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CAS embarks on faculty hiring blitz
By PATRICIA DONOVAN
Contributing Editor
In September, 37 new tenure-track faculty members began their UB careers in 20 of the 28 departments in the College of Arts and Sciences. Fifteen, or 40 percent, are women, including two assistant professors in the Department of Chemistry and one in the Department of Physics, both traditional male bastions.
Although these faculty members were hired before his tenure began, Uday Sukhatme, dean of CAS and a physicist, is happy to see the results and expects to increase this number during the current academic year, since the college is searching for 42 more tenure-track faculty members.
"It's important to provide role models for female students," he says, "and this is particularly essential in areas in which women are largely underrepresented—the natural sciences and engineering. The way we do that is to look at the pool of candidates and vigorously pursue well-qualified, talented women in that pool.
"We've initiated an aggressive search for 42 additional CAS faculty members," he says, "and already have hired very good candidates for 20 of those positions throughout the college."
Sukhatme points out that although many of the new hires are in the early stages of their academic careers, they already have shown signs of distinction.
"Hiring academic 'stars' has often worked out well for UB," he says, "but I think it's even more important to hire talented young scholars at the beginning of their careers and help them become stars."
That was the policy followed by UB in the early 1960s when the university became part of SUNY. Then-Gov. Nelson Rockefeller encouraged and funded the hiring of a large number promising young faculty members in UB's College of Arts and Sciences.
Many of them became national figures in their fields but have since retired or are nearing retirement age and questions have been raised over the past decade as to how UB would replace so many senior faculty members at one time.
New tenure-track faculty members in CAS for the 2002-03 academic year are, alphabetically by department:
African American Studies: Lillian Williams (Ph.D., UB), associate professor and chair. An award-winning specialist in U.S. social and urban history, Williams is the author of "Strangers in the Land of Paradise: The Creation of an African American Community, Buffalo, New York, 1900-1940," and conducts research in the fields of institutional development, ethnicity, biography and women's history.
Anthropology: Tina L. Thurston (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin, Madison), assistant professor. Thurston is an archaeologist specializing in European archaeology, the Iron Age and medieval Scandinavia, complex societies, ethnicity and agency, intensification, landscape archaeology, regional analysis and ethnohistory.
Art: Steven Kurtz (Ph.D., Florida State University), associate professor of computer art. Kurtz has graduate degrees in social thought and sociological theory, and in interdisciplinary humanities. His areas of focus are contemporary art history and theory, as well as post-studio practices. His books include "Electronic Civil Disobedience and Other Unpopular Ideas" and "The Electronic Disturbance." He has participated in many radical media performances in the U.S., Canada and Europe.
Art: Gary Nickard (M.A., M.F.A., UB), associate professor of photography. An artist and writer who has attracted national attention, Nickard's complex, multidimensional work articulates the interaction of technologies, nature and culture in a way that often questions the generally euphoric atmosphere surrounding the invention of new technologies. His work has appeared in many individual and group exhibitions, in collaborative projects and in Aperture and Exposure magazines.
Chemistry: Diana Aga (Ph.D., University of Kansas, Lawrence), assistant professor. An analytical chemist, her current research involves the development and applications of conventional and innovative analytical techniques to study the environmental fate and chemistry of chemical pollutants, particularly pesticides and animal antibiotics, that can contaminate surface and groundwater.
Chemistry: Sherry Chemler (Ph.D., Indiana University), assistant professor of chemistry and medicinal chemistry. An organic chemist, Chemler researches the development of new reactions and their application to the synthesis of valuable functional molecules, such as natural and unnatural drug candidates. She was a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellow at Sloan-Kettering Cancer Institute.
Chemistry: Richard Cheng (Ph.D., California Institute of Technology), assistant professor of medicinal chemistry. An NIH-NRSA postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania/DuPont, Cheng's research program focuses on sequence-specific polymers with potential applications in biomedical (biomimetics, pharmaceuticals, bio-materials) and material sciences (supramolecular structures, nanotechnology). He received a $200,000 award through the state's new James D. Watson Investigator Program designed to recognize and support outstanding scientists and engineers who, early in their careers, show potential for leadership and scientific discovery in the field of biotechnology.
