Five Tenure-Track Professors New to Haverford's Faculty This Year
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Haverford College welcomes five new tenure-track professors to the faculty.
Terrence LaMark Johnson has been promoted from Visiting Assistant Instructor to Assistant Professor of Religion. Johnson holds a bachelor's degree in English from Morehouse College and a master of divinity degree from Harvard Divinity School, and a Ph.D. in religious studies from Brown University. His research interests include religious ethics, moral philosophy, and African American religious thought and philosophy. He received the Woodrow Wilson Foundation's Charlotte Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship, and will soon have an essay published in The Souls of Black Folk: New Essays Reflections.
Weiwen Miao, new Associate Professor of Mathematics, received a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Beijing University and a master's and doctorate in probability and statistics from Tufts University. She comes to Haverford from Macalester College, where she was an associate professor in statistics; she has also taught at Mt. Holyoke College and Colby Colleges. She has been published in a wide range of journals, including The American Statistician, Journal of Statistical Computation and Simulation, Scandinavian Journal of Statistics, the Journal of Probability and Statistical Science, and International Statistical Review.
Barak Mendelsohn joins the department of political science as an assistant professor. A recent post-doctoral fellow at Tel Aviv University, Mendelsohn holds a bachelor's degree in Middle East studies from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, a master's in security studies from Tel Aviv University, and a master's and Ph.D. in government from Cornell University. His research focuses on terrorism and the evolution and ideology of the Jihadi movement; hegemony and interstate cooperation; the politics of the Middle East; the proliferation of WMDs; religion and international relations; psychological theories of decision making; theories of foreign policy; and the causes of interstate and intrastate conflict.
New Instructor of Spanish Aurelia Gómez Unamuno earned a licentiate's degree (with a thesis entitled“Revaloración del discurso utópico americano”) in Hispanic languages and literatures from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and a master's in Hispanic languages and literatures from the University of Pittsburgh, where she is currently a doctoral candidate. She is finishing a dissertation called“Marginal Narratives and Politics in Mexico after 1968.” Her areas of expertise include 20th-century Latin American narrative and culture, the new historical novel, and Latin American criticism. In March 2006 she organized a panel on“Narrativas marginales en América Latina” for the Latin American Studies Association Conference. She is interested in such topics as the presence and representation of marginal subjects as well as their dealings with power in Latin American narratives.
The religion department welcomes Assistant Professor Travis Zadeh, whose research focuses on the formative periods of Islamic intellectual history with particular attention given to the intersections between religion and literature. His work draws on Arabic, Persian, Syriac, Latin, and Spanish sources to explore concepts of translation and alterity in premodern Islam, and includes studies on sacred geographies and cartography, as well as theological issues surrounding the translatability of the Quran. Zadeh holds a B.A. in literary studies and Spanish from Middlebury College, and an A.M. and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in comparative literature. He has conducted research in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and South America. Zadeh lived in Syria on a Fulbright-Hays dissertation research grant in 2003-04. During the summer of 1998, he walked over 500 miles on a medieval pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint James the“Moor-Killer” in Santiago de Compostela, Spain.
Weiwen Miao, new Associate Professor of Mathematics, received a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Beijing University and a master's and doctorate in probability and statistics from Tufts University. She comes to Haverford from Macalester College, where she was an associate professor in statistics; she has also taught at Mt. Holyoke College and Colby Colleges. She has been published in a wide range of journals, including The American Statistician, Journal of Statistical Computation and Simulation, Scandinavian Journal of Statistics, the Journal of Probability and Statistical Science, and International Statistical Review.
Barak Mendelsohn joins the department of political science as an assistant professor. A recent post-doctoral fellow at Tel Aviv University, Mendelsohn holds a bachelor's degree in Middle East studies from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, a master's in security studies from Tel Aviv University, and a master's and Ph.D. in government from Cornell University. His research focuses on terrorism and the evolution and ideology of the Jihadi movement; hegemony and interstate cooperation; the politics of the Middle East; the proliferation of WMDs; religion and international relations; psychological theories of decision making; theories of foreign policy; and the causes of interstate and intrastate conflict.
New Instructor of Spanish Aurelia Gómez Unamuno earned a licentiate's degree (with a thesis entitled“Revaloración del discurso utópico americano”) in Hispanic languages and literatures from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and a master's in Hispanic languages and literatures from the University of Pittsburgh, where she is currently a doctoral candidate. She is finishing a dissertation called“Marginal Narratives and Politics in Mexico after 1968.” Her areas of expertise include 20th-century Latin American narrative and culture, the new historical novel, and Latin American criticism. In March 2006 she organized a panel on“Narrativas marginales en América Latina” for the Latin American Studies Association Conference. She is interested in such topics as the presence and representation of marginal subjects as well as their dealings with power in Latin American narratives.
The religion department welcomes Assistant Professor Travis Zadeh, whose research focuses on the formative periods of Islamic intellectual history with particular attention given to the intersections between religion and literature. His work draws on Arabic, Persian, Syriac, Latin, and Spanish sources to explore concepts of translation and alterity in premodern Islam, and includes studies on sacred geographies and cartography, as well as theological issues surrounding the translatability of the Quran. Zadeh holds a B.A. in literary studies and Spanish from Middlebury College, and an A.M. and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in comparative literature. He has conducted research in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and South America. Zadeh lived in Syria on a Fulbright-Hays dissertation research grant in 2003-04. During the summer of 1998, he walked over 500 miles on a medieval pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint James the“Moor-Killer” in Santiago de Compostela, Spain.
