New FAS Ladder Faculty 2012-2013

Ben Conisbee Baer comes to Yale from the Department of Comparative Literature at Princeton where he has been Assistant Professor for five years. Educated in the United Kingdom at Nottingham Trent University (B.A.) and the University of Nottingham (M.A.), and in the United States at Columbia University (Ph.D.), he works on comparative colonial and modernist literatures with emphases on South Asia (especially India and Bangladesh), critical theory, and postcolonial studies. He recently published a translation of one of India’s key mid-20th-century novels from Bengali (The Tale of Hansuli Turn by Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay, Columbia University Press, 2011). His book on transnational modernism and indigenous vanguard movements is forthcoming, also from Columbia.

Josh Billings trained in Classics, German, and Comparative Literature at Harvard and Oxford, and comes to Yale following a year as a research fellow at St John’s College, Cambridge. His research focuses on tragedy, intellectual history, and the classical tradition, with emphasis on ancient Greece and modern Germany. His first book, A Genealogy of the Tragic: Greek tragedy and German philosophy around 1800 (currently under review), traces the background and early development of German Idealist thought on tragedy. He is also co-editing two volumes, Choruses, Ancient and Modern and Tragedy and the Idea of Modernity, both under contract with Oxford University Press. He is an occasional contributor to the Times Literary Supplement and has been the recipient of Harvard’s Jacob Wendell and Newbold Rhinelander Landon Memorial Scholarships and a Rhodes Scholarship.

Stuart Campbell’s teaching and research interests revolve around the use of engineering as a means of understanding human physiology, with an emphasis on biomechanical function of the heart. He is currently studying the mechanisms that underlie genetic forms of heart disease using a combination of computational and experimental approaches. These include the development of new multi-scale models of the heart that bring together genomic, functional, and anatomical data to predict behavior of the intact organ. Stuart grew up in eastern Washington, where he attended Washington State University. He earned his doctoral degree in bioengineering from the University of California, San Diego, and completed postdoctoral work in physiology at the University of Kentucky.

Oswaldo Chinchilla is an archaeologist, working in the Maya area of Guatemala. He has conducted extensive archaeological research in the Cotzumalguapa region of Guatemala’s Pacific piedmont, including studies of settlement patterns and urbanism, recording and analysis of the sculptural corpus, and documentary research on the pre-Columbian peoples of the area. Originally trained at the University of San Carlos, Guatemala, he earned a Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University. His recent work, focusing on Mesoamerican religion and iconography, has resulted in a series of innovative papers published in major journals. In 2011, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work on Cotzumalhuapa art and archaeology. He is the author of Imágenes de la Mitología Maya (2011), an examination of mythological themes in Maya art, and Cotzumalguapa: La ciudad arqueológica (2012) an introductory guide to Cotzumalhuapa archaeology. He is coeditor of The Decipherment of Ancient Maya Writing (2001), The Technology of Maya Civilization (2011), and Arqueología Subacuática: Amatitlán, Atitlán (2011).

Jason Crawford received his Ph.D. in chemistry with Craig Townsend at the Johns Hopkins University, where he studied the biosynthesis of genetically encoded small molecules produced by microbes. He then carried out postdoctoral research with Jon Clardy in the Biological Chemistry & Molecular Pharmacology Department at Harvard Medical School, where he studied novel bioactive small molecule stimulation in the context of host-bacteria interactions. At Harvard Medical School, he was supported by a Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation fellowship and a National Institutes of Health Pathway to Independence fellowship. He is now excited to be a part of the Chemical Biology Institute on the West Campus, and the Department of Chemistry, where his lab will continue to execute interdisciplinary chemical biology approaches to exploit natural systems for antibiotic discovery and to decode the unknown microbial small molecule contributors governing host-bacteria interactions. More information on his research can be found online at:  http://crawfordlab.sites.yale.edu/.

Kim Dang is a mathematician, working in the area of probability and combinatorics. Her main research interests lie on random matrix theory and random regular graphs. She recently worked on random permutation matrices. Kim received her Ph.D. at University of Zurich, Switzerland. In addition to mathematics, she studied film science and media communication and served on several committees for film festivals and film prizes in Switzerland.

William Fleming completed his undergraduate degree in physics at Harvard and returned there for graduate studies, receiving his Ph.D. from the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations in 2011. He was a postdoctoral associate at Yale and has also spent time as a visiting researcher at Kyoto University and the National Institute of Japanese Literature in Tokyo. His research focuses on 18th- and 19th-century Japanese fiction and the popular stage, in particular the representation of and engagement with unfamiliar cultures, whether those of rural Japan, Japan’s geographical peripheries, or overseas. He teaches courses on premodern and early modern Japanese literature, theater, and cultural history.

Lloyd Grieger is an Assistant Professor in the department of Sociology and the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, and a faculty fellow at the Center for Research on Inequalities and the Life Course (CIQLE). A social demographer, he received his Ph.D. in Sociology and Public Policy in 2010 from the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. He also received an M.A. (statistics) and an M.P.P. (social policy analysis) from the University of Michigan. His research interests include poverty and social policy, the transition to adulthood, and family/relationship formation in the United States and South Africa. He is also interested in quantitative research methods, especially those using longitudinal panel data. He has held research positions at the U.S. Department of State (Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor), the United Nations (Demographic and Social Statistics Bureau), the Urban Institute, the (U.S.) National Poverty Center, and the Southern African Labor and Development Research Unit at the University of Cape Town.

Leslie Harkema earned her M.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Georgia at Athens in 2007 and her Ph.D. in Hispanic Language and Literatures in 2012 from Boston University. Her research focuses on 19th- and 20th-century Spanish literature, and she is currently working on a study of the relationship between the prolific essayist and poet Miguel de Unamuno and a group of writers known in the 1920s as “La Joven Literatura” (“The Young Literature”), later referred to as the Generation of 1927. In 2011, she was awarded a Fulbright grant to carry out archival research for this project in Madrid and Salamanca. This year at Yale, she will be teaching courses on Spanish culture and modern Hispanic poetry.