Communicative Disorders and Sciences: Geralyn R. Timler (Ph.D., University of Washington), assistant professor. A specialist in the hearing sciences, Timler conducts research into the interdisciplinary clinical assessment of language, communicative development and problem-solving in young children with communication and developmental disorders.
Comparative Literatures: Ernesto Laclau (Ph.D., University of Essex), professor. Laclau also holds a chair in political theory at the University of Essex, where he is director of the doctoral program in ideology and discourse analysis at the Centre for Theoretical Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences. He has lectured or been a visiting professor at distinguished universities on five continents. He is a former Guggenheim fellow, a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and a Woodrow Wilson fellow. His current research looks at theory in a comparative perspective, the discursive construction of social antagonism and deconstruction and politics. He is author of "Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory," "New Reflections on the Revolution of our Time" and "Emancipation(s)," and co-authored (with Chantal Mouffe) "Hegemony and Socialist Strategy." He also was the editor and a contributor to "The Making of Political Identities."
Economics: Katsutoshi Wakai (Ph.D., Yale University), assistant professor. His research interests include financial economics, microeconomics and behavioral economics. Wakai holds an M.A. and a M. Phil. from Yale, and has worked as a quantitative analyst for J.P. Morgan in Tokyo, London and New York. His work links behavioral economics, axiomatic decision theory and general equilibrium theory to analyze issues in financial economics. The behavioral issues he investigates are time-variability aversion, momentum and reversal effects, and uncertainty aversion. The analysis develops new theories and combines them with estimation and calibration.
English: Timothy J. Dean, (Ph.D., The Johns Hopkins University), associate professor. A former fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, Dean's areas of specialization include modern poetry, psychoanalysis and queer theory. Among his books are "Gary Snyder and the American Unconscious" and "Beyond Sexuality." Recent articles include "The Psychoanalysis of AIDS," "On the Eve of a Queer Future," "Sex & Syncope," "Two Kinds of Other and Their Consequences" and "Hart Crane's Poetics of Privacy."
English: Myung Mi Kim (M.F.A., University of Iowa), professor of poetry and poetics. A native of Korea, Kim came to the U.S. at age nine speaking no English and developed one of the most important voices in contemporary American poetry. The author of three collections, "Under Flag," "The Bounty" and "Dura," she was acting chair of creative writing at San Francisco State University. She has published in major poetry journals and her work has been anthologized widely. She is the recipient of the Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative North American Poetry and several awards from the Fund for Poetry, among others, and is the winner of the National Poetry Series,
English: Ruth E. Mack (Ph.D., The Johns Hopkins University), assistant professor. Mack's specialty is 18th century British literature. She is the author of "Literary Historicity: Literary Form and Historical Thinking in Mid-Eighteenth Century England."
English: Andrew McConnell Stott (Ph.D., Cardiff University, Wales), assistant professor. His areas of expertise include 16th and 17th century British literature and comedy. He is the author of "Writing and the Gaze in the English Renaissance" and "Hosts: Deconstruction Psychoanalysis History" (co-edited with Peter Buse).
English: Hershini Young (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley), assistant professor. Young's research focuses on African American literature, black cultural studies, black diasporic literary and visual production, intersections of race and gender in sub-Saharan African and Caribbean and African-American literature. She has received Mellon and Javits fellowships in the humanities, and is the author of "Feeding Hunger's Ghosts: Re-membering the Black Diasporic Body."
Geology: Mohamed I. Sultan (Ph.D., Washington University), professor and director of the Remote Sensing Lab. Sultan's interdisciplinary research takes advantage of the available tools and disciplines (e.g., remote sensing, geographic information systems (GIS), geochemistry, geochronology, hydrology, surface runoff and groundwater flow modeling, field geology, etc.) to address a wide range of complex geological and environmental problems. His ongoing projects address the potential influences of natural processes, global change and regional human activities on water and carbon cycles and ecosystems.
