Faculty Profiles

Chemistry Department
Division of Mathematical and Natural Sciences

I am interested in studying how small molecules and ligands are ferried across our cell membrane with the aid of proteins known as transporters — a type of phenomena which mediates many critical biological processes in the human body. This field lies at the intersection of chemistry, biology and physics, with immense scope for interdisciplinary research. Prior to Reed, I obtained my PhD in Physics from Stony Brook University in 2009 where I used NMR spectroscopy to study how the proteins in our eyes respond to light photons and kick-start the signaling pathway to the brain that allows us to “see” in the dark. Thereafter, my postdoctoral stints at both University of Michigan and Oregon Health & Science University were focused on using biophysical techniques (like NMR and X-Ray Crystallography) to study various biologically critical membrane proteins. I have also spent time as a postdoctoral fellow at Genentech, where I got experience working in a setting where fundamental scientific research gets directly translated into a real-life improvement for the public, in this case, developing better drugs to treat various diseases & medical conditions. At Reed I teach a general chemistry course (Chem102) as well as Chem391 (Structural Biochemistry) and Chem315 (Physical Chemistry Laboratory). In my time away from the classroom and labs, I enjoy doing puzzles, legos, crafting, cooking, camping, and going for long bike rides with my husband and our seven-year-old daughter.

Personal website

Dance Department
Division of the Arts

Portland-based artist and educator originally from New York State. After receiving her MFA in Dance Choreography & Performance, she founded Rejoice! Diaspora Dance Theater in 2014 with the support of New Expressive Works Artist Residency (Subashini Ganesan) and Performance Works NW’s Alembic Co-Production series(Linda Austin). Rejoice was built as a platform to create Black contemporary dance work with movement foundations from Africa and the African-Diaspora. Her choreography focuses on the complex identities, histories and futures of Black communities. Oluyinka was an educator and curriculum builder with Portland Public Schools for six years at Harriet Tubman Middle School, Faubion K-8, and Jefferson High School. Prior to PPS, Oluyinka was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance at Reed College and SUNY The College at Brockport, a three year guest artist for the Sankofa African Drum & Dance Ensemble; her work was featured in the International Association of Blacks in Dance conference (Washington D.C. and Los Angeles),  Carnaval 2014 (Salvador, BA, Brazil), TEDxMtHood, and Newmark Theater among others. Most recently, Oluyinka received the Oregon Dance Education Organization’s teacher of the year award in 2020.

Rejoice! Diaspora Dance Theater website

Spanish Department
Division of Literature and Languages

Born in Buenos Aires, Diego Alonso obtained his DEA from the University of Paris III in 1989 and his PhD from Princeton University in 1998. His research has focused on the relationship among aesthetics, rhetoric, and politics, as reflected in a corpus of essay writers (Martí, Rodó, Vasconcelos, Lugones, Mariátegui, Ortiz, Pedreira, among others) in the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century modernization processes in Latin America. Related to this subject, he published José Enrique Rodó: una retórica para la democracia (Editorial Trilce, 2009). His other line of research involves hermeneutical analysis of contemporary Argentinean and Uruguayan fiction (Borges, Walsh, Onetti, Piglia). In this domain, he has published in prestigious academic journals (Variaciones Borges, Iberoamericana, Latin American Literary Review, Catálogos) and is currently working on a book, Fiction and Truth: Hermeneutical Approaches to History and Memory in Borges and Walsh. Alonso is a board member of LALISA, an association devoted to promoting Latin American, Latino, and Iberian studies in the Pacific Northwest.

Spanish Department webpage

Computer Science Department
Division of Mathematical and Natural Sciences

Personal website

Psychology Department
Division of Philosophy, Religion, Psychology, and Linguistics

Kristen G. Anderson, Ph.D. is a professor of psychology at Reed College and the principal investigator of the Adolescent Health and Women’s Health Research Programs. Her term as vice president of the Research Society on Alcohol begins in July 2024. Her area of expertise is the developmental psychopathology of addictive behaviors from late childhood through emerging adulthood with a special emphasis on gender and gender diversity. Dr. Anderson specializes in alcohol and drug use decision-making in social contexts using simulations and social-cognitive models of alcohol and cannabis use. Dr. Anderson has published extensively and received research funding from the National Institutes of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA), and the ABMRF: The Alcohol Research Foundation. Dr. Anderson also served as the principal investigator of the Portland site of Project Options, a national, multisite field trial of a school-based alcohol and drug prevention program in the United States funded by NIAAA. At the University of Amsterdam, she served as a Fulbright Scholar (2013-2014), the academic director of the Summer Institute on Addictions (2016-2020), and currently codirects the Mental Health, Youth, and Society summer program (2021-). A licensed psychologist, Dr. Anderson received her Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky and completed her postdoctoral training at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Prior to joining the faculty at Reed, she was a research scientist and clinical faculty member in the UCSD Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry. Dr. Anderson attended Simon’s Rock College and Drew University as an undergraduate and also holds a M.Ed. in Special Education from American International College. For more information, please see her websites listed below.

Adolescent Health Research Program
Women’s Health Research Program
Psychology Department webpage

Biology Department
Division of Mathematical and Natural Sciences

I am happy to have joined the community here at Reed College in 2014. I received my B.S. from the University of Michigan in 2002, and my Ph.D. in Cell and Molecular Biology, from Northwestern University in 2007. As a Cell Biologist I subscribe to the mantra "seeing is believing," and microscopy and cell imaging techniques have revolutionized the field, allowing us to observe phenomena at a level of detail previously unimaginable to scientists just a few decades ago. I strive to incorporate imaging and microscopy into the classes I teach as well as in my own research. The courses I currently teach include Biology 101 which is an introductory Biology course, as well as Cell Biology (Bio 372) and a primary literature-based Seminar course focused on Cytoskeletal Dynamics (Bio 431), which is my particular field of expertise. The Cytoskeleton is a network of filaments found within cells that regulate cell shape (morphology) and how cells move (cell motility). Our understanding of how the Cytoskeleton is regulated is fundamental to our knowledge of how immune cells combat pathogens, neurons make connections in our brains, or how cancer cells migrate during metastases. My lab uses the humble fruit-fly (Drosophila melanogaster) to study these basic properties of cells. 

Biology Department webpage

Physics Department
Division of Mathematical and Natural Sciences

Personal website

Linguistics Department
Division of Philosophy, Religion, Psychology, and Linguistics

Kara Becker is Professor of Linguistics at Reed College. Kara is a sociolinguist, a variationist, and a dialectologist, whose scholarship concerns regional and social varieties of American English. Kara received a B.A. in Linguistics and an M.A. in Educational Linguistics from Stanford University, and Ph.D. in Linguistics from New York University. She joined the Reed faculty in 2010, and teaches courses on language and society, including Dialects of English, Contact Languages, Language, Sex, Gender and Sexuality, and African American English. Kara talks often to the media about linguistic diversity in the U.S., most commonly about the New York City dialect, but also about West Coast dialects (Portland Monthly article). More information on Kara’s research interests, teaching, and media presence can be found on her website.

Russian Department
Division of Literature and Languages

Evgenii (Zhenya) Bershtein grew up in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), Russia, and graduated from Tartu University (Estonia). His PhD is from UC Berkeley. He has held research fellowships at Columbia University (2001-02), Helsinki University (2004, 2005), and University of Cambridge (2014). Evgenii Bershtein has published on eighteenth–century Russian poetry, the cultural and intellectual history of Russian modernism, and on Russian film (you can read some of his work here). He has edited the English translation of Yuri Lotman’s Non-Memoirs (Dalkey Archive Press, 2014) and authored the a chapter entitled "Queerness" in the New Cambridge History of Russian Literature  (2024). He is at work on a project entitled Eisenstein, Sexuality, and Decadence and has recently published several papers on this topic. Professor Bershtein teaches classes on twentieth-century Russian literature, Russian and European Symbolism, Soviet and post-Soviet film, contemporary Russia, Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Eisenstein, as well as the Russian language at the elementary and advanced levels.

Computer Science Department
Division of Mathematical and Natural Sciences

Chemistry Department
Division of Mathematical and Natural Sciences

I am excited to be at Reed, where I teach general and inorganic chemistry courses, and run a research laboratory. In the lab, we aim to untangle the fundamental mechanisms that make catalysts work, using approaches from across inorganic, organic, physical, and synthetic chemistry. We have a special focus on protons, the smallest nuclei, and determining what they can do that heavier nuclei cannot. We are also looking for ways to put heavy metal contaminants to good use. The mechanisms we uncover may lead to better catalysts for synthesis and fuels. Before my arrival at Reed, I studied proton-coupled electron transfer (postdoctoral work at Yale University and the University of Washington) and organometallic catalysis (Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley; B.S. at Yale University), and I taught high school chemistry. My favorite thing to chase after, besides a chemical reaction mechanism, is a frisbee.

Personal website

Anthropology Department
Division of History and Social Sciences

Betsey Brada is a cultural anthropologist specializing in health and medicine in southern Africa. She received her Ph.D. in 2011 from the University of Chicago. She comes to Reed this fall from Princeton University where she taught and mentored students in the interdisciplinary Program in Global Health and Health Policy. Her research and teaching interests include: medical anthropology; the anthropology of pedagogy and expertise; and the ethnography and history of Africa. Her book manuscript in progress argues that global health, rather than a unidirectional flow of moral practice and expert knowledge from North to South, is an imaginative framework that organizes the space, time, and ethics of encounter. Based on ethnographic research at the intersection of Botswana's national public HIV treatment program and the private U.S.-based partnerships supporting it, Betsey analyzes the pedagogic projects by which visiting American experts and students as well as local clinicians and patients come to regard themselves and one another in terms of this framework. An article drawn from this project appeared in American Ethnologist and received the 2013 Clark Taylor Paper Prize. A second ethnographic project currently underway examines the development of Botswana's new and only medical school, the first African medical school to be founded after the advent of public HIV treatment and the transnational engagements that have accompanied it.

Theatre Department
Division of the Arts

Theatre Department webpage

History Department
Division of History and Social Sciences

Michael P. Breen is a specialist of early modern French & European social, political, and cultural history. His first book, Law, City, and King: Legal Culture, Municipal Politics, and State Formation in Early Modern Dijon (University of Rochester Press, 2007) examined how the political activities and consciousness of the barristers (avocats) who dominated local governance in an early modern provincial capital evolved in response to the expansion of the royal state. He is currently working on Law and Society in Medieval & Early Modern Europe (under contract with Cambridge University Press), which examines how and why law and legalism came to be foundations of the European social order, rivaling and even surpassing religion. Law and Society examines not only development of the legal professions and their crucial role in transforming European politics, culture, and society, but also law's evolution as a set of social, cultural, and institutional practices shaped by the ordinary men and women who increasingly utilized it in their daily lives. In addition to this research, Prof. Breen is also studying the épreuve du congrès, a controversial medico-legal procedure French Church courts used to adjudicate marital annulment suits in the late medieval and early modern periods. Articles based on this research have appeared or are forthcoming in the Annales de Bourgogne, Genre et Histoire, and the Journal of Modern History. Professor Breen has received numerous fellowships, including an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, an NEH Summer Stipend, and grants from the American Philosophical Society and Folger Shakespeare Library. He has also been an Invited Professor at the Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and has served on the editorial boards of French Historical Studies and Histoire, Économie, et Société. In July 2021, Prof. Breen assumed the role of Editor-in-Chief of H-France (www.h-france.net), the largest scholarly organization for the interdisciplinary study of Francophone history and culture in the Anglophone world.

History Department webpage

Psychology Department
Division of Philosophy, Religion, Psychology, and Linguistics

Music Department
Division of the Arts

Mark Burford is R.P. Wollenberg Professor of Music at Reed and chair of the American Studies program. His research and teaching focus on twentieth-century popular music in the United States, with particular focus on African American music after World War II, and late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Austro-German concert music. His scholarship has appeared several journals and other edited collections, including the article “Sam Cooke as Pop Album Artist—A Reinvention in Three Songs,” which received the Society for American Music’s 2012 Irving Lowens Award for the outstanding article on American music.  He is the author of Mahalia Jackson and the Black Gospel Field (Oxford University Press, 2019) and editor of The Mahalia Jackson Reader. He arrived at Reed in 2007.

