New Faculty
The article was originally published in the December 2001 issue of CLASnotes.
Alex Berkovich
Alex Berkovich is an assistant professor of mathematics who received
his PhD in physics from New York University in 1987. Since then, he has held
positions at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, the Instituto
de Matemáticas y F"sica Fundamental in Spain, the Universitŕt Bonn in Germany
and Penn State University. His research has focused on two-dimensional integrable
models, quantum groups and conformal field theory in mathematical physics.
While a visiting professor at UF from 1999-2000, Berkovich was part of the
major breakthrough in the theory of partitions and q-series.
Brenda Chalfin
Brenda
Chalfin is an assistant professor of anthropology who specializes in
gender, development and applied anthropology within Ghana and West Africa.
She earned her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1998. After that, she taught at the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver.
Last year she began NSF-funded research on customs and state sovereignty in Ghana, and she continues to work on this project.
George Christou
George Christou is a professor of chemistry. In 1978 he earned his PhD in organic chemistry from Exeter University in London. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Manchester University and a NATO Fellowship at Stanford and Harvard Universities, he held his first faculty position in 1982 at Imperial College in London. Before coming to UF, he served on the faculty of Indiana University for 18 years. Christou has been a leading figure in the development of single-molecule magnetism, or the ability of individual molecules to function as nanoscale magnetic particles. This has vast potential applications for ultra-high-density information storage, quantum computing and other specialized areas.
Mohssen Esseesy
Mohssen Esseesy is an assistant professor in the African and Asian languages and literatures department. He earned his PhD from the Department of Arabic Language, Linguistics and Literature at Georgetown University in April 2000. Before coming to UF, Esseesy was a visiting assistant professor at Georgetown and a language consultant at the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington, DC. His current research areas are the historical evolution of numeral systems with an emphasis on Arabic, linguistic theory of numerals, language testing and the development of tests for less-commonly-taught languages.
Stephen Hill
Stephen
Hill, an assistant professor of physics, received his PhD from the University
of Oxford in 1994. For two years he held a postdoctoral position at the National
High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee and joined the faculty at Montana
State University before coming to UF this year. The majority of his research
is experimental in nature and involves using spectroscopy to study strong
magnetic fields. He is currently working on two NSF-funded projects. One
focuses on the electrodynamic properties of highly anisotropic organic superconductors
in strong magnetic fields, and the other is a Nanoscale Interdisciplinary
Research project dealing with quantum effects in single molecule magnets.
Robert Holt
Robert Holt is an eminent scholar in zoology and the Arthur R. Marshall Jr. Chair in ecological studies. He received his PhD in biology from Harvard University in 1979. Holt held several positions on the faculty at the University of Kansas from 1979-2001, including professor, museum curator and senior scientist. His research focuses largely on theoretical issues at the population and community levels of ecological organization, and on the task of linking ecology with evolutionary biology. His current work includes studies of the implications of infectious disease for conservation and community ecology, spatial aspects of food webs and habitat fragmentation.
Aida Hozic
Aida Hozic, an assistant professor of political science, received her PhD in 1997 from the University of Virginia's Department of Government and Foreign Affairs. Her area of specialization is international relations, and she teaches courses in international security. Before coming to UF, Hozic taught at Hobart College and William Smith College in Geneva, NY and Ithaca College in Ithaca, NY. Last year she was a MacArthur Fellow at Cornell University. Her current research explores the relationship between media representation of violence and the politics of military intervention in Bosnia, Rwanda and Kosovo.
Gwynn Kessler
Gwynn
Kessler is an assistant professor of religion. She earned her
PhD from the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City in May 2001.
During the last year, Kessler was a lecturer at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her dissertation is titled "The God of Small Things: The Fetus and Its Development in Palestinian Aggadic Literature," and she is currently working on a book about this topic. Kessler is also researching constructions of God's gender in Rabbinic literature.
Eric Kligerman
Eric Kligerman is an assistant professor in the Department of Germanic and Slavic studies. He received his PhD from the University of Michigan in the spring of this year. Kligerman spent several years studying in Germany at the University of Freiburg on a Fulbright Fellowship. His research focuses on 19th- and 20th-century German literature, philosophy and visual arts, and he is especially interested in German-Jewish literature and Holocaust studies. Kligerman is currently looking at how poetic invocations of trauma in the works of Paul Celan have been translated into the space of visual media, especially the architecture of museums and memorials in Berlin.
John Krigbaum
John Krigbaum, an assistant professor of anthropology, earned his PhD in biological anthropology this year from New York University. His research focuses on human and faunal skeletal remains from archaeological and paleontological sites in Southeast Asia. He is interested in the spread of modern humans through the Old World, specifically into Eurasia and Southeast Asia, and in learning about their lifestyles. Part of his work involves analyzing the chemical composition (stable isotopes of carbon, nitrogen and oxygen) of bones and teeth to infer prehistoric diet.
Andrew Lynch
Andrew Lynch is an assistant professor of Spanish in the Romance languages and literatures department. With a dissertation focused on Spanish-English language use and variation among Cuban immigrant families in Miami, he earned his PhD from the University of Minnesota in 1999. His specializations are Hispanic linguistics, sociolinguistics and applied linguistics. Prior to coming to UF, he spent two years directing the Spanish for Heritage Speakers program at University of Miami. Lynch's current research deals with Spanish-English bilingualism in the US.
Carlos Rojas
Carlos
Rojas, an assistant professor in the African and Asian languages and
literatures department, received his PhD from Columbia University in 2000.
He also held a postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia for one year before coming
to UF.
Rojas specializes in modern Chinese literature, film and cultural studies. His current research examines themes of visual perception and reproduction in 19th- and 20th-century Chinese fictional texts, with a parallel consideration of related technological developments and cultural practices.
Leah Rosenberg
Leah Rosenberg is an assistant professor of English. She received her PhD in comparative literature, with a concentration in women's studies, from Cornell University in January 2000. Her area of specialization is Caribbean studies. Before coming to UF, she was an assistant professor of English at Grinnell College in Iowa. Rosenberg is currently writing a book titled Creolizing Womanhood: Building National Literatures in the Anglophone Caribbean, 1899-1938. It is a study of the development of national literature in Jamaica, Trinidad and Dominica, focusing on the prominence of women and domesticity in the emergence of national literatures.
Marilyn Thomas-Houston
Marilyn
Thomas-Houston, an assistant professor of anthropology, earned her PhD
in cultural anthropology from New York University in 1997. She has also an
appointment in the African American Studies Program. Before coming to UF,
Thomas-Houston was an assistant professor of anthropology and African American
studies at the University of South Carolina.
Her current research is on social action in the black communities of Nova Scotia, Canada, and she will direct a summer study abroad program in Nova Scotia focusing on the African Diaspora.
Credits
Photos
Jane Dominguez
