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Growing Our College
Arts and Letters celebrates significant hiring successes in recent years, welcoming dozens of new colleagues across the College. Many arrive as part of a cohort hire, a practice that clusters hiring opportunities to recruit candidates from different disciplinary backgrounds but who share common research and teaching interests.
“Last year, the College of Arts and Letters was fortunate to hire seven new faculty members in our initial cohort hire, and they are already transforming the university for the better,” said Dean Robert D. Aguirre. “This year's cohort hire will build on this effort, advancing our teaching and research about Latinx culture, a critically important field of study in the humanities, social sciences, and communication arts.”
Cohort hiring has allowed us to bring cutting-edge scholars into a readymade community and immediately into conversation with one another. The resulting network, in turn, helps transform our campus, not just in crossdisciplinary efforts, but in ways that revise and reinvigorate our curriculum, teaching, research and outreach – and, ultimately, that reimagine how we understand the role of a liberal arts and social sciences education.
Our two successful cohort hires – welcoming thirteen new CAL faculty in two years – signal our commitment to elevating and engaging with the critical issues that inform our current moment and will shape the future.
2022 Latinx Studies Cohort
Dr. Jason Baltazar joins us from the University of Kansas as an Assistant Professor of English. His research areas include fiction writing; hybrid forms; speculative fiction; and multiethnic and diasporic American literatures.
Dr. Reslie Cortés joins us from Arizona State University as an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies. A writer, director, and performer, her research areas include Puerto Rican food, history, and decolonialism; cultural and racial performance; and more.
Dr. Verónica Dávila Ellis joins us from Smith College as an Assistant Professor of Foreign Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. Their research areas include Latinx and Caribbean cultural studies; popular music; gender and queer theory; and sound and performance studies.
Dr. María José Delgadillo joins us from the University of Houston as an Assistant Professor of English. Her research areas include fairy-tale studies in contemporary literature; fantasy, wonder, gender, and horror in women writers in Latin America; translation as political practice; creative writing and bilingualism; and more.
Dr. Eduardo Duran joins us from the University of California, Los Angeles as an Assistant Professor of Sociology. His research interests include cultural sociology; medical sociology; phenomenological sociology; and the sociology of the senses.
Dr. Elim Hernandez joins us from the University of Oregon as an Assistant Professor of Media Arts & Design. His research areas include bilingualism; codeswitching; Spanglish; language intensification; advertising; persuasive communication; copywriting; and Hispanic- American consumers.
2021 Racial & Social Justice Cohort
Listed left to right: Dr. Tatiana Bejamin, Dr. Graciela Perez, and Dr. Deborwah Faulk
Dr. Tatiana Benjamin joined us from the University of Maryland, College Park, as an Assistant Professor of Justice Studies. Her research interests include prison abolition; immigration; access to mental health for Black immigrant communities; and more.
Dr. Graciela Perez joined us from the University of Delaware as an Assistant Professor of Justice Studies. Her research interests include punishment and social control; race and ethnicity; and the policing and victimization of immigrants.
Dr. Deborwah Faulk joined us from The Ohio State University as an Assistant Professor of Sociology. Her research interests include race and racial inequality in higher education, with a special focus on the way identities affect decisions about education.
Dr. Tiffany González (left) and Dr. Ja'La Wourman (right)
Dr. Tiffany González joined us from Texas A&M University as an Assistant Professor of History. Her research areas include 20th and 21st century U.S. History with an emphasis on American politics; Chicana/Latinx populations; and women & gender studies.
Dr. Ja’La Wourman joined us from Michigan State University as an Assistant Professor of Writing, Rhetoric and Technical Communication. Her research areas include race and culture in professional and technical communication, with a specialization in digital media and African American rhetoric.
Dr. Rachel Torres (left) and Dr. Cyril Uy (right)
Dr. Rachel Torres joined us from the University of Iowa as an Assistant Professor of Political Science. Her research interests include the relationship between U.S. immigration policy and the Latinx community; the politics of race; and political communication.
Dr. Cyril Uy joined us from Brown University as an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religion. His research “analyzes how mystics and philosophers across the medieval Islamic world produced knowledge to negotiate identity and relationships of power.”
New Faces Across the College
Dr. Kristiana L. Báez joins us from the University of Iowa as an Assistant Director of the JMU Debate team in Communication Studies. Her research areas include rhetoric, culture, and engagement and is heavily influenced by Black, Indigenous, and Latinx Feminism at the intersections of protest, history, and more.
Dr. Joost Burgers joins us from Ashoka University in India as an Associate Professor of English and the first Arts and Letters Digital Humanities/Social Sciences Faculty Scholar. His research includes narrative visualization and literary demography; Faulkner and digital Yoknapatawpha, global modernisms; and more.
Dr. Becky Childs joins us from Coastal Carolina University as the Academic Unit Head for the Department of English. Her research areas include linguistics and challenging assumptions and stereotypes surrounding African-American English, Appalachian English, Bahamian English, and Newfoundland English.
Dr. Muhammad Ittefaq joins us from the University of Kansas as an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies. His research interests include global health communication; new media and technologies; health mis/disinformation; public health; and burnout among public relations professionals.
Dr. Taylor Johnson ('17M) joins us from the University of Utah as an Assistant Director of Debate of the JMU Debate team in Communication Studies. Her research areas include Native American and Indigenous Studies; environmental justice; and rhetoric.
David Segal Photography
Dr. Sombo Muzata joins us from Virginia Commonwealth University as an Assistant Professor of Political Science. Her research areas include public financial management focusing on public budgeting and public debt; and economic development focusing on entrepreneurship.
Dr. Kenneth L. Pearce joins us from Trinity College Dublin as the Academic Unit Head for the Department of Philosophy and Religion. Pearce’s research areas include the history of 17th- and 18th- century philosophy and philosophy of religion.
Dr. Delores B. Phillips joins us from Old Dominion University as the Director of the African, African American, and Diaspora (AAAD) Studies Center and as an Associate Professor of English. Her research areas include postcolonial literature and theory with a focus on depictions of food, waste, and everyday life in culinary writing.
Dr. Constance Pruitt joins us from Howard University as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Political Science. Her research areas include comparative politics and international relations in Africa, with a focus on international organizations, elections, democratization, and peace and conflict in sub-Saharan Africa.
Dr. Yufan “Sunny” Qin joins us from the University of Florida as an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies. Her research interests include internal communication; leadership communication; relationship management; corporate purpose; and corporate social advocacy.
Photo by Jeffrey Albright
L. Renée joins us from Indiana University as the Assistant Director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center and an Assistant Professor of English. Her research interests include Black Appalachian subjectivity; oral history collection as a mode of cultural memory; and familial archives.
Dr. Amina Saidou joins us from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette as an Assistant Professor of Foreign Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. Her research areas include colonial, de- and postcolonial, cultural and transcultural studies; feminisms; resistance; immigration; identity construct; and more.
Nathan Selove ('17) joins us from the University of Northern Iowa as an Assistant Director of Individual Events of JMU Speech in Communication Studies. His research areas include disability rhetoric and advocacy; performance; and political rhetoric and advocacy.
Photo by Kennedi Carter
Dr. Jaimee Swift joins us from Howard University as an Assistant Professor of Political Science. Her research includes radical Black feminist politics and movement building in Brazil; historical and contemporary global Black feminist political struggles and memories; and more.
