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Core Faculty

Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies

Vanessa Gubbins is an Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies in the Department of Romance Studies. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Yale University.

Professor, Anthropology

John S. Henderson’s research interests center on early complex societies and how archaeology can explore the processes through which they develop. How do distinctions in status, wealth, and authority emerge within and between communities?

Senior Lecturer and Stephen H. Weiss Provost’s Teaching Fellow, Romance Studies

Cecelia Lawless teaches both language and literature/film courses as a senior lecturer. For several years, she was the faculty fellow for the Spanish Language House at Alice Cook.

Associate Professor, Labor Relations, Law, and History

Veronica Martínez-Matsuda’s research agenda is motivated by the following central questions: How do those excluded from the legal and everyday rights of American citizenship because of their political status, racial identity, or class standing as low-wage workers, express civic membership and cla

Associate Professor, Comparative Literature; Institute of Comparative Modernities; Literatures in English

Natalie Melas' interests range across Francophone and Anglophone Caribbean literature and thought, modern Greek, modern French and modern English poetry, comparison, modernism and colonialism, modern reconfigurations of antiquity, Homer, Césaire, Cavafy, philosophies of time, decadence, barbarism

Associate Professor, Anthropology and Asian American Studies

Viranjini Munasinghe's research interests focus on nationalism, race and ethnicity, creolization and indigeneity, Asian American Studies, South Asian Diaspora, Labor and Political Economy of Plantation Societies, Historical Anthropology, Anthropological Theory, Comparison, Postcolonial Theory.

Associate Professor, Anthropology

Alex Nading is a medical and environmental anthropologist. His research, mostly focused on Nicaragua, has examined transnational campaigns against dengue fever, bacterial disease, and chronic kidney disease, as well as grassroots movements to address these issues.

Lecturer, Romance Studies

Denise M. Osborne is a lecturer in Portuguese in the Department of Romance Studies. She earned her Ph.D. in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching from the University of Arizona (Tucson, AZ), and her M.A. in Applied Linguistics from Teachers College Columbia University (New York, NY).

Professor, Romance Studies

Edmundo Paz-Soldan is winner of the Bolivian National Book Award (1992 and 2003), and the Juan Rulfo Short Story Award (1997).

Professor, Romance Studies

Simone Pinet's teaching and research focus on medieval and early modern Spanish literatures and cultures, from the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries, especially in relation to spatiality, economics, poetics, and translation.