This article is from the archives of the UB Reporter.
Archives

New Faculty Faces

Published: November 17, 2005
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Name: Ligaya Ganster
School: University Libraries
Department: General Libraries Access Services
Academic Title: Visiting Senior Assistant Librarian
Academic Degrees: B.A. and M.L.I.S., University of Pittsburgh
Areas of Special Interest: Information literacy, digitization of research materials for access, minority recruitment into librarianship
The Jean Blackwell Hutson Library Residency Program at UB offers extensive training and mentorship that is extremely beneficial to a new librarian like myself.

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Name: Douglas Roland
School: College of Arts and Sciences
Department: Linguistics
Academic Title: Assistant Professor
Academic Degree: Ph.D., University of Colorado
Areas of Special Interest: Computational linguistics, corpus linguistics, psycholinguistics
My research focuses on language comprehension with an interest in both understanding how humans process language and improving the performance of computational applications. I am interested in examining the types of information that are available during sentence processing and how this information influences parsing decisions during comprehension. This research is based on a combination of corpus analysis, computational modeling and data from psycholinguistic experimentation. I feel that this combination of approaches is essential for reaching a complete understanding of language processing.

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Name: Jason Sorens
School: College of Arts and Sciences
Department: Political Science
Academic Title: Assistant Professor
Academic Degree: B.A., Washington and Lee University; Ph.D., Yale University
Areas of Special Interest: Comparative politics, political economy, nationalism and secessionism
I try to convey my enthusiasm for the major ideas and questions in social science and philosophy to my students. I'm congenitally unable to be a narrow specialist only; I believe strongly in looking at the "big picture" behind it all.

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Name: Gwynn Thomas
School: College of Arts and Sciences
Department: Women's Studies
Academic Title: Assistant Professor
Academic Degrees: B.A., political science, history and women's studies, Gonzaga University; M.A. and Ph.D., political science, Ph.D. minor, gender and history, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Areas of Special Interest: Gender and state development, familial imagery and rhetoric, feminist theory, Latin American politics, citizenship and nationalism, women's movements
UB's women's studies department is very unique in terms of its focus on international and global issues. Within our small department, we cover an incredible range of geographical areas and critical issues. I felt that I would be able to offer courses that reflected my passion and commitment to the global context of the intersection of gender and power.