Meet Our Recently Hired Tenure-Line Faculty
Amherst’s newest professors have scholarly interests ranging from global migration to exoplanet formation, and will be teaching such courses as “Sex and Law in Colonial America,” “Linear Algebra” and “Latin American Cinema.” Get to know the faculty members joining our community this year and the courses they'll be teaching this fall.
Harris Daniels
Assistant Professor of Mathematics
Daniels received a B.S. from Trinity College and M.S. Ph.D. degrees from the University of Connecticut. His research is in algebraic number theory—more specifically, elliptic curves and modular forms.
Fall 2016 Courses:
Katherine Brutlag Follette
Assistant Professor of Astronomy (arriving January 2017)
Follette earned a B.A. from Middlebury College and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Arizona. She studies (exo)planet formation by isolating light from newly formed planets orbiting young nearby stars, as well as imaging the circumstellar dust disks from which they form. She also studies quantitative reasoning in general-education science courses.
Jen Manion
Associate Professor of History
Manion has a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. from Rutgers University. A historian who uses queer theories of difference, power, and identity to understand how ordinary people lived in the past, Manion is the author of Liberty’s Prisoners: Carceral Culture in Early America (University of Pennsylvania, 2015), and is at work on a manuscript titled “Born in the Wrong Time: Transgender Archives & the History of Possibility, 1770–1870.”
Fall 2016 Courses:
Ruxandra Paul
Assistant Professor of Political Science
Paul earned a B.A. from Williams College and a Ph.D. from Harvard University. Her research focuses on international migration, globalization, supranational integration and cyberpolitics, analyzing how transnational flows of people and information recalibrate the state-citizen relationship. Her book manuscript is titled “Citizens of the Market: New Forms of International Migration and their Consequences for People, Parties and Political Systems.”
Fall 2016 Courses:
Paul Schroeder Rodríguez
Professor of Spanish
Rodríguez has a B.S. from Georgetown University, an M.A. from Arizona State University, and a Ph.D. from Stanford University. Paul’s research focus is Latin American cinema, and his contributions to the field include a book on Cuba’s foremost film director, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea: The Dialectics of a Filmmaker (Routledge, 2002), and the first comprehensive history of Latin American narrative cinema, titled Latin American Cinema: A Comparative History (University of California Press, 2016). He is beginning a research project on the work of Mexican criollo poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Afro-Brazilian architect and sculptor Aleijadinho, and indigenous architect José Kondori.
Fall 2016 Courses:
Niko Vicario
Assistant Professor of Art and the History of Art
Vicario holds a B.A. from Vassar College and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His scholarship analyzes the ways in which twentieth- and twenty-first century art has been entangled with political and economic processes, especially those relating to the spread of capitalism.
Fall 2016 Courses:
