17 Faculty Join Humanities and Social Sciences

The College of Humanities and Social Sciences is excited to welcome 17 new tenured and tenure-track faculty members to its ranks this academic year. These individuals bring diverse backgrounds and areas of expertise to the college, enhancing its ongoing commitment to excellence in teaching, research, innovation, collaboration and inclusion.

As scholars, researchers and writers their work and interests span many fields. They range from African popular culture and the social and cultural history of the ancient Mediterranean world to adult-child communication within a legal context, and from understanding and addressing workplace deviance and a design justice approach to digital communication to transnational non-governmental organizations and global activism, advancing human rights or global health.

Meet our new faculty.

Graham Ambrose

Ambrose joins the college as an assistant professor in the Department of Public Administration.

• Ph.D., Public Administration, Syracuse University

Ambrose is a public administration scholar who uses a policy process lens to explore representation in collaborative fora and the influence of diverse representation on collaborative outputs and outcomes. As such, he has developed a research agenda focused on examining the underlying assumptions of collaborative governance by operationalizing and measuring concepts such as representation, participation, institutional evolution and interpersonal conflict. His new work uses computational methods to evaluate and explore patterns of policy design evolution.

Marcelitte Failla Hendred

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

• Ph.D., Religion, Emory University.

Her interests lie at the intersections of Africana Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Black Religion. Her current book project investigates how contemporary Black witches employ African diasporic religions for manifestation, healing and protection from anti-Blackness. As a practitioner of Ifá/ Òrìṣà traditions and Hoodoo, she often holds ceremonial space in academic and community settings. She has articles in the Black Scholar and Liturgy and she is the recipient of the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship.

Seth Emmanuel Gaiters

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

• Ph.D., Religious Studies,The Ohio State University.

Gaiters is a scholar of African American religious studies, with a particular interest in the exploration of religion and race through Black progressive social movements and cultures in America. He is currently completing a book manuscript, tentatively titled, #BlackLivesMatter and Religion in the Street: A Revival of the Sacred in the Public Sphere.

Ichigo Mina Kaneko

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

• Ph.D., Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture, University of Southern California.

Kaneko works at the intersection of Japanese literature, media studies and environmental humanities. Kaneko’s research explores how literature and media offer generative means for contending with catastrophe. Her current book project examines how the figure of the mushroom has been used in Japanese visual culture to articulate nuclear horror and grapple with the legacy of WWII, from the atomic cloud to fungal monsters of science fiction.

Chris Lindgren

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

• Ph.D., Rhetoric and Scientific & Technical Communication, University of Minnesota Twin Cities.

Lindgren’s research, teaching and community-outreach projects take a design justice approach to digital communication. He studies data-driven, computational work as rhetorical communication and is doing coalitional work to develop new approaches to community-engaged and self-determined indigenous data sovereignty. He is a partner on The Rematriation Project, which is empowering Indigenous communities’ rights to their data, knowledge and practices, and he is also the founder of the SIG on the Writing and Rhetoric of Code.

Kristen Mahony-Atallah

Mahony-Atallah joins the college as an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology.

• Ph.D., School Psychology, Duquesne University.

Mahony-Atallah’s research focuses on developing academic interventions and school-based mental health services informed by positive psychology, specifically addressing interconnected challenges in academic skills, mental health, and educational disparities, with a focus on marginalized populations, including individuals with disabilities.

Colten Meisner

Meisner joins the college as an assistant professor in the Department of Communication.

• Ph.D., Communication, Cornell University.

Meisner is broadly interested in the social, cultural and policy implications of digital media technologies, especially social media platforms. An expert on the social media “creator economy,” Meisner’s research takes seriously the labor conditions, governance practices and power asymmetries in the relations between social media influencers and platform companies. His current book project analyzes how the logics, incentives and style of social media culture are actively reconfiguring work in the media industries.

Irina Mikhalevich

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

• Ph.D., Philosophy, Boston University.

