Introducing New Faculty
This article was originally published in the October 2002 issue of CLASnotes.
Jason Karlin
Jason Karlin is an assistant professor of history who received his PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in May 2002. He completed part of his dissertation research as a research fellow at the University of Tokyo in 1998-1999.
Karlin's current research explores the relationship between nationalism and aesthetics through the categories of taste and style in order to understand the construction of gender identity and the invention of national culture in modern Japan. Specifically, he has analyzed how the intensification of fashion in late 19th-century and early 20th-century Japan created a new awareness of the concept of "everyday life" as a nostalgic site of refuge from the hardships of modern change.
Stacey Langwick
Stacey Langwick joined UF in January as a joint appointment in the Department of Anthropology and the Center for Women's Studies and Gender Research. She received her PhD in anthropology from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 2001 and also holds a master's degree in public health from UNC.
Her work, which focuses on issues of healing and women's health in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly Tanzania, is located at the intersection of issues concerning science, gender and politics. Currently, she is examining the making of women's bodies and other objects of therapeutic practice through traditional and biomedical medicines dedicated to maternal and infant care in southern Tanzania.
Michelle Mack
Michelle Mack is an assistant professor of ecosystem ecology in the botany department who joined the faculty in January 2002. She received her PhD in integrative biology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1998. Before coming to UF, Mack was a research associate at the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.
Her current research addresses the effects of disturbance on ecosystem nutrient dynamics. Several of her current projects are funded by grants from the National Science Foundation and the USDA and involve studying the effects of fire on nutrient cycling in forests in Alaska and Siberia as well as the Arctic tundra.
Ted Schuur
Ted Schuur, an assistant professor of ecosystem ecology in the botany department, earned his PhD in ecosystem ecology in 1999 from the University of California, Berkeley. Before coming to UF in January of this year, Schuur held a two-year National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in bioinformatics at the University of California, Irvine.
His research focuses on the interaction between carbon cycling in terrestrial ecosystems, global biogeochemical cycles and climate change. He is particularly interested in the exchange of carbon between plants, soils and the atmosphere, and the response to changes in climate and disturbance regimes.
Jane Southworth
Jane Southworth is an assistant professor of geography who joined the department in January 2002. She earned her PhD in environmental science from Indiana University in 2000 and also earned a master's degree from Indiana in 1996.
Her research interests include modeling the impacts of climate change on agricultural and forest ecosystems, remote sensing of land cover change and land cover change modeling, and human-environment interactions. Southworth is one of the editors of the new book Effects of Climate Change and Variability on Agricultural Production Systems.
Credits
Photos
Jane Dominguez
