, Allegheny College; PhD candidate, Carnegie Mellon University)

Diana comes to Colgate from Carnegie Mellon University. His dissertation title is “Value-Adaptive Instruction for Promoting More Productive Civil Discourse.” His teaching specialties include human-computer interaction, interactive data science, user-centered research, machine learning, natural language processing, and educational technology. His research interests include civic technology, educational games, debiasing, adaptive instruction, and augmented reasoning.

Pierce Donovan, Visiting Assistant Professor in Economics (BS, Physics and Economics, Rochester Institute of Technology; PhD Candidate, UC Davis)

Donovan comes to Colgate from UC Davis. His teaching specialties include environmental and natural resource economics, statistics and econometrics, and computational/mathematical methods in economics. His research interests include environmental and species conservation; decision making under uncertainty; and dynamic optimization.

Frances Fairbairn, Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy (BA, Leeds University; MA, Leeds University; PhD, Cornell University)

Fairbairn comes to Colgate from Ithaca, N.Y., where she served as a post-doctoral visiting lecturer at Cornell University. Her dissertation title is “Tangled Inferences: An Investigation of Inference Webs in Metaphysics, Epistemology, and the Philosophy of Science.” Her teaching specialties and research interests include philosophy of science, epistemology, metaphysics, and environmental ethics.

Marisol Fonseca Malavasi, Visiting Assistant Professor of Romance Languages (BA, Spanish Philology, Universidad de Costa Rica; MFA, Creative Writing in Spanish, University of Iowa; MA, Romance Languages and Literature, University of Notre Dame; PhD, Literature and Gender Studies, University of Notre Dame)

Fonseca Malavasi comes to Colgate from the University of Notre Dame, where she was a postdoctoral scholar as well as an instructor, teaching Spanish, gender studies, and Latin American literature. Her dissertation title is “Beyond the Panopticon: Alternative Mobilities and Visual Models in Women’s Literature of the Southern Cone.”

Paul Harnik, Assistant Professor of Geology (BA, Oberlin College; PhD, University of Chicago)

Harnik comes to Colgate from Franklin and Marshall College where he served as an associate professor of geosciences. His teaching specialties include paleontology, earth history, marine science, and the Anthropocene. His research interests include how organisms respond to environmental change, specifically the capacities of species to adapt and move as well as their vulnerabilities to extinction.

Amelia Herbert, Visiting Instructor of Educational Studies (BA, Duke University; MA/EdM, Columbia University–Teachers College; PhD Candidate, Columbia University–Teachers College)

Herbert comes to Colgate from Columbia University. Her dissertation title is “‘A Ticket to Life:’ Marketized Schooling, Spatial Pedagogy, and the Politics of Aspiration in Cape Town.” Her teaching specialties include anthropology of education; comparative and international education. Her research interests include racial and spatial politics of schooling; marketized education reform; youth and the politics of aspiration; racial capitalism and schooling and geography of urban education.

Dominique Hill, Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies (BA, Colgate University; MS, Miami University; PhD, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

Hill is former A. Lindsay O’Connor Chair of American Institutions in Women’s Studies. Her teaching specialties include black feminisms, conventional and creative qualitative methods, creative and critical pedagogies, and cultural studies. Her research interests include exploring and curating mutual encoding between race and gender in traditional and cultural education spaces and black girls and women’s unlearning and subversion of these codes. Her recent book, Who Look at Me: Shifting the Gaze of Education Through Blackness, Queerness, and the Body, uses a black feminist cultural lens to observe multiple levels of gaze and proposes performance and critical introspection as tools to interrogate and shift how blackness and queerness are read, engaged, and valued in educational spaces, in and beyond schools.

Lyndse Hokanson, Head Coach in Women’s Soccer

Hokanson came to Colgate after serving five seasons as an assistant coach at Georgetown. She guided the Hoyas to five consecutive NCAA tournament appearances, three straight Big East championships, and two trips to the College Cup Semifinals.

Jason Houghtaling, Assistant Football Coach (BA, Binghamton University; MEd, Wagner College)

Houghtaling comes to Colgate from Wagner College, where he spent five seasons as head coach and, before that, was offensive coordinator. He spent the 2013 season at Cornell as offensive coordinator.

Matthew Hudson, Visiting Assistant Professor of Chemistry (BA, SUNY College at Potsdam; MPhil, Syracuse University; PhD, Syracuse University)

Hudson comes to Colgate from Stevenson University. His dissertation title is “Investigation of Hydrogen Bonded Molecular Solids by Diffraction, Spectroscopy, and Computational Chemistry.”

Sean Inoue, Visiting Professor of Economics (BA, Lewis and Clark College; PhD, University of Arizona)

Inoue comes to Colgate from Louisiana State University where he served as a visiting assistant professor. His dissertation title is “Essays on Experiments Examining Incomplete Contracting and Communication.” His teaching specialties include game theory, principles of economics and microeconomics. His research interests include game theory, experimental economics, behavioral economics, strategic communication, and contracting.

Elizabeth Johnson, Assistant Women’s Soccer Coach (BE, Vanderbilt University)

Johnson comes to Colgate from the University of Pennsylvania where she served as an assistant coach.

Taryn Jordon, CFD Postdoctoral Fellow in Women’s Studies (BS, Northern Arizona University; MA, Georgia State University; PhD Candidate, Emory University)

Jordan comes to Colgate from Emory University. Her dissertation title is “A Peculiar Sense: A Black Feminist Genealogy of Soul.” Her teaching specialties include feminist theory, queer theory, Black feminisms, Foucault, and Du Bois. Her research interests include Black aesthetics, Black poetics, Black domesticity, and Black food ways.