History: Andreas Daum (Ph.D., University of Munich), professor. He is formerly of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University and research fellow and acting director of the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. He also is a former Thysson, von Humboldt and Mellon fellow. Daum specializes in German history from the late 18th to the 20th century (intellectual, cultural and social history; history of nationalism; history of science, and civil society); transatlantic and German-American relations; the future, society and politics in the Cold War; history of Berlin and of capital cities; theoretical and methodological questions of national and transnational history, symbolic politics, and the relations between cultural and political history. He is the author of four books and numerous articles.
History: Claire Schen (Ph.D., Brandeis University), assistant professor. Her areas of specialization include British and early modern history.
History: Jason R. Young (Ph.D., University of California, Riverside), assistant professor. His research and publications examine the development of an African-Atlantic religious complex that emerged, in varying forms, throughout the Americas and within West and West-Central Africa. He currently is working on a book entitled "Rituals of Resistance: The Making of an African Atlantic Religious Complex in Congo and Along the Sea Islands of the Slave South."
Linguistics: Yue Wang (Ph.D., Cornell University), assistant professor and director of department's Chinese program. Wang's specialties are Chinese linguistics, experimental phonetics, speech perception and production and cognitive science. Formerly affiliated with the Center for Mind, Brain and Learning at the University of Washington, Wang is the author of "Processing of Tone in Mandarin Chinese."
Mathematics: Mikhail Khenner (Ph.D., Perm State University, Perm, Russia; Ph.D., Université de la Mediterrané Aix-Marseille II, both in fluid mechanics), assistant professor. Khenner focuses his work on computational mathematics and fluids. His areas of interest include mathematical modeling in materials science and in crystal growth, numerical methods for problems with interfaces and free boundaries, applied mathematics, selective area epitaxial crystal growth, mechanics of deformable solids and fluid mechanics.
Mathematics: Joseph Masters (Ph.D., University of Texas, Austin), assistant professor. His research areas are geometry and topology of hyperbolic 3-manifolds and low dimensional topology.
Mathematics: Adam Sikora (Ph.D., University of Maryland, College Park), assistant professor. Sikora conducts research in the areas of low dimensional topology, quantum topology, group actions on manifolds and character varieties.
Media Study: Loss Glazier (Ph.D., UB), associate professor. A pioneering specialist in digital literature, new media poetics and digital arts, Glazier is the author of "Digital Poetics," " Small Press: An Annotated Guide" and the poetry collections "Leaving Loss\ Glazier," "The Parts" and "White Faced Bromeliads (An Iteration), which feature individual poems, essays, programmed and kinetic works, and digital projects that include sound files, hypertexts and CD-ROM projects. His work has been published, presented or performed across the U.S., Europe and Latin America, and exhibited in museums that include the Guggenheim Museum. He is a member of the core faculty of the UB Poetics Program in the Department of English and serves as director of UB's Electronic Poetry Center, one of the world's most extensive Web-based collections of new media and innovative writing.
Media Study: Caroline Koebel (M.F.A., University of California, San Diego), assistant professor. Koebel is an interdisciplinary artist working in film, video, installation, performance and writing. Her practice, always experimental, often confronts the problems of female being-in-the-world and the expression of subjectivities at odds with commercial culture. Her work has appeared in scores of solo and group exhibitions, presentations, performances, screenings and professional publications.
Media Study: Robert Trebor Scholz (M.F.A., Slade School of Art, London; Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program), assistant professor. He is a Berlin-born, Brooklyn-based, interdisciplinary artist and curator who exhibits, lectures and curates programs in the U.S. and Europe. Author of "Surfacing at a Different Place," his work integrates traditional and new media to promote debate and community organization around such issues as economic inequality, borders, nationalism and indifference towards global events. His work appears in galleries, at universities, on the internet and in the street.
