Arhu Welcomes New Outstanding Faculty

September 14, 2009 College of Arts and Humanities

The University of Maryland College of Arts and Humanities welcomes new faculty appointments to begin during the 2009-2010 academic year

Communication

Dr. Brooke Fisher Liu: The Department of Communication welcomes public relations specialist Dr. Brooke Fisher Liu, a 2006 Ph.D. in Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Dr. Liu comes to us from DePaul University in Chicago, where she taught last year. In 2006-2007 she taught at American University. Her research, growing out of her dissertation studies the politics of disaster information for Hispanics. She has published journal articles that evaluate State Emergency-Management Web sites, that discuss how counties produce Spanish-language disaster information, and that assess the strategies in President George W. Bush’s post-Katrina speeches. back to top

Dance

Miriam Phillips: Joining the faculty of the Department of Dance as Assistant Professor of Dance History/Theory and Dance in World Cultures, is Miriam Phillips. Miriam brings a broad range of international experience and impressive credentials to this position, holding an M.A. in Dance Ethnology from UCLA and earned a Certified Movement Analyst (CMA) certification from the Laban/Bartinieff Institute of Movement Studies. In addition to impressive studio credentials, Miriam brings with her a significant scholarly profile: She has specialized in the aesthetic, cultural and historical inter-relationship between Flamenco and Northern Indian Kathak dance forms. Starting in 2007 she began participation in a collaborative, cultural-anthropology research project based in the Yale University Art Gallery that has taken her to West Africa to study and record D’mba performances. This project, funded by the NEH, promises to yield an exhibit and a book. She has experience teaching courses in Dance Ethnology, World Dance, Dance in Culture, Flamenco (both studio and theory), Movement Observation and Dance Research. back to top

Sara Pearson and Patrik Widrig: Joining the faculty of the Department of Dance as Associate Professors of Choreography and Technique, are Sara Pearson and Patrik Widrig. They will share the position in a unique arrangement that will bring both of these acclaimed dance artists and educators to campus. Sara and Patrik are co-artistic directors of PEARSONWIDRIG DANCETHEATER, based in New York City, and both are internationally recognized artists who tour extensively throughout the U.S. and Europe, India, Japan, Latin America, and New Zealand, as well as performing at New York's Joyce Theater, the NY City Center Fall for Dance festival, Central Park SummerStage, Lincoln Center, Dance Theater Workshop, the Kitchen, Danspace Project, P.S. 122, and Dancing in the Streets. Sara and Patrik are master teachers in technique, improvisation, and choreography; they have a reputation for their ability to mentor young emerging artists. Patrik was educated in Switzerland; Sara holds a B.A. from the University of Minnesota. Both have considerable teaching experience on the faculty of The Julliard School. They bring an exciting, dynamic combination of extraordinary professional credentials and bold educational philosophies. Their joint appointment dramatically raises the national and international profile of dance at Maryland. back to top

History

Dr. Michael Ross: The search to replace two newly retired senior professors in Legal/Constitutional History comes to a conclusion with the appointment of Associate Professor Michael Ross. Professor Ross holds both the Ph.D. in History from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (1999) and the J.D. from the Duke University School of Law (1989). He has taught at Loyola University in New Orleans since 1999, as Associate Professor since 2003. At the start of his career, Michael Ross very quickly carved out an area of American legal history in which he has become the leading authority – his work is the last word in the study of the “Slaughter-House Cases” in New Orleans, cases that challenged the newly passed Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution and the role that Justice Samuel F. Miller played in deciding those cases. Ross’ first book, Justice of Shattered Dreams: Samuel Freeman Miller and the Supreme Court during the Civil War Era, an outgrowth of his dissertation, was published in 2003 by the Louisiana State University Press in the series Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War. This volume won three prizes: from the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities, The George Tyler Moore Center, and The New Jersey Council for the Arts. Ross had already published “Justice Miller’s Reconstruction: Civil Rights, Health Codes, the Slaughter-House Cases, and New Orleans, 1862-1873” in the top-ranked Journal of Southern History in 1998. This is one of four prize-winning journal articles that Ross has published. back to top Also see below, Dr. Erika Lorraine Milam

Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Studies

Dr. Yoram Peri: The appointment of Dr. Yoram Peri, brings to conclusion the search for a distinguished senior scholar to serve as the first Jack and Abraham Kay Professor of Israel Studies in the Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Center and Program for Jewish Studies. Professor Peri earned his doctorate from the London School of Economics (1981). Since 1981 he has taught at Tel Aviv University while holding periodic visiting and temporary appointments at American University and the Middle East Institute in Washington, Hebrew University, Harvard, and Dartmouth. Interspersed with these appointments, Dr. Peri has carried on a parallel career as a journalist, political advisor, and public intellectual. From 1988 to 1990 he served as Editor in Chief of Davar, one of the most influential newspapers then published in Israel. He is the author of two dozen chapters in scholarly books, seventeen refereed journal articles, ten monographs and five books. His most recent books have both won awards; the most recent, Generals in the Cabinet Room: How the Military Shapes Israel Policy (2006) was given the “Best of the Best” award by the Association of American University Presses; Brothers at War; The Rabin Assassination and the Cultural War in Israel (2005) won the 2006 award as best book in the social sciences from the Israeli Political Science Association as well as the 2005 “Prime Minister’s Prize.” back to top

