New Faculty, Administration, and B2F Scholars

Nermeen Mouftah (University of Toronto, PhD) is joining the Department of Anthropology this fall as an assistant professor. Professor Mouftah joins UIC from Butler University, where she was an assistant professor in religious studies. She was a visiting assistant professor at UIC in the Departments of Anthropology and History and the Program in Religious Studies in 2017-2018 and a Buffett Institute for Global Studies postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University in 2015-2017. Her research examines how Muslims grapple with questions of progress, care, and justice. Her forthcoming book is titled Read in the Name of the Lord: Egyptian Literacy Politics Between Revolution and Islamic Reform (Indiana UP) and her articles have appeared in journals such as The Muslim World, Contemporary Islam, International Journal of Middle East Studies, and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. She has received funding from the Wabash Center, the American Academy of Religion, the Global Religions Research Initiative, the American Association of University Women, and the International Institute of Islamic Thought, and she has given numerous talks and presentations in the United States and internationally.

Nemat Oliver Keyhani (Johns Hopkins University, PhD) is joining the Department of Biological Sciences this fall as a professor. Professor Keyhani is a biologist whose research focuses on fungal biology and genetics, insect and plant pathogenic fungi, biological control, pest control, insect olfaction and immunity, laurel wilt, social insects, and beetles. He joins UIC from the University of Florida’s Department of Microbiology and Cell Science, where he was a faculty member for over twenty years. He serves as an editor for the Pathogens, Applied Microbiology & Biotechnology, Mycology, and IMA Fungus, as well as on the editorial board of the Journal of Invertebrate Pathology from 2014 to 2021. In addition he is the co-editor of Insect Pathology: Third Edition. His research has been published widely, including most recently in the Journal of Fungi, Microbiology Spectrum, and Environmental Microbiology. His research is currently supported by the National Science Foundation and the United States Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture. He has presented at over 90 conferences across the globe in the course of his career, including in 2022 as the invited symposia speaker at the XIII International Fungal Biology Conference & IV International Symposium on Fungal Stress in Sao Jose dos Campos, Brazil.

Danielle Beaujon (New York University, PhD) is joining the Department of Criminology, Law, and Justice and the Department of History this fall as an assistant professor. A 2021 Bridge to Faculty Postdoctoral Research Associate, Professor Beaujon is a historian with broad research interests in policing, race, and power in a global context. Her book project, “Controlling the Casbah: Policing North Africans in Marseille and Algiers, 1920-1950,” examines the intimate and oppositional relationship of police officers and North Africans in a connected Franco-Mediterranean world. She has been published in Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques and French Historical Studies, and her work has received support from the American Institute for Maghreb Studies, the Remarque Institute-École Normale Supérieure, and the Coordinating Council for Women in History.

Kasey Henricks (Loyola University Chicago, PhD) is returning to UIC as an assistant professor in the Department of Criminology, Law, and Justice this fall. He has been an assistant professor of sociology since 2017 and a fellow at the Center for the Study of Social Justice since 2019 at the University of Tennessee and was a postdoctoral associate at the UIC Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy in 2016-2017. His research interests lie in understanding how racial inequalities are reproduced over time through institutional arrangements sponsored by tax policy. His work has been supported by the Russell Sage Foundation, the American Sociological Association, and the National Science Foundation, and has been featured in media outlets such as Forbes, U.S. News & World Report, and The Chicago Tribune. His forthcoming book is titled Chicago on the Take: Ticketing and Towing in the City of Collision (Russell Sage) and he has been published in numerous journals, including Critical Sociology, Humanity & Society, and Sociology of Race & Ethnicity.

David Hernandez-Uribe (Colorado School of Mines, PhD) is joining the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences as an assistant professor this fall. A 2022 Bridge to Faculty Postdoctoral Research Associate, Professor Hernandez-Uribe is a petrologist whose research interests include subduction-zone processes, metamorphic geology and tectonics, and phase equilibria. He held a postdoctoral appointment at the University of Michigan from 2020-2022 and was a lecturer at the Universidad Autónoma de México (UNAM) in Spring 2021. He has performed field work in Guatemala, Baja California, south-central Mexico, and the U.S. Southwest, and has been published in numerous journals including Geology, Journal of Petrology, Journal of Metamorphic Geology, and Scientific Reports. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Geological Society of America, and the Programa de Apoyo a Proyectos de Investigación e Innovación Tecnológica (PAPIIT; the Mexican NSF equivalent), among others.

