Maxwell announces new faculty members, department chair
The academic year begins at the Maxwell School with the
arrival of several new faculty members. In addition, Tom Perreault,
professor of geography, is the new chair of the Department of Geography.
Perreault has been a member of the Maxwell faculty since 2000,
having earned his doctorate in geography from the University of Colorado at
Boulder that year. He is currently the DellPlain Professor of Latin American
Geography and a Laura J. and L. Douglas Meredith Professor of Teaching
Excellence.
Perreault’s research specialties include political ecology,
environmental and resource governance, agrarian political economy and rural
livelihoods, indigeneity and indigenous politics, and Latin America. He is author,
editor, or co-editor of the books Water
Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2018); The Handbook of Political Ecology (Routledge, 2015); Minería, Agua y Justicia Social en los
Andes: Experiencias Comparativas de Perú y Bolivia (Centro Bartolomé de las
Casas, PIEB/Plural, 2014); and Movilización
política e identidad indígena en el Alto Napo (Ediciones Abya Yala, 2002). His
research has appeared in The Journal
Geographical Journal, Environment and Planning A, The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, and Water International, among others.
A dozen new faculty members are joining the Maxwell School
during this academic year:
Mona Bhan, associate professor of anthropology and
Ford-Maxwell Professor of South Asian Studies, focuses on political
anthropology, environmental anthropology, militarization, occupation,
counterinsurgency, war, environmentalism, infrastructure, water, and Kashmir.
Bhan’s commitment to public anthropology is grounded in long-term ethnographic
research on border wars; counterinsurgency; climate change; and space, power,
and infrastructure. She has authored/co-authored three books — Counterinsurgency, Democracy, and The
Politics of Identity in India: From Warfare to Welfare? (Routledge, 2013), Climate without Nature: A Critical
Anthropology of the Anthropocene (co-authored with Andrew Bauer, Cambridge
University Press, 2018), and Resisting
Occupation in Kashmir (co-edited with Haley Duschinski, Ather Zia, and
Cynthia Mahmood; University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). She earned her PhD in
anthropology from Rutgers University in 2006.
Erin Accampo Hern, assistant professor of political science,
specializes in African politics, comparative politics and political behavior,
and women and gender. Her research is based on field work in Zambia and
examines structural influences on political participation, with a special
focus on public policy and service provision. Hern is the author of Developing States, Shaping Citizenship:
Service Delivery and Political Participation in Zambia (University of
Michigan Press, 2019). In 2013, she won a Fulbright U.S. Student Award to carry
out her doctoral research in Zambia. At Cornell University, she received the Houston
I. Flournoy Fellowship and the Dean’s Prize for Distinguished Teaching. She
has a PhD in political science from Cornell University (2015).
Johannes Himmelreich, assistant professor of public
administration and international affairs, specializes in moral
and political philosophy, philosophy of the social sciences, and applied
ethics (especially regarding artificial intelligence). He enjoys exploring
conceptual questions about human agency and moral responsibility, but also
practical issues about the ethics of self-driving cars, the right to asylum, values
in data science, and dilemmas of public policy. Himmelreich has recently
published on “Responsibility for Killer Robots,” the trolley problem, and the
ethics of self-driving cars, as well as on the role of embodiment in virtual
reality. He has also spent time at Apple, working on the ethics of machine
learning and autonomous systems. He earned his PhD in philosophy from the
London School of Economics and Political Science in 2016.
Jenn M. Jackson, assistant professor of political science,
researches black politics, with a focus on group threat, gender
and sexuality, public opinion, political psychology, and behavior. Her first
book project investigates the role of group threat in influencing black
Americans’ political behavior. She has written for the Washington Post, Teen
Vogue, The Root, Ebony, Marie Claire, Daily Dot, and The
Independent, among others. She has also appeared on Al Jazeera, WGN, and Chicago
Tonight to discuss issues of race and class inequity, police reform, and
violence against young black people. She earned her PhD in political science
from the University of Chicago in 2019.
Jok Madut Jok, professor of anthropology, specializes
in security, governance, democracy, and development in South Sudan and Sudan.
He has written extensively about gender, sexuality and reproductive health,
humanitarian aid, ethnography of political violence, gender-based violence, and
war and slavery and the politics of identity in South Sudan and Sudan. He is
the author of Breaking Sudan: The Search
for Peace (Oneworld Publications, 2017), Sudan: Race, Religion and Violence (One World Publication, 2007), War and Slavery in Sudan (University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2001), and Militarization,
Gender and Reproductive Health in South Sudan (Edwin Mellen Press, 1998).
