Conn welcomes 14 new faculty

Connecticut College has welcomed 14 new tenure-track professors who bring a breadth of expertise in their respective fields, which include film studies, botany, history, economics, education, music, psychology, human development, French and francophone studies, government, and English.

Collectively, the new faculty members represent a broad range of specializations, including the ecology of sustainable food production, the role of education in paths toward a more just society, the social determinants of health, contemporary queer cinematic production, and secularism and religious conflicts.

Meet the new faculty:

Sana Abdi

Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies

Sana Abdi’s research interests include Francophone and Arabophone postcolonial literature, stylistics, bilingualism, and translation. Her current book project “Arabic at the heart of French: Linguistic and Literary Expressions” considers the ways in which Arabic, textually and intertextually, permeates the French verse in North African contemporary poetry. By identifying and parsing linguistic and literary references to Arabic in the French corpus, she explores the stylistic expressions of bilingual writing and its reception. Abdi has published peer-reviewed articles in Expressions Maghrébines and Les Lettres Romanes.

Dean Accardi

Assistant Professor of History

Dean Accardi (Ph.D., The University of Texas at Austin) is an historian of gender, religion, and politics in South Asia and the Islamic World. He is interested in secularism and religious conflict as well as the connections between religious and political practices, institutions, and discourses in early modern and modern worlds. His research focuses on the gendered ascetic practices of saints revered by both Hindus and Muslims and their use to establish and articulate religious and political power.

Pierce Donovan

Assistant Professor of Economics

Pierce Donovan is working on problems involving endangered species conservation, land use, and climate change. Within these settings, his research emphasizes sustainable ecological-economic systems. He has developed cost-effective management plans for riparian species interaction and hydropower generation in the Grand Canyon ecosystem, bycatch management in California, and emissions abatement at a global scale.

Isaac Gottesman

Lenore Tingle Howard '42 Associate Professor of Education, Department Chair

Isaac Gottesman is a historian of education interested in the role of education in paths towards a more just society. His scholarly and teaching interests thus straddle the historical and the contemporary.

Andrew Greenwald

Assistant Professor of Music

Andrew Greenwald is a composing and performing musician. HIs compositions probe questions of coherence in musical form, often using computer models to seamlessly meld improvisation and traditionally notated music. His works have been commissioned, recorded, and independently programmed by the Arditti Quartet, JACK Quartet, Mivos Quartet, Spektral Quartet, Ensemble Adapter, On Structure, Ensemble Dal Niente, Line Upon Line Percussion, Wild Up, Gnarwhallaby, and Distractfold as well as soloists Seth Josel, Ryan Muncy, Yuki Numata Resnick, Weston Olencki, Matt Barbier, Josh Modney, Austin Wulliman, and Séverine Ballon, and Marco Fusi at festivals and venues throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe.

Hyun Joon Park

Assistant Professor of Psychology

Hyun Joon investigates the multilevel pathways (i.e., intrapersonal, interpersonal, intergroup, and regional-level processes) through which psychological threat (e.g., being exposed to group-based discrimination or negative stereotypes) impacts health, academic performance, and intergroup relations, with a focus on testing interventions that mitigate the experience of threat. Hyun Joon earned his Ph.D. in social psychology, with a minor in social data analytics (a program focused on applying computational methods to social sciences) at The Pennsylvania State University in 2022.

Kris Klein Hernández

Assistant Professor of History

Kris Klein Hernández is a U.S. historian of race, gender, and sexuality whose scholarship is located at the nexus of borderlands history and comparative ethnic studies. He specializes in comparative racialization, militarization, and sexuality in the long 19th century, with a focus on the geography of the U.S.-Mexico boundary. He teaches courses on 19th century U.S. history; borderlands history; Vast Early America; settler colonialisms; comparative ethnic histories; U.S. imperialism and empire; and sexuality from the early republic to the present.

Katherine Kwong

Assistant Professor of Human Development

Katherine Kwong earned her Ph.D. in Aging Studies from the School of Medicine at Tulane University. As a gerontologist with a background in public health, her current work is driven by a theoretical understanding of social determinants of health, and focuses on one of the fastest growing segments of the population in the United States, older adults who identify as a racial or ethnic minority.

Sonia Misra

Instructor of Film Studies

Sonia Misra is an interdisciplinary film scholar and film programmer. Her current research project, Queer (Post-)Cinematic Futures: Temporality, the Digital, and the Limits of Representation, focuses on contemporary queer cinematic production to explore how queerness becomes reoriented around the shifting relationships that define our digital age.

Daniel Moak

Assistant Professor of Government

Daniel Moak earned his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2016. He is interested in American politics, race and ethnic politics, public policy, and public law. His work examines how social policy developments have shaped the incorporation of different groups, the scope of the broader social welfare state, the experience of citizenship, and the conceptualization of democracy in the United States. He is particularly interested in the ways in which race has been used in the United States to separate, segregate, and channel individuals and groups into different lanes of civic worth and opportunity.

Kate Rushin

Professor of English, Poet in Residence

Kate Rushin joined Connecticut College as Distinguished Visiting Poet in 2021 and was appointed Professor of English and Poet in Residence beginning in the 2022-23 academic year.

Matthew Swagler

Assistant Professor of History

Matt Swagler is a historian of twentieth-century Africa, focusing on decolonization and conceptions of youth in Senegal and Congo-Brazzaville. His work combines social, political, and urban history to understand why youth organizations became the primary vehicles for the expression of popular grievances against new African governments following the end of formal colonial rule. Through his research and teaching, Prof. Swagler also explores histories of childhood, Pan-Africanism, gender and sexuality in Africa, the global 1960s, and the historical dynamics of African economies.

Laxman Timilsina

Assistant Professor of Economics

Laxman earned his Ph.D. from the Graduate Center, CUNY, in 2020. He completed his B.A. from Middlebury College.

Eric Vukicevich

Sue and Eugene Mercy, Jr. Assistant Professor of Botany (Sustainable Agriculture)

Eric Vukicevich is an agricultural scientist and educator broadly interested in the ecological aspects of sustainable food production. His research and teaching experience range from investigating how cover crops affect soil microbial communities to the ecological management of soil fertility, pests, diseases, and weeds. He also draws from practical experience working in commercial agriculture as well as research, community, and student farms. At Connecticut College, Eric will be teaching courses in sustainable agriculture and coordinating activities at the Sprout Garden, incorporating local food production into a hands-on learning environment. He will also be organizing community partnerships for students and community members to engage with local food production and access.

Join the herd. Learn more

September 6, 2022

Conn welcomes 14 new faculty

Meet the new faculty:

Sana Abdi

Dean Accardi

Pierce Donovan

Isaac Gottesman

Andrew Greenwald

Hyun Joon Park

Kris Klein Hernández

Katherine Kwong

Sonia Misra

Daniel Moak

Kate Rushin

Matthew Swagler

Laxman Timilsina

Eric Vukicevich

Join the herd. Learn more

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