The following are among the new faculty members at the University. Others will be introduced periodically in this space.
Roshan Abraham, Ph.D, joins the Department of Classics and the Religious Studies Program, both in Arts & Sciences, as assistant professor. He earned a doctorate in Classical studies from the University of Pennsylvania, where his dissertation focused on magic, religion and the description of India in Flavius Philostratus’ “Life of Apollonius of Tyana,” a third-century biography of a pagan holy man. He specializes in Greek prose literature written under the Roman Empire. Abraham’s research interests include the development of Christianity in its Mediterranean environment, ancient Greek and Roman magic and religion, and the ethnography of India in classical literature.
David A. Fike, Ph.D., joins the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences in Arts & Sciences as an assistant professor of isotope biogeochemistry. Fike earned a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he investigated the rise of atmospheric oxygen and the early evolution of multicellular animals in the Ediacaran Period (about 635 million-542 million years ago). After graduation, Fike completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology, where he applied high-resolution isotopic techniques to map modern microbial ecology and metabolic activity. His research interests involve applying field, laboratory and theoretical approaches to understand the co-evolution of life and the Earth’s surface environment over geologic time.
Ignacio Infante, Ph.D., joins Washington University as assistant professor in the Comparative Literature Program and the Department of Romance Languages & Literatures (Spanish), both in Arts & Sciences. A native of Spain, Infante earned a doctorate in comparative literature in 2009 from Rutgers University. Infante has been awarded a Fulbright fellowship and has translated into Spanish the work of the American poet John Ashbery and the English novelist Will Self. His primary research interests are 20th-century poetry and poetics, Spanish cultural studies, literary theory, translation studies, Transatlantic modernisms and the avant-garde.
Gaylyn Studlar, Ph.D, joins Washington University as director of the Program in Film and Media Studies and professor in the Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences. Previously, she was on the faculty of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor for 13 years and the faculty of Emory University for eight. She earned a doctorate from the University of Southern California in cinema studies, where she also earned a master of music in cello performance. Her research interests include feminist film theory, the history of Hollywood cinema, genre studies, and the relationship between film and the other arts. She is the author of “This Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz Age,” “In the Realm of Pleasure: Von Sternberg, Dietrich, and the Masochistic Aesthetic” and dozens of scholarly articles and film reviews. She has also co-edited four anthologies.
Sarah Westphal-Wihl, Ph.D., joins the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures in Arts & Sciences as associate professor. She earned a doctorate from Yale University in 1983. She has taught at Duke University, McGill University and, most recently, at Rice University in Houston. Her research includes women and gender during the European Middle Ages, law and literature, and the history of the book. Her latest book, “Ladies, Harlots and Pious Women: A Sourcebook in Courtly, Religious, and Urban Cultures of Late Medieval Germany,” is forthcoming in 2010 from Medieval Institute Publications. It is co-written with Ann Marie Rasmussen, Ph.D., of Duke University.
Li Yang, Ph.D., joins the Department of Physics in Arts & Sciences as assistant professor of computational condensed matter physics. Yang earned a doctorate from the Georgia Institute of Technology. He continued his study at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. His research interests include both developing first-principles (parameter-free) computational methods and their applications to the electronic structure and optical response of reduced-dimensional materials. He has worked on various structures such as graphene, graphene nanoribbons and silicon nanowires.