Russian Department
Division of Literature and Languages

Chemistry Department
Division of Mathematical and Natural Sciences

Personal website

Economics Department
Division of History and Social Sciences

Felipe Carrera is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Reed College, where he teaches industrial organization, economic history, and econometrics. His research examines questions in industrial organization and applied microeconomics using historical settings. His current work explores the long-term effects on education, crime, and mortality of large-scale displacements of slums during the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, and the interaction between entry and productivity during the Chilean nitrate cartels before World War I. His research has been supported by grants from the California Center of Population Research and the UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate Research. Felipe received his Ph.D. from UCLA in 2020. More information on Felipe’s research interests and teaching can be found on his website.

Personal website

Biology Department
Division of Mathematical and Natural Sciences

Kara earned a BS in Biology from Duke University, a Ph.D. in Biochemistry, Cellular, and Molecular Biology from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and conducted research as a post-doctoral fellow at the University College London, before joining the Reed Biology faculty in the fall of 2012. She teaches Developmental Biology with lab (BIO 351L), Developmental Neurobiology (BIO 431, an advanced conference-style course that focuses on historical and current topics in the visual system), and Introduction to Biology (Cells and Development Module, BIO 102). She also mentors year-long thesis projects (BIO 471) and semester-long independent studies (BIO 481). The research in Kara's lab focuses on how cells transition from proliferation to differentiation in the developing zebrafish visual system and is supported by the NIH National Eye Institute and the MJ Murdock Trust. Kara has a passion for sharing the beauty of biology and is always happy to share movies and images of developing zebrafish with any who would like to tour her lab.

Personal website
Biology Department webpage

Chemistry Department
Division of Mathematical and Natural Sciences

I study how metal ions are trafficked in the cell by using a mixture of biochemistry and spectroscopy. My lab is particularly interested in catching the physical act of metal ion transfer from one metalloprotein to another, as well as characterizing newly discovered metalloproteins. This work heavily relies upon bi-yearly lab trips to a number of synchrotron lightsources. At Reed, I teach Introductory Chemistry, Metabolic Biochemistry (with emphasis on metal ions), and Biochemical Methods. I am also very passionate about increasing the presence of historically underrepresented groups in chemistry, by improving and/or creating institutional scaffolds of support for those groups. Outside of our beautiful College, I am heavily involved in the bioinorganic chemistry community, as well as devoted to exploring the great outdoors. I invite anyone who wants to know more about my work to stop by my office for a cup of tea — it is my true pleasure to translate my science for the public and potential students.

Biology Department
Division of Mathematical and Natural Sciences

Art Department
Division of the Arts

Kris Cohen is trained as a media theorist and an art historian. These two fields come together in his work on the technological mediation of social life. His first large scale research project, now complete, takes up this history near the end, with the advent of electronic networks and the building of new collective forms in networked environments. Future projects will extend this history back in time as a way to better understand the present. One will consider the relationship between art practices and changes to the intellectual property laws that govern creative labor and the commons. Another seeks to write a history for the bitmap as a mid-century screen technology that significantly transformed techniques of visual representation. Kris' PhD is in Art History from the University of Chicago (2010). He has written for the journals Afterall, New Media and Society, Continuum, caareviews, and a number of exhibition catalogues. He has also recently been involved in starting a new online journal, Open-Set. At Reed, he's taught "Video, Media, Politics (1968-Present)," "Figuring Relation," "The Art of Capitalism," "Theories of Forms," and Humanities 110.

Art Department webpage

Psychology Department
Division of Philosophy, Religion, Psychology, and Linguistics

Jennifer Henderlong Corpus is a professor of developmental psychology. Her research focuses on the factors that underlie children’s motivation to learn. She studies the tension and synergy between intrinsic and extrinsic forms of motivation as well as the strategies parents and teachers use to affect children’s motivation. Her courses in developmental psychology focus on the individual in social context and the reciprocal nature of socialization. She also teaches a course in educational psychology that focuses on motivation in educational contexts, which is informed by her scholarly work on achievement motivation. Jennifer earned her B.A. in psychology from the University of Michigan in 1995 before attending Stanford University, where she obtained her Ph.D. in 2000. She has been teaching at Reed since 2001, and in 2014 was named Oregon Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. 

Psychology Department webpage

Economics Department
Division of History and Social Sciences

Erin Cottle Hunt joined the Economics Department at Reed College in 2023. Her research interests include macroeconomics, public finance, and life-cycle economics. She is an applied theorist and uses analytical and quantitative models to answer questions about social security, pensions, saving, and the macroeconomy. She teaches macroeconomic and computational economics courses at Reed College. Prior to working at Reed, Erin was an assistant professor of economics at Lafayette College in Easton Pennsylvania. She completed a Ph.D. in Economics at the University of Oregon in 2018, a M.A. in Political Science at Utah State University in 2011, and B.A.s in Economics and Political Science at Utah State in 2009.

Personal website

Physics Department
Division of Mathematical and Natural Sciences

Alison Crocker is an astrophysicist whose research focuses on the physics of star formation in nearby galaxies. She works on connecting what we know about the gas in galaxies (the precursor to star formation) to what we know about the stars that actually form. Her most recent paper documents how the ultraviolet light from young stars interacts with their surroundings. Alison majored in physics and mathematics at Dartmouth College before attending the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. She earned her DPhil in astrophysics from Oxford and completed two postdoctoral positions at the University of Massachusetts and the University of Toledo before joining the physics faculty at Reed in the fall of 2014. In addition to teaching an astrophysics course, Alison teaches courses across the physics major and runs a weekly open astronomy/astrophysics discussion group.

Personal website

Philosophy Department
Division of Philosophy, Religion, Psychology, and Linguistics

Troy Cross (PhD 2004, Rutgers) works on, broadly speaking, questions of knowledge and reality. In addition to those core areas of philosophy (epistemology and metaphysics), he has recently taught courses on the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of mind, and the nature of color. Before coming to Reed in 2010, he held positions at Yale and at Merton College, Oxford.

Mathematics and Statistics Department
Division of Mathematical and Natural Sciences

Publications website

Political Science Department
Division of History and Social Sciences

Mariela Daby studies the incentives that contribute to the persistence of clientelism in consolidated democracies in Latin America. She is also interested in questions of political participation, voter turnout, and gender and development in new democracies. Her work has been published in the Journal of Comparative Politics, Latin American Research Review, Social Networks, Latin American Politics and Society, Nueva Sociedad, and Women's Policy Journal of Harvard.

Personal website

Economics Department
Division of History and Social Sciences

I specialise in International Economics and Macroeconomics. My current research focuses on how global value chains, exchange rates, and expectations propagate sectoral, aggregate, or spatial disturbances and impact output, inflation, and trade flows. At Reed, I teach International Trade, International Macroeconomics, and Financial Economics. Before joining Reed in August 2024, I worked as a Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science and as a PhD Trainee at the European Central Bank. I obtained my PhD in Economics at the University of York in 2019.

Personal website

Biology Department
Division of Mathematical and Natural Sciences

Google Scholar webpage

Chemistry Department
Division of Mathematical and Natural Sciences

My research focuses on the use of computational methods to study problems of protein biophysics, especially in proteins that are involved in membraneless organelles and aging diseases. The primary method that I use to study these problems is coarse-grained molecular dynamics which allows for the motion of protein aggregates to be studied at length and time-scales needed to study these phenomena. I graduated from the University of Oregon with a double major in Chemistry and Physics. During my time as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, I studied theory and method development of coarse-grained models. I was specifically interested in the theories of interpretation of coarse-grained and developed a method for interpreting observables in coarse-grained models. While at the National Institutes of Health during my postdoc, I started to become interested in using coarse-grained models of intrinsically disordered proteins. Intrinsically disordered proteins play an essential role in protein aggregates and many of these proteins which aggregate also form solid plaques which occur patients of aging diseases. At Reed, I will teaching be General Chemistry (Chem 101 and 102) and Chemical Thermodynamics (Chem 332). I am also excited to start a start a research group to help teach students about the power and joy of computational chemistry.

Mathematics and Statistics Department
Division of Mathematical and Natural Sciences

French Department
Division of Literature and Languages

Ann T. Delehanty joined the Reed faculty in 2000 after completing a PhD in comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley and a BA in philosophy at Carleton College. She is a professor of French and Humanities. She teaches Humanities 110, French language, French literature from the medieval and early modern periods, and comparative literature. She teaches courses that cover all literary genres. She has a particular interest in how literature serves a vital social role not only by representing social relationships but also by critiquing the (sometimes) harmful presumptions that lie behind those relationships. Delehanty's research is focused on the literature and philosophy of early modern Europe, particularly France, Spain, and England. Her first book, Literary Knowing in Neoclassical France: From Poetics to Aesthetics, came out from Bucknell UP in 2013. That book traces the shift away from rule-based poetics in the late seventeenth century and towards experience- and sentiment-based aesthetics in the early eighteenth century. Her second book, entitled Disenchantment, Skepticism, and the Early Modern Novel in Spain and France (Routledge, 2022), argues that the experimental form of several early modern novels served to allow their authors to "disillusion" (desengañar) their readers and to make a veiled skeptical critique.

English Department
Division of Literature and Languages

Jay M. Dickson is Professor of English and Humanities at Reed College. He received an A.B. in English and American Language and Literature from Harvard University, and his Ph.D. in English is from Princeton University. Professor Dickson has taught at Reed College from 1996 to 1999 as a Visiting Assistant Professor, and then since 2001 on a permanent basis. From 1999 to 2001 he was Assistant Professor of English at the University of Tennessee—Knoxville, where he was awarded the John G. Hodges Excellence in Teaching Award. At Reed, he teaches in Humanities 110 and Humanities 220, and also teaches courses in the English department on British 21st-, 20th-, and 19th- century fiction; memory and desire in modern fiction; detective stories and crime fiction; James Joyce; Virginia Woolf; and the literature and culture of the British Home Front during World War II. He has published on many modernist figures, including Woolf, Joyce, E. M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield, and Lytton Strachey. His most recent article, “Katherine Mansfield, Garsington, and Bloomsbury,” recently appeared in The Bloomsbury Handbook to Katherine Mansfield, ed. Todd Martin (Bloomsbury, 2021). He has forthcoming a specially commissioned essay on sentimentality and expression in Mansfield’s short story “The Garden Party” in the 2022 issue of Katherine Mansfield Studies, and also an article on sentimental education in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited in Friendship and the Novel, ed. Allan Hepburn (McGill University Press, 2023).

Anthropology Department
Division of History and Social Sciences

Tarık Nejat Dinç is a sociocultural anthropologist working at the intersection of environmental anthropology, science and technology studies, and resource geography. He received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Stanford University in 2022. Nejat has research expertise in rural environmental justice movements, technopolitics of risk, and materialities of mining and toxicity, with a regional focus on Turkey, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East. His current book project, Incomplete: Risk Topographies and Conflict Landscapes in the Age of the New Gold Rush, traces the main contours of extractive violence and conflicts in the current mineral age by exploring the making of Turkey’s first modern gold mine in Bergama, a primarily cotton and olive farming town in the Aegean region. A selection of this work, “Assembling Gold, Manufacturing Risk: Technopolitics in the Age of the Third Gold Rush,” is forthcoming in the edited volume Material Politics in Turkey: Infrastructure, Science, and Expertise. Before joining Reed, he taught at Stanford University and Bahçeşehir University, Istanbul. Nejat is a scholar-activist and worked as a food and agriculture campaigner for Greenpeace and as Program Coordinator of the Farmers’ Union of Turkey, a member of the global peasant movement La Via Campesina, prior to completing his Ph.D. His new research project critically examines the emerging conjuncture of climate change mitigation and biomining,  a novel extractivist practice whereby acid-secreting synthetic microorganisms become significant mining actors to meet the mineral needs of lithium batteries - the critical infrastructure of “energy transition.”

History Department
Division of History and Social Sciences

Professor Dirks was educated at Reed College and Yale University. She is a veteran teacher of undergraduate U.S. history. She has taught classes on U.S. cultural and political history, the history of western consumer culture, U.S. women's history, the history of the nineteenth-century family, and twentieth-century gender and sexuality. Professor Dirks also participates in Reed’s American Studies colloquium. Her current research project is tentatively titled Giving Women Credit and focuses on twentieth-century American women's claims to citizenship rights based on their economic roles as consumers, wage earners and heads of household. She recently contributed a review essay to the Oregon Historical Quarterly's special issue to mark the state centenary of woman suffrage: "The Straight State of Oregon: Notes Toward Queering the History of the Past Century."