Linguistics

Dr. Alexander Williams: The successful candidate in Linguistics’ search for an Assistant Professor of semantics is Dr. Alexander Williams. Williams – who was a pos-doctoral fellow in Linguistics at UMD from 2005 to 2008 – holds the B.A. from Princeton and the Ph. D. from Penn (2005). He returns to the University of Maryland after spending a year as Assistant Professor at the University of Georgia. Among his published papers one finds titles such as “Word order in resultatives,” “Patients in Igbo and Mandarin,” “On the lack of reflexive benefactives in Kannada,” and “C-locality and the interaction of reflexives and ditransitives.” Dr. Williams has been a frequent collaborator with UMD Associate Professor Jeffrey Lidz. back to top

Music

Katherine Murdock: Katherine Murdock, who emerged from a national search for a specialist in viola and chamber music coach, is not unknown to the faculty of our School of Music, having served as a part-time Lecturer at UMD since 1997. Since 2001 she taught as a Lecturer at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, as well. She is also a founding member of the Left Bank Quartet, a chamber ensemble that also features two full-time members of our music faculty, Evelyn Elsing and David Salness. Early in her career, Murdock established herself through her orchestral affiliations with the New England Chamber Orchestra, the Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestra, the Boston Symphony, the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, the Orpheus Orchestra, and the National Symphony Orchestra. More important for the present appointment have been her numerous chamber-music affiliations, especially her work as violist with the highly acclaimed Mendelssohn String Quartet and her work as guest violist with the Boston Chamber Music Society. She presents a most impressive array of performance collaborations and an equally impressive list of summer festivals in which she has participated. The list of prominent musicians with whom she has collaborated, includes the likes of Janos Starker, Leon Fleischer, and Jean-Pierre Rampal. She has appeared under the baton of such high-profile conductors as Seiji Ozawa, Kurt Masur, and Herbert von Karajan. The School of Music is most pleased to welcome Professor Murdock as a full-time Associate Professor of Viola. back to top

Dr. Patrick Warfield: The School of Music welcomes Assistant Professor Patrick Warfield, a musicologist who specializes in the music of John Philip Sousa. Warfield earned his doctorate at Indiana University (2003). Since 2001 he has been Visiting Assistant Professor at Georgetown, and he has also taught at the Peabody Conservatory and at Towson University. Among his published journal articles are titles such as “John Esputa, John Philip Sousa and the Boundaries of a Musical Career,” “The Essence of Uncle Sam: John Philip Sousa’s 1911 World Tour,” and “Making the Band: John Philip Sousa, David Blakely, and the Creation of the Sousa Band.” Professor Warfield is at work on a book on Sousa and a volume entitled Six Marches by Sousa in the Music of the United States of America series. back to top

School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures

Dr. Valerie Anischenkova: The newly appointed Assistant Professor of Arabic language and literature is Russian born Valerie Anischenkova. Dr. Anischenkova earned her Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan (2007); she has been teaching at Tufts University since 2003, putting in place a program in Arabic Language. She thus brings to UM an interesting combination of abilities. Her research area focuses on literature, film, and culture, whereas her pedagogical experience at Tufts has featured program building and Language teaching. She is at work turning her dissertation (“Polyphonic Selves: Modalities of Autobiographical Subjectivity in Contemporary Arab Narrative Discourse”) into a book. She has created courses such as “Sexuality in Arab Literature and Film” and “Fascinating Monsters: Representing Arabs in American Pop Culture vs. Americans in Arab Pop Culture.” back to top

Dr. Steven Ross: Dr. Steven Ross, since 1995 a tenured Professor specializing in Language Policy in the School of Policy Studies, Research Methods, and Sociolinguistics, at Kwansei Gakuin University in Japan, joins a growing number of faculty working in the Second Language Acquisition (SLA) program within the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures (SLLC). Dr. Ross has published three monographs and two edited volumes; fourteen book chapters and twenty-five articles in refereed journals as well as delivering fifty-four conference presentations. Moreover, he has compiled this record while teaching at Kwansei Gakuin University a Japanese university that features only a modest graduate program with few students capable of doing graduate work in an English language medium. To that end, Ross has kept up an adjunct relationship with Columbia Teachers College (Japan), Temple University (Japan), and especially Macquarie University (Australia) in order to afford him the opportunity to direct the work of doctoral students. Dr Ross’s refereed articles have appeared in the top tier journals in his discipline, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, Language Learning, Second Language Research, Applied Linguistics, and International Review of Applied Linguistics. back to top

