New Humanities Faculty Welcome Event

The departments of American Studies and Ethnicity, Anthropology, English, French and Italian, History, and Spanish and Portuguese invite you to attend:

New Humanities Faculty Welcome Event Thursday, September 14, 2017 3:30–6:30p.m.

Moreton Fig, University Park Campus

College of Liberal Arts Referred to as “Old College,” this building housed the first true campus library. From 1887 to 1948, it stood on land now occupied by Taper Hall of Humanities.

(1920 photo courtesy of Los Angeles Water and Power Associates, Inc.)

Bovard Administration Building

The following departments at USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences welcome our outstanding new faculty and postdoctoral scholars in:

American Studies and Ethnicity

French and Italian

Faculty

Lydie Moudileno

Riley Snorton

Postdoctoral scholars

Kimberly McNair (American Studies and History) Sharon Tran

Anthropology Faculty

Reighan Gillam

English Faculty

Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus Zakiyyah Iman Jackson Robin Coste Lewis Enrique MartĂ­nez Celaya Maggie Nelson Beatrice Sanford Russell Danzy Senna Andrew McConnell Stott Postdoctoral scholars

Christopher Findeisen (The Society of Fellows) Marci Vogel (Dornsife Preceptor)

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Faculty

History Faculty

Benjamin Uchiyama Maya Maskarinec (Fall 2018) Ketaki Pant (Fall 2018) Aro Velmet (Fall 2018) Postdoctoral scholars

Karin Amundsen (Dornsife Preceptor) David-James Gonzalez (Dornsife Preceptor) Kimberly McNair (American Studies and History) Jeremy Mikecz (Digital Humanities Fellow)

Spanish and Portuguese Faculty

Natalie Belisle Ronald Mendoza-de JesĂşs

American Studies and Ethnicity Main office: Kaprielian Hall 462 Chair: Nayan Shah, Ph.D. website: dornsife.usc.edu/ase/

Undergraduate programs: American Popular Culture (B.A.) American Studies and Ethnicity (B.A.) African American Studies (B.A.) Asian American Studies (B.A.) Chicano/Latino Studies (B.A.) Graduate program: American Studies and Ethnicity (Ph.D.)

Riley Snorton Associate Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity Professor Snorton received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in Communications and Culture. His research explores the intersections among queer and transgender theory, history, and African American Studies. His first book, Nobody Is Supposed to Know, traces news media and popular culture discourse of black male sexuality. His new book, Black on Both Sides, is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press in December 2017. This study examines the multiple intersections between blackness and transness from the mid-19th century to current anti-black and anti-trans legislation and violence.

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Anthropology Main office: Grace Ford Salvatori 120 Chair: Gary Seaman, Ph.D. website: dornsife.usc.edu/anth/

Undergraduate programs: Anthropology (B.A.) Visual Anthropology (B.A.) Global Studies (B.A.) Graduate programs: Visual Anthropology (MVA) Anthropology (Ph.D.)

Reighan Gillam Assistant Professor of Anthropology Professor Gillam received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Cornell University. She came to USC from the University of Michigan where she was an assistant professor. Gillam’s book manuscript, titled Colored Lenses: Visualizing Black Lives in Afro-Brazilian Media, examines how emerging Afro-Brazilian media producers are forging a range of possible visions for representing blackness in Brazil.

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Department of Anthropology

English Main office: Taper Hall of Humanities 404 Chair: David St. John, MFA website: dornsife.usc.edu/engl/

Undergraduate programs: English (B.A.) Narrative Studies (B.A.) Graduate programs: Literary Editing and Publishing (M.A.) English Literature (Ph.D.) Literature and Creative Writing (Ph.D.)

Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus Assistant Professor of English Professor Daniels-Rauterkus comes to USC from the University of Alabama at Birmingham where she held a joint appointment in English and African American Studies. Her scholarship focuses on 19th-century African American literary history and cultural production, particularly the relationship between aesthetics and cultural politics in postbellum America. Her first book, African American Realisms and the Romances of Race: Rethinking Nineteenth-Century Literary History is forthcoming from LSU Press in 2019.

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Zakiyyah Iman Jackson Assistant Professor of English Professor Jackson received a Ph.D. in African Diaspora Studies with designated emphases in Film and Media and Women, Gender, and Sexuality from the University of California, Berkeley. Her work concerns the intersection of science, philosophy, and African diasporic literature and visual culture. Professor Jackson’s book in progress, tentatively titled The Blackness of Space Between Matter and Meaning, clarifies the nature of the proximity between blackness and animality in the history of Western science and philosophy.

Robin Coste Lewis Writer-in-Residence Robin Coste Lewis is the Poet Laureate of the City of Los Angeles.

Professor Lewis received her Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Visual Studies here at USC. She also has an MFA in poetry from NYU, and an MTS in Sanskrit and comparative religious literature from Harvard’s Divinity School. Her book, Voyage of the Sable Venus (Knopf, 2015), which she has described as an experiment in archive about the history of race and Western art, won the National Book Award in Poetry. Her work engages primarily conversations between desire and history.