Chinese Department
Division of Literature and Languages

German Department
Division of Literature and Languages

Spanish Department
Division of Literature and Languages

Elizabeth Drumm is the John and Elizabeth Yeon Professor of Spanish and Humanities. She joined the Reed faculty in 1995 after receiving a BA from the Program of Liberal Studies at the University of Notre Dame and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago. She teaches Spanish language courses, literature courses on 19th- and 20th-century Peninsular Spanish literature and a course on Don Quixote and narrative theory. She also teaches Reed’s interdisciplinary Humanities course on the ancient Mediterranean. Her current research focuses on memory and representation in Spanish modernism and, in particular, Ramón del Valle-Inclán's "aesthetics of memory." She has published articles on Valle-Inclán, Antonio Buero Vallejo, Ignacio Amestoy and Fernando Arrabal and is the author of Painting on Stage: Visual Art in Twentieth-Century Spanish Theater, a book that explores the relationship between theatrical language and visual images.

Spanish Department website

Theatre Department
Division of the Arts

Catherine (Kate) Ming T'ien Duffly is a scholar-director and community-engaged theatre artist with a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to her position as Assistant Professor of Theatre at Reed, Kate taught at UC Berkeley and California College of Arts. Her teaching and research interests include acting, directing, socially engaged and community-based theatre, 20th and 21st century American theatre, race theory and performance and feminist performance. Kate's writing has appeared in Theatre Journal, Theatre Annual, and TDR. She has collaborated on projects with Cornerstone Theater, Touchable Stories, Lunatique Fantastique, Wise Fool Community Arts, and Bread and Puppet Theatre. Kate currently sits on the board of Portland's August Wilson Red Door Project, an organization which seeks to change the racial ecology of Portland through the arts.

Personal website

Art Department
Division of the Arts

Personal website

English Department
Division of Literature and Languages

Michael Faletra has been teaching and writing about the literatures of medieval Britain, including Middle English, Anglo-Latin, Anglo-Norman, Welsh, Irish, and Anglo-Saxon. He is the editor and translator of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain (Broadview Press, 2008), one of the most influential books of the English Middle Ages. His most recent critical study, Wales and the Medieval Colonial Imagination: The Matters of Britain, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2014, and he has also published a number of articles on English proto-nationalism, Middle English and Anglo-Latin pseudo-histories, and on the interpenetration of English and Celtic cultures during the "long" twelfth century. His current projects include a book-length study of the Anglo-Latin writer Gerald of Wales and a collaborative translation (with Paul Merchant) of some of the works of the finest poet of medieval Wales, Dafydd ap Gwilym. Since 2001, Michael has been a member of the faculty at Reed College, where he regularly teaches courses on Chaucer, Dante, the medieval romance, and medieval Celtic literatures.

Personal website

Music Department
Division of the Arts

Biology Department
Division of Mathematical and Natural Sciences

Biology Department webpage

Computer Science Department
Division of Mathematical and Natural Sciences

Professor Fix received his B.S. in mathematics and computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1992, and his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Washington in 2002. His main interests are in the design and analysis of algorithms and in the theory of computation. Fix's work seeks to adapt ideas from theoretical approaches to their practical implementation. His past work, for example, considered the impact of cache performance on algorithm design. More recently, he has investigated the parallel implementation of algorithms and data structures that support graph search and large text indexing, and also formal methods for reasoning about concurrent and distributed computation.

Personal website

Dance Department
Division of the Arts

Victoria Fortuna is a dance studies scholar and contemporary dance practitioner. Her teaching and research interests include Latin American concert and social dance, dance as a mode of political engagement and community organization, collaborative creation methods, and cultural histories of dance in transnational perspective. She founded and directs the Community Dance at Reed project, which brings together members of the Reed and broader Portland communities. Her book, Moving Otherwise: Dance, Violence, and Memory in Buenos Aires (Oxford UP, 2019), examines the relationship between Buenos Aires based contemporary dance practices and histories of political and economic violence in Argentina from the mid-1960s to the mid-2010s. She is currently working on two projects: a digital humanities project focused on the use of personal collections in dance studies research and a book length project that examines the relationship between concert dance and the construction of race in Argentina during the twentieth century. Her articles appear in publications including Dance Research Journal, Performance Research, and The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics. She has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, New York Public Library, Fulbright, Society of Dance History Scholars, American Society for Theatre Research, and Latin American Studies Association. She also serves on the Board of Directors of the Dance Studies Association. Victoria holds a BA in Comparative Literature from Brown University and an MA and PhD in Performance Studies from Northwestern University.

German Department
Division of Literature and Languages

Jake Fraser joined the Reed faculty in 2018 and is Associate Professor of German and Humanities. He received a BA in Economics from UNC-Chapel Hill (2010) and a PhD in Germanic Studies from the University of Chicago (2018). He specializes in late 18^th- and early 20^th-century German literature and philosophy, with emphases in philosophies of time and history and histories of science and technology. At Reed, he teaches courses on 20^th-century German thought and literature, psychoanalysis, and media studies. He has published on figures and topics ranging from Heinrich von Kleist and early modern print media to Franz Kafka and technologies of bureaucracy. He is currently completing a book-length study of theories and technologies of “retroactivity” [Ger: Nachträglichkeit] from the 18^th to 20^th centuries. Future projects include a study of the metaphorics of the Book of Nature in the late 18^th century and a media history of latency and delay.

Personal website

Spanish Department
Division of Literature and Languages

Ariadna García-Bryce earned her BA from Yale University in 1989, majoring in Comparative Literature; she earned her PhD in Spanish Literature from Princeton University in 1997. She works on early modern Spanish literature and culture and has published in peer-reviewed journals on a variety of topics: the relationship between drama, religion, and visual culture; rhetoric, poetics and the construction of social authority; the appropriation of Baroque poetics in twentieth-century Latin America; conceptions of the body and gender construction. Her book, Transcending Textuality: Quevedo and Political Authority in the Age of Print (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), examines the connection between political prose and court spectacle in the context of incipient bureaucratization. At Reed, aside from courses in her area of expertise, she teaches Humanities 110, “Introduction to Humanities: Greece and the Ancient Mediterranean”, and Humanities 210, “Early Modern Europe.” 

German Department
Division of Literature and Languages

Katja Garloff joined the Reed Faculty in 1997 after receiving an M.A. from the University of Hamburg and a Ph.D. in German Literature from the University of Chicago. She is the author of Words from Abroad: Trauma and Displacement in Postwar German Jewish Writers (Wayne State University Press, 2005), Mixed Feelings: Tropes of Love in German Jewish Culture (Cornell University Press, 2016), and Making German Jewish Literature Anew: Authorship, Memory, and Place (Indiana University Press, 2022), as well as the co-editor of German Jewish Literature after 1990 (Camden House, 2018). In recent years, she has won grants from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). She serves on the editorial boards of Humanities, of Nexus: Essays in German Jewish Studies, and of The Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook. At Reed, she offers courses on modern German literature, German Jewish culture, and film and media studies, and she also teaches in Humanities 220.

History Department
Division of History and Social Sciences

I teach Latin American history, and classical and early modern European humanities. As the only Latin Americanist and Iberianist in the history department, I try to offer a broad array of classes, focusing on social, religious, and ethnohistory; generally I teach one colonial and one modern class a year. Recent offerings have been Catholicism in the Early Modern Spanish World; the Incas; the Maya; Race and Ethnicity in the Andes; the United States and Latin America; Labor in Modern Latin America; and the Mexican Revolution. My research and publications focus on colonial Cusco [Peru]. Earlier work on the Incas include Shadows of Empire: The Indian Nobility of Cusco, 1750-1825 (Cambridge, 2005) and several articles. At present I am working the geography of late 17th-century Cusco and the role of royal government in this mid-colonial society; this project has produced several articles to date. Among grants and awards I’ve won since joining Reed in 1998 are Marjorie Millicent McIntosh Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation (2006-8) and the Alice Adams Fellowship at the John Carter Brown Library (2015); and, for articles, the James Alexader Robinson Prize (2005), the Tibesar Prize (2008), and the Franklin Pease G.Y. Prize (2012, runner-up). I have a BA from Yale in Political Philosophy, an MA from Harvard in History, and an MPhil and PhD from Columbia in History.

Chemistry Department
Division of Mathematical and Natural Sciences

Professor Gerrity received a B.A. in Chemistry from Cornell College in 1977, and a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from Harvard University in 1982. He joined the Reed Faculty in 1987. Dan currently teaches all of the physical chemistry lecture and laboratory courses offered at Reed, and he participates in the teaching of the analytical chemistry course as well (during his first dozen years at the College, Dan was solely responsible for teaching all four of the 300-level chemistry courses required for the chemistry major at Reed — including all of the lab sections associated with these courses). He served as a member of the Committee of Examiners for the Graduate Record Exams Subject Test in Chemistry for eight years, was elected to the Executive Committee of the American Chemical Society’s Division of Physical Chemistry (serving from 1994-1997) as well as the Western Spectroscopy Association (serving from 1991-1994), and was Reed’s liaison for the Partners In Science Program for over fifteen years. Dan is an experimental physical chemist; his research utilizes the short bursts of extremely intense light produced by pulsed lasers to study chemical dynamics and the electronic structure of molecules. In addition to the hundreds of students he has had the pleasure to teach, Dan is most proud of his contributions to the construction of the Arthur Scott Chemistry Building (including helping to get financial support from the NSF and the Murdoch Foundation), raising funds for several major equipment purchases for the chemistry program, and helping to obtain College funding for over 50 student summer research positions in the sciences at Reed.

Chemistry Department webpage

Religion Department
Division of Philosophy, Religion, Psychology, and Linguistics

Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, Professor of Religion & Humanities, joined Reed College in 2002 after completing his doctoral studies in the committee on the study of religion at Harvard University. An internationally recognized scholar in Islam in America and the Middle East, he was named a Carnegie Scholar for his book A History of Islam in America and a Guggenheim Fellow for his current book project on the mosque in Islamic history. He also served as one of five national scholars who developed the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Library Association Muslim Journeys Bookshelf.

Psychology Department
Division of Philosophy, Religion, Psychology, and Linguistics

Chemistry Department
Division of Mathematical and Natural Sciences

Russian Department
Division of Literature and Languages

Marat Grinberg came to Reed College in 2006 and is professor of Russian and Humanities. He received his BAs in Comparative Literature from Columbia University and in Modern Jewish Studies from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in 1999, and his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago in 2006. He is a specialist in 20th century Russian literature and culture, with an emphasis on Soviet poetry, modern Jewish literature, culture, and politics, and post-war European and American cinema. At Reed he teaches courses in Russian poetry and 19th century novel, Russian and Jewish literature of destruction, Jewish modernisms, Soviet science fiction, Introduction to Comparative Literature, and courses on film and media studies. He is the author of I am to be Read not from Left to Right, but in Jewish: from Right to Left: The Poetics of Boris Slutsky (Academic Studies Press 2011/ paperback 2013), TheCommissar (Intellect, 2016), and The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf (Brandeis University Press, 2022). He is also co-editor of Woody on Rye: Jewishness in the Films and Plays of Woody Allen (Brandeis University Press, 2013) and the editor and translator of Mikhail Goldis’ Memoirs of Jewish District Attorney from Soviet Ukraine (Academic Studies Press, 2024). He has published extensively in both academic and journalistic venues on Russian and Jewish literature, culture, and cinema.

Computer Science Department
Division of Mathematical and Natural Sciences

Adam Groce is a cryptographer whose work focuses on database privacy. The goal of this field is to allow large databases of private information (e.g., medical records) to be used by researchers interested in advancing our understanding of the world while at the same time protecting the individuals whose information the databases contain. He is also involved in efforts to apply game-theoretic concepts to cryptography, treating adversaries as self-interested agents with particular goals. Apart from his research in cryptography, he is interested in all aspects of theoretical computer science, as well as in cybersecurity policy questions. Adam holds bachelors degrees in mathematics and political science from MIT and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Maryland. He joined Reed as a visitor in 2014.

Personal website

Religion Department
Division of Philosophy, Religion, Psychology, and Linguistics

Economics Department
Division of History and Social Sciences

Denise Hare is the Dr. Lester B. Lave Professor of Economics at Reed College. Her research examines economic development in China and Vietnam, addressing questions about labor markets, gender, rural industry, privatization and property rights, local public finance, and food security policy. Current work explores differences in returns to schooling across the general and vocational tracks in contemporary China. Denise received her B.A. from Carleton College and her Ph.D. from Stanford University, both in economics. From 1995 to 1997, she held a Postdoctoral Fellow position in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at The Australian National University. In 2000 and 2001, she held a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship at Vietnam National University. In 2008 she was an Institute for International Research Fellow at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center of Nanjing University. Her work also has been funded by the Ford Foundation, the Committee for Scholarly Communication with the People's Republic of China, and the Pew Foundation. From 2002 to 2015 she served as an instructor and research mentor in the Chinese Women Economists' Network hosted by the China Center for Economic Research at Beijing University. In the fall of 2021, Denise held the SIT Investment Visiting Professor of Asian Policy chair at Carleton College.

