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Vox of Dartmouth is pleased to offer the third in its continuing series of articles introducing new members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, giving readers an opportunity to learn more about their work and their interests.
"These wonderful scholars have quickly established themselves as integral members of our academic community," says Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Biological Sciences Carol Folt. "They bring new ideas to our classrooms and our departments by complementing the expertise of their colleagues. Dartmouth is fortunate to recruit such stimulating faculty each year, and their scholarship innovates and invigorates our entire community."
Read the first and second articles in this series.
Rebecca Biron
Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese
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A widely published scholar whose teaching has been recognized with numerous awards, Rebecca Biron holds a B.A. in comparative literature and Spanish from the University of Georgia and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of Iowa. She has held faculty posts at the University of Iowa (1987–1994), the University of Miami (2000–2006), and at Emory University, where she taught as a visiting assistant professor in 1999. The recipient of the University Excellence in Teaching Award and a student nominee for the Greek System Teaching Award, both from the University of Miami, she was also a student nominee for Outstanding Teaching Assistant at the University of Iowa.
Before coming to Dartmouth, she served as an associate professor of Spanish at the University of Miami and led several academic programs and initiatives there. She was faculty coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Studies Programs, director of undergraduate studies in Spanish, and associate director of graduate studies. She also served on the planning committee for the department of international and comparative politics and was a member of the executive committee of the Center for Latin American Studies and the Center for Study of the Americas. She most recently served as director of the Latin American Studies Program at Miami, a position she held from 2003 until she joined the Dartmouth faculty in 2006.
Her teaching and scholarship on Latin American narratives, with special focus on Mexican literature, have established her as a leader in these fields. Biron is the author of one book, Murder and Masculinity: Violent Fictions of 20th Century Latin America (2000), and is completing a second, The Anxiety of Desire: Elena Garro and Mexico's Modern Dreams. She is also producing an edited volume, forthcoming with Duke University Press (City/Art), and has begun work on a third book, slated for completion in 2008. Biron's articles on Latin American literature have been published in scholarly journals ranging from Discourse and Feminist Studies, to the Latin American Literary Review and the Delaware Review of Latin American Studies. Her current research focuses on Mexican discourse about modernization and globalization.
She is the assembly delegate for the Division on 20th Century Latin American Literature of the Modern Language Association (MLA), and was a founding member, executive committee secretary, and president of the Mexicanist Cultural and Literary Studies Discussion Group of the MLA. Biron is a member of the editorial board of the Latin American Literary Review and a manuscript reviewer for a variety of publications, including Hispanic Review and Letras Femininas.
Andrew T. Campbell
Associate Professor of Computer Science
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Andrew T. Campbell comes to Dartmouth from Columbia University, where he taught from 1996 to 2005 as an associate professor of electrical engineering. He led a systems research group there that worked closely with a number of industrial partners to develop network algorithms, protocols, and systems architectures for the Internet, with particular focus on mobility and wireless challenges, and on the need to make the Internet more programmable for rapid deployment of new network services. He was educated in England, receiving a B.Sc. in mechanical engineering from Aston University (Birmingham), an M.Sc. in computer engineering from City University of London, and a Ph.D. in computer science from Lancaster University.
At Dartmouth, Campbell leads the Sensor Network Systems Laboratory, where he works with students on the development of a new wireless sensor edge network for the Internet. He is also a member of the Center for Mobile Computing and the Institute for Security Technology Studies. He came to academia after 10 years in the telecommunications industry designing computer networks in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and the United States. This experience shaped his desire to solve practical design problems relevant to telecommunications. He seeks to design, build, and evaluate experimental prototype systems based on sound theoretical principles, learning from them to build more scalable and robust systems.
Campbell also leads the Armstrong Project, based at Columbia, which investigates new technologies for wireless sensor and "ad hoc" networks. The integration of sensors-tiny wireless devices that are capable of forming large sensor webs with thousands of distributed devices-is a critical frontier in Internet development. Wireless sensing has the potential to advance science, technology, and discovery across a wide range of disciplines, including environmental monitoring, health care, disaster recovery, smart building technology, industrial process management, and what Campbell calls "people-centric urban sensing." Focusing on places where people gather, these sensor networks could be used to facilitate processes that are part of everyday life, including enterprise, hospitals, stores, recreational areas, towns, and cities.
