Faculty
Sophie Pinkham

Professor of the Practice, Comparative Literature
Sophie Pinkham’s research focuses on post-Soviet and post-socialist literature, culture, and politics, primarily in Russia and Ukraine. Her current project is a history of the forest in the Russian imagination.
Additional Information
Semida Silveira

Professor of Practice, Systems Engineering
Semida Silveira is a Professor of Practice in the Systems Engineering Program and a member of the CEET Council of Engineers for the Energy Transition. Her goal is to contribute to science-based societal transformation, a global low-carbon circular economy, and sustainable development through transdisciplinary research, education, and actions with impact. She has three decades of experience working with sustainability, particularly energy and climate policy in the European and developing countries' context.
Additional Information
Cristobal Young

Associate Professor, Sociology
Cristobal Young is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology. He works in the overlapping fields of economic sociology, stratification, and quantitative methodology. His research has examined religion and economic growth in Europe, the effects of the Schengen Agreement on European migration, and comparisons of social capital in the U.S. and Europe.
Additional Information
Jean Bernard Cerin

Assistant Professor, Music
Jean Bernard Cerin is a multifaceted artist and scholar who produces and performs in projects ranging from film, recital, oratorio, opera, and folk music. Praised for his “burnished tone and focused phrasing” (Chestnut Hill Local). Cerin performs extensively as a baritone with leading early music ensembles across the United States. He founded the Lisette Project in 2021, a research and performance platform focusing on early Haitian classical music, beginning with the oldest song in Haitian Creole, Lisette quitté la plaine.
Additional Information
Jennifer Kuo

Assistant Professor, Linguistics
Jennifer Kuo’s research focuses on how people learn linguistic sound patterns, and how cognitive biases influence this learning process. She draws heavily on insights from Austronesian languages, including the Formosan languages of Taiwan.
Additional Information
David Cortright

Visiting Scholar
David Cortright is professor emeritus of the practice at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. Previously, Cortright was the director of policy studies at the Keough School’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and director of the institute’s Peace Accords Matrix project, the largest existing collection of implementation data on intrastate peace agreements.
Additional Information
Shaoling Ma

Associate Professor, Asian Studies
Shaoling Ma is an interdisciplinary scholar and critical theorist of global Chinese history, literature, and media. At the broadest level, she is drawn to historical periods when geopolitical, socio-economic, and technological developments appear to provide external vantage points from which to navigate the landscape of cultural production, while, in fact, being resolutely embedded in the latter. Ma's teaching and research interests include late nineteenth-century to contemporary Chinese and Southeast Asian cultural productions, media studies, and critical theory.
Additional Information
Ding Fei

Assistant Professor, City and Regional Planning
Additional Information
Jennifer Newsom

Assistant Professor, Architecture
Additional Information
Kurt Waldman

Assistant Professor, Department of Global Development
Kurt Waldman is an assistant professor in the Department of Global Development at Cornell University. He studies judgment and decision making related to environmental sustainability, climate adaptation and food security. He uses interdisciplinary quantitative methods, drawing on behavioral experiments, econometrics, and often integrating social and environmental data.