Economics Department webpage

Art Department
Division of the Arts

Juniper Harrower works at the intersection of ecology and art, specializing in multispecies entanglements under climate change. Through a multimedia art and science research practice she considers the ways that humans influence ecosystems while seeking solutions that protect at-risk species and promote environmental justice. Harrower received a PhD in plant ecology from UC Santa Cruz, an MFA in art practice from UC Berkeley, and a teaching credential focused on education for multicultural classrooms. She has collaborated or exhibited with: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Berkeley Art Museum, the Getty, California Academy of Sciences, Santa Cruz Museum of Art, Wolf Museum, Wignall Museum, Cameron Art Museum, Museum of Art and History Lancaster, Fort Mason Center, Palm Springs Museum, RMIT Australia, Universidad Complutense Spain, Entre y Arte Buenos Aires, ISEA Montreal, and Joshua Tree National Park among other places. Harrower is the recipient of several awards such as the Cota-Robles Fellowship, UC Berkeley MFA Fellowship, Andrew Mellon Foundation, National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Americorps Fellowship, Hammett Fellowship, and received the highest ranked dissertation award by Leonardo MIT press. She publishes in academic journals across disciplines and her research and artistic works have received wide exposure in popular media such as National Geographic, Kunstforum International, KCET Artbound, Atlas Obscura, the associated press, podcasts, music festivals and conferences. Harrower founded and directed the art+science initiative at UC Santa Cruz, and has taught art at both UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz. Her new book project and upcoming exhibition in partnership with MOAH Lancaster and the Getty, considers the ecologies and caretaking of Joshua tree in collaboration with indigenous scholars, artists, and scientists.

Personal website

Physics Department
Division of Mathematical and Natural Sciences

Jennifer Heath earned a BA in mathematics and physics from Whitman College and a PhD in physics from University of Oregon. Before coming to Reed in 2022, she was a professor at Linfield University and a visiting scientist at National Renewable Energy Laboratory and at University of Washington. Her National Science Foundation supported research focuses on electronic transport in materials such as photovoltaics, two-dimensional materials, and polymer-nanoparticle composites, using Scanning Probe Microscopy and other methods. She particularly enjoys welcoming students into her laboratory, whether they are exploring these topics or developing their own ideas. Her work is generally collaborative and interdisciplinary, and anyone who would like to learn more, or who wants to explore the ways scanning probe microscopy could potentially apply to their work, is encouraged to reach out. She currently teaches Oscillations and Waves, and Energy and Sustainability. She also enjoys gardening and hiking, and occasionally fosters cats and kittens.

Philosophy Department
Division of Philosophy, Religion, Psychology, and Linguistics

PhD, Princeton, 1988. Joined the faculty in 1991. His interests are in metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of language. He teaches these subjects regularly, and has written on them for journals and collections. He is currently doing work in the philosophy of time, specifically on the nature and reality of tense.

Psychology Department
Division of Philosophy, Religion, Psychology, and Linguistics

French Department
Division of Literature and Languages

Hugh Hochman joined the Reed College faculty in 1999 and is Professor of French and Humanities. He received his BA in Comparative Literature from Columbia University in 1990, and his PhD in French from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1999. He teaches French language courses, courses in 20th-century French poetry and prose, and Humanities 220, Reed’s interdisciplinary modern European humanities course. His research focuses on 20th-century French poets, and he is especially interested in the relationship of language to material reality and in the ways in which the interpretive gestures demanded by literary texts are related to ethical questions of human action. He has published articles on Yves Bonnefoy, Guillevic, Paul Eluard, Robert Desnos, Jacques Réda, and most recently, Francis Ponge and the ethical goals of a poetics of the nonhuman.

Psychology Department
Division of Philosophy, Religion, Psychology, and Linguistics

I am a cognitive scientist who studies the structure of human knowledge. Two broad, interrelated questions guide my work: (1) How does language reflect and shape the way we think? (2) How do people reason about complex, real-world issues? My research exploring these questions engages undergraduate students as close collaborators in all aspects of the scientific process. My teaching focuses on core topics in cognitive psychology and fundamentals of research design and data analysis, with the goal of preparing students for lives of thoughtful, evidence-based inquiry. Beyond Reed, I am active in the interdisciplinary cognitive science community and have served on the program committee for the Cognitive Science Society's annual conference. I hold a B.A. in human biology and an M.A. in psychology from Stanford University, and I earned my Ph.D. in cognitive psychology at Emory University. I also completed a postdoctoral fellowship in cognitive science at UC Berkeley. Before joining the Reed faculty in 2020, I was an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Colorado College for six years.

Psychology department webpage
Google Scholar publication list

Philosophy Department
Division of Philosophy, Religion, Psychology, and Linguistics

Paul Hovda's research interests include metaphysics and philosophical logic. He is particularly interested in formally rigorous theories that bear on metaphysical topics, such as mereology. He received his B.A. with majors in Mathematics and in Philosophy from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from UCLA.

Personal website

History Department
Division of History and Social Sciences

Joshua Howe is Associate Professor of History and Environmental Studies. He teaches courses in U.S. and world environmental history, the U.S. West, and the history of U.S. foreign policy, as well as in the interdisciplinary Environmental Studies junior seminar. Much of his early research revolved around the science and politics of climate change, and in 2014 he published Behind the Curve: Science and the Politics of Global Warming: Science and the Politics of Global Warming(University of Washington Press), followed by an edited collection called Making Climate Change History: Documents from Global Warming’s Past (University of Washington Press, 2017). Since 2016 he has also been engaged in a long-term research project investigating relationships among nature and natural resources, toxicity, and American foreign policy, with a primary focus on the environmental legacies of Cold War foreign policy on bodies and landscapes throughout the Cold War world. His forthcoming co-authored book with Marine Corps Veteran and Reed MALS graduate Alexander Lemons, Warbody: A Marine Sniper and the Hidden Violence of Modern Warfare (W.W. Norton, 2025), explores the myriad toxic exposures among American military personnel during the global war on terror in a far-reaching reconceptualization of the violence of warfare. Josh holds a B.A. in history and creative writing from Middlebury College and a Ph.D. in history from Stanford University. From 2010-2012, he served as a postdoctoral fellow with the National Science Foundation’s John Tyndall Correspondence Project at Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana. He has been at Reed since 2012. Josh currently serves as chair of the Environmental Studies Program, and served as the chair of the History Department from 2020-2022. When he is not in the classroom or the archives, you might see him skiing, surfing, riding bikes, or otherwise playing outside somewhere in the mountains of the greater northwestern U.S.

Greek, Latin, and Ancient Mediterranean Studies Department
Division of Literature and Languages

Alice Hu studies Latin literature of the early imperial period, with particular interests in Latin epic poetry and intertextuality. Past research projects have focused on Vergil’s use of tragic allusion in the Aeneid. Alice is particularly interested in trauma and PTSD in ancient literature; her current research project focuses on Statius’ Thebaid, examining the epic’s preoccupation with survivors and survival in the context of larger discourses about the traumas of civil war that characterize literature produced in the aftermath of the Roman civil war of 69 CE. Alice has taught courses in Latin and Greek at all levels, on Roman topography and history, and on the mythological figure of Hercules through the ages; at Reed, she will teach both languages and in the Humanities 110 program. Prior to coming to Reed, she taught at Gustavus Adolphus College. Before that, she was Resident Instructor at the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome. Alice earned her B.A. in Classics and History from Stanford University and her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.

Physics Department
Division of Mathematical and Natural Sciences

Born in Germany, I studied physics at the Humboldt University in Berlin, obtained my Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego in 2002 and joined Reed College in 2007 after a postdoctoral position at Duke University. I am interested in the nonlinear dynamics of dissipative systems and networks of such systems. Through an interplay of theory and tabletop experiments I address questions such as: How do systems transition from equilibrium to a state of complicated non-repeating oscillations as parameters are changed? How does one determine the value of those parameters from measured output? What new collective phenomena arise when several oscillatory systems are linked to form a network? How do these phenomena depend on the topology of the network, the coupling strengths and the coupling delays that arise due to finite signal propagation times? Experiments in my lab range from mechanical systems, such as a chaotic water wheel whose slow movements can be observed with the naked eye, to optoelectronic oscillators whose light intensity fluctuates on timescales of nanoseconds or less.

Physics Department webpage

English Department
Division of Literature and Languages

Chemistry Department
Division of Mathematical and Natural Sciences

Personal website

Psychology Department
Division of Philosophy, Religion, Psychology, and Linguistics

Chinese Department
Division of Literature and Languages

Jing Jiang joined the Reed faculty in 2006 and is Professor of Chinese and Humanities. She received a BA and a MA in English Language and Literature from Nanjing University Peking University respectively, and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor. She specializes in 20th-century Chinese literature and culture, with particular interests in the question of translation and transnational approaches to the study of literature.  At Reed, she teaches courses on modern Chinese literature, post-socialist and Sinophone film, and participates in the team-taught Chinese Humanities course. She regularly serves as a member of the Film and Media Studies committee and Comparative Literature Committee. Also, she teaches the Chinese language at the intermediate and advanced levels. She has published on the writer Xiao Hong, early modern Chinese drama, Feng Xiaogang’s film, and Chinese science fiction (an AAS Short book). Her current book-length research project, tentatively titled “The World Embedded in Modern Chinese Literary Imagination,” received support from the inaugural ACLS Fellowship in Chinese and Comparative Literature. 

English Department
Division of Literature and Languages

Personal website

Biology Department
Division of Mathematical and Natural Sciences

Keith Karoly received his B.A. in biology from Whitman College and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in evolutionary biology from The University of Chicago, studying the reproductive biology of California annual lupines for his doctoral research. He conducted post-doctoral research at SUNY-Stony Brook and the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, investigating the pollination dynamics of avalanche lilies in Colorado and the evolution of separate sexes for a meadow rue in upstate New York. Keith began his current position in the Reed College Biology Department in 1994. He teaches Vascular Plant Diversity, Molecular Ecology, Introductory Biology, and seminar courses on Molecular Genetic Analyses of Plant Evolution and Plant-Human Ecological and Evolutionary Interactions. His research projects have been broadly centered on the genetics and ecology of plant evolutionary diversification, with a particular interest in the mating systems of flowering plants. Specific projects since arriving at Reed have included continuing studies of mating system variation in annual California lupines, the evolution of floral diversity in the mustard family, the phylogeography of the Oregon white oak, and genetic and ecological studies focused on understanding the recent evolutionary divergence of PNW larkspurs (the genus Delphinium) — several of which are species of conservation concern.

Biology Department webpage

Art Department
Division of the Arts

Dana E. Katz, Ph.D. (2003) in Art History from the University of Chicago, is Joshua C. Taylor Professor of Art History and Humanities at Reed College, where she teaches courses on Renaissance art, architecture, and material culture; early modern culture in Europe, the Americas, and the Muslim Mediterranean; and art historical methodologies. Her research explores representations of religious difference in the art and culture of early modern Italy. In particular, she studies the relations and negotiations between Jewish cultural history and the visual culture of the Italian Renaissance. A recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, Samuel H. Kress Foundation, Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundations, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Renaissance Society of America, Katz is the author of The Jew in the Art of the Italian Renaissance (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008) and The Jewish Ghetto and the Visual Imagination of Early Modern Venice (Cambridge University Press, 2017 and 2019). Her new book project, entitled Mimicry and the Art Museum, redirects her inquiry of social difference to the museum to investigate the intersection of early modern art history and contemporary issues of social justice. Mimicry and the Art Museum explores how the popular remaking of museum images from the past can make new connections in the present through representational strategies of imitation.

Website

Linguistics Department
Division of Philosophy, Religion, Psychology, and Linguistics

Sameer joined the Linguistics Department at Reed College in 2012. His research interests lie in phonetics and phonology, areas that cover the physical attributes of speech sounds, the complex patterns they form, and the abstract representations they embody in our mental grammars. His publications focus on intonation, voice quality, and reduplication, with a particular interest in the languages of South Asia and Mesoamerica. Every year, he teaches phonetics, phonology, and half of the introductory course on formal linguistics. In selected years, he also teaches advanced courses on intonation, laboratory phonology, phonological knowledge, field methods, and South Asian languages. He serves as the director of the Lab of Linguistics, where faculty and students conduct research on diverse languages and their varieties.

