CLAS Welcomes New Faculty
CLAS welcomes more than 60 new faculty members this year
William Baber
William Baber is a professor
in the Department of Anthropology. He earned his PhD from Stanford
University in 1979 and has held positions at Tuskegee University,
Purdue University and the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.
His most recent research is on African American masculinity and HIV risk behavior. He also is working on a book-length manuscript, “The Social Ecology of Booker T. Washington,” based on research funded by the Department of the Interior from 1997 to 1999 and research conducted at the Booker T. Washington National Monument in Franklin County, Virginia. Baber is teaching an African American studies course, The Social Ecology of Booker T. Washington, and Introduction to Applied Anthropology. He is also developing a course for the spring 2005 semester on environment and disease.
Juliana Barr
Juliana Barr is an assistant professor in the Department of History. After earning her PhD in 1999 from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, she held a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas before becoming an assistant professor at Rutgers University.
Barr is currently revising a book manuscript, “Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: the Power Relations of Spanish and Indian Nations in the Early Southwestern Borderlands,” that explores the gendered dynamics of European-Indian political and economic interaction in 18th century Texas. She is teaching two courses this fall, Early America and Native American History I, and will teach Native American History II and a graduate course on American history in the spring.
Laura Baudis
Laura Baudis is an assistant professor in the Department of Physics. She earned her PhD in 1999 from the University of Heidelberg in Germany, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University in 2003.
Her main research interests are particle astrophysics and cosmology, in particular the domain of particle dark matter.
Her present work is focused on the direct detection of non-baryonic dark matter with the cryogenic dark matter search experiment and with liquid xenon. Baudis teaches Physics with Calculus and Mechanics 1.
Peter Bergmann
Peter Bergmann is an associate professor jointly appointed between the Center for European Studies and the Department of History. He received his PhD in 1983 from the University of California, Berkeley, and his area of specialization is modern German intellectual history.
Before coming to UF, Bergmann was a professor at the University of Connecticut for 15 years. His present research project examines German and American exceptionalism. He is teaching Modern European Intellectual History, Nationalism and the Idea of Europe, and War and Society.
Chris Caes
Chris Caes is an assistant professor, jointly appointed between the Center for European Studies and the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies. His specialty is Polish studies, and he received his PhD in 2004 from the University of California, Berkeley.
Caes’ current research focuses on conceptions of selfhood and agency in the literature and cinema of Polish Stalinism. This fall he is teaching Polish Culture and Society of the 20th Century. In the spring, he plans to teach Modern Polish Cinema and The Absurd in 20th Century Polish Literature and Theater.
Alin Ceobanu
Alin Ceobanu is an assistant professor jointly appointed between the Center for European Studies and the Department of Sociology. He earned his PhD in sociology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in May 2004, with a certificate of graduate specialization in Russian language and area studies. His dissertation was on the public sentiment of immigrants and immigration policies in Central and Eastern Europe.
Ceobanu’s current research focuses on post-communist societies of East-Central Europe and enlargement of the European Union, cross-national aspects of nationalism, inter-group relations, and collective action and social movements. He is teaching Nationalism and Ethnicity in Europe and Culture and Identity in the New Europe.
Jian Ge
Jian Ge is a professor in the Department of Astronomy. He received his PhD in astronomy from the University of Arizona in 1998 and served as an assistant professor at The Pennsylvania State University. He also has held research positions at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Steward Observatory and the Beijing Astronomical Observatory.
Ge’s research involves extrasolar planet searches, planetary disks, brown dwarf and faint companion searches, quasar absorption line systems and optical and infrared instrument techniques.
Linda Hermer-Vazquez
Linda Hermer-Vazquez is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology. She earned her PhD from Cornell University in 1997 in biopsychology with a minor in cognitive studies. Before coming to UF she was a research assistant professor in the lab of renowned neurophysiologist John Chapin at the State University of New York at Brooklyn.
Her research includes studies of olfactory-based perception, learning, decision-making and motor execution. She collaborates with her husband Raymond Hermer-Vazquez, a new assistant scientist in psychology, and the two are studying the physiological basis for how different brain regions involved in these behaviors communicate with one another, in both frequency and time. They also are teaching a graduate seminar, Current Controversies in Neuroscience.
