Introducing Brandeis' newest faculty members

The sun shining through bright fall leaves looking up a campus pathway

Along with the return of students to campus, Brandeis University has welcomed 25 new full-time and visiting faculty members and postdoctoral faculty fellows to the university community this fall.

The group spans all four divisions of the School of Arts and Sciences, as well as the Brandeis International Business School, and was welcomed to campus at the faculty meeting on Sept. 10.

“Our newest faculty represent a tremendous amount of knowledge, perspective and expertise,” said Provost Carol A. Fierke. “It is with great excitement that we welcome them to campus and look forward to their contributions to the Brandeis community.”

The following new faculty join the university this academic year:

School of Arts and Sciences

Division of the Humanities

Jeremy Swist
Lecturer
Classical Studies

Swist’s research interests include Greek and Latin historiography and rhetoric in the later Roman empire, and the reception of antiquity in heavy metal music. After receiving his PhD in classics from the University of Iowa in 2018, Swist taught at the University of Iowa and Miami University. He joins Brandeis from Xavier University where he has served as an instructor in the department of philosophy and modern languages while also teaching remotely at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

Howie Tam
Florence Levy Kay Fellow and Lecturer
English, and German, Russian and Asian Languages and Literature

Tam’s expertise encompasses Asian American cultural politics, transnational Vietnamese studies, Cold War culture, and diaspora studies. Tam received his PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania in 2019 and, later that year, took up appointment as assistant director and postdoctoral fellow in transnational, decolonial, and intersectional politics at Dartmouth College’s Consortium of Studies in Race, Migration, and Sexuality.

Yuval Evri
Assistant Professor
Marash and Ocuin Chair in Ottoman, Mizrahi, and Sephardic Jewish Studies
Near Eastern and Judaic Studies

Evri’s research sits at the intersection of Jewish history, literary studies, cultural studies, and Middle Eastern studies, with a particular focus on Sephardi/Mizrahi history and culture in conjunction with questions of ethnicity, race, nationality, linguistics, translation, and identity. Since receiving his PhD in sociology (focusing on intellectual and cultural Sephardi history) from Tel Aviv University in 2014, Evri has served as an EUME postdoctoral fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin, as a faculty member at the Mandel Leadership Institute in Jerusalem, as a postdoctoral fellow at SOAS University of London, and as a fellow at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He joins Brandeis from King’s College London where he has been a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow since January 2019.

Madadh Richey
Assistant Professor
Near Eastern and Judaic Studies

Richey’s research examines the putative divide between “popular” and “official” religious practice in Israel, Judah, and neighboring areas. She engages epigraphy and visual art in order to show how minoritized religious traditions are integral components of Yahwistic and related belief systems. Richey received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 2019 and joins Brandeis from Princeton University where she served as a postdoctoral research associate and lecturer in Hebrew Bible.

Larisa Svirsky
Lecturer
Philosophy

Svirsky received her PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2019. Since then, she has served as a postdoctoral scholar at The Ohio State University where she held a joint appointment in the College of Public Health and the Center for Bioethics, and was part of a project called “Regulating Addiction: Paternalism, Stigma, and Health Disparities.” Her research interests include normative ethics, moral psychology, bioethics, and philosophy of psychiatry.

Zoila Castro
Senior Lecturer
Romance Studies

Castro has a master’s degree in Spanish language and literature from the University of Rhode Island and over 20 years of experience teaching Spanish at different institutions in the U.S., France and Peru. She joins Brandeis from the University of Rhode Island where she has served as lecturer and as Spanish coordinator.

María Durán
Assistant Professor
Latinx Cultural Studies

Durán’s research interests encompass Latinx literatures and cultures, feminist theory, and Chicanx theatre and performance focusing in particular on political agency and the performance of resistance in 20th- and 21st-century U.S. Latinx cultural productions. Durán received her PhD in English from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2019 and, for the past two years, has served as Florence Levy Kay Fellow in U.S. Latinx Cultural Studies here at Brandeis.

Paige Eggebrecht
Administrator and lecturer
University Writing Program

Eggebrecht received her PhD in literature from Brandeis in 2020 with a dissertation titled “Divided Labors: Political Economy and the Victorian Social Novel.” Eggebrecht is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Library and Information Science.

Allison Giannotti
Lecturer
University Writing Program

Giannotti received her PhD in English with a concentration in Rhetoric and composition from the University of New Hampshire in 2021 with a dissertation titled “Becoming Scientists: Students’ Literacy Activities in Laboratory Education.” She also holds an M.F.A. in Creative Nonfiction Writing from Columbia University. Over the past five years, Giannotti has taught composition courses in a variety of departments at UNH, including English, Applied Engineering and Sciences, and Women’s and Gender Studies.

Patrick Kindig
Lecturer
University Writing Program

Kindig completed his PhD in English (with a concentration in American literature) at Indiana University in 2019; he earned his M.F.A. in creative writing (also from Indiana University) 2017. At Indiana, he taught a range of courses, from basic writing to writing-intensive literature courses.

Gregory Palermo
Lecturer
University Writing Program

Palermo is currently finishing his PhD in the English Department at Northeastern University; the title of his dissertation is “Re-Landscaping Digital Scholarship: A Computational Analysis of Citations in Digital Humanities and Writing Studies.” His research interests include citation, humanities data analysis methods, disciplinary rhetorics, and conceptual metaphor.

Division of Science

Steven DeLuca
Assistant Professor
Biology

DeLuca is a developmental biologist whose research explores genome function with a particular focus on the role chromatin plays in cell differentiation. DeLuca received his PhD from the University of California, San Francisco in 2012. He joins Brandeis from the Carnegie Institution for Science/Johns Hopkins University where he has served as a postdoctoral fellow since 2013. DeLuca will join Brandeis in January 2022.

