The Global Arts + Humanities Discovery Theme’s core goal is to build intellectual community and capacity for cross-disciplinary research that integrates humanistic orientations, and its cluster hiring program has greatly advanced these goals. These colleagues join scholarly communities across the university to advance GAHDT’s commitment to cross-disciplinarity.
Faculty hires
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Corinne Mitsuye Sugino
Assistant Professor, Department of English and Center for Ethnic Studies
Mitsuye Sugino’s research focus lies at the intersections of Asian American studies, cultural studies, rhetorical theory and media studies. She holds a PhD in Communication from the University of Pittsburgh. Her book, Making the Human Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans is forthcoming from Rutgers University Press and explores Asian Americans, narrative, and notions of animacy/inanimacy in the racialized construction of the human.
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.
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.
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.