This year, new professors join the Departments of Economics, English, and Music, as well as the African and Africana Studies Program.
Elizabeth Kim joins the English Department as an assistant professor. Her research explores multilingual and multimedia practices in experimental poetry by contemporary Asian American and Pacific Islander writers. She examines the ways in which these writers enact formal hybridity through the combination of text and images as a means of negotiating national, cultural, racial, and ideological boundaries. Kim received her Ph.D. in English Literature from Temple University and her MFA in Poetry from the Creative Writing Program at Rutgers University-Newark. Her article “‘Crammed with Tongues’: Cosmopolitan Creole in Cathy Park Hong’s Dance Dance Revolution” is forthcoming in College Literature. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Platform Review, The Stillwater Review, The Waiting Room Reader, and American Book Review. Previously, as a visiting assistant in the English Department, Kim taught courses such as “Asian American Hybridity,” “The Graphic Novel,” and “Approaches to Literary Analysis.” In the fall, she will teach “Introduction to Asian American Literature” and “Creative Writing: Poetry I.”
Mei-Ling Lee joins the Music Department as an assistant professor. Originally from Taiwan, her specialty is composition, sound synthesis, real-time interactive music, and audio design in new media environments. She received her Ph.D. in Music Composition and DMA in Music Performance in Data-Driven Instruments from the University of Oregon, her dissertation being “Storytelling: The Human Experience Through Data-Driven Instruments.” Lee’s work has been performed throughout the U.S. and internationally, including the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States, International Computer Music Conference, International Symposium on Electronic Art, New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, and Kyma International Sound Symposium. Her recent work has combined storytelling with data-driven instruments in what she refers to as a storytelling-data-driven-instrumentation paradigm. Her compositions address diverse themes such as the meaning of family, belonging to human nature and the cycles of the natural world, the occasional absurdities of new technologies, and current societal issues, including the relentless traumas of gun violence in the United States. In the fall, she will teach “Principles of Tonal Harmony I.”
Wei Qian joins the Economics Department as an assistant professor. She is an empirical macroeconomist whose research interests include development economics and labor economics. Her current work analyzes the exertion of firms’ monopsony power against workers in labor markets in developing countries. In particular, she and her coauthors quantified the impact of firms’ monopsony power on wages using large-scale, factory-level data and examined how firms’ monopsony power changes with economic shocks such as trade liberalization and infrastructure development. Qian is also interested in using randomized information experiments to study the formation of individual expectations about the macroeconomy. Before Haverford, Qian was assistant professor of Economics at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Notre Dame. This year, she will teach a junior research seminar on Labor Economics.
Kevin Quin joins the faculty as an assistant professor of Africana Studies. He is currently working on a book project that examines how Black queer activist-intellectuals shaped the Black power movement. He has received fellowships and awards from the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, the Ford Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. He has published in the Journal of African American History and Women’s Studies. He received his Ph.D. in Africana Studies with a graduate minor in LGBTQ Studies from Cornell University. Quin teaches courses on African American history that also explore issues related to gender, sexuality, and class. In the fall, he will teach “Introduction to Africana Studies.”
