Faculty Cluster Hires

Faculty Cluster Hires


Global Arts + Humanities cluster-hired faculty members bring expertise in inclusive Indigenous feminisms; dance pedagogy; racial justice and community engagement; the circulation of cultural forms in socialist Eastern Europe; Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Latino histories of gender, migration and labor; gender, race, caste and religion in Latin America; art and transnational migration; and transnational private law, gender inequality and global justice. 


Faculty hires

Smiling woman with hair braided back wearing a dark tunic standing against a fence outdoors

Clementine Bordeaux
Assistant Professor, Department of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies

Bordeaux's research examines how complex Lakota concepts become diluted when transferred to varied social contexts. They track what happens when the process of relationality is interrupted by coloniality. Bordeaux is interested in the intersections of art, culture and land and highlights the work of Indigenous artists that create for, on and about Lakota communities to show an alternative map to misappropriation. Bordeaux features artists that engage with topics that are about resistance and highlight connection to land and place. Broad Research Interests: Lakota ontology, Indigenous feminisms, Indigenous representation, visual anthropology, digital and new media, community-based participatory research, autoethnography.

Photograph of Jessica Delgado

Jessica Delgado
Associate Professor, Departments of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies and History

Delgado's areas of teaching and research are the histories of women, gender, sexuality, religion and race in Latin America. Other interests include colonial Catholicism; gender, race, caste and religion in the early modern Atlantic World; the materiality of devotion; the relationship between religiosity and people’s experiences of the physical world and embodiment; and the intersection between social and spiritual status.

 

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Liliana Gil
Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Studies

Gil's teaching and research center on postcolonial and feminist studies of science and technology with a focus on Brazil and its global South connections. Their ongoing research project – Beyond Make-Do Innovation: Practices and Politics of Technological Improvisation in Brazil – examines how improvisational abilities and techniques have been thought of, performed and valued across a range of sites of technological production, from innovation hubs and repair shops in São Paulo to electronics factories in the Amazon. Based on eighteen months of fieldwork and more than five years of continued research, this work contributes to debates on labor, skill, and creativity, global inequalities of tech and inclusive innovation and design. 

Photograph of Víctor Espinosa

Víctor Espinosa
Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology (Newark)

Espinosa is a sociologist, ethnographer and curator wh researches the intersection of art and transnational migration. Espinosa is the author of Martín Ramírez: Framing His Life and Art (University of Texas Press, 2015) and El dilema del retorno: Migración, género y pertenencia en un contexto transnacional (El Colegio de Michoacan, 1998). He is currently working on a book project, Staging Migrant Suffering: Melodrama in Latin American and Latino Activism with Ana Elena Puga.

Photograph of Phillip Gleissner

Phillip Gleissner
Assistant Professor, Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures 

Gleissner specializes in the cultures and literatures of socialist Eastern Europe, with an emphasis on print media in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and the GDR. He is particularly interested in the migration of media: mechanisms that facilitate the circulation of texts within and beyond Eastern Europe. Gleissner’s research relies on digital humanities methodology as a tool for the critical exploration of culture.

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Jessica Kantarovich
Assistant Professor, Department of Linguistics

Kantarovich specializes in language contact, change and variation, with a particular focus on language ecologies of the Arctic and language endangerment and shift in Siberia. Their overarching research interest is developing a typology of languages in situations of unstable multilingualism and shift, including endangered languages, heritage languages and contact varieties. Languages they have worked on include: Chukchi, Yupik, Even, and Sakha in Siberia; heritage Lithuanian in Chicago; and heritage contact varieties of Russian (Russian in Alaska and Ukraine).

Photograph of woman smiling

Nyama McCarthy-Brown
Associate Professor, Department of Dance

McCarthy-Brown has been an active performer, choreographer and educator for the past fifteen years. Her scholarship is interdisciplinary and always relates to heightened understanding of cultural diversity. She regularly presents her research in the area of dance education and equity at national and international conferences. In 2021, McCarthy-Brown was awarded an Outstanding Educator Award from the National Dance Education Organization and a Distinguished Dance Educator Award from Dance Teacher Magazine. 

Photograph of Momar Ndiaye

Momar Ndiaye
Assistant professor, Department of Dance

Ndiaye has worked with many well-known choreographers from Africa, Europe, Asia and America. Since 2010, he has danced for internationally-acclaimed choreographer Andreya Ouamba in the Dakar-based company, Premier Temps. Since 2004, he has been developing work with his own company, Cadanses, and he has created and toured several staged contemporary dance works.

Smiling woman with short dark hair wearing a white shirt and red blazer

Ashley Smith-Purviance | Assistant Professor,
Departments of African and African American Studies and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies

Smith-Purviance studies how educational policies and institutions shape and reproduce harmful inequalities for Black women and girls. At the intersection of state violence and school discipline, her work examines forms of punishment, anti-Blackness, and gender-based violence.

Photograph of Lyn Tjon Soei Len

Lyn Tjon Soei Len
Assistant professor, Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies

Tjon Soei Len’s scholarly interests include contract theory and feminist legal theory. She writes on issues as they relate to economic exchange, with an emphasis on the political-philosophical foundations of transnational private law and questions of gender inequality and global justice.