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In the Spotlight

New members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Fifteen scholars joined nine departments and two interdisciplinary academic programs of Dartmouth's Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Thayer School of Engineering during fall term.

The new faculty members include three with expertise on Africa and two whose studies connect to Asia. Two are practicing artists and designers. The College's departments of history and sociology gained two members each, as did the program in linguistics and cognitive sciences. The departments of anthropology, biological sciences, chemistry, classics, film and media studies, French and Italian, and theater, as well as the academic program in Native American studies also welcomed members.

Below, an overview of the scholarly interests and achievements of Dartmouth's newest professors, including a selection of the courses they are teaching this academic year.

Bruce Duthu '80
Professor of Native American Studies

Bruce Duthu '80

Duthu is the author of American Indians and the Law (Viking, 2008). A member of the faculty of Vermont Law School from 1991 to 2008, Duthu previously served Dartmouth as director of the Native American Program, associate dean of first-year students, and Gordon Russell Visiting Professor of Native American Studies. He holds a J.D. from Loyola University School of Law.

Duthu studies tribal sovereignty and the nature of political and legal relations among Indian tribes and the federal and state governments, both historically and in the modern era. He is a member of the United Houma Nation of Louisiana, and is a consultant to several Indian tribes and federal officials on topics including federal recognition, jurisdiction, and the environment. Duthu is teaching "Indian Country Today" this year.

Mary Flanagan
The Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities and Professor of Film and Media Studies

Mary Flanagan

Flanagan's research engages with contemporary issues surrounding digital culture. A co-founder of Rapunsel, a National Science Foundation-funded project to teach girls programming, she recently joined a Microsoft Research-led initiative, the Games for Learning Institute (G4LI).

Flanagan's Tiltfactor, a laboratory dedicated to researching and developing software and art with a focus on inventive game design for social change, will play a key role in G4LI. Her work also includes the books re: skin (MIT Press, 2007) and Critical Play (MIT Press, forthcoming).

Flanagan holds a Ph.D. in computational media from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. She is teaching courses on digital culture and new technologies. Says Flanagan, "I am prepared to spark Dartmouth students' curiosity and imagination and help develop their vision and problem solving abilities holistically. Together, we'll make important new discoveries."

Christiane Donahue
Associate Professor of Linguistics and Director of the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric

Christiane Donahue

"Learning how to recognize, articulate, and analyze argument in all its forms is central to a liberal arts education," says Donahue. "I hope that my research about cross-cultural patterns in academic writing will help bring attention to the effects internationalization and globalization in higher education have on what we teach students about writing and about language."

Donahue is teaching expository writing this year. Her publications include Ecrire a la Université: Analyse Comparée en France et aux Etats-Unis (Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2008) as well as articles in the journals Recherches Linguistiques and Written Communication. She holds a Ph.D. in linguistics from the Université Paris Descartes, and is a 2008-09 Fulbright scholar in linguistics.

Jiannbin Shiao
Associate Professor of Sociology

Jiannbin Shiao

Shiao, a sociologist of race and ethnicity, is the author of Identifying Talent, Institutionalizing Diversity: Race and Philanthropy in Post-Civil Rights America (Duke University Press, 2005). His work has also appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, Asian American Policy Review, and Race and Society.

"My scholarship has focused on the relationship between demographic heterogeneity and race relations in the post-civil rights era, or in other words, between the quantity and quality of diversity," he says.

Shiao's work in progress includes a book manuscript on transracial international adoption, focusing on the racial/ethnic identities of Korean adoptees. He holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California at Berkeley. He is teaching "Race and Ethnicity in the United States," "A Sociological Introduction to the Asian American Experience," and "The Sociology of Asian America."

Ivan Aprahamian
Assistant Professor of Chemistry

Ivan Aprahamian

Aprahamian's work is in materials science and nanotechnology. He seeks to develop light-powered molecular switches that could serve as the building blocks of molecular machines. A second line of investigation pursues chemical compounds that can assemble themselves into lithium-containing molecular wires. He comes to Dartmouth from postdoctoral studies at UCLA.

Aprahamian's work has appeared in the Journal of Organic Chemistry, the Journal of the American Chemical Society, and Angewandte Chemie. He holds a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Aprahamian teaches "Synthetic Organic Chemistry" this year. "I think that as a teacher my job is to direct my students through the vast sea of knowledge which is available nowadays," he says, "but before I can do that the students must jump in and get wet!"

Pramit Chaudhuri
Assistant Professor of Classics

Pramit Chaudhuri

Chaudhuri specializes in the Latin poetry of the early Roman Empire. He also studies the use and reuse of classical texts during the Renaissance, including their impact on Renaissance painting. He is teaching "The Heroic Vision: Epics of Greece and Rome" and "Vergil" this year.

"The most important thing to convey to any student of literature is the capacity of language, especially poetic language, to signify more than one can initially comprehend," says Chaudhuri. "I try to get students to be patient with the text and to immerse themselves in knowledge of the culture that gave birth to the text." Chaudhuri holds a Ph.D. in classics and comparative literature from Yale University. He is currently researching literary depictions of "theomachy," conflicts between humans and gods.

Marc Dixon
Assistant Professor of Sociology

Marc Dixon

Dixon has published studies of labor policy, social protest, and strikes in journals including Social Forces and the Journal of Policy History. "I am interested in the factors that make social movements more or less successful in the political process-a theme that occupies much of my research and teaching," he says. "One component of this work is historical: I use archival materials to assess the strategies and effectiveness of union and employer organizations in the shaping of American labor law."