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Department of English

Enrique Martínez Celaya Provost Professor of Humanities and Arts Enrique Martínez Celaya is the first person to hold the position of Provost Professor of Humanities and Arts at USC. Professor Martínez Celaya is an artist, writer, and scientist who, after inventing several patented laser devices, decided to abandon a career in physics for art.

He has published on poetry, art, philosophy, and physics. His paintings and sculptures have been exhibited and collected by major institutions around the world -including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, LACMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, as well as museums and galleries in Germany, Sweden, and Russia among others.

Maggie Nelson Professor of English Professor Nelson is the author of nine books of poetry and prose, many of which have become cult classics. Her most recent book, The Argonauts, was a New York Times bestseller and won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. The recipient of many prizes, in 2016, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. She holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the City University of New York, and comes to USC after 12 years of teaching at CalArts, where she directed the MFA Creative Writing Program.

Beatrice Sanford Russell Assistant Professor (Teaching) of English Professor Sanford Russell received her Ph.D. in English Literature from Princeton University. Before joining USC’s English department, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at USC in the Early Modern Studies Institute and taught within USC’s General Education Program. She works on nineteenth-century British poetry and aesthetics.

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Danzy Senna Associate Professor of English Professor Senna received her B.A. from Stanford University and her MFA in Creative Writing from UC Irvine. She is the author of five critically acclaimed books of fiction and nonfiction, including the novels Caucasia, Symptomatic, and most recently, New People. The recipient of the Whiting Writers Award and the 2016 Dos Passos Prize for Literature, she held a five-year post as Writer-in-Residence at Occidental College before coming to USC.

Andrew McConnell Stott USC Dornsife College Dean of Undergraduate Education Professor of English Professor Stott came to USC from the University at Buffalo, SUNY, where he was Vice Provost and Dean of Undergraduate Education and Professor of English. Originally from the UK, Professor Stott specializes in British popular culture from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, and is the author of several books, including The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi which won the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for nonfiction.

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Department of English

French and Italian Main office: Taper Hall of Humanities 155 Chair: Margaret Rosenthal, Ph.D. website: dornsife.usc.edu/fren-ital/

Undergraduate programs: French (B.A.) Italian (B.A.) Graduate program: Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture - French and Francophone Studies (Ph.D.)

Lydie Moudileno Professor of French Professor Moudileno joins the faculty at USC from the University of Pennsylvania, where she taught for 23 years and served as the Director of the African Studies Center. Lydie is the author of several books on French and Francophone Studies that range from Caribbean literature to contemporary fiction of Sub-Saharan Africa, including a recent book on the literary production of five Congolese writers. Her current research reexamines the question of authorship and the legacies of the French empire in a global context.

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History Main office: Social Sciences Building 153 Chair: Philip J. Ethington, Ph.D.

Undergraduate programs: History (B.A.) History and Social Science Education (B.A.) Law, History, and Culture (B.A.)

website: dornsife.usc.edu/hist/

Graduate program: History (Ph.D.)

Benjamin Uchiyama Assistant Professor of History Professor Uchiyama is a social and cultural historian of modern Japan.

He earned his Ph.D. at USC in 2013 before accepting an Assistant Professor position in the History Department of the University of Kansas. His book manuscript Total War and Mass Culture in Japan: Carnival War on the Home Front: 1937-1945 (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press) explores the intersection between imperialism and mass culture during the Asia-Pacific War.

Maya Maskarinec Assistant Professor of History (beginning Fall 2018) Professor Maskarinec is a historian of late antique/early medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, with an emphasis on the city of Rome as an interlocutor across geographical, cultural and chronological divides. She is currently finishing a post-doc at NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. She completed her Ph.D. at UCLA in 2015 and spent the following year teaching at Columbia University.

Her first book, Building Rome Saint by Saint in the Early Middle Ages, is forthcoming in January 2018 with University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Department of History

Spanish and Portuguese Main office: Taper Hall of Humanities 156 Chair: Julián Gutiérrez-Albilla, Ph.D. website: dornsife.usc.edu/spanish/

Undergraduate programs: Spanish (B.A.) Latin American and Iberian Cultures, Media and Politics (B.A.) Graduate program: Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture - Spanish and Latin American Studies (Ph.D.)

Natalie Belisle Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Professor Belisle received her Ph.D. in Latin American studies from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Natalie’s research engages Caribbean literature and culture and political theory. Her work looks to the Afro-Caribbean diaspora with a focus on race and citizenship to better understand its literary, historical, and cultural alliances. She is currently working on a manuscript on contemporary Caribbean literary fictions of citizenship.

Ronald Mendoza-de Jesús Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Professor Mendoza-de Jesús received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Emory University and held a two-year postdoc fellowship at the USC Society of Fellows in the Humanities. Ronald is a Comparatist trained in Latin American and Caribbean studies, German and French thought, and critical theory (including feminist and queer theory). In addition to his numerous published articles, Ronald has a forthcoming book titled Reading Danger: Literary History “After” Historicism.

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The departments of American Studies and Ethnicity, Anthropology, English, French and Italian, History, and Spanish and Portuguese would like to thank the Dornsife Office of the Dean for its support in making this New Humanities Faculty Welcome possible.