Personal website

English Department
Division of Literature and Languages

Educated in France, Germany and the US, Nathalia King holds a French baccalaureat, studied at the University of Freiburg, has a B.A. in Comparative Literature from UMass/Amherst and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from New York University. She has taught at Reed since 1987 and has been the recipient of Fulbright and Mellon grants. Her research focuses on the transitions between oral and literate cultures (in classical and modernist literature); text-image relations; and comparative accounts of consciousness in philosophy, psychology, and literature. Her courses include: Intro to Theory; Literary Theory; Description and Narration; the Literary Imagination and the Working Hand; and Theories of Mind: Representations of Consciousness.

Computer Science Department
Division of Mathematical and Natural Sciences

Personal website

Music Department
Division of the Arts

Mathematics and Statistics Department
Division of Mathematical and Natural Sciences

Personal website

Political Science Department
Division of History and Social Sciences

Chris was an assistant professor at James Madison University from 2007-2011 and has been at Reed since Fall 2011. His research interests include many aspects of the policy process, with a particular theoretical focus on policy design and implementation. Substantively, Chris has focused on environmental policy, homeland security policy, and the politics of state budgeting. Chris currently teaches introduction to public policy, state and local politics and policy, and environmental politics and policy. Chris' classes are also a part of the environmental studies (ES) program at Reed. He can be found talking politics and policy anywhere, but particularly where there is pinball, bowling, barbeque, and good fishing.

Political Science Department webpage

Spanish Department
Division of Literature and Languages

I hold a PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures (Spanish) from the University of Michigan (2012) and joined Reed in August 2014. I also hold a master’s degree in urban planning and studies from Michigan, and was a practitioner architect before turning to academia. My area of specialization is 20th and 21st century Latin American literature and culture with an emphasis on contemporary Central America, Mexico and Peru. My research interests include critical, spatial and political theory, state violence and the languages of resistance, and the relation between culture, politics and the production of space, all of which I strive to incorporate in my teaching. I am currently at work on a book-length project on the languages and spaces of (counter)insurgency in Latin America.

Theatre Department
Division of the Arts

Peter Ksander is a stage designer and theater artist who joined the Reed College Faculty in 2011. He holds an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and a BA from the University of Iowa. In the decade prior to arriving at Reed he created designs for performance events in both the United States and Europe. His work has been presented at The National Theater of Hungary, Maison des Arts de Creteil, The Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Public Theater, The Chocolate Factory, The Walker Art Center, Arts at St. Ann’s, La Mama ETC. PS122, HERE Arts Center, The Ontological-Hysteric Theater, The ICA (Boston), Theater for a New Audience, The TBA Festival, and the Under the Radar Festival as well as regional theaters around the country. In 2005 Peter was a recipient of the NEA/TCG Career Development Program, through which he spent two years investigating how experimental theater ideas are explored at all levels of production in the United States. In 2006 He joined the curatorial board of the Ontological-Hysteric Incubator and for the next five years served as a curator of new and experimental work. During that time he worked alongside co-curator Brendan Regimbal to develop SHORTFORM, a residency program for artists to explore serial and sequential performance works. In 2008 he won an Obie award for the scenic design of Untitled Mars (this title may change) and in 2014 he won a Bessie award for the visual design of This was the End.

Theatre Department webpage

Greek, Latin, and Ancient Mediterranean Studies Department
Division of Literature and Languages

Tom earned a BA in History and a BA in Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies from Penn State University in 2006, and a PhD in 2013 from the Interdepartmental Program in Classical Art and Archaeology (IPCAA) at the University of Michigan. His teaching and research interests center on archaeology and history of the Hellenistic Eastern Mediterranean, in particular Cyprus and Ptolemaic Egypt (323-30 BCE). Tom’s research, which has been supported by the National Science Foundation and a Fulbright award, focuses on the archaeology of death and burial, identity, and the archaeology of imperialism, with a particular interest in cross-cultural interaction and its effect on material culture. He is a field archaeologist, and is currently co-director of the Pyla-Kousopetria Archaeological Project’s (PKAP) excavations at the site of Vigla, Cyprus. The project includes an archaeological field school, which Reed students have participated in since 2018.

Greek, Latin, and Ancient Mediterranean Studies Department webpage

History Department
Division of History and Social Sciences

I tend to be attracted to a kind of thinking that marries philosophical reflection to historical inquiry, with specific interests in technology, the environment, globalisms, psychoanalysis, religious thought, political thought, political economy, animality, the emotions, and movements for social action. I received my Ph.D. at UC Berkeley, taught for three years at the University of Chicago, and have been at Reed since 2005. As a scholar and writer, I have done some work in the history of religion, and my book, God Interrupted (Princeton, 2008), received awards from the American Academy of Religion and the Templeton Foundation. I've also co-edited a volume in the study of emotion called Fear: Across the Disciplines (Pittsburgh, 2012). I've since embarked on some new research projects, principally a history of the Whole Earth. A sample of that project, a capsule history of philosophical reactions to the first images of the Earth from space, appeared as an article ("Earthrise; or, the Globalization of the World Picture") in the American Historical Review. This year I am teaching a course on technology and social thought, on the Whole Earth, and a sequence of classes in modern Humanities from the Enlightenment era to the present. In the near future I hope to offer courses on the psychoanalytic tradition, on the history of emotions, and on the concept of the anthropocene era.

Personal website

English Department
Division of Literature and Languages

Laura Arnold Leibman is Kenan Professor of English and Humanities at Reed College. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1995. Her work focuses on how material culture changes our understanding of the role of women, children, and Jews of color in the early Atlantic World. Leibman is the author of The Art of the Jewish Family: A History of Women in Early New York in Five Objects (Bard Graduate Center, 2020) which won three National Jewish Book Awards, and Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life (2012), which won a Jordan Schnitzer Book Award and a National Jewish Book Award. She has written several other books and numerous academic articles, including three articles co-authored with Reed students, one of which won the 2015 Wasserman Essay Prize from the journal American Jewish History. She has been a Fulbright scholar at the University of Panama and the University of Utrecht (Netherlands), a visiting fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew an Jewish Studies at University of Oxford, and the Leon Levy Foundation Professor of Jewish Material Culture at Bard Graduate Center. She is known for her scholarship in Digital Humanities and regularly teaches courses in this area. She has served as the Chair of the Digital Media Committee for the Association for Jewish Studies (AJS), and the academic director of the award-winning, multimedia public television series American Passages: A Literary Survey (2003). As a literary scholar, she was the series editor for Gale Researcher’s 10-volume American Literature I, and the religion and literature delegate to the Modern Language Association. She is currently the Vice President of Program for the Association for Jewish Studies. Her latest book Once We Were Slaves (Oxford University Press, 2021) about an early multiracial Jewish family who began their lives enslaved in the Caribbean and became some of the wealthiest Jews in New York was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award.

Personal website

Spanish Department
Division of Literature and Languages

Mónica joined Reed in 2015. She received a PhD in Comparative Literature and a Graduate Certificate in Film Studies from the University of Michigan. She also holds a Law degree from the University of Valencia (Spain) and a LL.M. in Jurisprudence from the European Academy of Legal Theory (Belgium). At Reed she teaches a variety of interdisciplinary courses in film theory, political documentaries, law and violence, justice and the senses, cinema and human rights, and comparative literature. She has also taught at the Faculty of Law of the University of Helsinki, the Peter A. Allard School of Law of the University of British Columbia, and the School of International Relations of the Kyrgyz State National University. Mónica’s research interests include contemporary Spanish film and literature, with particular emphasis on film theory, gender, aesthetics, politics, memory, and law and humanities. She is the author of Sensing Justice through Contemporary Spanish Cinema: Aesthetics, Politics, Law (Edinburgh University Press, 2021). She is also the editor of Cartografías in/justas: Representaciones culturales del espacio urbano y rural en la España contemporánea (Editorial Comares, 2024) and the co-editor of Rancière and Law (Routledge, 2018).  She is currently working on a new book project tentatively titled Documentaries Against the Law: Evidence, Affect, and Reflexivity. From 2012 to 2017, Mónica was editor-in-chief of No-Foundations: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Law. Currently she serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Media & Rights. Her research has been funded by numerous fellowships, such as the Finnish Cultural Foundation Grant, the Jean Monnet Graduate Fellowship, and the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs Research Fellowship.

Music Department
Division of the Arts

Morgan James Luker is Associate Professor of Music at Reed College. An ethnomusicologist, Morgan's scholarly work focuses on the cultural politics of Latin American music, with special emphasis on contemporary tango music in Buenos Aires, Argentina. His first book on this topic is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. Morgan received a B.A. in Music History from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and a M.A. and Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from Columbia University. He joined the Reed faculty in 2010, and teaches a wide variety of courses on world music and culture, including the Cultural Study of Music, Music and Politics, Latin American Popular Music, and Musical Ethnography, among many others. Morgan is also the director of Tango For Musicians at Reed College, an intensive summer music program that brings musicians from around the world to Reed to study tango.

History Department
Division of History and Social Sciences

Chenxi Luo is a historian of late imperial China, specializing in slavery and law, migration and diaspora, gender and sexuality, and ethnicity and borderland. She is working on her first book project, which investigates the institution of slavery in a moving empire. In particular, this research examines how geographical movement transformed social relationships between masters and slaves during the Qing period, China’s last dynasty. Her intellectual inquiry extends to the history of Asian Americans. She creates a public-facing StoryMap project on Asian immigrants in St. Louis. Chenxi received her Ph.D. degree from Washington University in St. Louis in 2024. At Reed, she teaches courses on the histories of sexuality and of slavery in East Asia and will also teach Humanities 110.

Anthropology Department
Division of History and Social Sciences

I have served on the Reed College faculty in the Department of Anthropology since 2000. I received my Ph.D in anthropology from the University of Michigan (1999), where I pursued interdisciplinary graduate studies in Buddhist Studies, Chinese and Tibetan language and culture, and linguistic and cultural anthropology. For the past twenty years, I have been conducting ethnographic and historical research in the troubled Sino-Tibetan frontier zone (Gansu and Qinghai provinces, China). My first book, The Violence of Liberation: Gender and Tibetan Buddhist Revival in Post-Mao China, was published in 2007 by the University of California Press. That project was based on several years of fieldwork (1990s-early 2000s) in the famous Buddhist monastery town of Labrang in Gansu province. My current book project, funded by Fulbright Senior Scholar and American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellowships, is The Politics of Presence: State-Led Development, Personhood and Power among Tibetans in China. In it, I analyze data I collected in a new, but historically related research site in Rebgong several mountain passes to the northwest. During this new stage of research (early 2000s-present), I have been looking at the multi-faceted impacts on Tibetan communities of state-led development projects unleashed since the Great Develop the West campaign (Ch. Xibu Da Kaifa) was launched in 2000.

Personal website

Dance Department
Division of the Arts

English Department
Division of Literature and Languages

Lucía Martínez Valdivia (Reed 2014-, PhD University of Pennsylvania 2014, MA Columbia University 2007, BMus Florida State University 2005) is an associate professor of English and Humanities at Reed College, and works primarily in early modern poetry and poetics. Lucía specializes in histories of poetic forms and has published extensively on early modern English lyric and prosody, with particular focus on short-form lines and the interplay of poetic form, music, and religion. Her current project explores the relationship between reading poetry and audiation, or the mind’s ear. Lucía teaches various poetry-focused courses in the English department, and in Hum 211/212.

History Department
Division of History and Social Sciences

Chemistry Department
Division of Mathematical and Natural Sciences

Alicia McGhee is an organic chemist who studies reaction development and chemical education. In the laboratory setting, she is particularly interested in the development of safer chemical reagents and implementing processes that reduce the use of toxic compounds and/or the generation of chemical waste. In the classroom, she is interested in implementing active learning strategies and incorporating societal themes such as social justice, the life cycle of chemicals in the environment, and information literacy. She teaches introductory and advanced organic chemistry. Before Reed, she studied organic chemistry methodology, organometallic catalysis, and natural products synthesis at the University of East Anglia (M.S.) and the University of Washington (Ph.D.).

