CHASS Welcomes New Tenure-Track Faculty
The College of Humanities and Social Sciences welcomes 18 new tenure-track faculty to its ranks this fall. Their research interests range from forensic psychology to the religions of East Asia. Meet these stellar scholars, researchers, and teachers.
Haydon Cherry joins the Department of History as an Assistant Professor with a specialty in modern Southeast Asian history.
Ph.D. (History), Yale University, 2011
M.Phil. (History), Yale University, 2007
M.A. (History), National University of Singapore, 2005
B.A. with First Class Honors (Southeast Asian Studies), National University of Singapore
Haydon Cherry’s dissertation traced the changing social and economic history of the poor in French Colonial Saigon by following the lives of six migrants (an orphan, a prostitute, a rickshaw puller, a poor Frenchman, a Chinese coolie, and an invalid) in the early decades of the 20th century. Cherry’s other projects include an intellectual biography of a leading Vietnamese Marxist intellectual and a social history of crime in Rangoon, Burma, during the 1920s and 1930s. At Yale, Cherry received both a prestigious Whiting Fellowship and the Wright Prize for the best dissertation outside of U.S. and European history. In 2011-2012, he held a post-doctoral fellowship at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University.
Anne Clément joins the college as an assistant professor of History and as a member of the International Studies faculty with a focus on the Modern Middle East.
Ph.D. (Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations), University of Toronto, 2012
Diplôme d’Etudes Approfondies (Middle Eastern and Mediterranean Studies), National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations, Paris, 2003
Diplôme de Sciences Po (Sciences Po), Sciences Po, Paris, 2001
Anne Clément is a historian whose dissertation examined the interrelated issues of law and empire. Through the experiences of peasants tried for murder by newly created (1894-1914) “native” courts, she analyzes the implementation of a modern legal system in colonial Egypt, which in practice proved to be a parody of justice that linked peasants’ alleged immorality to their illiteracy. Her second line of research reflects her long-term interest in the relationships between history, memory, and politics, and focuses on issues of historiography and history education in the Middle East. She has worked with international NGOs, and in 2011-2012 she held a Weatherhead Center for International Affairs post-doctoral fellowship at the Harvard Academy for International Area Studies.
Sarah Desmarais joins the Department of Psychology as Assistant Professor in the area of Psychology in the Public Interest.
Ph.D. (Psychology), Simon Fraser University, 2008
M.A. (Psychology), Simon Fraser University, 2005
B.A. (Psychology), Guelph University, 2003
Sarah Desmarais is a forensic psychologist who works on issues related to mental illness, substance use, and violence in criminal justice and health care settings. Her current research focuses on the development, implementation, and evaluation of assessment and intervention strategies for justice-involved adolescents and adults with behavioral health problems, as well as victims and perpetrators of partner violence. Before coming to NC State, Sarah was as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mental Health Law & Policy (College of Behavioral and Community Sciences) and the Department of Community & Family Health (College of Public Health) at the University of South Florida.
Michaela DeSoucey has been named Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. She will teach primarily cultural sociology and the sociology of food movements.
Ph.D. (Sociology), Northwestern University
M.A. (Sociology), Northwestern University
B.A. (Sociology and Anthropology, Concentration in Women’s Studies) Swarthmore College
Michaela DeSoucey’s appointment follows post-doctoral studies at Princeton University. Her work brings together the culture of food with national and regional movements, using both historical and organizational approaches. Her dissertation brings these perspectives to an analysis of contention over foie gras in France, the European Union, and the United States. DeSoucey’s articles, published in such prestigious journals as American Sociological Review and Administrative Science Quarterly have been recognized with awards from the American Sociological Association’s sections on political sociology, economic sociology, and the sociology of culture.
Huiling Ding joins the Department of English as Assistant Professor.
Ph.D. (Rhetoric and Composition), Purdue, 2007
M.A. (English), Northern Illinois University, 2002
B.A., Department of English for Medical Purposes, Xi’an Medical University, P.R. China, 1997
Huiling Ding taught Professional Communication at Clemson University for five years before coming to NC State University. Her research focuses on intercultural professional communication, rhetoric of medicine, risk communication, and health communication. Her articles have appeared in Technical Communication Quarterly, Written Communication, Business Communication Quarterly, Rhetoric Review, English for Specific Purposes, and China Media Research. Others are forthcoming in Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization and Journal of Medical Humanities. She has recently finished a book manuscript on the transcultural communication about the global epidemic of SARS.
Michelle R. Eley joins the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures as Assistant Professor of German.
Ph.D. (German Studies), Duke University, 2012
B.A. (German), University of North Carolina at Asheville, 2004
Michelle Eley’s research and teaching interests include German literature and cinema, African Diaspora, gender and race, and critical media literacy. Her current research explores narratives of racism, race, and identity in German film since World War II and focuses on the historical development of resistance to dominant national identity narratives in film productions. She has lived in a number of cities throughout Germany, including Essen, where she conducted research and lectured on cinematic interpretations of literature and race discourse in film at the University of Essen-Duisburg.
