The College of Humanities and Social Sciences welcomes new tenured, tenured-track and professional-track faculty to its ranks this academic year. Their diverse backgrounds and expertise will reinforce the college’s long-standing tradition of excellence in teaching and research, while nurturing a culture of innovation, collaboration and belongingness. Rooted in human-centered thought, they will help imagine and shape solutions to some of today’s most complex societal challenges.

As scholars, researchers and writers, their work and interests are diverse. They range from 20^th and 21^st century German media and cultural history to ancient Greek and Roman ethics and American and immigration history to equity in postsecondary education.

Meet some of our new faculty members.

Alok Amatya

Amatya joins the college as an assistant professor in the Department of English

• Ph.D., English, University of Miami

Amatya teaches global anglophone literature, world literature, and British literature courses. His research develops the intersections of global literature, environmental humanities and indigenous studies. By examining narratives about natural resource conflicts, he calls for a greater level of ecological and geographic awareness while reading popular literary works. You can read his scholarly contributions in journals like Environmental Humanities and Modern Fiction Studies.

Taylor Braswell

Braswell joins the college as an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology

• Ph.D., Sociology, Northeastern University

Braswell researches the social, environmental, and political-economic dynamics of urbanization and infrastructure development in the United States. His recent and ongoing projects examine topics that include the environmental justice dimensions of energy infrastructure, the role of urban-rural spatial politics in shaping infrastructure governance, and the drivers of growth in the wildland-urban interface.

Ryan Carty

Carty joins the college as an assistant professor in the Department of History.

• Ph.D., History, Michigan State University

Carty specializes in the history of modern West Africa with a focus on science and technology, animal studies and agriculture. His current research project investigates West African approaches to technology important for the development of a transnational livestock trade. This research also considers the way livestock, as unruly animals, shaped this history. Additionally, Carty contributes to digital humanities projects. His expertise includes structured data, text analysis, and interactive web-based visualizations.

Carolyn Coberly

Coberly joins the college as an assistant teaching professor in the School of Public and International Affairs.

• Ph.D., Foreign Affairs, University of Virginia

Coberly studies international political development, with a focus on political parties in authoritarian regimes and the interaction of state capacity and political behavior.  A former U.S. diplomat, Coberly has worked in the Middle East and Afghanistan and gained expertise analyzing the domestic politics of Iran. 

Karl Feld

Feld joins the college as a lecturer in the Department of Communication

• Ph.D., Communication, Rhetoric and Digital Media, NC State University

Feld’s research explores the interconnection of crisis communication, organizational strategic communication decision-making, public diplomacy, globalization, transnational and cross-cultural communication, and power relations of a digitally networked society.  He is interested in radical activist rhetoric and the affective use of music. Feld is examining the linguistic basis of generative artificial intelligence with attention to theories of language and meaning manifested in neural networks, large language models and translation.  He applies qualitative and quantitative methods to his work.

Diamond Forde

Forde joins the college as an assistant professor in the Department of English

• Ph.D., Creative Writing, Florida State University

Forde’s research explores the sociopolitical parameters defining excess and normalcy and how those parameters define race and class dichotomies in the language of beauty, musical genre, and the American South.

Antonio Garcia

Garcia joins the college as a professor in the School of Social Work

Ph.D., Social Welfare, University of Washington

Garcia is a former Child Protective Services Worker. He is committed to using research evidence to effectively engage diverse populations in culturally relevant, evidence-informed services and programs. In addition to illuminating their experiences of system involvement, he relies on the lived experiences of agency providers and clinicians to inform the development of structural and systemic strategies to promote child safety and healthy developmental outcomes.

Anna Gibson

Gibson is an assistant professor in the Department of English

• Ph.D., English, Duke University

Gibson works on British literature of the long nineteenth century, with a focus on the Victorian novel. Her current projects focus on serial publication and on the relationship between the form of novel and modern conceptions of human consciousness and agency. She is the co-director of the Digital Dickens Notes Project (dickensnotes.com), which explores the working notes Charles Dickens kept for his serial novels; the project was recently awarded a NEH Scholarly Editions Grant. (Gibson is not actually a new faculty member. She joined NC State in 2018 as a teaching assistant professor of English and coordinator of HSS120: Introduction to Humanities & Social Sciences. This is her eighth year on the faculty.) 

Brett Janos

Janos joins the college as an assistant teaching professor in the Department of History.

• Ph.D., History, University of New Mexico

Janos specializes in American and immigration history. His research challenges the idea that U.S. immigration policy, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was controlled solely by the federal government. It argues that state governments played a pivotal role in shaping immigration patterns and regulations, and highlights the complex relationship between local, state, and federal authorities, revealing the ingenuity of state immigration boards and commissions. His research also examines how immigration policies affected the environment and Indigenous communities, emphasizing the importance of including marginalized voices in historical narratives and shedding light on the often-overlooked consequences of these policies for Indigenous peoples.