Computer Science Department
Division of Mathematical and Natural Sciences

Biology Department
Division of Mathematical and Natural Sciences

Jay is Amgen-Perlmutter Professor of Biology and Chair of the Biology Department at Reed College, where he began teaching in 1999. Before he began teaching, Jay was a research scientist at Microgenics Corporation, a small biotechnology company in California (now a subsidiary of Thermo Fisher Scientific). Jay earned a BS in biochemistry, with a minor in music, in 1986 and a PhD in microbiology in 1994 from the University of California at Davis. He was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Germany and a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Vaccine Development at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. At Reed, he teaches courses in Microbiology, Immunology and a senior seminar on Bacterial Pathogenesis. His research focuses on the molecular pathogenesis of Escherichia coli bacteria. Jay has received funding for undergraduate student-driven research from the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Murdock Charitable Trust, and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). He and student co-authors have published a number of articles in professional journals, and he holds a patent for a therapeutic drug discovery technology. Jay is a curriculum section editor for the American Society for Microbiology's Journal of Microbiology and Biology Education.

Biology Department webpage

Political Science Department
Division of History and Social Sciences

Tamara Metz's fields of interests include history of political thought, liberalism and its critics, feminist, democratic and critical theory, American political thought and theories of freedom. Her current research includes: care in diverse, liberal democracies. In Untying the Knot: Marriage, the State and the Case for Their Divorce (Princeton University Press, 2010), she explores the history of liberal treatment of the relationship between marriage and the state, and concludes that marriage should be disestablished. Metz is the co-editor of Justice, Politics, and the Family (Paradigm Press, 2014). Her work also appears in Just Marriage (Oxford, 2004), Contemporary Political Theory (2007), Politics & Gender (2010) and The Nation (2013). In addition to her work in political theory, she has a special interest in pedagogical issues especially those pertaining to thesis advising.

Political Science Department webpage

Mathematics and Statistics Department
Division of Mathematical and Natural Sciences

Personal website

German Department
Division of Literature and Languages

Jan Mieszkowski is a specialist in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European literature and philosophy. At Reed, he teaches courses in German and Comparative Literature and has been part of both the Ancient and Modern Humanities staffs. He regularly offers seminars in poetry and poetics, the methods of literary analysis, and continental philosophy. Jan is the author of Labors of Imagination: Aesthetics and Political Economy from Kant to Althusser (Fordham University Press, 2006), Watching War (Stanford University Press, 2012), and Crises of the Sentence (University of Chicago Press, 2019). His recent articles explore a variety of topics in philosophy, literary and critical theory, and media studies. A recipient of National Endowment of the Humanities and Mellon fellowships, he is on the editorial board of Postmodern Culture. Jan is currently writing a book about the poetics of botany.

Personal website

Greek, Latin, and Ancient Mediterranean Studies Department
Division of Literature and Languages

Ellen G. Millender is Omar and Althea Hoskins Professor of Greek, Latin, and Ancient Mediterranean Studies and Humanities. She received a B.A. and M.A. in Classics from Brown University, a B.A. in Literae Humaniores from Oxford University, and a Ph.D. in the Graduate Group in Ancient History from the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Millender joined the Reed faculty in 2002 and received tenure in 2005. She teaches Humanities 110 (the first-year humanities class), Greek and Latin at all levels, and courses in Greek and Roman history and historiography. Her research focuses on both the history of ancient Sparta and Athenian representations of Spartan society in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. She has published articles on a wide range of topics in Spartan social, political, and intellectual history, including literacy, kingship, military organization, and sexual and gender mores. Professor Millender’s recent work includes chapters on Spartan women and kingship in the Blackwell Companion to Sparta (A. Powell, ed., 2018), “Athens, Sparta, and the Τέχνη of Deliberation” in The Greek Superpower: Sparta in the Self-Definitions of Athenians, 33-60 (P. Cartledge and A. Powell, eds., 2018), and “A Contest in Charisma: Cynisca’s Heroization, Spartan Royal Authority, and the Threat of Non-Royal Glorification” in Political Religions in the Greco-Roman World: Discourses, Practices and Images, 34-63 (E. Koulakiotis and C. Dunn, eds., 2019). Her forthcoming publications focus on Spartan austerity, Spartan leadership, and the Athenian author Xenophon's construction of Spartan obedience.

Greek, Latin, and Ancient Mediterranean Studies Department webpage

History Department
Division of History and Social Sciences

Mary Ashburn Miller is a historian of modern Europe with a specialization in eighteenth and nineteenth-century France. She is the author of A Natural History of Revolution: Violence and Nature in the French Revolutionary Imagination (2011), and her current research is on the return of emigrants and refugees to France after the French Revolution. Her teaching interests include the history of war and violence, European travel and colonization, and the history of science; recent courses include Europe and North Africa in the Long Nineteenth Century and War & Peace in Europe, 1700-1914. She also teaches in Reed’s Humanities program. A native of Lexington, Kentucky, Mary received her B.A. from the University of Virginia, and her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. She joined Reed’s faculty in 2008.

English Department
Division of Literature and Languages

History Department
Division of History and Social Sciences

Margot Minardi is a historian of the early American republic, with particular interests in reform movements, historical memory, slavery and freedom, and nationalism and colonialism. Her current research concerns American peace reformers in the nineteenth century. She is the author of Making Slavery History: Abolitionism and the Politics of Memory in Massachusetts, which won a first book prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. In 2011-2012, she was an MHS-NEH Long-Term Research Fellow at the Massachusetts Historical Society. At Reed, she offers courses on race, African American history, American social reform, antebellum U.S. history, and the American Revolution, and she also teaches in the college’s first-year interdisciplinary course, Humanities 110. Minardi came to Reed in 2007 after completing a Ph.D. at Harvard University.

Personal website

Religion Department
Division of Philosophy, Religion, Psychology, and Linguistics

Candace’s teaching interests include a variety of topics in Islamic studies as well as the materiality of religious practice (such as her Holy Sh*t! course). She earned her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an M.A. from McGill University, and her B.A. from Vanderbilt University. She is currently working on her book project, Fatimeh Matter(s) in Contemporary Iranian Shiʿism. This book is focused on contemporary Shiʻism in Iran through an analysis of Fatima, daughter of the Prophet Muhammad, using a collection and examination of devotional visual and material culture. She considers the significance of Fatima al-Zahra in contemporary Iran and especially in the city of Mashhad as produced through material artifacts and ritual commemorations since the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988). By following the trajectory of the succession to Muhammad after his passing to the Battle of Karbala, contemporary Shiʿi studies and broader studies of Islam and Muslim histories or cultures have narrowly focused on prophethood and the Shiʿi imams, thereby missing the opportunity to consider gendered notions and models of religious leadership and the significance of Fatima as the female link to the line of the imams. She’s recently published a contribution to the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion as well as recently published articles in the Journal of Religion and Film as well as Material Religion and has an upcoming contribution to the Oxford Handbook of Islamic Reform. Candace is an associate editor and book review editor for the journal Material Religion and is an interviewer for podcasts on The Religious Studies Project. 

Art Department
Division of the Arts

Akihiko Miyoshi has been exploring the intersection between art and technology most frequently dealing with issues surrounding photographic representation. His works often reveal the conventions of perception and representation through tensions created by the use of computers and traditional photographic techniques. Miyoshi received a MFA in photography in 2005 from the Rochester Institute of Technology after taking a leave of absence as a PhD student in computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University to pursue art. His work has been exhibited widely including Portland, New York, Los Angeles, Rochester, Pittsburgh, and Toronto. He was named the International Award Winner of Fellowship 12 at The Silver Eye Center for Photography in Pittsburgh PA and the finalist for the Betty Bowen Award in 2012 and Aperture Portfolio Prize in 2013. Miyoshi received a Hallie Ford Fellowship in 2012.

Personal website

Mathematics and Statistics Department
Division of Mathematical and Natural Sciences

Personal website

French Department
Division of Literature and Languages

Political Science Department
Division of History and Social Sciences

Alexander H. Montgomery has published articles on dismantling proliferation networks and on the effects of social networks of international organizations on interstate conflict. His research interests include political organizations, social networks, weapons of mass disruption and destruction, social studies of technology, and interstate social relations. Most recently, he has been a Residential Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; prior to that he was a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow in Nuclear Security with a placement in the US Office of the Secretary of Defense (Policy) working for the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction. His portfolio included writing a new Department of Defense Strategy for Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Political Science Department webpage

Political Science Department
Division of History and Social Sciences

Fathimath Musthaq’s research interests are in central banking, the politics of finance and financialization, natural resources, colonial legacies and development. Her dissertation examined the trajectory and politics of central banking in the Global South, focusing in particular on when central banks accommodate financial accumulation by banks and nonbanks that impede broader growth and development goals. Areas of ongoing research include the pathways through which hierarchies in the international system incentivize financialization of debt and natural resources in poor countries, the role of the state in de-risking accumulation in late capitalism, the politics of climate finance, and the impact of colonial legacies on development trajectories. Fathimath received her PhD in political science from Indiana University Bloomington in 2021. Before starting her PhD, she worked in the NGO sector as a project manager for civic education programs. She received her BA from Williams College (MA), and her International Baccalaureate diploma from the United World College of the Atlantic. Her work has appeared in New Political Economy, the Review of African Political Economy and the Journal of Democracy.

Personal website

History Department
Division of History and Social Sciences

Political Science Department
Division of History and Social Sciences

Personal website

Economics Department
Division of History and Social Sciences

Noelwah R. Netusil is the Stanley H. Cohn Professor of Economics. Her research has explored the effect of urban environmental conditions, such as water quality, proximity to open spaces, vegetation, and green infrastructure, on property sale prices. Her current research investigates the willingness-to-pay for flood insurance and flood insurance literacy.  She is also collaborating with researchers from the UK, Netherlands, and China to study the future of blue-green infrastructure. Her classes include environmental and natural resources economics, economics of the public sector, and law and economics. Dr. Netusil is an Associate Editor at Landscape and Urban Policy and on is on the editorial board of Land Economics.

Economics Department webpage

Anthropology Department
Division of History and Social Sciences

Yoli Ngandali is a member of the Ngbaka Tribe from the DR Congo. She is a Ronald E. McNair Fellow and a Ph.D. Candidate in Archaeology at the University of Washington (UW). She obtained a B.S. in Archaeological Studies from the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse (2014) and an M.A. in Archaeology from UW (2017). Her research, supported by the Social Science Research Council and the Wenner-Gren’s Engaged Research Grant, in partnership with the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde’s Cultural Resources Department, focuses on developing digital and community-based approaches to Indigenous art revitalization within museum settings specifically highlighting the long-standing carving traditions from the Lower Columbia River. Her teaching and research interests span Indigenous archaeology, museum studies, digital curation, conservation science, re-analysis of legacy data, Black and Indigenous futurity, multi-spectral imaging, geophysical survey, Pacific Northwest archaeology, and African archaeology. Additionally, she was a co-host of Our Past is Our Future (2022) SAPIENS: A Podcast for Everything Human Season 4 (2022) which explored stories of Black and Indigenous scholars in archaeology, produced by House of Pod and supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation.

Greek, Latin, and Ancient Mediterranean Studies Department
Division of Literature and Languages

Department webpage

Economics Department
Division of History and Social Sciences

Personal website

Psychology Department
Division of Philosophy, Religion, Psychology, and Linguistics

Kathryn C. Oleson, PhD, joined the Reed faculty in 1995. She currently serves as Dean of the Faculty, and is the Patricia and Clifford Lunneborg Professor of Psychology and former Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning. She was a National Institute of Mental Health Postdoctoral Fellow at The Ohio State University from 1993-1995 after finishing her Ph.D. in Social Psychology at Princeton University funded by a National Science Foundation graduate fellowship. She has been Associate Editor of the journal Basic and Applied Social Psychology and co-editor (with Robert Arkin and Patrick Carroll) of the Handbook of the Uncertain Self. Much of her research has examined the reactions of the social self in challenging academic contexts, concentrating on self-doubt, achievement goals, academic procrastination, and behavioral strategies. Currently, her primary research project is exploring ways to make the college classroom more inclusive, with a particular focus on productive and unproductive discomfort. She teaches a range of courses including Introduction to Psychology, Research Design and Data Analysis, Social Psychology, Interpersonal Perception, Stereotyping and Prejudice, and The Social Self. She seeks to actively involve students in the learning process and to help them develop important skills in writing, research, and critical thinking; in her courses students are engaged with research design and implementation that involves the collection and analysis of new data.