Campbell is also a member of several other research project teams, including the MAP and Dragonfly Projects. The MAP (Measure, Analyze, Protect) Project seeks to find WiFi security solutions in campus-scale wireless networks. The Dragonfly Project is investigating new open spectrum radio and wireless networks that could replace the radio spectrum now used for cell phones, television, and WiFi networks.
Campbell has been a principal or coprincipal investigator on NSF, ARO, and DHS agency-funded projects and has been sponsored by numerous companies for work on joint projects. He is the recipient of an IBM University Partnership Faculty Award, an AT&T Foundation Faculty Award, and an NSF Career Award for his research in programmable wireless networking. During 2003-04 he won an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) fellowship and spent his sabbatical year at the Computer Lab at Cambridge University, England.
Technical program chair and general chair for several Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) conferences, he is currently technical program cochair for the Third IEEE International Workshop on Embedded Networked Sensors. He is also the general chair for the Fourth ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems. Campbell is an associate editor of the new journal ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks, and has served as associate editor for several other technical and scholarly journals.
An avid jazz fan, squash player, and marathoner, he recently finished his fifth marathon and looks forward to at least another five, if not more-starting with the Stowe, Vt., marathon this fall.
Andrew McCann
Associate Professor of English
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Andrew McCann comes to the English department after a distinguished teaching career in Australia, including three years at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, and six years at the University of Melbourne. He holds a B.A. and an M.A. from the University of Melbourne, and a second M.A. as well as a Ph.D. from Cornell University.
McCann works primarily on 19th-century British Romantic and Victorian literature, though he is also interested in critical theory and its ability to engage with contemporary political contexts and creative practices. His first academic monograph, Cultural Politics in the 1790s: Literature, Radicalism and the Public Sphere (1999), explores the relationship between Romantic aesthetics and political radicalism. Colonial adaptations of Romanticism have also been a focus of his research. His most recent monograph, Marcus Clarke's Bohemia: Literature and Modernity in Colonial Melbourne (2004), uses the career of the novelist and journalist Marcus Clarke to discuss colonial Australian adaptations of metropolitan literary sensibilities. In his most recent research, McCann traces the relationship between evolutionary anthropology and aesthetic experience, both in Britain and the settler colonies of 19th-century Australia, focusing in particular on the visions of extinction that appear in the popular fiction of empire.
McCann has also published two novels, which he sees as growing out of his academic work. The White Body of Evening (2002) is a historical novel that draws on his archival research on colonial culture. Subtopia (2005) grows out of his interest in the role of suburbia in contemporary Australian fiction and consciousness. One of the challenges facing contemporary literary studies, McCann believes, is that of developing a dialogue between traditional academic research and creative writing.
At Dartmouth, McCann is teaching Victorian Literature and Culture, 1837-1859, and Romantic Literature: Writing and English Society, 1780-1832. Both courses explore the relationship between literary form and historical context.
Michelle Warren
Associate Professor of Comparative Literature
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Michelle Warren is a leading medievalist who specializes in French and British studies. Her comparative approach to early texts has brought new insight to the fields in which she teaches and conducts research, including French medieval literature, romance philology, Arthurian studies, translation theory, and postcolonial theory. She is the author of History on the Edge: Excalibur and the Borders of Britain, 1100-1300 (2000). Warren comes to Dartmouth from a distinguished teaching career at the University of Miami, where she received the Scholarly Excellence Award from the College of Arts and Sciences and a University Excellence in Teaching Award.
Warren received her B.A. in comparative literature from the University of California, and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University. Her teaching at Stanford was recognized with two Centennial Awards from the university, one for excellence in undergraduate teaching and the other for program development.
Throughout her career, Warren has been active in curricular development and oversight, most recently as director of graduate studies for the Ph.D. in romance studies and workshop leader for new teaching assistants in the Instructional Advancement Center, both at the University of Miami. At Dartmouth, she is a member of the Leslie Humanities Center advisory committee and a member of the Comparative Literature Program's steering committee.