Media Study: Bernadette Wegenstein (Ph.D., University of Vienna), assistant professor. A linguist, semiotician and specialist in Romance languages and cultures, Wegenstein studied communication at the University of Bologna with Umberto Eco and social science at Paris' Ecole des Hautes Studes en Sciences Sociales. She directs UB's new Interdisciplinary Film Curriculum for the College of Arts and Sciences. Her specialties are film analysis and media theory, and her writings are widely anthologized. Her seminar "Bodyworks: Medicine, Technology and the Body in the Late 20th Century" has been offered as an interactive video course via an Internet 2 web-link with professor Timothy Lenoir at Stanford University.
Romance Languages and Literatures: Ramon Soto-Crespo (Ph.D., Purdue University), associate professor and director of the Latina/o Studies Program and a member of the Center for the Study of Psycholanalysis and Culture. His specialties include Latina/o and Caribbean literature, continental philosophy, psychoanalysis and queer studies. He has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Ford Foundation and the Institute on Race and Ethnicity.
Music: Jonathan G. Golove (Ph.D., UB), assistant professor. A member of the Baird Trio, Golove is an accomplished composer and cellist who has established and co-directed several chamber ensembles dedicated to the performance of new music. His compositions, often performed in combination with live electronic processing, have been performed by distinguished ensembles in a variety of locations in North America and Europe. He has received commissions, awards and grants for his work from such organizations as the European Academy of Music/International Festival of Lyric Art of Aix-en-Provence, VOXNOVA, ASCAP, the Yvar Mikhashoff Trust for New Music, Meet the Composer and the Darius Milhaud Society.
Philosophy: David Hershenov (Ph.D., University of California, Santa Barbara), assistant professor. His areas of specializations are the philosophy of medicine, metaphysics, bioethics and the philosophy of biology. He has written on such topics as restitution and revenge, the problem of intermittent existence and the possibility of resurrection, and whether there can be spatially coincident entities of the same kind.
Physics: Xuedong Hu (Ph.D., University of Michigan), assistant professor. Hu's specialty areas are quantum physics, theoretical condensed matter physics, squeezed photons, semiconductors, quantum computing and information processing.
Psychology: Eduardo Mercado III (Ph.D., University of Hawaii), assistant professor. Mercado is a behavioral neuroscientist who uses research techniques from several fields to examine how brain systems interact to develop representations of experienced events, and how these representations change over time. He also conducts research in auditory learning and memory in rodents, cetaceans and humans.
Psychology: Gretchen Sechrist (Ph.D., University of Maryland), assistant professor. Her research and publications focus on stereotype development, change and use, the role of group norms and social influence in prejudice and the impact of stereotyping and prejudice on individuals, issues of prejudice from the target's perspective, perceptions of gender discrimination, determinants and consequences of denying discrimination and the academic achievement of minority group members.
Sociology: Sampson Lee Blair (Ph.D., Pennsylvania State University), associate professor. Blair specializes in the sociology of the family, child and adolescent development, gender and ethnicity. His research in these areas has been published widely in refereed journals and presented frequently at professional meetings. He is associate editor of the journals Marriage and Family Review and Journal of Family Issues, and is the former editor of Sociological Inquiry.
Sociology: Peter St. Jean (Ph.D., University of Chicago), assistant professor. The Dominican-born St. Jean's research, publications and teaching interests are in urban and rural community studies and social organization; sociological research methods and problem solving; neighborhoods and crime; community policing; race, gender and ethnicity studies; Caribbean studies; social change; stratification; family studies, and juvenile delinquency.
Theatre and Dance: Lynne M. Koscielniak (M.F.A., Northwestern University), assistant professor. Koscielniak is an award-winning set-and-lighting designer who has worked on productions for a number of theaters in Chicago, as well as many productions at Northwestern and Buffalo State College, from which she received her bachelor's degree with honors in 1997.