Dean of the Faculty webpage

Art Department
Division of the Arts

Geraldine Ondrizek is a Professor of Art and artist at Reed College in Portland Oregon. For the last twenty-five years she has created architectural installations and artist books based on medical and genetic information to explore personal and political issues. Each piece results from lengthy collaborations with scientists and medical researchers with the goal of producing work that incorporates and comments on medicine, genetics, and ethics.  She has had over 40 solo exhibitions internationally and is the recipient of several grants and residencies including an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Ford Family Foundation, the Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship, University of Washington Genetic Medicine Commission, NASA at the Johnson Space Center, the Houston Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and a NEA exhibition support grant. Residencies include UNESCO Artist in Residence Amman Jordon and Marnay sur Seine France, Gasworks London, Momentum AIR and the Max Plank Archive, Berlin.  Her recent exhibition include, The Hallie Ford Museum at Willamette University, Universidad Católica de la Santísima Concepción Chile, Bienal Concepción, Arte & Ciencia, Chile Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Berlin Germany,  Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art Karlsruhe, Germany, The Phoenix Gallery, Brighton, England, Momentum Berlin, the Nassir School of Art Gallery, Jerusalem, Haber Space, New York, Cornish College of the Arts, Seattle, King Street Station, Seattle, Evergreen College Gallery, Olympia, The Boise Art Museum, Florida International University and The University of Houston. Her work has been collected by The Portland Art Museum, John Hopkins University, MIT, Sanofi-Genzyme, The University of Washington Department of Medical Genetics, and Florida International University. Her current projects include; Chromosome 2, Genes Controlling Our Proteins, A public art commission for WVU Cancer Institute, Berkeley Medical Center, Martinsburg, West Virginia  and  Becoming You, A book showing the process of human fertilization, gestation and genetic testing. Written by Dr. Shizuko Takahashi ’95 with images by Geraldine Ondrizek. She received her BFA from Carnegie-Mellon University and an MFA from the University of Washington.

Personal website

Mathematics and Statistics Department
Division of Mathematical and Natural Sciences

Kyle Ormsby studies topology, especially homotopy theory and its interactions with algebraic geometry. He earned his Ph.D. in 2010 from the University of Michigan, and then worked as an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT before joining the Reed College math department in 2014. He has been a visiting scholar at the University of Oslo and at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, California. Ormsby was a co-organizer for the conferences Equivariant and motivic homotopy theory (hosted at Reed with colleague Angélica Osorno, May 2015) and Equivariant derived algebraic geometry at the American Institute of Mathematics (June 2016). He has supervised undergraduate theses and research projects on topics ranging from topological quantum field theory to modular forms to algebraic K-theory, the final project under the auspices of an NSF grant-funded summer program, The K-group. At Reed, Ormsby is currently developing the course Knot theory, knot practice, an inclusive introduction to contemporary mathematics through the lens of knot theory.

Personal website

Mathematics and Statistics Department
Division of Mathematical and Natural Sciences

Angélica M. Osorno is an associate professor of mathematics. She does research in algebraic topology, with a particular interest in higher category theory and its connections with higher K-theory and infinite loop space theory. She received a B.Sc. in Mathematics from MIT in 2005, and a Ph.D. in Mathematics, also from MIT, in 2010. She joined the Reed faculty in 2013. She was the invited faculty speaker at the Underrepresented Students in Topology and Algebra Research Symposium in April 2015.

Personal website

Mathematics and Statistics Department
Division of Mathematical and Natural Sciences

Michael Pearce is a Bayesian statistician interested in developing and applying methods for problems in the social sciences. His recent work focuses on statistical preference analysis, specifically the estimation of heterogeneous preference ideologies within a population based on complex preference data. Applications of his work include voting, preference surveys, and academic peer review. He is additionally interested in statistical demography, with published work on probabilistic forecasting of human longevity. During his graduate studies, Michael worked as an applied statistician at Boeing. He earned a B.A. in mathematics from St. Olaf College and a Ph.D. in statistics from the University of Washington before joining Reed in 2023.

Personal website

Linguistics Department
Division of Philosophy, Religion, Psychology, and Linguistics

Matt Pearson received his BA in linguistics from Reed College in 1992, and his PhD in linguistics from UCLA in 2001. He has taught at Reed since 2001. The founding chair of Reed’s Linguistics Department, Matt teaches courses dealing with formal theory and grammatical analysis, focusing on morpho-syntax (the structure of words and sentences), typology and language universals, and the grammatical description of the world’s languages. He also teaches courses on semantics (the relationship between sentence structure and interpretation) and field methods (techniques for eliciting morpho-syntactic data from native speakers). Matt’s scholarship focuses on the syntax of Malagasy, the language of Madagascar. He has worked with native speakers of Malagasy in Madagascar, Montreal, and Los Angeles, and his research has appeared in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory and other publications. Matt is also interested in constructed languages, and in 1996 he developed the alien language for the NBC science fiction show Dark Skies.

Personal website

Psychology Department
Division of Philosophy, Religion, Psychology, and Linguistics

I joined the Reed faculty in 2011, after earning a Ph.D. in Psychology from Colorado State University in 2007, followed by four years of post-doctoral research in Neuroscience at UCSD. My primary research interests center around the search for the neural substrates of consciousness. In psychology and cognitive neuroscience, it is generally accepted that most of what the brain does, it does so automatically, unconsciously. Because we have conscious experiences, however, some aspects of what the brain does must result in our subjective awareness of the world and of our own thoughts and feelings. A key unanswered question that my research seeks to resolve is: How does brain activity differ during conscious versus unconscious processing of objects and events in our world? To address this question, the primary strategy I use is to compare brain activity elicited by the same physical stimulus (typically visual or auditory) when it is perceived versus not-perceived, or perceived as X versus Y. In my lab we measure electrical brain activity non-invasively with EEG and use psychophysics, behavioral tasks, and eye tracking to manipulate attention and awareness in human subjects. My teaching relates to my research by providing students with a background in cognitive neuroscience methods, sensation and perception research, and specialized investigations into the neuroscience of consciousness and attention and consciousness research. I currently share research space with my colleague, Enriqueta Canseco-Gonzalez who studies neural mechanisms of language processing, and our lab is collectively known as the "SCALP Lab," an acronym for "Sensation, Cognition, Attention, Language, and Perception Lab."

SCALP lab website
Psychology Department webpage

Mathematics and Statistics Department
Division of Mathematical and Natural Sciences

Jamie Pommersheim, Katharine Piggott Professor of Mathematics, joined the Reed faculty in 2004. He held post-doctoral positions at the Institute for Advanced Study, M.I.T., and U.C. Berkeley, and served on the mathematics faculty at New Mexico State University and Pomona College. Pommersheim has published research papers in a wide variety of areas, including algebraic geometry, number theory, and topology. Much of his recent work centers around quantum computation, specifically quantum learning algorithms. For many years, Pommersheim has taught talented high-school students at Johns Hopkins University's Center for Talented Youth (CTY), as well as the Hampshire College Summer Studies in Mathematics (HCSSiM). His 2010 number theory text, co-written with Tim Marks and Erica Flapan, provides a rigorous yet leisurely-paced introduction to the subject.

Personal website

Biology Department
Division of Mathematical and Natural Sciences

I joined the Biology Department as an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow in 2020, and then as a visiting faculty member in 2023. Throughout my PhD and teaching career, my research has focused on the intricate relationship among lichens, bryophytes, host trees, and the surrounding ecosystem, all set against the dynamic backdrop of climate change and urbanization. My work has taken place around the globe, most notably in tall trees species, urban environments, and polar ecosystems. I have worked locally and internationally guiding and teaching tree climbing research techniques, as well as spending five field seasons on the Western Antarctica Peninsula, where I co-led a collaborative project examining warming effects on polar moss communities. As a longtime Oregonian, I received my PhD in Biology from Portland State University and a B.S from Oregon State University. At Reed, I teach courses on the Lichens of the Pacific Northwest (BIO 113), Forest Canopy Ecophysiology (BIO 313), and a seminar on Advances in Forest Canopy Research (BIO 431). I am excited to bring a diverse array of field-based experiences and methodology to Reed students, and I hope to foster a sense of excitement and awe for the often overlooked, yet fascinating world of Pacific Northwest epiphytes (lichens and bryophytes)! In my spare time, you will find me seeking out type II fun and flow on my bikes, skis, and feet.

English Department
Division of Literature and Languages

Biology Department
Division of Mathematical and Natural Sciences

Biology department webpage

Biology Department
Division of Mathematical and Natural Sciences

In a nutshell, I use computer science to solve biological problems. I joined the Biology Department in the Fall of 2015 after studying how cells respond to external signals as a postdoctoral researcher at Virginia Tech. Before that, I received M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Brown University, where I was an NSF Graduate Research Fellow and taught a computational thinking class for humanities majors, and I received my B.A. from Carleton College. My research explores different ways to model biological systems using computers, concentrating on the ways diseases such as cancer affect these systems. I am excited to present students with computational methods to use in their biology study and research — my lab is filled with computers! I hope my teaching promotes interdisciplinary learning in a way that attracts a wide array of students, including those typically under-represented in the field.

Biology Department webpage

Mathematics and Statistics Department
Division of Mathematical and Natural Sciences

English Department
Division of Literature and Languages

Peter Rock joined the Reed College faculty in 2001. He teaches the writing of prose, both fiction and non-fiction, with special interest in the intersection between the two, economical forms, the fantastic and invisible, animals, ghosts and linkages of every kind. His favorite book is most likely Yasunari Kawabata’s Palm-of-the-Hand Stories or Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. Or Octavia Butler’s Bloodchild. Rock was born and raised in Salt Lake City. His most recent novel, Passersthrough, involves a murder house, a fax machine, communications between the living and the dead, and a mountain lake that moves from place to place. He is also the author of the novels The Night Swimmers, SPELLS, Klickitat, The Shelter Cycle, My Abandonment, The Bewildered, The Ambidextrist, Carnival Wolves and This Is the Place, as well as a story collection, The Unsettling. Rock attended Deep Springs College, received a BA in English from Yale University, and held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. He has taught fiction at the University of Pennsylvania, Yale, Deep Springs College, and in the MFA program at San Francisco State University. His stories and freelance writing have both appeared and been anthologized widely, and his books published in various countries and languages. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and an Alex Award, as well as a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, he currently lives in Portland, Oregon, where he is a Professor in the English Department of Reed College. Leave No Trace, the film adaptation of My Abandonment, directed by Debra Granik, premiered at Sundance and Cannes and was released to critical acclaim in 2018. 

Personal website

Economics Department
Division of History and Social Sciences

Jon Rork joined Reed College in 2010, having previously been on the faculty at the University of New Hampshire, Vassar College and Georgia State University. Rork studies a variety of issues in state and local public finance. His current research interests are in the realm of state taxation, interjurisdictional competition, and the economic determinants of interstate migration, especially as it pertains to the elderly. At Reed, Rork teaches courses in microeconomic theory, game theory, public finance, urban economics and behavioral economics.

Personal website

Greek, Latin, and Ancient Mediterranean Studies Department
Division of Literature and Languages

Sonia Sabnis has taught at Reed College since 2006. She received her BA from Columbia University (1998) before completing an MA (2000) and Ph.D. (2006) at University of California, Berkeley. She is broadly interested in imperial literature, Greek and Latin, but her primary research specialty is the African Roman author Apuleius. Her published research includes studies of slavery and literature, figurative katabasis, and reception in different contexts in the twentieth and twenty-first century, including contemporary Algerian novels, mid-century horror, and poetry in English. She has held research fellowships at Vassar College, Wellesley College, and the W. E. B. Du Bois Center at the University of Massachusetts. She will be Professor-in-Charge at the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome in 2024-25. Professor Sabnis currently volunteers time as a mentor through the Asian and Asian American Classical Caucus (AAACC) and as a tour guide at the Portland Japanese Garden.

Greek, Latin, and Ancient Mediterranean Studies Department webpage

Psychology Department
Division of Philosophy, Religion, Psychology, and Linguistics

Art Department
Division of the Arts

Jenny Sakai is an art historian specializing in early modern (approximately 15th-18th centuries) art. She was trained as a historian of northern European art, and her current teaching and research focus on early modern art in the context of colonialism and imperialism. She is interested in what happens to artistic form, content, style, and function when works of art cross temporal, cultural, political, ideological, or theological boundaries. She completed her BA and PhD in the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley, and she is the recipient of a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship and a Samuel H. Kress Institutional Fellowship. Jenny has published in the Journal of Art Historiography, and her article on the 17th-century Dutch inventor, cityscape painter, and fire captain Jan van der Heyden, will be published in a forthcoming issue of the interdisciplinary journal Word & Image.