William Link
William Link is the Milbauer Eminent Scholar in the Department of History. He received his PhD in history from the University of Virginia in 1981, and his specialization is the 19th- and 20th-century American South. Before coming to UF, he spent 23 years as a history professor at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.
Link has written four major books, most recently, Roots of Secession: Slavery and Politics in Antebellum Virginia, in 2003. He currently is working on a project on the life of Jesse Helms and teaches a graduate seminar, Race and Politics in the American South Since 1850.
Xueli Liu
Xueli Liu is an assistant professor in the Department of Statistics. She completed her PhD in 2002 at the University of California, Davis, and was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles for two years before coming to UF.
Liu’s current research focuses on bioinformatics, specifically on gene expression data and tissue micro-array data. She also works on statistical genetics and functional data analysis and has collaborations with the McKnight Brain Institute.
Barbara Mennel
Barbara Mennel is an assistant professor in
the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies and the Film and
Media Studies Program in the Department of English. She received
her PhD in German studies from Cornell University in 1998 and has
held positions at Bates College and the University of Maryland.
She currently is completing a book project on masochistic aesthetics in 19th- and 20th-century German language, literature and film. Mennel’s next research project concerns the cinematic representation of cities. She is teaching a graduate course on modern German literature, Gender and Sexuality at the Fin-de-Siecle, and an undergraduate film seminar, From Berlin to Hollywood: Film Emigration.
Conor O'Dwyer
Conor O’Dwyer is an assistant professor, jointly appointed between the Center for European Studies and the Department of Political Science. He recently earned his PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, specializing in comparative politics with a regional focus on European and East European politics. In 2004, his dissertation paper won Best Dissertation in the American Political Science Association’s European Politics and Society Section.
O’Dwyer has held a postdoctoral fellowship position at Harvard University. His current research considers the connection between democratization and state building in post-communist Eastern Europe. He teaches The Politics of Post-Communist Eastern Europe and Introduction to Comparative Politics.
Mary Robison
Mary Robison is a professor of creative writing in the Department of English. She received her master’s degree from Johns Hopkins University, and was a professor at the University of Southern Mississippi before coming to UF. She also has held appointments at Harvard University, Oberlin College, Ohio University, Bennington College, the University of Houston and the University of Southern California, Irvine.
Robison has worked as a screenwriter and script doctor in Hollywood and is the author of three novels and four collections of stories. She also has published around two dozen stories in The New Yorker. At UF, she is teaching Introduction to Screenwriting and a graduate writing workshop.
Ray Russo
Ray Russo is an assistant professor in the Department of Geology. He received his PhD in geophysics from Northwestern University in 1990, where he served as an assistant professor until coming to UF in 2004. He also has held positions at Universite de Montpellier II in France, the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Washington, DC and the University of the West Indies in Trinidad and Tobago.
Russo’s research focuses on the flow of the Earth’s upper mantle and its effects on tectonics of the surface plates. Currently, he has ongoing projects in Southeast Asia and China, Chile, Venezuela, Hawaii, Romania, the Caribbean and the central US. This semester he is teaching Introduction to Geophysics.
Benjamin Smith
Benjamin Smith is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science. He received his PhD from the University of Washington in 2002 and served as an academy scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies at Harvard University.
Smith is working on a book manuscript on the politics of oil and state building and is teaching Introduction to Comparative Politics, Southeast Asian Politics, and Authoritarianism in an Era of Democratization.
Martin Sorbille
Martin Sorbille is an assistant professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. He received his PhD in Hispanic languages and literatures from the University of California, Los Angeles in spring 2004.
Sorbille specializes in 19th-century Spanish American literature, Spanish American film studies and psychoanalytic theory. He is teaching an undergraduate seminar, Poetry and Essay of 19th Century South Cone Literature.
Richard Wang
Richard Wang is an assistant professor in the Department of African and Asian Languages and Literatures, specializing in Chinese. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1999. Wang has taught at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and at Swarthmore College.
His current research focuses on the religious dimensions of traditional Chinese fiction, and his most recent book is The Romantic Sentiment and the Religious Spirit: The Late Ming Literature and the Intellectual Currents, published in 1999. He is teaching Chinese Culture and Third-Year Chinese.
Photos:
Courtesy William Baber (Baber)
Buffy Lockette (Liu)
all others by Jane Dominguez