Matthew Tarduno (University of California, Berkeley, PhD) is joining the Department of Economics as an assistant professor this fall. His fields of interest are environmental economics and public economics, and he studies externalities and the policies that drive them. He joins UIC from a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University’s Center for the Environment. At Berkeley, he was also a graduate student researcher at the Energy Institute at Haas School of Business. His work has been published in the Journal of Urban Economics and by the University of California Institute of Transportation Studies.

Lauren Johnson (Michigan State University, PhD) is joining the Department of English as an assistant professor this fall. A 2021 Bridge to Faculty Postdoctoral Research Associate, Professor Johnson’s research considers intersections of race, gender, class, and geography to understand the possibilities of Black girls’ literacies, youth and community storytelling and place-making practices, and justice-oriented education. A veteran teacher of secondary English and literacy in New Orleans and New York, her work has been supported repeatedly by the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and she has presented numerous times at AERA and National Council on Teachers of English annual conferences, among others. She has been published in the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education and in the forthcoming anthology, The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Critical Perspectives on Mental Health, where she authored the chapter, “Aesthetic Practices and Youth.”

Kaitlin Forcier (University of California, Berkeley, PhD) is joining the Department of English as an assistant professor this fall. Professor Forcier’s research interests include media theory; digital art; the history of computation; environmental humanities; media archaeology; film theory; and film history, art and technology. She researches and teaches on the history and theory of screen media, with a focus on the intersections of computation, popular media, and film and video art, and her work has been published or is forthcoming in the journals Afterimage and Media-N, the anthology The Media Crease: Essays on Intersectionality and Repetition, and the multi-media collaborative project Screensavers VR. She has presented at numerous conferences including at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Annual Conference, the Princeton Weimar Summer School for Media Studies, and the London Center for Interdisciplinary Research.

Justin Phan (University of California, Riverside, PhD) is joining the Global Asian Studies Program as an Assistant Professor this fall. A 2021 Bridge to Faculty Postdoctoral Research Associate, Professor Phan’s research and teaching interests focus on Southeast Asian diasporic cultural texts, refugee studies, feminist theories and epistemologies, decolonization, colonial and empire formations, critical race and ethnic studies, aesthetics, embodiment, queer diaspora, Afro-Asia, militarism, transnational feminisms, and visual culture. He is currently preparing a monograph for submission to the University of Minnesota Press entitled Embodied Nonalignment: Vietnamese Diasporic Aesthetics and Cold War Mediations and his work has appeared in several outlets, including Contemporary Art from Vietnam: A Reader. He has presented at numerous conferences including the Association of Asian American Studies and the National Women’s Studies Association.

Danielle Beaujon (New York University, PhD) is joining the Department of Criminology, Law, and Justice and the Department of History this fall as an assistant professor. A 2021 Bridge to Faculty Postdoctoral Research Associate, Professor Beaujon is a historian with broad research interests in policing, race, and power in a global context. Her book project, “Controlling the Casbah: Policing North Africans in Marseille and Algiers, 1920-1950,” examines the intimate and oppositional relationship of police officers and North Africans in a connected Franco-Mediterranean world. She has been published in Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques and French Historical Studies, and her work has received support from the American Institute for Maghreb Studies, the Remarque Institute-École Normale Supérieure, and the Coordinating Council for Women in History.

Nicholas Doumanis (University of New South Wales, PhD) is joining the Department of History this fall as Professor and the inaugural Illinois Chair in Hellenic Studies. Professor Doumanis is a historian whose expertise is on the history of Greece, modern Europe, global history, empires, and Greek migrants in Australia. Among his many books are The Edinburgh History of the Greeks, 1912 to the Present: The Long Twentieth Century (Edinburgh UP), Before the Nation: Christian-Muslim Coexistence and its Destruction in Late Ottoman Anatolia (Oxford UP), and A History of Greece (Palgrave Macmillan, Essential Histories Series). His articles have appeared in numerous prestigious journals and anthologies including the Australian Journal of Politics and History; The Cambridge History of International Law, Vol. IX, International Law in the Age of Empire; and the Oxford Handbook for European History. He has presented at conferences, workshops, and seminars throughout Australia, Europe, and North America, and has given interviews and commentary on television and radio. He was awarded the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History from the Institute of Historical Research and the Wiener Library for his book Myth and Memory in the Mediterranean, was a Stanley J. Seeger Fellow in Hellenic Studies at Princeton University, and received an Erasmus+ International Credit Mobility teaching grant from University College Dublin. Professor Doumanis has also consulted closely with the Greek community in Sydney, and has been invited to speak at the Greek Festival of Sydney, The Greek Orthodox Community of Melbourne, and the State Library of New South Wales, among others.