In addition to her book on medieval England, she is coeditor, with David Glimp, of Arts of Calculation: Quantifying Thought in Early Modern Europe (2004), and Postcolonial Moves: Medieval Through Modern, with Patricia Clare Ingham (2003). Her articles and essays are widely published in scholarly journals and she is sought after as a reviewer of books on the medieval era for publications worldwide. She is currently working on several projects, including scholarship on Creole medievalism, and other comparative studies of early French and English literary works and contexts.
Warren's work has been supported by Stanford, the University of Miami, the Camargo Foundation, the Wolfsonian Museum at Florida International University, the Brown Trust, and the University of Melbourne, where she will be a visiting fellow this fall. She is an invited lecturer at universities around the world and has organized major conferences for the Medieval Academy of America, and numerous other scholarly groups, including the Modern Language Association, where she is a member of the executive committees for medieval French and Arthurian studies.
Diana Abouali
Assistant Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Languages
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Diana Abouali is a historian whose scholarship focuses on the Middle East, specifically Ottoman history, the social history of the early modern Middle East, and family history in Ottoman Syria and Palestine. With a B.A. from Wellesley College, she pursued graduate studies at Harvard University, obtaining her Ph.D. there in history and Middle Eastern studies. Her dissertation, "Family and Society in a 17th-Century Ottoman City: The Alamis of Jerusalem," was supported by a grant from the Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES).
At Dartmouth, she is teaching courses including Elementary and Intermediate Arabic; Introduction to Arab Culture; and Society, Culture, and Gender in the Middle East. She helped establish and led a language study abroad program this summer in Fez, Morocco, with faculty colleague Jonathan Smolin, and she will lead an Arabic language study abroad program next summer.
Prior to joining the Dartmouth faculty, Abouali was a teaching fellow at Harvard, where she led several courses, including Elementary and Advanced Arabic, Introduction to Islamic Studies, and Art in the Wake of the Mongol Conquest: Genghis Khan and His Successors. She also coordinated two CMES seminars there, one that investigated the global impact of current economic, social, and political structures on the health of women in Muslim societies and the other on the construction of gender during various periods in Islamic and Middle Eastern history.
Michael Chaney
Assistant Professor of English and African and African American Studies
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Michael Chaney specializes in 19th-century American literature, concentrating on questions of race representation between literary and visual media. He obtained his Ph.D. from Indiana University in 2005, where he also received the university's Culbertson Award for Outstanding Teaching. As a mixed race person, he is interested in examining ideologies of "passing," miscegenation, and myths of racial purity. His scholarship also extends into the 20th century, examining authors such as Ishmael Reed and Claude McKay, as well as cultural phenomena such as slave exhibitions in heritage museums and contemporary cartoons where race is a factor.
He is the author of Fugitive Vision: Between Word and Image in Antebellum Slave Narrative, and his articles and essays have appeared in scholarly journals nationwide. Writing on topics ranging from the Harlem renaissance and African American graphic novels, to black voice minstrelsy, he also has a critical interest in graphic novels and taught a survey course on the subject earlier this year.
Chaney has been selected as a fellow for the upcoming Leslie Center international institute, "No Laughing Matter Visual Humor in Ideas of Race, Nationality, and Ethnicity," scheduled for November 2007. The institute will bring scholars and performing artists together to explore, among other questions, whether visual humor can be shared across ethnicities, and to examine the ways in which humor establishes a sense of difference or community.
Chaney teaches Reading Between the Color Line: 19th-Century Interracial Literature, and Cities, Crowds, Chaos: The Urban and the Novel, among other courses. In his wide-ranging scholarship, he explores the relationships between the experience of race and the cultural constructs that have grown from or helped to define that experience.
