The following are among the new faculty members at the University. Others will be introduced periodically in this space.
William Acree, Ph.D., joins the Department of Romance Languages & Literatures in Arts & Sciences as assistant professor of Spanish. Prior to joining Washington University, he was assistant professor at San Diego State University. Acree earned a doctorate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research spans the fields of Latin American literary and cultural studies and has a strong historical focus centering on the late-colonial period and the 19th century. Acree is especially interested in print and popular cultures in the area of the Rio de la Plata (southern Brazil, Uruguay and eastern Argentina), the sociology of reading, literary history, and links between reading practices and group identity.
Shefali Chandra, Ph.D., joins the Department of History and the International & Area Studies Program, both in Arts & Sciences, as assistant professor. She earned a doctorate in South Asian history from the University of Pennsylvania in 2003, after which she was at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the departments of History and Gender & Women’s Studies. Chandra researches the shifting and transnational production of gender and sexuality, with a specific focus on Anglo-American imperialism, Indian globalization and South Asian modernities.
William J. Maxwell, Ph.D., joins the Department of English and the African and African American Studies Program, both in Arts & Sciences, as associate professor. Since earning a doctorate from Duke University, he has taught at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, the College of William and Mary, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he also served as director of English Graduate Studies. He has published more than 30 articles and reviews and two books exploring the intersection of American and African-American literary histories. He is at work on a book for Princeton University Press titled “FB Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Modernism.”
John W. Patty, Ph.D., joins the Department of Political Science in Arts & Sciences as associate professor. Since earning a doctorate in social sciences from the California Institute of Technology in 2001, Patty held faculty appointments in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University and the Department of Government at Harvard University. Patty is a formal political theorist who studies legislative and bureaucratic institutions. He regularly teaches courses on Congress, the federal bureaucracy, game theory, formal models of political institutions, and computational modeling.
Elizabeth Maggie Penn, Ph.D., joins the Department of Political Science in Arts & Sciences as associate professor. Penn earned a doctorate in social science in 2003 from the California Institute of Technology, where she worked on the role of institutional design in shaping long-term voter preferences over policy. Penn was formerly assistant professor of Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University and assistant professor of Government at Harvard University. Her research interests include mathematical models of voting, institutional design and collective preference.
Philip Skemer, Ph.D., joins the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences in Arts & Sciences as assistant professor. He earned a doctorate from Yale University, where he worked with Shun Karato, Ph.D., on the deformation of the Earth’s mantle. He comes most recently from a postdoctoral position at Brown University, where he was a member of the rock deformation group. His research interests include high-temperature and high-pressure rock deformation, properties of planetary materials, and microstructural analysis. He is setting up a lab that can simulate the pressure and temperature tens to hundreds of kilometers below the Earth’s surface.
Priscilla Song, Ph.D., joins the Department of Anthropology in Arts & Sciences as assistant professor with a focus on medical anthropology, Chinese studies, and science and technology studies. She earned a doctorate from Harvard University, where she was both a National Science Foundation Fellow and Andrew Mellon Humanities Fellow. She previously taught at the New School University in New York City, Peking University’s Health Sciences Campus, and Yale University. She also was a visiting scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing and Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan. She is completing a book manuscript that situates the rise of medical tourism for stem cell therapies within the politico-economic transformations of the Chinese health-care system.
M. Deniz Yavuz, Ph.D., joins Olin Business School as assistant professor of finance. With an undergraduate degree in industrial engineering and a master’s degree in management from Bogazici University in Istanbul, Yavuz earned a master’s degree in business administration and doctorate at Yale University. He has been a consultant to the World Bank, investment banks and multinational companies in corporate governance, valuation and legal disputes. Before joining Olin, Yavuz was an assistant professor of finance at Arizona State University’s W. P. Carey School of Business, where he taught managerial finance and empirical corporate finance. His research interests include private equity, international corporate governance and empirical asset pricing.