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Faculty Experts

These members of the faculty and other members of the community are knowledgeable in various disciplines and can provide expert commentary on a wide range of issues in the news. Please contact the  Communications Office if you would like to reach them.

 

Higher Education

​Art and Art History

  • Tomoko Sakomura: Japanese art history; Japanese visual culture, contemporary and late medieval; East Asian art

Astronomy

  • David Cohen: x-ray spectroscopy; radiation-driven stellar winds; stellar x-ray emission
  • Eric Jensen: planet formation; astrobiology or origin and distribution of life in the cosmos; protoplanetary disks

Biology

  • Sara Hiebert Burch: hypometabolic states; hibernation, daily torpor; stress hormones and behavior
  • Jose-Luis Machado: biodiversity; ecosystems; plant physiological ecology; metabolic ecology
  • Amy Cheng Vollmer: bacterial stress response, particularly in prokaryotes such as E. coli; microbiology; immune response; biotechnology

Black Studies

  • Nina Johnson: sociology: race, class, inequality, urban sociology, cultural sociology, neighborhoods, spatial inequality, prisons, urban public policy, and black studies
  • Valerie Smith, president: African-American literature

Chemistry

  • Kathleen Howard: biophysical chemistry; magnetic resonance spectroscopy; membrane protein structure determination
  • Robert Paley: modern organic synthetic chemistry; organic chemistry

Cognitive Science

  • Lisa Meeden: adaptive robotics; developmental robotics; artificial intelligence

Computer Science

Dance

Economics

  • Amanda Bayer: microeconomics, game theory, labor markets, diversity
  • Syon Bhanot: behavioral economics, public policy, experimental economics, decision-making, and public economics

  • Erin Todd Bronchetti: public finance, labor economics, health economics

  • John Caskey: fringe banking such as pawn shops and check-cashing outlets
  • Stephen Golub: international trade and finance
  • Philip Jefferson: macroeconomics; government taxation; Federal Reserve decisions
  • Mark Kuperberg: macroeconomics, public finance, law and economics
  • Ellen Magenheim: health care; industrial organization; antitrust issues
  • Stephen O'Connell: political economy of Africa, macroeconomic policy in low-income developing countries, monetary policy management of surges in foreign aid
  • Jennifer Peck: labor economics, development economics, and energy and environmental economics
  • Marc Remer: antitrust, mergers, collusion, industrial organization, and the retail gasoline industry

Educational Studies

  • Edwin Mayorga: education policy, U.S. Latinx education, urban politics and social movements, and social justice education
  • Joseph Derrick Nelson:  boys' education, identity development, participatory action research, single-sex education, qualitative research methods, urban school reform
  • Lisa Smulyan '76: gender and education, adolescence

Engineering

  • Erik Cheever '82: electronic circuit applications
  • Carr Everbach: wind power; green design; human nature and technology; thermofluid mechanics; physical effects of ultrasound
  • Lynne Molter '79: fiber optics; waveguide devices; electromagnetics; scientific literacy in the liberal arts
  • Faruq Siddiqui: structural theory and design; geotechnical design; mechanics of solids

English Literature

  • Nathalie Anderson: modern and contemporary poetry; libretti; creative writing
  • Anthony Foy: African American literature; literature of black Philadelphia
  • Bakirathi Mani: Asian American culture and literature; South Asian diasporas; transnational feminist studies
  • Peter Schmidt: American literature; fiction in the U.S. South during Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras; race, ethnicity, and literature in the U.S.
  • Valerie Smith, president: African-American literature
  • Patricia White: representation of women in film and visual media

Environmental Studies

  • Carr Everbach, engineering: wind power; green design; human nature and technology
  • Jose-Luis Machado, biology: biodiversity; ecosystems; Crum Woods
  • Mark Wallace, religion: Christian theology and environmental studies

Film & Media Studies

  • William Gardner, Japanese: Japanese film and media; the intersection of contemporary literature with visual and electronic media
  • Sunka Simon, German: cyberculture; German and European cinema
  • Bob Rehak: special effects, fictional worlds,  transmedia franchises 
  • Patricia White, English literature: representation of women in film and visual media
  • Carina Yervasi, French: French and Francophone African film