Ivon Padilla-Rodriguez (Columbia University, PhD) is joining the Department of History as an assistant professor this fall. A 2021 Bridge to Faculty Postdoctoral Research Associate, Professor Padilla-Rodriguez is a socio-legal historian of child migration and a scholar-activist. She was the 2021 winner of the Columbia University Bancroft Dissertation Award for her monograph, “Undocumented Youth: The Labor, Education, and Rights of Migrant Children in Twentieth Century America,” and her work has appeared in the Journal of American Ethnic History, Modern Frontiers: Essays on the American West in the Twenty-First Century, and the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History. She has also written for numerous popular and governmental venues, including Time, The Washington Post, and the L.A. Review of Books. She has presented most recently at the annual meetings of the American Historical Association and the American Society for Legal History as well as at the Newberry Library Seminar in Borderlands and Latino/a Studies. Her research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation, American Historical Association, American Society for Legal History, and the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, among others.

Zachary Davis Cuyler (New York University, PhD) is joining the Department of History this fall as an assistant professor. He will also be part of the Middle East and Muslim Societies cluster. Professor Cuyler’s research interests include infrastructure politics, political economy, and environmental history in the mashriq, and his dissertation examines how infrastructures of oil historically shaped Lebanon as a national space and political economy. He has published in several peer-reviewed journals including International Labor and Working-Class History, Historical Materialism, and Labor History and has published editorials and essays in various other venues on the topic of Lebanon’s oil and energy infrastructure. He has presented at the Orient-Institut Beirut, the Sciences-Po Centre de Recherches Internationales, and the Middle East Studies Association, and served as an assistant editor on the Arab Studies Journal and a Senior Policy Associate, Middle East Programs, at Century International in New York.

Gyu-Ho Shin (University of Hawai’i at Manoa, PhD) is joining the Department of Linguistics this fall as an assistant professor. Professor Shin studies language acquisition/development, computational linguistics, Natural Language Processing, psychology of language, and corpus linguistics. His current research focus is on the interplay between linguistic knowledge and cognitive-psychological factors in the course of language learning, specifically on that at the interface of AI. He joins UIC from Palacký University Olomouc in the Czech Republic, where he was an assistant professor in the Department of Asian Studies and the director of both the Lab for Data and Technology and the King Sejong Institute. He has published numerous peer-reviewed articles, most recently in Developmental Science, Cognitive Development, Journal of Child Language, and Applied Linguistics Review. He has presented at conferences around the globe, including at CogSci (Cognitive Science Society), BUCLD (Boston University Conference on Language Development), AAAL (American Association for Applied Linguistics), and EuroSLA (European Second Language Association). His work has been supported by the Czech Ministry of Education (under the European Research and Development Fund), the Academy of Korean Studies, and the Language Learning journal.

Matthew Harrison-Trainor (University of California, Berkeley, PhD) is joining the Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science as an assistant professor this fall. Professor Harrison-Trainor’s research focuses on mathematical logic and computability theory, and he is interested in understanding and measuring complexity in mathematics from a computability-theoretic viewpoint. He joins UIC from the University of Michigan, where he was the Donald J. Lewis Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics. He was also a postdoctoral fellow at Victoria University of Wellington and Massey University (New Zealand) and the University of Waterloo (Canada). His research is supported by the National Science Foundation, and his doctoral thesis, The Complexity of Countable Structures, won the Sacks Prize in 2017, which is awarded by the Association for Symbolic Logic for the most outstanding thesis in mathematical logic worldwide. His work is published or forthcoming in peer-reviewed journals, including most recently Mathematical Social Sciences, the Journal of Symbolic Logic, and Transactions of the American Mathematical Society. He has given numerous talks at conferences and symposia worldwide, and has served as a referee for the Annals of Mathematics, Transactions of the AMS, and Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science, among others.

