New Hires by Department
Anthropology
Juan M. Obarrio (jmo@jhu.edu) joins the Department of Anthropology as an assistant professor after serving as a visiting assistant professor and earlier, as a postdoctoral fellow. Obarrio earned his PhD from Columbia University. He will teach in the areas of legal and political anthropology, as well as on exchange and value, and he will be active in the school's programs in Africana and Latin American studies. Obarrio's forthcoming book, The Spirit of the Laws in Mozambique, which will be published by University of Chicago Press, is a historical ethnography of the postcolonial state in the light of legal reform on transitional justice, "customary" laws, and traditional chieftaincy in Mozambique. The book is based on Obarrio's dissertation and reflects two years of field research funded by the MacArthur Foundation and the Social Science Research Council.
Cognitive Science
Cognitive Science
Kyle Rawlins (rawlins@cogsci.jhu.edu) comes to the Department of Cognitive Science this year as a visiting assistant professor and will become an assistant professor in the department in 2010. Rawlins' area of research is formal semantics, pragmatics, syntax, and the interfaces of these fields. He also studies mathematical linguistics, the philosophy of language, and computational semantics. He earned his PhD in linguistics from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2008, and his dissertation was titled "(Un)conditionals: An Investigation in the Syntax and Semantics of Conditional Structures." This fall Rawlins is teaching two courses: Semantics 1 and a research seminar in semantics.
Earth and Planetary Sciences
Naomi E. Levin (nlevin3@jhu.edu) is a new assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and one of three new faculty members who came to Hopkins as part of the department's Global Change Science Initiative. Levin's research centers on understanding how terrestrial landscapes and organisms respond to past climate change, and she uses stable isotopic records to study interactions between mammals, vegetation, and climate in past ecosystems. In 2008 she earned her PhD in geology from the University of Utah, and her dissertation was titled "Isotopic Records of Plio-Pleistocene Climate and Environments in Eastern Africa."
Benjamin Passey (bhpassey@gmail.com) comes to Hopkins from a postdoctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology. An assistant professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Passey joined the faculty last Spring as part of the department's Global Change Science Initiative. His research examines the history of, and interrelationships among, the Earth's climate, ecology, and geochemistry. He utilizes geochemical and ecological tools to help extract and interpret information from modern environments and from the geological record. Passey earned his doctorate in geology from the University of Utah in 2007. His dissertation is titled "Stable Isotope Paleoecology: Methodological Advances and Applications to the Neogene Environmental History of China."
An assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Benjamin Zaitchik (zaitchik@jhu.edu) researches hydrological modeling, regional climate modeling, and remote sensing. He is interested in understanding, managing, and coping with climatic and hydrologic variability. Zaitchik earned his PhD from Yale University, where his research concerned the study of regional drivers of aridity in the Middle East and beyond. Prior to arriving at Hopkins as part of the Global Change Science Initiative, Zaitchik was a foreign affairs officer specializing in climate change issues in the Office of Global Change for the U.S. Department of State.
English
Mark Christian Thompson (mct@illinois.edu) is a new associate professor of English whose research interests include African-American literature of the early 20th century, political and critical theory, and German literature of the 20th century. "I try to find ways for all of my interests to converge and make sense," he explains. He comes to Hopkins from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he served as an associate professor of English, comparative literature, German, and the unit for criticism and interpretive theory. His first book, Black Fascisms: African American Literature and Culture Between the Wars (University of Virginia Press, 2007) is a study of fascist modes of thought on the black nationalist movement and on black literary culture. He earned his PhD in comparative literature from New York University. Thompson begins teaching at Hopkins in January.
Jesse Rosenthal (jrosenthal@jhu.edu) will join the faculty as an assistant professor in 2010 following his completion of a postdoctoral fellowship in the English department this year. Rosenthal received his PhD from Columbia University in 2009. His dissertation, "Moral Sensibilities: Ethical Feeling and Narrative Form in the Victorian Novel," examines the role of intuition in 19th-century understandings of moral experience and the feeling of novel-reading. His research interests include a consideration of the literary categories of the "dated" and "timeless" and the applications of computer-aided quantitative methods to literary analysis. This fall he will be teaching a seminar on Victorian realism.
Language Teaching Center
Yuki Johnson (yuki.johnson@jhu.edu) joins the School of Arts and Sciences as the director of the Language Teaching Center. Through theory and practice she has learned the basis of effective language teaching and the most modern, still-evolving theories of language education. Prior to coming to Hopkins, Johnson was an associate professor of Japanese linguistics and undergraduate program coordinator in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. She has also served as director of the Japanese Language Program at the University of Michigan and the University of British Columbia and worked successfully to modernize teaching methodologies at both institutions. Johnson earned her PhD in linguistics at the University of Minnesota, where she focused her research on the syntax and semantics of Japanese and English. She is the author of Fundamentals of Japanese Grammar: Comprehensive Acquisition (University of Hawaii Press, 2007).
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