Dr. Minglang Zhou: The appointment of Dr. Minglang Zhou is the outcome of the SLLC’s search for a specialist in Chinese Language and Literature. Zhou holds the Ph.D. in Chinese Linguistics from the Michigan State University (1993). Since 2001, Zhou has taught at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, since 2003 as a tenured Associate Professor. Prior to his work at Dickinson College, Zhou taught at the University of Colorado (1996-2001) and the University of Oregon (1993-1996). He has published sixteen book chapters and refereed articles since 1998, and he has another four currently in press. This works out to a rate of roughly two per year. Zhou has also edited or co-edited four volumes of essays on Chinese sociolinguistics. Especially noteworthy among these was the 2006 issue of the Journal of Asian Pacific Communication which Zhou edited and to which he contributed an important introductory essay. The centerpiece of Zhou’s published work to date is his monograph, Multilingualism in China: The Politics of Writing Reforms for Minority Languages 1949-2002. This volume appeared in 2003 in the Contributions to the Sociology of Language series edited by Joshua Fishman and published by Mouton de Gruyer. back to top

Theatre

Izumi Ashizawa: Joins the faculty of the Department of Theatre as Assistant Professor of Movement and Acting. Izumi brings a broad range of experience and impressive credentials to this position. She holds a B.A. and M.A. from the University of the Sacred Heart of Japan; she earned her M.F.A. from the Yale University School of Drama. Her professional work and teaching experience is on an international scale, having created performances, directed, and/or taught in the U.S., Romania, Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Iran, and Japan. Izumi's movement and acting classes are based on Western acting techniques, fused with Japanese traditional Noh theatre and Suzuki methods. A practitioner of puppetry, she also utilizes techniques of Aikido, Chigong, and Tai Chi in her studio classes. Professor Ashizawa comes to us from the School of Theatre and Dance at the University of South Florida. Her most recent professional project is a collaborative performance piece in Australia. She provides a wonderful addition to the Performance area as the Department of Theatre prepares to implement a new M.F.A. in Performance in 2010. back to top

Brian MacDevitt: Joins the faculty of the Department of Theatre as Associate Professor of Lighting Design. MacDevitt is without a doubt among the top handful of professional designers working in America today. He has designed more than 50 productions on Broadway in the past decade, recently receiving his fourth Tony Award for Lighting Design (for the revival of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone); he has been nominated for Tony Awards 8 times, as well as winning the Drama Desk Award for Lighting Design (from a total of 6 nominations). He has also received the Outer Critics Circle Award, the Lucille Lortel Award, a Bessie Award for his work in Dance, and an OBIE Award for Sustained Excellence in Lighting Design. He has had a long-term teaching relationship with Purchase College (formerly SUNY Purchase, from which he received his B.F.A. in 1980), and has also taught at the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. In addition, he is a regular master teacher in the Broadway Lighting Master Class, held each spring in New York City, where the top lighting and projection designers working on Broadway are featured as lecturers. back to top

In addition to the above faculty, the following are “new” faculty who emerged from searches run in 2007-2008.

English

Dr. Keguro Macharia: Kenyan born Assistant Professor Macharia, earned his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois (2008). He was the successful candidate in the search for a specialist in African-American Literature. In his dissertation, entitled “Queer Natives,” Professor Macharia brought modern gender theory to bear on issues of emerging from the special circumstances surrounding writers – from the Harlem Renaissance, and writers of early postcolonial fiction -- emerging from the African diaspora. His dissertation argues that twentieth-century black intellectuals considered that sexuality is central to a construction of diasporic culture and politics. He arrived on campus in the spring semester of 2009. back to top

History

Dr. Erika Lorraine Milam: Emerging from the search for an Assistant Professor in the History of Science is Erica Lorraine Milam who earned her doctorate in from the University of Wisconsin – Madison (2006), producing a dissertation entitled Looking for a few Good Males: Female Choice in Evolutionary Biology, 1915-1575. Dr. Milam served in 2006-2007 as a Lecturer in the department of Biological Sciences at Clemson and she spent the 2007-08 academic year and the fall semester of 2008 as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. She joined the History Department in January of 2009. back to top

Philosophy

Dr. Susan Dwyer: Joining the Department of Philosophy in January of 2009 was Associate Professor Susan Dwyer. Professor Dwyer earned her Ph.D. in Philosophy from M.I.T. (1991). From 1991 to 1998, she taught at McGill University in Montreal, receiving tenure and promotion to Associate Professor in 1997. After spending a year as a visiting research scholar in the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy (UMD) and a year at the Naval Academy, she took a tenured position as Associate Professor at UMBC in 1999, where she has remained until the end of 2008. She spent the 2007-2008 academic year on leave at Harvard as a visiting researcher in the Cognitive Evolution Laboratory. Dwyer’s scholarly work has focused primarily on two areas, moral psychology and applied ethics. Over the course of her career she has published twenty-two articles, a dozen book reviews, and several crucial notices and commentaries. back to top