Austin Baty (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, PhD) is joining the Department of Physics this fall as an assistant professor. He joins UIC from Rice University, where he was a Rice Academy Postdoctoral Fellow. He is a member of an international collaboration of over 2000 physicists that operates the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland. Professor Baty’s research, with Prof. Wei Li in Rice’s Bonner Nuclear Laboratory, has focused on elucidating the properties of the hottest man-made form of matter in the universe: the quark-gluon plasma. In 2022, he won the CMS Collaboration award “for his development work on the heavy ion track reconstruction and research activity aiming to evolve the tracker data storage scheme.” His research has been published in Physical Review Letters and he has served as a reviewer for Physical Review C. He has delivered numerous talks at conferences and seminars worldwide, including most recently at CMS Week (CERN, Switzerland), Quark Matter 2022, and the Vanderbilt University Department of Physics and Astronomy Colloquium.

Christine Coughlin (University of California, Davis) is joining the Department of Psychology as an assistant professor this fall. She joins UIC from the University of Texas at Austin, where she was a postdoctoral researcher. Professor Coughlin’s research interests include episodic memory, flexible cognition, the role of experience in future thinking, and the relation between flexible cognition and resilience. Her research has been supported by the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Institutes of Health, and her work has been published or is forthcoming in various journals, most recently in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Frontiers in Neuroscience, and Cognitive Development and she has served as a reviewer for Child Development, Cognition, Developmental Psychology, and others. She has presented at numerous conferences, including at the Society for Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Annual Conference, the Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting, and the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.

Mayra Guerrero (DePaul University, PhD) is joining the Department of Psychology as an assistant professor this fall. A 2022 Bridge to Faculty Postdoctoral Research Associate, Professor Guerrero’s research centers on examining the social and contextual factors that promote the well-being of marginalized populations using multi-level approaches and frameworks. Before joining UIC, she was a postdoctoral research associate in the Research Consortium on Gender-Based Violence in the Department of Psychology at Michigan State University. She has work published or forthcoming in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence, the Journal of Prevention and Intervention in the Community, and the American Journal of Community Psychology, among others, as well as in the popular press, including in The Community Psychologist and Community Psychology. Her research has been supported by the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, and she was a project director at the Center for Community Research at DePaul University. She has presented at many conferences including the Society for Community Research and Action, the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, and the Midwestern Psychological Association Conference.

Sigrid Willa Luhr (University of California, Berkeley, PhD) will join the Department of Sociology as an assistant professor this fall. Professor Luhr’s research is broadly concerned with the intersections between gender, work, and family, and much of it examines the causes and consequences of workplace inequality across various sectors of the economy. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the American Journal of Sociology, Social Problems, and Gender & Society, among others, and she has also contributed to multiple policy briefs. She has presented at many conferences and seminars, most recently at the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, the RSF Conference on Low-Income Families in the 21^st Century, and the Population Association of America Annual Conference. Her research has been supported by the Work Family Researchers Network Early Career Fellowship and the Soroptimist Founder Region Fellowship, and she is an active mentor in the First-at-LAS program.

Ian Kennedy (University of Washington, Seattle, PhD) will join the Department of Sociology as an assistant professor this fall. Professor Kennedy is a computational social scientist working at the intersection of race, digital platforms, and text analysis, and their research interests include residential segregation, online misinformation, critical race theory, inequality and the digital world, stratification, text analysis statistical methods, and demographic methods. Their work has appeared most recently in The Journal of Quantitative Description, Nature Human Behavior, and Housing Policy Debate, in addition to popular outlets like The New York Times. They have presented at numerous conferences and seminars, most recently at the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, the Population Association of America Annual Meeting, and the Russell Sage Foundation Conference on State Monetary Sanctions and the Cost of Justice, and others. Their research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, and they contributed to a white paper from the Center for an Informed Public about misinformation in the 2020 election.

Emily Vasquez (Columbia University, PhD) will join the Department of Sociology this fall as an assistant professor. A 2021 Bridge to Faculty Postdoctoral Research Associate, Professor Vasquez is an ethnographer of science, medicine, and public health. She has published in many journals, including most recently in Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine, Social Science and Medicine, and PLOS ONE, and she is one of the editors of the book Social Inequalities and Contemporary Struggles for Collective Health in Latin America (Routledge). She has presented at numerous conferences across the United States and internationally, and her research has been supported by a Mellon Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies fellowship, the National Science Foundation, and a Fulbright fellowship.