Massimiliano De Santis
Assistant Professor of Economics
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Massimiliano De Santis, a graduate of the Università della Tuscia in Italy, obtained an M.S. degree in applied econometrics from the University of Arizona and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Davis. His dissertation, "Time Varying Risk Premia, Sources of Macroeconomic Risk and Aggregate Stock Market Behavior," examined the impact of markets in response to economic shocks and perceived risks. Prior to joining the Dartmouth faculty, De Santis was an instructor at the University of Arizona, Tucson, and a teaching and research assistant at the University of California, Davis.
De Santis is interested in the intersection of finance and macroeconomics, especially the relationship between business cycles and the prices of assets such as stocks and bonds. His research focuses on gaining a deeper understanding of how economy-wide shocks affect stock and bond prices, with the aim of improving asset pricing in relation to economic risk on a large scale, as well as helping individuals in their management of financial risk. In related scholarship, De Santis shows how policies that reduce income variability among average U.S. households can result in large welfare gains, and his scholarship has shed light on differences in the historical performance of financial markets.
His work has been recognized and supported by agencies in the United States and overseas, including a DeLoach Fellowship, a research fellowship from the Italian Ministry of University and Scientific Research, and the bank Monte dei Paschi di Siena. De Santis has taught seminars at Tulane, Clemson, Fordham, the University of Toronto, and the European Central Bank.
He has actively participated in, and helped organize, major conferences on economics and financial management. De Santis is a member of the Econometrics Society, the American Finance Association, and the American Econometrics Association.
Jeffrey Santa Ana
Assistant Professor of English
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Jeffrey Santa Ana's scholarship examines how racial attitudes and affects are expressed through multi-ethnic fiction and culture in the United States, with a particular focus on Asian American and Pacific Islander literature and film. He explores the impact of colonialism and capitalism on mixed-race peoples, using their representations in popular and high culture as a key to understanding how persons of mixed race experience globalization in the modern world.
His interests encompass 19th- and 20th-century U.S. literature, globalization and transnationalism, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality studies, and critical theory. He holds a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and has taught at Evergreen State College, at the University of California, Berkeley, and, most recently, at Mount Holyoke College, where he was an assistant professor of English and American studies.
Santa Ana is currently completing two books, Racial Feeling: the Politics of Emotions and Mixed Race in Asian America, and Empire's American Sons: On the Colonial Origins of Mestizo Masculinity in Filipino America. Santa Ana is the coeditor of a volume of essays, The Critical Filipino Studies Reader: Essays on Empire, Globalization, and the Cultures of the Filipino Diaspora, and his articles have appeared in numerous scholarly journals.
He was the recipient of an Outstanding Teaching Award at Berkeley and a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship for his thesis, "Critical Emotions: Affect, Politics, and Ethnic American Literature in an Age of Global Capitalism." At Dartmouth, he is a member of a committee that is reviewing curriculum offerings for Asian American studies and served on the planning committee for the Leslie Center's 2006 Summer Arts Festival on Pan Asia and Asian America. Santa Ana organized the College's first Asian American studies conference, Crossings and Crossroads: Critical Intersections in Asian American Studies.
Jonathan Smolin
Instructor of Asian and Middle Eastern Languages and Literatures
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Jonathan Smolin studies modern Arabic and Francophone literature and culture. He specializes in crime and police fiction, the writings of torture victims, and illegal immigration. He also has a particular interest in modern North African mass media. During the past year, he helped establish the Dartmouth Language Study Abroad program in Fez, Morocco, with faculty colleague Diana Abouali.
With B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Chicago, Smolin is a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University, where he also received an M.A. in Arabic and Islamic studies. His dissertation, "Policing Reality: Fictions of Crime and Punishment in the New Morocco," examines how various fictional narratives such as novels, newspapers, magazines, and television productions formed the foundation for the recent public relations campaign by the police aimed at improving their image in contemporary Moroccan society.
Smolin has contributed to numerous scholarly journals, including the Arab Studies Journal, World Literature Today, and the Journal of North African Studies, and he has translated several works from Arabic to English. At Harvard, he received the Derek Bok Center Award for Teaching Excellence, and his research was supported by numerous organizations, including the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, and a Jens Aubrey Westengard Scholarship.
