The research in Alexander S. Flecker’s lab is at the interface between community and ecosystem ecology and aims to understand the functional significance of biodiversity. Much of the research focuses on stream ecosystems in both the tropics and temperate zone, addressing questions pertaining to the importance of species diversity and identity for ecosystem functioning. Flecker’s research team has found that species that engineer their physical and chemical environments can be particularly important drivers of ecosystem structure and function.

María Fernández’s research and teaching concern three areas and their intersections: the history and theory of digital and new media art, postcolonial and gender studies and Latin American art and architecture.

Fernández has taught courses in the history and theory of digital art, Latin American art of various periods as well as feminist art in new media. Recent seminar topics include: Feminist Postumanisms, Latin American Modernisms and Technology, BioArt (with Angela Douglas, Depts. Entomology, Molecular Biology & Genetics) and Video Game Criticism.

Timothy Devoogd studies how the brains of birds encode learned behaviors like song or memory for food locations. Particular questions now being studied include the neural basis for female song discrimination, and the interplay between the hippocampus and other brain areas in spatial memory. He studies these questions in a variety of species in order to infer how these abilities evolved.

Raymond Craib's research and teaching interests revolve around the intersections of space, politics, and everyday practice. He is especially interested in Latin America and/as global history, critical geography/cartography, the left, and theory and history. As a 2020–21 Global Public Voices fellow, he collaborated with José Ragas (Universidad Catolica, Chile).

Ananda Cohen-Aponte works on the visual culture of colonial Latin America, with special interests in issues of cross-cultural exchange, historicity, identity, and anti-colonial movements. Her research and teaching explore legacies of colonialism in contemporary Latinx art as well as Latin American and Caribbean archaeology, visual and material culture in the Andes, and landscape, environment and archaeology of colonialism in Pre-Columbian and colonial Latin American art.

Suman Seth works on the social, cultural, and intellectual history of science and medicine. His interests include the history of medicine, race, and colonialism, the physical sciences (particularly quantum theory), & gender and science.

Lourdes Casanova’s work focuses on environmental policy, government, politics, and policy studies as well as emerging multinationals from Brazil and Latin America.

Philip Lorenz received his PhD from New York University. His teaching and research focus on English and Spanish literature and drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in relation to problems of sovereignty and political theology. Related areas of interest include International Law, Religion, Psychoanalysis, Translation and Poetics and Theory.

Geographic Research Area: India, China, Ukraine, Fiji, and United States

Teaching/Research Interests: Historic cements, modernist architecture, cultural exchange, and sustainable development

Ernesto Bassi Arevalo is an associate professor of history in the College of Arts and Sciences. His research focuses on the role circulation (of goods, people, news, and ideas) plays in the configuration of geographic spaces and political allegiances.