last modified:2009-09-15 09:31:34
New Faculty
2009
Bahmin Baktiari, Director, Middle East Center
Professor Bahman Baktiari is Director of the Middle East Center. He received his Ph.D. from the Woodrow Wilson Department of Government and Foreign Affairs at the University of Virginia.
His most recent publication, Iranian Society 30 Years after the Revolution: A Surprising Picture , appeared in the Spring 2009 special issue of The Middle East Journal. His article, Globalization and Religion, appeared in an edited volume on Globalization in 2008. He has also published in Current History ( Conservative Revival in Iran -January 2007) and Reform and Democracy in Iran, in Robert Hefner, Remaking Muslim Politics, Princeton University Press, 2005. His book chapter (co-authored with Asef Bayat, American University in Cairo) entitled "Revolutionary Iran and Egypt: Exporting Inspirations and Anxiety", was published in Nikkie Keddie and R. Mathee, edited volume, Iran and the Surrounding World: Interactions in Culture and Cultural Politics, University of Washington Press, 2002. His book, Parliamentary Politics in Revolutionary Iran: Institutionalization of Factional Politics, was published by the University Press of Florida in 1996. He also co-edited a series of articles entitled "Social and Political Developments in Iran", published in the Fall 2001 issue of the Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies.
Some of his opinion pieces on the Middle East have been published in the Christian Science Monitor, the Council on Foreign Relations' Muslim Politics Report, Maine Sunday Telegram, and Al-Ahram weekly. He has also been interviewed on national public television's Jim Lehrer's NewsHour, CNN International, Voice of America, and Radio Free Europe, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Congressional Research. In 1988, he was appointed as the University of Maine's Academic Associate to the Atlantic Council of the United States. In 1999-2001, Professor Baktiari was invited to give lectures on Iran in several research centers in Cairo, Egypt. For the year of 1999-2001, Professor Baktiari was a Visiting Professor of Political Science at the American University in Cairo.
Erin Finzer, Department of Languages and Literature
Erin Finzer received her PhD in Spanish from the University of Kansas. She specializes in Latin American poetry and enjoys taking a cultural studies approach to both teaching and research. Her doctoral thesis examined how Central American female writers used poetry to perforate the male-dominated literary establishment in the 1930s, a decade characterized by dictatorships, revolutions and rapid modernization on the isthmus. Her current book project takes on an ecocritical slant as it explores the cultural promotion of the pan-American conservation movement of the 1930s and 40s by female intellectuals across Latin America. She also continues to indulge a long-time interest in artistic production of the Cuban Special Period and has an article forthcoming in _Letras Femeninas_ on Cuban poet, Reina María Rodríguez.
Alexandra Squina Santos, Department of Langauges and Literature
Alessandra Santos is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Languages and Literature. She received a B.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley, a Ph.D. in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from the University of California, Los Angeles, and she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of British Columbia for two years. She specializes in modern and contemporary Brazilian literature and culture. Her dissertation, “Words in Five Senses: Arnaldo Antunes and Reinterpretations of Antropofagia,” addresses the notion of cultural cannibalism, exploring critical appropriations and the artistic implications of production and consumption. Alessandra’s research interests are literary criticism and critical theory, cultural studies and cultural history, aesthetics and politics; poetry, music, cinema, visual and performing arts; the avant-garde and satire. Her current project investigates the dynamics of democracy and culture.
Mamiko Suzuki, Department of Languages and Literature
Mamiko Suzuki is an Assistant Professor in Japanese language and literature. She received her BA from Haverford College, PA in Comparative Literature and East Asian Studies. She continued with her MA and PhD work at the University of Chicago. She specializes in Meiji period (1868-1912) women's writing, particularly in the works of Kishida Toshiko (1864-1901), one of the first female orators in the Freedom and Popular Rights Movement and a writer. Suzuki's dissertation examines multiple genres through which Toshiko presented her ideas and how the mediums of transcribed oratory, fiction, and diary writing presented a new kind of gendered intervention in the literary and political areas of the Meiji period. In addition to issues relating to gender, genre, and style, she is particularly drawn to the upheavals that took place from the late-Tokugawa into the mid-Meiji period in linguistic, educational, legal, and literary practices. Her other scholarly interests include contemporary Japanese fiction, literature as political activism, and diary-writing. She recently published the article, "Between the Public Persona and the Private Narrator: The Open Space of Kishida Toshiko" in the U.S.-Japan Women's Journal, and has forthcoming translations of Sata Ineko's "Kito" and an essay by Genji scholar, Mitani Kuniaki.