Kevin Kiley

Kiley joins the college as an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology

• Ph.D., Sociology, Duke University

Kiley is a cultural and organizational sociologist who uses quantitative and computational methods to understand the sources of belief and opinion stability over the life course, especially the conditions under which people are more likely to adjust these attitudes. Across this work, he refines theories of belief holding and cultural internalization by focusing on the interaction of human cognition with the “scaffolding” of the social environment.

Katherine Kinkopf

Kinkopf joins the college as an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology.

•  Ph.D., Anthropology, University of California

Kinkopf is a biological anthropologist with expertise in skeletal biology, bioarchaeology and disability studies. She uses mixed methods to examine the recent and deep histories of disability and chronic illness in hominins, especially in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States, the medieval Italian peninsula, and the Upper Paleolithic. Her first book, An Introduction to Crip Archaeology, will be published with University Press of Florida in early 2026.

Roy Lee

Lee joins the college as an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies.

• Ph.D., Philosophy, Stanford University

Lee specializes in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, especially ancient ethics. I have published papers on Aristotle’s views and methods in ethics and politics, including happiness, virtue and the rule of law.

Travis McKenna

McKenna joins the college as an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies.

• Ph.D., Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh

McKenna works primarily in the philosophy of science, though he is also interested in the philosophy of language. I’m generally interested in questions to do with models and explanation, how applied mathematics works, the role that laws play in scientific inquiry, multiscalar modelling strategies of various kinds, and conceptual engineering.

Tim Michaelis

• Ph.D., Psychology, NC State University

Michaelis joins the college as an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology.

Michaelis focuses primarily on developing original research around the topics of resourcefulness and the efficient (i.e., frugal) use of resources in entrepreneurial ventures. Overall, his work looks to help increase the survival rates of startups and corporate spinoffs. Additional research interests include (a) hybrid entrepreneurship, (b) crime and unethical behavior in entrepreneurship, (c) longitudinal analysis and experimental design, (d) the role of health in association with venture outcomes (e.g., well-being, venture survival and performance).

Meghan O’Donoghue

• Ph.D., French, University of Virginia

O’Donoghue joins the college as an assistant professor in the Department of World Languages and Cultures.

As a specialist in Francophone Cultural Studies, O’Donoghue researches the intersections of colonial discourse, environmental knowledge and colonized resistance in 20th-century French West Africa. She looks at how French colonial powers used stories to assert the supremacy of colonial knowledge over West African agricultural practices. At the same time, O’Donoghue argues that these stories inadvertently disclosed the ways that West African agricultural knowledge continued to hold sway in colonized communities and challenge colonial power.

Ebony N. Perez

• Ph.D., Higher Education Administration, University of Pittsburgh

Perez joins the college as an associate professor in the School of Social Work.

Perez’s research centers on equity in postsecondary education, focusing on ethical praxis in social work and the experiences of minoritized students. Using qualitative methods and critical frameworks, she explores how educators prepare students for equitable practice and how students of color navigate academic spaces. Her work spans social work education, STEM equity and Black women’s doctoral experiences, with a growing interest in sport social work as a site for advocacy, healing and justice.

Yasheng She

She joins the college as an assistant professor in the Department of English.

• Ph.D., Film & Digital Media, University of California, Santa Cruz

She’s research bridges cultural studies, gender, queer theory, Asian/Asian American studies, and creative practice by recognizing anime and games as visual culture. She’s current project investigates how public memories of historical events shape (post)apocalyptic fiction, examining these narratives as sites for the negotiation of masculinity in the age of precarity.

Daniel Shussett

Shussett joins the college as a postdoctoral teaching scholar in Interdisciplinary Affairs and Partnerships  

• Ph.D., Philosophy, Villanova University

Shussett’s work focuses on smart cities, the ethics of emerging technologies, and the relationships between technology, society, and the environment. Broadly, he aims to use the theoretical tools of the field of philosophy to influence public policy on important issues. His areas of specialization include: social ontology and epistemology, social-political philosophy, and philosophy of mind. Shussett is also interested in the governance and management of commons and common-pool resources, especially knowledge commons and urban commons.

Marcel Strobel

Strobel joins the college as an assistant professor in the Department of World Languages and Cultures.

• Ph.D., Comparative Literature (Emphasis in Feminist Studies and College and University Teaching), University of California, Santa Barbara.

Strobel specializes in 20th- and 21st-century German media and cultural history. His research centers on queer and trans experiences during Weimar and Nazi Germany, examining how archival material can recover marginalized voices and challenge dominant narratives of gender, sexuality, and public memory. His work draws on queer studies, Holocaust studies, literary studies, film studies, and archival research to explore the intersections of trauma, erasure, and identity in German culture.