History

  • Diego Armus: Latin American history; history of disease and public health in urban settings
  • Timothy Burke: modern African history, specifically southern Africa, popular culture, including advertising, cartoons, and video games
  • Allison Dorsey: Southern and African American history, slavery, Reconstruction, women in civil rights movement, food
  • Bruce Dorsey: early American history, gender and sexuality, masculinity, American culture
  • Marjorie Murphy: public education, labor and women's history
  • Robert Weinberg: Russian history since the 18th century; history and experiences of Jews in Soviet Union and Russia

Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies

  • Farha Ghannam, anthropology: contemporary Islamic practices and identities; gender and sexuality in the Middle East
  • Tariq al-Jamil, religion: medieval Islamic social history and law, with particular focus on Shi'ism

Latin American Studies

  • Diego Armus, history: Latin American history, history of disease and public health in urban settings, particularly Buenos Aires
  • Edwin Mayorga, educational studies: education policy, U.S. Latinx education, urban politics and social movements, and social justice education
  • Kenneth Sharpe, political science: Latin American politics; U.S. foreign policy; U.S. drug enforcement policies

Linguistics

  • K. David Harrison: endangered languages; connections between language and biodiversity, ethnoecology; Turkic languages of Inner Asia
  • Donna Jo Napoli: language use, including slang and catch phrases
  • Nathan Sanders: language sounds, language change, constructed/artificial languages, language games, linguistic universals, and the intersection of language with physics and biology
  • Jamie Thomas: language learning; second language acquisition; study abroad; identity; race, color, and ethnicity; Africa; African diaspora; Mexico; Tanzania; African languages; Swahili; Pan Africanism; zombies; and the afterlife

Mathematics and Statistics

  • Phil Everson: statistics; sports editor of Chance magazine (an American Statistical Association publication) and writes the column, "A statistician reads the sports pages"
  • Steve Wang: statistical techniques in paleontology and evolutionary biology; mass extinctions

Modern Languages and Literatures

  • Sunka Simon, German: cyberculture; German and European cinema
  • Hansjakob Werlen, German: Goethe; German Romanticism; Slow Food Movement; cultural history of food
  • Carina Yervasi, French: French and Francophone African film

Music

Peace and Conflict Studies

Philosophy

  • Krista Thomason: moral emotions, shame and shaming, Immanuel Kant, genocide, and child soldiers

Physics

  • Michael Brown: solar physics; nuclear fusion energy
  • Amy Graves:  simulations of soft condensed matter systems, gender and science, and computational physics education

Political Science

  • Benjamin Berger: modern political theory; democratic politics; ethics in politics; civic engagement
  • Carol Nackenoff: electoral politics; political rhetoric
  • Keith Reeves '88: the impact of race on electoral politics and public affairs
  • Kenneth Sharpe: U.S. foreign policy; Latin American politics; U.S. drug enforcement policies
  • Dominic Tierney: international politics; U.S. foreign policy; public opinion and war; security issues
  • Richard Valelly '75: electoral law and the 1965 Voting Rights Act; the party system; Congress
  • Tyrene White: China; women and culture, birth planning in China; East Asian politics

Psychology

  • Frank Durgin: perception and cognition
  • Kenneth Gergen: personal identity; language and communication
  • Barry Schwartz: social and psychological effects of free-market economic institutions
  • Andrew Ward: self-regulation and control, including strategies for control of eating, smoking, aggression, depressed mood, and obsessive thoughts; psychological barriers to conflict resolution; bargaining and negotiation

Religion

  • Yvonne Chireau: African-based religions such as Santeria and Voodoo in America; religion and healing; black American religion; religion and comics, manga, and graphic novels
  • Steven Hopkins: Hinduism and Buddhism in South Asia; South Indian devotional literature in Sanskrit and Tamil; religion and literature
  • Tariq al-Jamil: medieval Islamic social history and law, with particular focus on Shi'ism
  • Helen Plotkin '77: classical Jewish texts; director, Beit Midrash
  • Mark Wallace: religion and ecology

Sociology and Anthropology

  • Farha Ghannam, anthropology: contemporary Islamic practices and identities; gender and sexuality in the Middle East; urban ethnography
  • Nina Johnson, sociology: race, class, inequality, urban sociology, cultural sociology, neighborhoods, spatial inequality, prisons, urban public policy, and black studies
  • Braulio Muñoz, sociology: sociology of culture, Latin America, author of Peruvian Notebooks
  • Lee Smithey, sociology: nonviolent social movements; ethnopolitical conflict; Northern Ireland
  • Sarah Willie-LeBreton, sociology: African-American culture, politics, and literature

Theater