Christine Grienberger
Assistant Professor
Biology

Grienberger is a neuroscientist; her work intersects cellular and systems neuroscience and aims to provide a mechanistic understanding of information processing in the mammalian brain. Grienberger received her PhD from Technical University (TU) Munich, Germany in 2013. She joins Brandeis from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute at Baylor College of Medicine, where she has served as a Research Specialist since 2018.

Nathalie Vladis
Assistant Professor
Biology

Vladis’ expertise is pedagogy and neuroscience; she develops and implements curricula using evidence-based best practices to enhance biomedical teaching and learning. Vladis received her PhD in integrative physiology (molecular neuroscience) in 2018 from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. She joins Brandeis from Harvard Medical School where she was a lecturer in biomedical informatics in 2020 and served as Curriculum Fellow in Quantitative biology since 2018.

Carolyn Abbott
Assistant Professor
Mathematics

Abbott’s primary research interest is geometric group theory, which sits at the intersection of group theory, geometry, and topology. Abbott received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2017 when she was appointed as a visiting assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She has served as an NSF Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley and, more recently, at Columbia University.

Tyler Maunu
Assistant Professor
Mathematics

Maunu studies recovery problems and optimization over Wasserstein space utilizing research interests that lie at the intersection of optimization, high-dimensional statistics, geometry, and machine-learning. Maunu received his PhD from the University of Minnesota in 2018 and since then has served as Instructor in Applied Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Aram Apyan
Assistant Professor
Physics

Apyan’s research area is experimental high-energy physics with a particular interest in the exploration of the Electroweak (EW) sector of the Standard Model (SM) of particles. Apyan received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2017. He joins Brandeis from Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory where he has served as a research associate since 2016 working on the CMS experiment at CERN.

 

Divison of Creative Arts
 

Bradford Garvey
Visiting Assistant Professor
Music

Garvey received his PhD in Ethnomusicology from the City University of New York. His dissertation, “Poems to Open Palms: Praise Performance and the State in the Sultanate of Oman,” was based on nearly two years of fieldwork with Arab men’s praise singing troupes in rural northern Oman and was supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.

Taylor Ackley
Visiting Assistant Professor
Music

Ackley earned a master’s degree and PhD in composition and a master’s degree in Ethnomusicology from Stony Brook University. He is a scholar, composer, and performer of American Roots music.

Division of Social Sciences

Rachel Cantave
Madeleine Haas Russell Visiting Professor
African and African American Studies

Cantave is an assistant professor of International Affairs at Skidmore University. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from American University, and a master’s degree in Public Anthropology and a bachelor’s degree in Individualized Study from New York University. Cantave teaches courses on cultural theory, research methods, race, religion, and identity politics in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Anya Wallace
Visiting Assistant Professor
African and African American Studies
Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Wallace received her PhD in Art Education and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from The Pennsylvania State University. Professor Wallace is a visual artist with a concentration in black and white photography and painting. She received a BA from Agnes Scott College in Studio Art and Spanish, and studied Photography at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Her work in photography is shaped by a desire to visually narrate the stories of Black girlhood.

Israel Ukawuba
Florence Levy Kay Fellow
Environmental Studies, and Health: Science, Society, and Policy
Lecturer
Environmental Studies

Ukawuba received his PhD and master’s degree from the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. His dissertation is entitled “Use of climate in a simple entomological framework to improve dynamic simulation and forecast of malaria transmission.” He uses sophisticated modelling techniques that incorporate climate change, the life cycle of the mosquito vector, and the life cycle of the malaria parasite to predict what control measures will be most effective as climate changes over the coming years.

Aaron Bray '13
Lecturer
Legal Studies

Bray earned his bachelor's' degree form Brandeis and his JD from Harvard in 2016, followed by an LLM in Advocacy at Georgetown University Law Center in 2021. in his law practice, Aaron served as a public defender in Massachusetts, and also worked with Roca, Inc. and other community-based organizations supporting individuals involved with the justice system. Bray will teach Criminal Law in the fall and The War on Drugs in the spring semester. He will continue to work with incarcerated students at Brandeis, through the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative

Renanah Miles Joyce
Assistant Professor
Politics

Joyce received her PhD from Columbia University in 2020. She specializes in military assistance to developing-country militaries, with a focus on U.S., Chinese, and Canadian military training in Sub-Saharan Africa. Joyce is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the joint Harvard-MIT Program on Grand Strategy, Security, and Statecraft. Joyce will join Brandeis in January 2022.

Evangelina Macias
Allen-Berenson Fellow
Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Macias received her PhD from the University of California, Riverside. Her dissertation, “Dancing Defiance: From Native American Women’s Fancy Shawl Dance to Indigenous Burlesque and Pole Dance,” views dance as an act of defiance against “the containment which colonization has imposed” on Indigenous bodies and communities. She is especially interested in the body “as a site of knowledge and sexual expression for Indigenous women, femmes, non-binary, Two-Spirit artists” against the backdrop of violence against Indigenous people.

Brandeis International Business School

Erin Vicente
Senior lecturer

Vicente holds a doctorate of education in organizational leadership and communication from Northeastern University. She has taught at both the undergraduate and graduate level as a former associate professor of communication. Her research focuses on contingent faculty experiences and has appeared in Review of Social Sciences, as well as been presented at numerous conferences such as the National Communication Association, International Communication Association, and an International Roundtable Symposium for Women and Education at Oxford. Erin has also held senior account executive and financial planning positions at Viacom, CBS Radio-Boston, and Fleet Boston Financial.

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