Biology Department
Division of Mathematical and Natural Sciences

I started at Reed in 2011 after attending a small liberal arts college for undergraduate, finishing my PhD at Indiana University, and doing a couple of post-docs. My training is in evolutionary genetics and genomics, and my specific area of expertise is mobile DNA. At Reed, I teach a variety of courses on these topics and work with students individually who are interested in learning about how mutations occur, and how they affect organisms. In addition to regular courses, I organize workshops to introduce students to problems and tools in bioinformatics and genomics — a frontier in the field of biology right now that lends itself to the intense learning environment provided by the workshop format. In terms of doing science, the major themes of research in the lab that I spearhead provide lots of opportunities for students to do research, often for the first time. That's not the whole story though, since often students come to me with their own research passions and a strong desire to develop their own ideas. These collaborations are also very rich and rewarding — I enjoy learning as much as my students do.

Personal website

Philosophy Department
Division of Philosophy, Religion, Psychology, and Linguistics

Philosophy Department webpage

Religion Department
Division of Philosophy, Religion, Psychology, and Linguistics

Kristin Scheible is a scholar of South Asian religions.  She serves as Chair of the Religion Department, Co-PI for the Mellon-funded Environmental Humanities Initiative, and as co-chair of the Critical Theory and Discourses on Religion unit of the American Academy of Religion. She received a BA in Religious Studies and Art History from Colby College, a Masters in Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School, and her PhD from Harvard University. Her philologically-grounded first book, Reading the Mahāvaṃsa: The Literary Aims of a Theravāda Buddhist History (Columbia University Press, 2016) challenges standard political readings of this Buddhist text and foregrounds instead the literary imagination it engenders. She recently co-edited and co-authored a volume, The Buddha: A Storied Life (Oxford University Press, 2024), bringing together leading scholars of South Asian Buddhism to examine the paradigmatic episodes that constitute the Buddha's biography. Her recent work appears in several journals and volumes, including Cambridge Companion to Religion and War (2023), The Epic World (Routledge, 2023), and the Journal of Buddhist Ethics (2024). She is currently working on Fruitful Metaphors: Cultivating Faith in Hindu and Buddhist Imagination, a book considering the bountiful and generative metaphorical uses of plants for moral cultivation (propagating, planting, and harvesting; seeds, roots, and fruit). Her research and teaching interests include Hindu and Buddhist history, the genre of historical narrative literature (vaṃsa) in the Pāli language, rhetorical strategies employed in Pāli and Sanskrit texts, the affective domain provoked by religious texts, and (prompted by her past experience with Permaculture) the environmental humanities.

Psychology Department
Division of Philosophy, Religion, Psychology, and Linguistics

Sociology Department
Division of History and Social Sciences

Marc Schneiberg received his BA from Haverford College, and his PhD in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and has taught at Reed since 2000. He is an economic and organizational sociologist who researches the rise, contemporary fates, and economic consequences of organizational diversity and alternatives to giant, shareholder corporations in American capitalism. This work addresses both the evolution of cooperative and other alternative enterprise systems in the US, including electrical and agricultural cooperatives, insurance mutuals, community banks, and credit uinons, and how the emergence of such enterprises can help upgrade markets, regulate corporations, and foster more decentralized and small stakeholder trajectories of capitalist development. Schneiberg also studies association, regulation and self-regulation in American manufacturing and finance. He is Editor of Socio-Economic Review, and Consulting Editor of Sociological Science, has served on the executive councils of the American Sociological Association and the Society for the Advancement of Socio Economics, and has twice received National Science Foundation support for his research. He teaches courses in economic and organizational sociology (Economic Sociology, Institutional Analysis, American Capitalism, Sociology of Finance, Regulation) but also Race and Ethnicity and Race, Economic Sociology, and Organizations. His papers and course syllabi can be found on his webpage.

Personal website
Sociology Department website

Physics Department
Division of Mathematical and Natural Sciences

As a condensed matter theorist, my teaching in the physics department at Reed College has focused on Physics 201 (our students' introduction to mathematical methods), solid-state physics, and the advanced quantum mechanics course. My education began at Reed College in 1991 and I received my PhD in physics from Stanford University in 2002. From 2007-2009, working with my thesis student Eliot Kapit (Reed '05), I published a pair of papers in Physical Review Letters and Physical Review B which identified a microscopic model for a state of matter known as the chiral spin liquid. This is the work of which I am the most proud, in part because it is a significant scientific accomplishment, but also because the solution to the problem arose from the senior thesis experience at Reed. Recently, I have been working with Reed students both during the summer and during the year on a type of magnetic ordering known as orbital antiferromagnetism that may play a role in the phenomenon of high-Tc superconductivity.

Personal website

Anthropology Department
Division of History and Social Sciences

Biology Department
Division of Mathematical and Natural Sciences

I'm excited to join Reed College as Visiting Assistant Professor of Neurobiology in the Department of Biology. My academic journey began with a PhD at the University of Lisbon, where I delved into animal behavior, particularly focusing on the social dynamics of fish. This work sparked my interest in understanding how social behaviors shape brain physiology across species. During my postdoctoral tenure at Northwestern University, I explored the neural mechanisms underlying temperature perception and behavioral avoidance in flies. My interdisciplinary approach integrates neuroethology and neurobiology, leveraging techniques such as optogenetics, calcium imaging, connectomics and behavior modeling to decipher how environmental cues shape neural circuits. At Reed College, I'm eager to unravel how social interactions are impacted by external conditions, such as hot temperatures, and how the brain resolves these conflicts to elicit appropriate behavioral responses. I look forward to collaborating with colleagues and mentoring students, contributing to advancements in neuroethology and neurobiology within the department.

German Department
Division of Literature and Languages

Irina Simova received her PhD from the department of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. Her scholarship addresses twentieth- and twenty-first-century Germanophone and Eastern European film, literature, and performance. She focuses specifically on interdisciplinary problems of globalization, neoliberal governance, biopower, migration, media, AI, and ecocriticism often in reference to political theory approaches. Her first book in progress explores cinematic works in the Germanophone sphere that investigate the political economy of body management in late capitalism and forms of experience developed around entrepreneurship, endurance, anxiety, risk management, and precarity. She has previously written on Alexander Kluge, Michel Foucault, Lauren Berlant, Christoph Schlingensief, Harun Farocki, and Karl Marx, among others. Her work has been supported by the Fulbright Commission, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), Goethe Gesellschaft, and the Princeton University Institute for International and Regional Studies. Her next project focuses on global political shifts in Central and Eastern Europe reflected in literature, film, and performance since 2000. The project examines the ways in which contemporary artists re-negotiate post-reunification and post-communist narratives about political rights, identity, memory, migration, (techno-)capitalism, ethnicity, and gender. Prior to Reed College, she served as a Visiting Assistant Professor of German at the University of Pittsburgh and as co-editor of the Alexander Kluge-Yearbook. The 9th edition of the Yearbook, Crisis and Astonishment, was published in November 2024.

Political Science Department
Division of History and Social Sciences

Peter Steinberger is Robert H. and Blanche Day Ellis Professor of Political Science and Humanities. A member of the Reed faculty since 1977, he teaches political philosophy. He is a former president of the Western Political Science Association and served as Reed’s Dean of the Faculty from 1997 to 2010. His books include The Politics of Objectivity: An Essay on the Foundations of Political Conflict (Cambridge University Press, 2015), The Problem With God: Why Atheists, True Believers and Even Agnostics Must All be Wrong (Columbia University Press, 2013), The Idea of the State (Cambridge University Press, 2004), The Concept of Political Judgment (University of Chicago Press, 1993), Logic and Politics: Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (Yale University Press, 1988) and Ideology and the Urban Crisis (State University of New York Press, 1985). His articles have appeared in most of the major political science journals including American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics and Political Theory, as well as in such general interest publications as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Christian Science Monitor.

Political Science Department webpage

Art Department
Division of the Arts

Art Department
Division of the Arts

Project website

English Department
Division of Literature and Languages

Sarah Wagner-McCoy is an Associate Professor of English and the Humanities at Reed College. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University, M.A. from University College Dublin, and B.A. from Columbia University. She specializes in 19th- and 20th-century U.S. literature and is currently working on an edition of the complete writings of Charles W. Chesnutt, the first major African American fiction writer, publishing manuscripts discovered in 2014 with the support of the NEH. Her book manuscript, Eden Scams: Transatlantic Pastoral and the Realist Novel, builds on her doctoral work at Harvard, for which she received the Helen Choate Bell Dissertation Prize. She argues that developments such as speculation, slavery, industrialization, and immigration required increasingly abstract conceptions of American land and labor; realist novelists used pastoral literary conventions to envision America’s changing international economic and cultural role. At Reed, Sarah teaches a range of seminars including The American Con Artist, Transatlantic Bestsellers, Race and Region: Southern Fiction, American Pastoral, and, based on her time in Ireland as a Mitchell Scholar, Modern Irish Drama. She also teaches in Humanities 110, the college’s first-year interdisciplinary course, where she is able to synthesize her love of classical literature with her interest in the politics of educational access in America.

Mathematics and Statistics Department
Division of Mathematical and Natural Sciences

English Department
Division of Literature and Languages

Simone Waller is an early modernist specializing in English drama and prose. Her work centers on the intersection of literature and politics during the Reformation and is particularly attuned to historical questions of access to and involvement in public speech. Her current book project explores the proliferation of voices in sixteenth-century printed dialogues and performed drama, arguing that creative interactions between old and new means of communication in the press and theater established a mandate for political representation across the social spectrum. An article drawn from this project has been published in The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. New work under development focuses on the interplay between bodies, books, and the natural world as vehicles for communication in early drama. Simone received her PhD in 2019 from Northwestern University. At Reed, she teaches courses on Shakespeare and his contemporary dramatists, as well as Humanities 110.

Art Department
Division of the Arts

Michelle H. Wang specializes in art and archaeology of tenth century BCE to third century CE China, with an emphasis on early notational systems. Her research interests include artisanal practice, history of technology, excavated texts, and mortuary culture. Her current book project examines the extant corpus of early Chinese maps and their multifunctionality. Two other projects are underway: one on excavated covenants from the fifth century BCE and another on Han dynasty tomb murals. Michelle received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley (2014).

Drawing by Precious Romo '21

Sociology Department
Division of History and Social Sciences

Kjersten Bunker Whittington is Professor of Sociology at Reed College. A quantitative and network methodologist, her research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of gender and work, scientific careers and science-based organizations, networks and social structure, and the knowledge economy. Her primary line of research focuses on sex disparities in scientific and technical careers. A second research focus investigates regional dynamics and the science economy; in particular, the influence of inter-organizational network structure on firm-level outputs, and the determinants of successful regional clustering in the biotechnology industry. Kjersten received a B.S. in Physics from North Carolina State University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from Stanford University. She joined the Reed faculty in 2007, and teaches courses on gender, networks, science, and social science methodology. Most recently, Kjersten served a year away as a AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow, with a placement in the Office of Research on Women's Health (ORWH) at the National Institutes of Health working for the NIH Associate Director for Research on Women's Health. Her fellowship work at ORWH included the development and formulation of NIH policy to enhance consideration of sex as a biological variable in NIH-funded biomedical research.

Personal website

French Department
Division of Literature and Languages

Poets as Readers in Nineteenth-Century France
Ententes–à partir d’Hélène Cixous
Ethics of Care in Documentary Filmmaking since 1968
Redécouvrir Louisa Siefert (1845-1877)

Theatre Department
Division of the Arts

Music Department
Division of the Arts

Personal website

History Department
Division of History and Social Sciences

Biology Department
Division of Mathematical and Natural Sciences

Erik is a neuroscientist with a broad interest in understanding how brains generate behaviors. He studied cell and molecular biology at the University of Michigan (BS '97), trained in neurobiology as a graduate student at Columbia University (PhD '06) and was a postdoc at Boston University and the University of Utah. His research primarily investigates how neurons and neural circuits generate vocal behaviors of the African clawed frog, Xenopus laevis. Much of his research employs electrical recordings of vocal neurons. Since arriving at Reed in 2012, he has also been collaborating with Reed students to use molecular tools to identify genes that are critical for the production, development and evolution of frog vocalizations. Erik's courses focus on understanding how neurons work, and how nervous systems control physiologically critical functions such sensory processing, movement, and metabolism.

Biology Department webpage