He has also co-edited The Sudan Handbook
(James Currey, 2011). He received his PhD in anthropology from the University
of California, Los Angeles in 1996.
Andrew Jonelis, assistant teaching professor of economics,
specializes in macroeconomics, with a focus on how institutions
shape economic growth. His other research interests include international
economics, political economy, public finance, and Sub-Saharan African
economies. His writings have been published in the South African Journal of Economics,
and his work on the informal economy in sub-Saharan Africa has been referenced
in The Economist and The Financial Times. At the University
of Kentucky, he won the Excellence in Teaching award from the Economics
Department. He has also worked as a research analyst with the International
Monetary Fund, where he won the IMF African Departmental Award in 2013 and
2014. He earned his PhD in economics from the University of Kentucky in 2019.
Michael Lorenzo, assistant teaching professor of economics,
specializes in open-economy macroeconomics, international trade, and
international finance. His research focuses on the role of country size
heterogeneity on macroeconomic interactions within the euro area. As a teacher,
he strives to present economics to students as a toolkit for strategic
decision-making, which can then be applied across multiple disciplines. He
joins Maxwell from Wesleyan University, where he was a visiting professor of
economics. He was the instructor of record at the University of Connecticut,
and also worked for the Connecticut Center for Economic Analysis. He received
his PhD in economics from the University of Connecticut in 2018.
Arnisson Andre Ortega, assistant professor of geography, is an interdisciplinary
geographer and critical demographer specializing in community geography,
urbanization, migration, Global South cities, counter-mapping, and critical
demography. He is the author of Neoliberalizing Spaces in the Philippines:
Suburbanization, Transnational Migration, and Dispossession (Lexington
Books, Rowman & Littlefield Press, 2016), for which he won the Virginia
Miralao Excellence in Research Award of the Philippine Social Science Council
and the IPC 2018 Award for Best Global Research about the Philippines. He
earned his PhD in geography from the University of Washington in 2012.
Dennis Rasmussen, professor of political science, specializes
in political theory and the history of political thought. His research
interests center on the Enlightenment and on the virtues and shortcomings of
liberal democracy and market capitalism. His most recent book, The Infidel
and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship That Shaped
Modern Thought (Princeton University Press, 2017) received a number of
accolades. He is also the author of the books The Pragmatic Enlightenment:
Recovering the Liberalism of Hume, Smith, Montesquieu, and Voltaire (Cambridge
University Press, 2014) and The Problems and Promise of Commercial Society:
Adam Smith’s Response to Rousseau (Pennsylvania State University Press,
2008). He earned his PhD in political science from Duke University in
2005.
Ying Shi, assistant professor of public
administration and international affairs, is an
applied microeconomist working broadly on issues of education policy. Her
research investigates the causes and consequences of educational inequality,
and evaluates policies’ effectiveness in bridging existing gaps. Her work has appeared in peer-reviewed
publications such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
Economics of Education Review, and Political Communication. Among
her many achievements, she was nominated for the Dean’s Award for Excellence in
Teaching at Duke University in 2015. She received her PhD in public
policy from Duke University in 2017.
Emily Wiemers, associate professor of public
administration and international affairs, is an economist specializing
in the economics of aging, economic demography, and labor economics. She
focuses her studies on changes over time in economic well-being and the role
of the family and intergenerational ties in mitigating the effects of economic
insecurity. She will conduct research at the Aging Studies Institute, a
collaborative initiative of the Maxwell School and the Falk College of Sport
and Human Dynamics. Her writings have been published in Demography, Population
Development Review, The Gerontologist, and Review of Economics of the
Household, among others. She earned her PhD in economics from the University
of California, Los Angeles in 2009.
Maria Zhu, assistant professor of economics, researches
labor economics, applied microeconomics, and the economics of education. She
has worked on projects looking at affirmative action, social networks in the
labor market, and instructor quality in higher education. Currently, she’s
working on a project on coworker networks. Her writings have been published in
the Annual Review of Economics. Among her many accolades, she won the
Best Poster Award at the Society of Labor Economists Conference in 2017, earned
an Education and Human Development Scholars Fellowship, was named to the Duke
Social Science Research Institute (2015–17), and received the James B. Duke
Fellowship, Duke University, 2013–17. She received her PhD in economics
from Duke University in 2019.
09/12/19