An early China specialist, Mick Hunter received his Ph.D. from the Department of East Asian Studies at Princeton University. His current research project, Sayings of Confucius, Deselected, examines the history of the Confucius saying in the early period (through the fall of the Han dynasty in 220 CE) and features the argument that the Confucian Analects, a text traditionally thought to have originated in the fifth century BCE, was compiled no earlier than ca. 150 BCE. (In the Chinese context, this is akin to arguing that Plato’s dialogues were composed during Julius Caesar’s reign.) Having received his B.A. in ancient Greek and philosophy from Swarthmore College, Mick also has an ongoing interest in ancient Greece/early China comparisons and hopes to teach a course on comparative ancient thought at Yale in the near future. His courses this year will include “Ancient Chinese Thought,” “Text and Author in Ancient China,” and “The Five Classics.”

Liang Jiang received his B.S. degree from the California Institute of Technology in 2004 and his Ph.D. in physics from Harvard in 2009. He has worked as a Sherman Fairchild postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Quantum Information at Caltech. His research area is quantum physics with potential applications including unforgeable quantum money, secure quantum networks, and powerful quantum computers with unprecedented computational capabilities.

Noreen Khawaja works on 19th- and 20th-century European intellectual history, and particularly on the shifting status of religious ideas in late modern Western philosophy and culture. Her current book project looks at the relation between religious and philosophical aspects of existentialism. Focusing on Søren Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger, this work examines the role played by Pauline models of religious conversion in the development of the ideal of personal authenticity. She received her Ph.D. in 2012 from Stanford University and her B.A. from Williams College in 2005. At Yale, she will be teaching a variety of courses on modern religious thought and the philosophy of religion.

Samuel S. Kortum is professor of economics at Yale, research associate at the NBER, and fellow of the Econometric Society.  He received his bachelor’s degree from Wesleyan University in 1983 and a Ph.D. in economics from Yale in 1992. He was formerly on the faculty of Boston University, University of Minnesota, and University of Chicago. While at Chicago he served as an editor of the Journal of Political Economy.  In the past decade, his research has focused on international trade. In 2004, he and Jonathan Eaton received the Frisch Medal for their paper “Technology, Geography, and Trade.” In addition to international economics, he has written on economic growth, innovation, technology diffusion, and firm dynamics. His research has appeared in top academic journals and has been supported by a series of grants from the National Science Foundation.

Andrew Papachristos’s research focuses on social networks, neighborhoods, street gangs, and interpersonal violence. Papachristos was recently awarded an NSF Early CAREER award to examine how violence spreads through high-risk social networks in four cities. He is also currently involved in the evaluation and implementation of several violence reduction strategies, most notably the Project Safe Neighborhoods and the Group Violence Reduction Strategy in Chicago. His writing has appeared in Foreign Policy, The American Journal of Sociology, The Annals of the American Academy of Social and Political Science, The American Journal of Public Health, The Journal of Urban Health, Criminology & Public Policy, Journal of Quantitative Criminology, and several edited volumes and other peer-reviewed journals. In addition, he is the most recent recipient of the American Society of Criminology’s Ruth Cavan “Young Scholar” award, given each year to the most outstanding scholar who was granted a Ph.D. within the previous five years. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2007.

Kelly Rader researches and teaches on topics related to American politics. Her work examines the ways in which American institutional features and institutional context affect the decisions of individual actors therein and the resultant policy outcomes. Specifically, she is interested in how collegiality and hierarchy shape and constrain decision making in the U.S. Supreme Court and lower courts and also the ways in which U.S. Congressional institutions, like parties and apportionment schemes, leave their mark on distributive spending in states and localities. She received her Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University. Prior to her graduate studies, Kelly worked at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C. and earned a B.A. in mathematical economic analysis from Rice University.

Raúl Saucedo works primarily in contemporary analytic metaphysics and related topics in philosophical logic and philosophy of science. His current research focuses on a few interconnected issues concerning parts and wholes, space and time, and fundamentality. He is also interested in the development of such themes across the history of philosophy (especially in the ancient Greek and early modern periods) as well as in non-western intellectual traditions (especially ancient Indian thought). He has held postdoctoral research appointments at Yale and the Australian National University. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University and studied philosophy as an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, and the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He was born and raised in Mexico City, Mexico.

Vesla Mae Weaver was on the faculty of the University of Virginia before coming to Yale in 2012. Weaver is broadly interested in understanding racial inequality in the United States, how state policies shape citizenship, and the political causes and consequences of the growth of the criminal justice system in the United States. Her newest book project with Amy Lerman, Policing Citizenship: America’s Antidemocratic Institutions and the New Civic Underclass, is concerned with the effects of increasing punishment and surveillance in America on democratic inclusion, particularly for the black urban poor. She is also the author of Frontlash: Civil Rights, the Carceral State, and the Transformation of American Politics (under contract with Cambridge), which uncovers a connection between the movement for civil rights and the development of punitive criminal justice. The book grows out of her dissertation, winner of the Best Dissertation Award in Race, Ethnicity, and Politics given by the American Political Science Association. Weaver is also the co-author of Creating a New Racial Order, which explores how multiracialism, immigration, the genomics revolution, and generational changes are reshaping the racial order in the United States (with Professors Jennifer Hochschild and Traci Burch). Weaver’s research has been supported by fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Brookings Institution. She has previously worked for the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, and the Southern Poverty Law Center. At the University of Virginia, she spearheaded the Working Group on Racial Inequality.