New Faculty 2011-2012

Joe is professor of English at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. He was educated at NUI Maynooth and Columbia University, where he studied with Edward W. Said. He is the author of Literature, Partition and the Nation-State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel and Palestine (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and Outrageous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland (Dublin: Field Day Publications, 2007). He has co-edited (with Claire Connolly) The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2005), and (with Michael de Nie) a special issue of Éire-Ireland on ‘Empire Studies’ (Summer 2007). His articles on modern Irish writing and literary history have appeared in American, British, and Irish journals. He was a visiting professor at Notre Dame University in 2000 and the director of the prestigious Notre Dame Irish Seminar in Dublin from 2007-2009. He currently is editing The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism and co-editing a special issue on “Peripheral Realisms” for MLQ.

Alejandra received both her B.A. and Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research looks at the ways in which people in Colonial America transmitted and acquired news. Her work focuses on early America, the Spanish borderlands, and information networks. She has designed several new courses at Yale including a freshman seminar on “War and Rebellion” as well as a course on information in early America.

Jacqueline has previously taught at New York University and the University of Chicago. She teaches courses in late 19th-to mid-20th-century African American and American literatures. Her first book, A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2006), won the Modern Language Association’s William S. Scarborough Prize in 2007 for the best book in black American literature and culture. The American Studies Association named A Spectacular Secret the finalist for its Lora Romero First Book Prize in 2007. She is currently editing a Norton Critical Edition of James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. Her second book, Birth of the Cool: African American Literary Culture of the 1940s and 1950s, will examine the aesthetic cosmopolitanism of African American literature during the post-World War II/pre-Civil Rights Movement era, and the new geographies of black literary production during those decades. As part of Birth of the Cool's research, Jacqueline recently completed "Mapping the Stacks," a nationally acclaimed project that recovered "hidden" archives chronicling Chicago's mid-20th-century African American literary, cultural, and visual histories.

Eitan studies and teaches topics related to U.S. electoral politics. He focuses on campaign strategy, voting behavior, information technology and politics, and the administration of elections.  His current research develops an information theory of electoral politics, examining how politicians, bureaucrats and campaigns collect and utilize personal information about voters in the electorate. For this research, Eitan has partnered with political parties and private data vendors and is examining a complete national database of all registered voters in the United States, with over 700 personal characteristics that are collected by campaigns about each person. Eitan is from Providence, Rhode Island, and received his B.A. from Tufts University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Farren received a B.S.E. in bioengineering from the University of Pennsylvania and obtained his Ph.D. at Boston University.  His Ph.D. work focused on pioneering the design and development of synthetic RNA components capable of probing and programming cellular function.  He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, where he worked on genome engineering technologies with George Church.  His research is focused on developing foundational genomic and biomolecular engineering technologies with the goal of developing new genetic codes, and engineered cells that serve as factories for chemical, drug and biofuel production.  In 2008, he was selected as a "rising young star of science" by Genome Technology Magazine.

Dan was born and raised in Boston, and received his Ph.D. in Economics from MIT and his B.A. from Yale.  He studies development economics, in particular the operations of firms and markets in developing countries, but also topics such as governance and financial expansion. His current research projects have included a comparison of the costs and benefits of bargaining versus fixed prices for autorickshaw rides, police reform in Rajasthan, and the long-term impacts of the Great Fire of Boston.  

Dan is a historian of 20th-century South Africa. His first book is an intellectual history of the Black Consciousness Movement in that country during the 1970’s, focusing especially on the role of radical Christian thought in the struggle against apartheid. His current research is on the history of black South African visual artists from the 1920’s to the 1980’s. He received his B.A. from Northwestern, his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and taught at Cornell for four years before coming to Yale. At Yale, Dan will teach courses on South Africa, modern Africa, religion and political thought across the continent, and the cultural and intellectual tradition of the African diaspora.  

Hindy’s areas of expertise are Second Temple Judaism, Hellenistic Judaism, Hebrew Bible, early Rabbinics and the history of Jewish interpretation.  Her primary focus is the history of concepts in ancient Judaism.  She has written about interpretive authority and revelation, and is now embarking on a project on the author function in Jewish antiquity. Hindy completed her Ph.D. at Harvard and has taught at the University of Toronto and the University of Notre Dame.  Among her publications are Seconding Sinai: The Development of Mosaic Discourse in Second Temple Judaism (Brill, 2003) and Past Renewals (Brill, 2010).  She currently is working on a book on the relationship between revelation and destruction and a new translation with commentary of 4 Ezra.  Hindy  served as the editor-in-chief for the Journal for the Study of Judaism Supplement Series from 2008 to 2011 and was the thematics issues editor for Dead Sea Discoveries from 2003 to 2010.

Sara is a socio-cultural anthropologist working in the Himalayan regions of Nepal, India, and China (especially the Tibetan Autonomous Region). Her research addresses the relationships between political discourse, ritual practice, cultural performance, and cross-border migration in producing contemporary ethnic identities. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. from Cornell University, following a B.A. from Brown University. From 2009-2011 she was a research fellow at St. Catharine's College, University of Cambridge. She has received grants for her research from Fulbright, the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies, and is currently involved in a British Academy-funded U.K.-South Asia partnership project entitled "Inequality and Affirmative Action in South Asia: Current Experiences and Future Agendas in India and Nepal." She is preparing two books emerging from over a decade of ethnographic research with the Thangmi, a Himalayan community of approximately 30,000 in Nepal, India, and China.