Marcie Fisher-Borne joins the Department of Social Work as an Assistant Professor.
Ph.D. (Social Work), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2009
M.S.W., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2004
M.P.H., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2003
B.A. (Women and Gender Studies and Philosophy), Louisiana State University, 1997
Before coming to NC State, Marcie Fisher-Borne served as the director of evidence-based practice for the American Cancer Society. For the last seven years, she has also served as adjunct faculty within the Department of Social Work at UNC Chapel Hill, teaching coursework on community organizing, nonprofit leadership and programming planning and evaluation. Fisher-Borne’s research interests involve identifying community-driven strategies to address health inequalities and understanding social determinants of health. She spent four years with the UNC-CH Center for Infectious Disease as a research associate with Project STYLE (Strength through Youth Living Empowered), the first federally funded HIV care and research project for adolescent men of color in the Southeast. Her dissertation was an outgrowth of the work of Project STYLE and involved the development and evaluation of a mixed methods study testing a cultural competency intervention for health care providers in North Carolina.
Ryan J. Hurley joins the Department of Communication as Assistant Professor of Communication.
Ph.D. (Speech Communication), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009
M.A. (Speech Communication), Kansas State University, 2003
B.A. (Communication Studies), Concordia College, 2001
Hurley’s research focuses on new media and health information dissemination coming from a media content and effects perspective. For example, he has demonstrated that cancer news differs between sources as a result of the news aggregation process employed by websites such as Google News and Yahoo! News, which collect information from thousands of outlets simultaneously. His work has been published in top journals in communication, such as Communication Monographs, Journal of Communication, Public Understanding of Science, Journal of Health Communication, and Media Psychology among others.
Chelsey Juarez joins the Department of Sociology and Anthropology as an Assistant Professor of Anthropology. She will teach primarily in the area of forensic anthropology and will participate in the creation of the university’s Institute of Forensics.
Ph.D. (Physical Anthropology), University of California-Santa Cruz
M.A. (Anthropology), University of California-Santa Cruz
B.A. (Anthropology/Women’s Studies), University of California-Berkeley
In her recently completed dissertation, Juarez develops methods useful to start the identification of undocumented immigrants who die crossing the U.S.-Mexican border. She uses stable isotope analysis of teeth to determine the birth place of the deceased, as she describes in the highly-regarded Journal of Forensic Sciences. Her work more generally applies chemical methods to geolocation. She continues the application of forensic science to issues associated with undocumented immigration. Her doctoral work included additional specialization in Latin American and Latino Studies.
Richard Mahoney has been named director of the School of Public and International Affairs. SPIA encompasses political science, public administration, the master’s of international studies program, and several leadership development programs.
J.D., Arizona State University, 1980
M.A., Ph.D. (International Relations), the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, 1980
B.A. (History), Princeton University, 1973
C.E.P. (Economics), Institut D’etudes Politiques de Paris, 1971
For the past four years, Richard Mahoney has held the Elizabeth Evans Baker Professorship of Peace and Conflict Studies at Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, where he directed the Baker Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. He was Secretary of State of Arizona for four years in the 1990s. Mahoney is considered one of the leading historians in the United States on the Kennedys and was the John F. Kennedy Scholar at the University of Massachusetts. He writes and consults on international security and is currently completing a book on regime change to be published by Oxford University Press.
Levi McLaughlin joins the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies as Assistant Professor of Religious Studies.
Ph.D. (Religious Studies) Princeton University, 2009
M.A. (East Asian Studies) University of Toronto, 1998
B.A. (Japanese Studies) University of Toronto, 1996
Levi McLaughlin is a specialist in East Asian religions. He was Assistant Professor at Wofford College from 2009 until 2012 and a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Iowa’s Center for Asian and Pacific Studies in 2011-2012. He has done extensive research in Japan and has been a Visiting Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, University of Singapore. An expert on the lay Buddhist group Sōka Gakkai, Japan’s largest active religious organization, McLaughlin is completing a book entitled How to Cultivate a Mass Movement: Buddhism and Romantic Heroism in Sōka Gakkai. His future projects will include a reconsideration of the category “new religion” through a case study of the group Kenshōkai in Japan, and collaborative investigations of religion, natural disaster, and the state in modern Asia.
Shea McManus has been appointed jointly to the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and to the CHASS interdisciplinary program in International Studies, specifically the Middle East Studies program. She will serve as an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and teach cultural anthropology with a focus on the Middle East.