Krista Kennedy, NEH Visiting Professor of Writing and Rhetoric (BA, University of Arkansas at Little Rock; MA, University of Arkansas at Little Rock; PhD, University of Minnesota)

Kennedy comes to Colgate from Syracuse University where she served as an associate professor of writing and rhetoric. Her teaching specialties include rhetorical studies, philosophy of technology, disability studies, and digital writing. Her research focuses on the ways that humans work closely with technologies and the rhetorical implications of policies and laws that shape that work. She is also interested in the ways we construct our relationships with technologies, whether contemporary or historical. Her experience as a deaf academic informs her current project, which examines intersections of deafness, artificial intelligence, and ethics of medical data collection.

Harlis Meaders, Director of Track and Field and Cross Country

Meaders arrived at Colgate last October after seven years as head coach and director of track and field and cross country at the University of North Carolina. He returned to coach at his alma mater, UNC, in 2012 after an 18-year stint at Florida State. While with the Seminoles, he rose to the program’s associate head coach in 2004 while coaching the throwers and coordinating recruiting operations.

Maggie Millner, Creative Writing Fellow (BA, Brown University; MFA, New York University)

Millner comes to Colgate from Bucknell University where she served as a Stadler Fellow in poetry. She also worked at Rutgers University as an NTT instructor in the writing program. Her teaching specialties include creative and critical writing, poetry and poetics, and LGBTQ studies.

David M.A. Murphy, Assistant Professor of Economics (BA, SUNY Geneseo; MA, Tufts University; PhD, Cornell University)

Murphy comes to Colgate from Evansville, Ind., where he served as an assistant professor at the University of Evansville. His dissertation title is “Three Essays on Agriculture, the Environment, and Peer Networks in Western Kenya.” David’s teaching specialties include development economics. His research interests include economics of development, agriculture, networks, religion, gender, and environment.

David M. Newman, Visiting Professor of Sociology and Anthropology (BA, San Diego State; MA, University of Washington; PhD, University of Washington)

Newman comes to Colgate from DePauw University. His dissertation title is “Gender and power in intimate relationships: Dyadic structure and cognitive processes.” His teaching specialties include deviance, mental illness, inequality, family, and research methods.

Jennifer Peeler, Assistant Professor of Chemistry (BA, Franklin and Marshall College; PhD, The Rockefeller University)

Peeler comes to Colgate from Boston College where she served as a postdoc in the chemistry department. Her dissertation title is “Isopeptide and Ester Bond Ubiquitination Regulate Degradation of the Human Dopamine Receptor 4.” Her teaching specialties include biochemistry. Her research interests include chemical biology, especially the use of genetic code expansion to study post-translational modifications and selenoprotein biology.

Stephen Rodriguez-Plate, Gretchen Hoadley Burke Endowed Chair for Regional Studies (BA, Seattle Pacific University; MATS, Columbia Theological Seminary; MTh, University of Glasgow, Scotland; PhD, Emory University)

Rodriguez-Plate comes to Colgate from Hamilton College where he served as professor of religious studies and cinema and media studies by special appointment. His teaching specialties include religion and visual culture and religion and media. His research interests include theories of religion, comparative religion, media studies, and sense perception.

Lucy Schiller, Olive B. O'Connor Fellow in Nonfiction, English (BA, Grinnell College; MFA, University of Iowa)

Schiller comes to Colgate from the Technical University of Dortmund, University of Iowa. Her teaching specialties include nonfiction writing, the history of the essay, literary journalism, immersion journalism, and hybrid work. Her research interests include nonfiction writing, experimental documentary writing, WPA-era journalism, documentary poetry, and environmentalist writing.

Rebecca Upton, Visiting Professor in Sociology and Anthropology and Africana and Latin American Studies (BA, Colgate University; MPH, Emory; PhD, Brown University)

Upton comes to Colgate from DePauw University where she served as a professor of sociology and anthropology and codirector and cofounder of the Global Health Program. Her dissertation title is “Our Blood Does Not Agree: Negotiating Infertility in Northern Botswana.” Her teaching specialties include gender and the body, medical anthropology, public health ethnographic methods and models of inquiry–mixed methods, qualitative research methods, ideologies of representation and identity and museum studies, gendered economies, migration and development, the politics of reproductive health and HIV/AIDS, Sub-Saharan Africa and the African Diaspora, anthropology of the contemporary United States, anthropology, and public health. Her research interests include fertility, disease prevention, HIV/AIDS, migration, work and family, gender, cultural material, Africana studies, and Micronesia.

Noah Wilson, Visiting Instructor of Writing and Rhetoric (BS, SUNY Brockport; MA, SUNY Brockport; PhD Candidate, Syracuse University)

Wilson comes to Colgate from Syracuse University. His dissertation title is “Algorithmic Dwelling: The Consequences of Ethos on Social Media Platforms.” His teaching specialties include digital writing, rhetorical theory, and first-year composition. His research interests include algorithmic rhetorics, surveillance studies, and popular culture.

Bowen Zhou, Post-Doc in Physics (BS, Applied Physics, Chengdu University of Technology, China; PhD, Physics, Washington University)

Zhou comes to Colgate from Washington University, where he was a graduate researcher in the physics department’s graphene and 2D material lab. His dissertation is titled “Extraordinary magnetoresistance in encapsulated graphene device.”