2008
Lourdes Alberto, Assistant Professor of English and Ethnic Studies
A native of Los Angeles CA, Lourdes Alberto received her BA from UC Riverside and an MA and PhD in English from Rice University. Her research interests focus on Chicano/a Studies and the emergent, interdisciplinary field of Indigenous studies. Lourdes is currently working on a book manuscript that examines the production of the Indian subject in Chicano/a literature and culture, a subject, she argues, contested by the assertions transnational, indigenous communities in the US. Lourdes teaches courses in twentieth-century American literature and Chicano/a literature and feminism and comes to the University of Utah as the recipient of the UC Davis Chicana/Latina Research Center Fellowship.
Aniko Csirmaz, Department of Linguistics, specializes in topics that relate to the structure and interpretation of languages in general. The issues that she is currently working on include the representation and characteristics of time in language and the properties of the description of situations in language. In addition, she works on how different forms and positions of linguistic elements affect meaning, and on more formal aspects of linguistic structure. In her spare time, she enjoys cooking and baking.
Alexis M. Christensen, Department of Languagages and Literature, received her BA in Classical Archaeology from the University of Evansville (1994), and MAs in Classical Archaeology (1997) and Latin (2003) at Florida State University and her PhD in Classics from FSU (2006). She has participated in and direct excavations and field surveys in Tuscany, Rome and Ukraine. In addition to teaching in the field, she has had the opportunity to teach a variety of Latin, myth, archaeology, and ancient civilization courses at FSU and at the University of Iowa, including semesters at FSU's study abroad centers in London and Greece. Her primary area of specialization is Roman material culture, with a particular emphasis on the social dynamic of architecture, which allows him to consider not only the artefactual remains but also the literary expressions of how ancient peoples perceived their environment. Her current research focuses on how the interior design and decoration of domestic architecture served as competitive media that could be manipulated by a householder to establish and reinforce his social position.
Angela Cecilia Espinosa-Lebsack (Ph.D. UC-Irvine, 2008) was hired by the Department of Languages and Literature for the tenure-track position in Mexican literature and Border Studies. Her dissertation, The "Origin" of Spaces: Gender and Ideology in Literature of the Latin American VanguardsLa virgen de los sicarios" appeared in the April issue of Semiosis: A Journal on Literature and Theory from the University of Veracruz, Mexico. She is currently co-editing an issue of The Journal of Contemporary Mexican Literature from University of Texas-El Paso. Angela looks forward to contributing to the Spanish and Comparative Literature programs in her department, as well as collaborating on interdisciplinary projects in Latin American Studies and the School of Dance. A native of Denver, CO, she is happy to return to the Rocky Mountains. explores issues of borders, marginality, and identity between 1922 and 1941 with a particular emphasis on the representations of both gender and urban spaces. Her research interests are transnational and comparative in scope, and include Latin American film, dance, and popular music. She draws on the theoretical frameworks of gender studies, postcolonial studies, and psychoanalysis to enlighten her investigations. Last year, Angela was the first ever Excellence in Diversity Teaching Fellow here at the University of Utah and taught upper-division courses on the avant-garde and Hispanic poetry. In addition, she participated in workshops geared toward graduate student enrichment. Her article "En busca de la especifidad utópica homosexual en
Masako Ikenushi is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Japanese in the Department of Languages and Literature. She received her Ph.D. in 2007 from University of California, Irvine, in Japanese Literature and East Asian Languages and Literatures. Her research interests include; comfort women during the war, women in the precedence and subsequence of the war, fiction on the postwar, literature in the water-world, the role of Maruyama Courtesans in relations with China in the 19th century, women in Ninkyō (yakuza) literature, Burakumin (outcast) literature, women’s status and discrimination in medieval and pre-modern Japan, new Wwomen and yransformation in twentieth century Japan. She was born, raised and educated in Sapporo Japan (where the 1970 Winter Olympics were held). She enjoys teaching and living in SLC. She has not gone skiing since she left Sapporo as a teen and is therefore, looking forward to skiing here in Utah.
Sean Lawason, Department of Communication, received his Ph.D. from the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2008 with a dissertation titled, "Info@war.mil: Nonlinear Science and the Emergence of Information Age Warfare in the United States Military." In general, his research focuses on the relationship between the histories of science, technology and the development of military ideas. His research interests include the intersection of science, technology, and international affairs, including national security, defense policy, military strategy, and WMD nonproliferation. In particular, he has been researching the military's use of concepts and metaphors from nonlinear science in its attempts to theorize Information Age warfare.
Before beginning his Ph.D. work at Rensselaer, he worked as an Associate National Security Analyst with DynCorp Systems & Solutions, LLC (now Computer Sciences Corporation) in Alexandria, VA. He has an MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University (2002) and a BA in History from California State University, Stanislaus (2000). He interned in the Chemical and Biological Weapons Nonproliferation Project at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies (1999) in Monterey CA.
John Reed begins an appointment as Lecturer-Assistant Professor in History. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Southern California, and will teach courses on 19th and 20th Century American history, US-Asian relations, and the history of U.S. foreign policy.
Kevin DeLuca, Department of Communication