Ph.D. (Anthropology), Graduate Center, City University of New York
M.Phil. (Anthropology), Graduate Center, City University of New York
M.A. with distinction (Sociology), Goldsmiths College, University of London
B.A. summa cum laude (Political Science), Honors College, Arizona State University
Shea McManus’s recently completed dissertation is a critical ethnography of transitional justice in postwar Lebanon. Her work ranges across institutions, actors, discourses, sensibilities, and subjectivities to inform global arguments about the expanding scope of international law, democracy, and human rights. Much of her field work was with mothers of “the disappeared,” women who have continued their mobilization for many years after the war.
Jeff Mielke joins the Department of English as Associate Professor of Linguistics.
Ph.D. (Linguistics), the Ohio State University, 2004
M.A. (Linguistics), the Ohio State University, 1999
B.A. (Japanese), University of Washington, 1997
Jeff Mielke uses laboratory and computational techniques to investigate linguistic sound systems in his research about the interaction of physiological, cognitive, social, and other factors. His current work includes projects on the relationship between autism and the mental representation of speech, and changes occurring in Canadian French vowels. This year he will build a phonology laboratory for using ultrasound imaging and other tools to study variation in the production and perception of speech sounds in English and other languages. Mielke spent two years as a postdoc at the University of Arizona and six years as a professor at the University of Ottawa before coming to NC State University.
John Millhauser joins the Department of Sociology and Anthropology as Assistant Professor of Anthropology. He will teach primarily archaeology.
Ph.D. (Anthropology), Northwestern University
M.A. (Anthropology), Arizona State University
B.A. magna cum laude (Anthropology), Brown University
John Millhauser is an anthropological archaeologist whose current research focuses on the links among work, group identity, and political agency in central Mexico under Aztec and Spanish rule. He focuses on how the social dimension of technologies such as stone-tool production and saltmaking link people together in households and communities. He is particularly interested in using archaeological methods to give a voice to the people who are typically voiceless in the historical record. He has contributed to archaeological methods via portable X-ray fluorescence, as documented in the well-regarded Journal of Archaeological Science.
James Mulholland joins the Department of English as Assistant Professor.
Ph.D. (English), Rutgers, New Brunswick, 2005
M.A., University of Washington
B.A. (English), University of Virginia, 1997
Mulholland’s work focuses on the global 18th century, with a focus primarily on British poetry and Anglo-Indian literature. His book Sounding Imperial: Poetic Voice and the Politics of Empire, 1730-1820 (Johns Hopkins, 2013) uncovers the close relationship between the evolution of 18th century poetry, the creation of a British nation, and colonial expansion overseas. His next project focuses on the Indian Ocean world and argues for the importance of regional—not just international—dynamics for emergence of Anglo-Indian literature during the 18th century. In addition to teaching 18th century literature and culture, he has interests in theories of orality, book history, and sound studies, globalization, and the literature of 9/11.
Alexander ‘Sasha’ Newell becomes an Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. He will teach cultural anthropology with an emphasis on Africa.
Ph.D. (Anthropology), Cornell University
MA (Anthroplogy), Cornell University
BA (Social Anthropology), Reed College
Sasha Newell’s research focuses on the social life of objects and the role of materiality in the production of culture. His book, The Modernity Bluff: Crime, Consumption, and Citizenship in Côte d’Ivoire, describes how urban African youth consume European and U.S. brands in an effort to perform “modern” success. Such performances, involving dance, slang, and conspicuous consumption, are recognized as bluffing, but imitation is appreciated as an art form rather than scorned as artifice. Newell is currently engaged in a new research project on storage space, memory, and role of stored objects in the production of kinship in U.S. culture.
Jennifer Nolan-Stinson joins the Department of English as Assistant Professor.
Ph.D. (American Studies), University of Maryland, College Park, 2008
M.A. (English Language and Literature), University of Virginia, 2001
B.A. (English and Philosophy), University of Texas at Austin, 1998
Jennifer Nolan-Stinson is an interdisciplinary scholar of 20th century American literature, culture, and reading practices whose research and teaching fall at the intersections of literary studies, reception studies, cultural studies, and book history. She is currently completing her book manuscript, Reading Alone, which offers detailed ethnographic studies of three readers who came of age during the unprecedented expansion of book publishing in the United States following World War II. She is also interested in the materiality of the book and has begun a project on the role of the paperback revolution in shaping how American literature is marketed, understood, and received.
Nick Taylor has been appointed to the Department of Communication as Assistant Professor of Digital Media.
Ph.D. (Language, Culture and Teaching), York University, 2009
M.A. (Communication and Culture), York University, 2003
B.A. (Humanities), Carleton University, 2001
Nick Taylor is an ethnographer whose research and teaching charts the intersections of gender, digital media and play. His interests include designing educational games, conducting fieldwork with digital gaming communities, and exploring audio-visual research methodologies. These pursuits are united by a curiosity for the communicative potentials of digital media, and by an awareness of the inequities associated with their use. Prior to joining NC State, Nick worked as a post-doctoral fellow on a three-year collaborative study between York University (Toronto) and SRI International, in which he managed an international study of communication, sociality and identity in online role-playing games.