Sociology

Claire Laurier Decoteau received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Michigan (2008). In fall, Professor Decoteau will begin her term as Interim Head of the Department of Sociology. Broadly, her research focuses on the social construction of health and disease, the politics of knowledge production, and peoples’ grounded experiences with healing and health care systems. Decoteau has received numerous awards for her scholarship and teaching. In 2022, she was awarded the Lewis A. Coser Award for Theoretical Agenda-Setting from the Theory Section of the American Sociological Association. She has also received the Junior Theorist Award, the Robert K. Merton Prize, the Star Nelkin Award and the American Sociological Association’s Dissertation Award. Decoteau has also received two awards for excellence in teaching from UIC, as well as the 2018 Graduate Mentoring award.

Decoteau’s first book, Ancestors and Antiretrovirals: The Biopolitics of HIV/AIDS in Post-Apartheid South Africa (2013, University of Chicago Press) argues that it is through HIV/AIDS policy that the South African government attempted to balance the contradictory demands of postcolonial nation-building – forced to satisfy the requirements of neoliberal global capital and meet the needs of its most impoverished population.  Drawing on 30 months of ethnographic, discursive and historical research, the book traces the politics of AIDS in South Africa from 1994 through 2010 analyzing: the political economy of the post-apartheid health system, the shifting symbolic struggles over the signification of HIV/AIDS, and the ways in which communities profoundly affected by the epidemic incorporate culturally hybrid subjectivities, informed by both indigenous and biomedical healing paradigms.  This book was awarded three honorable mentions for outstanding book awards from American Sociological Association sections: Medical Sociology; Science, Knowledge and Technology; and the Theory Section.

Decoteau’s second book, The Western Disease: Contesting Autism in the Somali Diaspora (2021, University of Chicago Press) draws on three years of ethnographic and interview data and was funded by the National Science Foundation. The Western Disease analyzes the curiously high rates of autism among Somalis in Minneapolis and Toronto, and illustrates how Somalis’ experiences of immigration and racial marginalization play a prominent role in how they make sense of autism.  Somalis in both locations have forged epistemic communities, united around a unique theory of autism that challenges orthodox explanations.  The epistemic communities become a basis for mobilizing for resources and attention.  Centering an analysis on autism within the Somali diaspora exposes how autism has been institutionalized as a white, middle-class disorder, leading to health disparities based on race, class, age and ability.  But Somalis also ask us to consider the social causes of disease and the role environmental changes and structural inequalities play in health vulnerability. This is the first study of autism to explore the racial, class and national implications of autism etiology and politics. This book was awarded the 2022 Robert K. Merton Prize from the Science, Knowledge and Technology section of ASA.

Decoteau’s third book, Emergency: COVID-19 and the Uneven Valuation of Life (Forthcoming, University of Chicago Press) examines how public health metrics and state bureaucrats’ policy decision-making exacerbate race, class and legal disparities in COVID-19 infection and deaths. Drawing on interviews with federal, state and local policymakers and experts, as well as residents of three racially and economically disadvantaged neighborhoods in Chicago, this project analyzes the “racial equity” framework adopted by the state of Illinois and city of Chicago to mitigate racial disparities in COVID-19 outcomes and assesses its success, from the perspective of those most marginalized by race, class and legal status. Decoteau argues that COVID-19 represents and reifies the convergence of three sets of emergency: a state of emergency that protects white supremacy and wealth; the slow emergencies racially marginalized populations have faced due to the long-term gutting of care infrastructure and deindustrialization; and the sacrifice “essential workers” were asked to make to protect the US economy. Each of these three emergencies operate along distinct temporalities, invoke divergent politics of visibility, and are governed with unique strategies of exclusion.

Decoteau has also engaged in research on: 1) debates about the etiology of autism waged between dominant and heterodox autism experts in the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee; 2) debates over the controversial link between childhood vaccinations and autism development within the US federal vaccine court proceedings on autism; 3) sex work and transactional sex in South Africa, where gift and commodity exchange become symbolic distinctions in an increasingly neoliberal economy; 4) the epistemic debates that were instigated by the release of the DSM-5; and 5) a series of theoretical and methodological pieces on multicausal explanation, Bourdieusian action theory, and critical realism.

Decoteau teaches undergraduate and graduate sociological theory as well as courses in the sociology of health and medicine.

Anthropology
Zeynel Gül

Hispanic & Italian Studies
Enrique Macari

Math, Statistics, and Computer Science / Learning Sciences Research Institute
Phi Nguyen

History
Celso Armando Mendoza y Barajas