He has delivered talks on Arabic crime and police fiction, war and violence in modern Algerian literature, and Moroccan clandestine emigration literature for numerous institutions and organizations, including the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), the University of Chicago, the American Comparative Literature Association, and the International Conference for Literary Translation.
He is a member of the Modern Language Association, MESA, the American Comparative Literature Association, and the American Institute for Maghrib Studies.
Craig Sutton
Assistant Professor of Mathematics
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Craig Sutton is currently investigating problems in Riemannian geometry, specifically spectral geometry and manifolds of non-negative sectional curvature. He received a B.A. from Yale University, an M.S. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He joined the Dartmouth faculty in 2001 as a visiting assistant professor and went on to become a lecturer and National Science Foundation (NSF) postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, where he twice received the Good Teaching Award from the mathematics department. He returned to Dartmouth in 2005, joining the faculty as an assistant professor.
In his research, Sutton makes extensive use of the theory of Lie groups and other techniques in order to explore questions in Riemannian geometry. Lie groups are important in mathematical analysis, physics, and geometry because they serve to describe the symmetry of structures. Riemannian geometry is the study of generalized surfaces (manifolds) with a particular interest in the notions of distance and curvature.
Sutton is the author of several scholarly articles and is a sought-after speaker at seminars and colloquia at institutions ranging from Williams College and Duke University to the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and Haverford College. At Dartmouth, he has taught courses in linear programming, differential geometry, differential equations, and calculus. He has also served as a member of the mathematics department's Thayer Exam Committee and the Graduate Admissions Committee.
Sutton is deeply involved in educational outreach. He instructed disadvantaged middle school students at the Horizons Summer Camp in Connecticut, encouraged junior high students to pursue mathematics and science through the King-Chavez-Parks Program at the University of Michigan, and mentored students in mathematics at Ypsilanti West Middle School as a HOPE tutor. He is currently involved with Dartmouth's E.E. Just Program, which seeks to encourage students who are members of minorities to pursue the sciences. The program, open to all Dartmouth students, is named in honor of the renowned African American cell biologist, Ernest Everett Just, who graduated from Dartmouth in 1907.
Rebecca Weber
Assistant Professor of Mathematics
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Rebecca Weber holds a B.S. in mathematics from the University of Richmond. She pursued graduate work at the University of Notre Dame, obtaining M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in mathematics there in 2002 and 2004, respectively. Before coming to Dartmouth, she was a lecturer at Pennsylvania State University and a postdoctoral researcher at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand.
She teaches courses on vector calculus, computability and complexity, engineering calculus, and finite mathematics, and her scholarship focuses on the area of logic called computability (recursion) theory. The distinguishing feature of computability is concern with the complexity of sets, where the most well-known scale (Turing's) involves how much outside information an idealized computer needs to answer questions of the form "is x in the set?" Relative complexity puts structure on the collection of sets, with a notion of order, least upper bound, greatest lower bound, all of which are subjects of lattice theory. Weber finds it interesting to ask not only about broad lattice-theoretic properties of such structures, but also about the relationship between lattice-theoretic and computability properties of the individual elements. Another of her interests is randomness; in particular, the relationship between different mathematical formulations of the intuitive notion of randomness and the existence and behavior of numbers which are neither random nor computable, but somewhere in between.
Weber's work has appeared in the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, and several articles are forthcoming in other scholarly journals. She lectures frequently on theoretical mathematics, speaking on such topics as the natural history of the Cantor-Bendixson derivative, complexity, randomness and compression, lattice embeddings, and computability.
Weber was the recipient of a Clare Booth Luce Fellowship for women in science and engineering and a James D. Crump Prize for excellence in mathematics. Her teaching has been recognized numerous times by the University of Notre Dame Kaneb Center for Teaching and Learning, where she was twice awarded the Outstanding Graduate Student Teacher and received the Striving for Excellence in College and University Teaching award. She is a member of the American Mathematical Society, the Association for Symbolic Logic, the Association for Women in Mathematics, Phi Beta Kappa, and the Mathematical Association of America.
By LAUREL STAVIS AND JANE CARROLL
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