Dixon holds a Ph.D. in sociology from Ohio State University. This year, his courses include "Political Sociology," "Labor Movements," and "Sociological Classics."

James Igoe
Assistant Professor of Anthropology

James Igoe

Igoe is a cultural anthropologist with interests in political ecology, environmental justice, and conservation, as well as in globalization and indigenous people. "Which people have access to which resources and which people pay the heaviest costs as a result of negative human impacts on the environment?" Igoe asks. "This intersection of human-environmental relationships and social justice is an especially fruitful area of inquiry."

Igoe's published work includes Conservation and Globalization: A Study of National Parks and Indigenous Communities from East Africa to South Dakota (Wadsworth/Thompson, 2004) and Nature Unbound: Conservation, Capitalism, and the Future of Protected Areas (Earthscan, 2008; with Dan Brockington and Rosaleen Duffy).

He is currently studying community-based neighborhood recovery in post-Katrina New Orleans. Igoe holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from Boston University, and is teaching "Main Currents in Anthropology," "Africa: The Ethnographic Encounter," and "Introduction to Anthropology."

Andrew Kern
Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences

Andrew Kern

Kern studies evolutionary genetics, using computational and empirical methods to explore how genetic variation is created and maintained in the genes of Drosophila (the fruit fly) and in humans. Prior to joining the Dartmouth faculty, Kern was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Kern's work has been published in Nature, Science, and Genetics, and supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. He holds a Ph.D. in population biology from the University of California, Davis. Kern is teaching "Microevolution" this year.

Laurie Churba Kohn
Assistant Professor of Theater

Laurie Churba Kohn

Kohn has an extensive professional background in costume design for theater, television, film, and commercials. During 11 years at Saturday Night Live, Kohn designed costumes for the show's live skits. She also worked on Oliver Stone's film Ground Zero. Her Broadway debut was the 1999 revival of Arthur Miller's The Price, one of more than 80 productions she has designed across the country.

Kohn's work at Dartmouth includes the costume design for Stop Kiss by Diana Son, presented in November. "The costume design project I created for that production involved 35 quick-changes and fake legs," she notes. She is also creating the costume design for an upcoming production of Grapes of Wrath, adapted by Frank Galati from the Steinbeck novel, which is scheduled for February 2009. She has an M.F.A. in costume design from the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. Kohn brings her expertise to the classroom this year in "Costume Design."

Kofi Odame
Assistant Professor of Engineering, Thayer School

Kofi Odame

Odame's research contributes to the pursuit of self-powered electronic sensors, which must operate with extraordinary energy efficiency. He develops mixed-signal nonlinear integrated circuits that extract information for devices operating in circumstances where very little power and very little space is available. Examples include remote sensors, and ones that process biological signals, such as in cochlear implants. Odame holds a patent for a "hearing aid adaptive filter"; his work has been published in journals and conference proceedings in the fields of circuits and systems, and signal processing.

Of opportunities at Dartmouth, Odame says, "Thayer School is small and yet rich in resources; that is extremely appealing. I was also attracted by the amount of collaboration that occurs between Thayer and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center." He is teaching "Electronics: Linear and Digital" this year. Odame holds a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Courtney Quaintance
Assistant Professor of Italian

Courtney Quaintance

Quaintance studies Renaissance Italy. Her published work includes an article on satires targeting Venetian courtesans, and a forthcoming  critical edition of a 16th-century Venetian banquet play. Her current research examines the interconnections between social networks and literature in 16th-century Venice. She has a Ph.D. in Italian literature from the University of Chicago.

Quaintance says, "I want my students to cultivate an educated imagination, to expand their notion of what is possible. I believe that teaching literature-and language, of course, since the two are inherently connected-can do just that." Her courses this year include "Dante."

Naaborko Sackeyfio
Assistant Professor of History

Naaborko Sackeyfio

Sackeyfio specializes in modern African history with a focus on West Africa. She has interests in social and political history, and in questions of memory and perceptions of homeland in the African Diaspora. She holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Sackeyfio's current research examines the impact of British colonialism and urbanization on the Ga chieftaincy and land tenure system in colonial Accra, Ghana, while also considering the effect such forces had on Ga identities. This year, she is teaching "Pre-Colonial African History" and "History of Africa Since 1800."

James Stanford
Assistant Professor of Linguistics

James Stanford

Stanford, a sociolinguist, explores language variation in less commonly studied minority communities, including issues of identity, dialect, clans, and linguistic contact. His dissertation was based on fieldwork among the indigenous Sui people of China, who speak a Tai-Kadai minority language.

Prior to his graduate studies, Stanford lived in mainland China from 1995 to 2003. He holds a Ph.D. in linguistics from Michigan State University. He teaches "Sociolinguistics" this year.

George R. Trumbull IV
Assistant Professor of History

George R. Trumbull IV

Trumbull is the author of An Empire of Facts: Colonial Power, Cultural Knowledge, and Islam (Algeria, 1871-1914), forthcoming in the Cambridge University Press series "Critical Perspectives on Empire." He studies the history of north and Islamic Africa, and has further interests in colonialism, in narrative history, and in environmental studies.
This year, Trumbull is teaching "Africa and the World" and "Islam in Africa." He is also researching a book to be titled "An Ocean of Sand: A Cultural History of Water in the Colonial Sahara." Trumbull holds a Ph.D. in history from Yale University.

By KELLY SEAMAN

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