Mikhalevich is a philosopher of science working at the intersection of the philosophy of science, cognitive science, biology and ethics. Her research centers primarily around conceptual and methodological problems in comparative (animal) cognition science and their implications for the mindedness and moral status of beings with cognitive architectures that differ dramatically from our own.

Nii Kotei Nikoi

Nikoi joins the college as an assistant professor in the Department of Communication.

Ph.D., Communication Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Nikoi studies African popular culture. He is concerned with how digital meaning-making practices inherently relate to broader questions of power among axes of social difference and hierarchy. His research is theoretically informed by critical cultural studies, production studies, and the political economy of communication. He employs qualitative and visual methodologies to examine these concerns. His creative practice also draws on his background in graphic design, documentary photography and podcasting.

Irina Randriamiadana

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

• Ph.D., French and Francophone Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Randriamiadana’s teaching and research interests center on Afropean, Beur, Polynesian, and Caribbean literature, film and music. Her primary research examines representations of the questionable tastes of The New Natives of the French Republic through the frameworks of postcolonial, gender, and sensory studies.

Sydney Reichin

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

• Ph.D., Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Pennsylvania State University.

Reichin is an industrial and organizational psychologist specializing in predicting, understanding, and addressing workplace deviance. Her research focuses on personality, implicit motives and psychometric assessments, with particular attention to maladaptive traits such as the motive to aggress. Recently, she has expanded her work to terrorism and targeted violence, striving to enhance resilience against attacks on soft targets and to improve threat evaluation and mitigation in workplace settings.

Jay Rickabaugh

Rickabaugh joins the college as an assistant professor in the Department of Public Administration.

• Ph.D., Public and International Affairs, University of Pittsburgh.

Rickabaugh’s research primarily focuses on how local governments cooperate. In North Carolina, this often takes the form of Councils of Governments, Metropolitan Planning Organizations, and River Basin Associations, among other examples.

Jordan Rogers

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

• Ph.D., Ancient History, University of Pennsylvania.

Rogers is a social and cultural historian of the ancient Mediterranean world, with a particular interest in how urban communities formed and maintained themselves in the Roman world. Beyond Roman urbanism, he has an abiding interest in ancient labor histories and marginalized ethnic and gender identities in the Mediterranean basin. Lastly, he maintains an active research program, investigating how ancient populations constructed their pasts, including historiography, oral traditions, religion and ritual, and the manipulation of space and monumentality.

Hans Peter Schmitz

Schmitz joins the college as the inaugural Mattocks Distinguished Professor of Nonprofit Leadership in the Department of Public Administration in the School of Public and International Affairs.

• Ph.D., Political and Social Sciences, European University Institute, San Domenico di Fiesole, Italy.

Schmitz does research on transnational non-governmental organizations (TNGOs) and global activism, advancing human rights and global health. His publications have appeared across a range of academic fields and include peer-reviewed articles in Comparative Politics, Health Policy and Planning, Human Rights Quarterly, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Business Ethics, Public Administration Review, and Voluntas. The most recent co-authored book is Between Power and Irrelevance. The Future of Transnational NGOs.

Justin Tackett

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

• Ph.D., English, Stanford University.

Tackett specializes in transatlantic literature from the eighteenth century to the present with a focus on technology, media, science and culture. He has published work in Public Books, The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Review of Books, Review of English Studies, Victorian Poetry, and others.

Breanne Wylie

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

• Ph.D., Psychology, Brock University.

Wylie studies adult-child communication within a legal context. Specifically, she researches children’s developing ability to accurately report experiences of maltreatment when questioned by adults (e.g., lawyers, police officers, nurses, teachers). Her program of research uses a multi-methodological approach to address her research questions, using both laboratory and field-based methods. She is passionate about knowledge mobilization and works closely with practitioners in the field to provide training and support evidence-inform practices.

Sara Zahler

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

• Ph.D., Hispanic Linguistics, Indiana University.

Zahler’s research focuses on the cognitive, social and linguistic mechanisms that contribute to language variation and change in first, heritage, and additional languages.