Hunter College announced today the appointment of 26 new faculty members to start the academic school year, a group marked by remarkable scholarship and expertise, as well as diversity in backgrounds and interests. The appointments mark additions to Hunter in the Schools of Arts & Sciences, Education, Health Professions, Nursing, and Social Work.
“Attracting more than two dozen new and remarkably talented faculty members is one of the most important things we can do for Hunter students,” said Jennifer J. Raab, President of Hunter College. “These faculty members will make a difference on campus with their commitment to education, scholarship, research, and interdisciplinary collaboration, in so many fields of study.”
The new appointments in the School of Arts & Sciences:
Anita Raja joins Hunter as Professor in the Computer Science Department. An internationally recognized expert in metareasoning in artificial intelligence, Professor Raja also focuses on machine learning for clinical informatics and game theory for traffic network optimization. Having taught courses on blockchain, distributed artificial intelligence, application development, and engineering design, she has led classes that feature collaborative work with academic medical centers. In 2019, Crain’s New York Business named Professor Raja one of the “Notable Women in Tech” in the Greater New York City area.
Lázaro Lima joins Hunter as Professor in the Department of Africana and Puerto Rican/Latino Studies. A scholar, documentary film-maker, and poet, his work focuses on how the intersections of nationalism, race, language, gender, and sexuality have given rise to majority conceptions of “minority” subjectivity. His research, scholarship, and creative work have appeared in the popular press, edited volumes, and academic journals, and his book Being Brown: Sonia Sotomayor and the Latino Question has just been published. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the American Library Association.
Nicholas Bloom joins Hunter as Professor in the Department of Urban Policy & Planning. His research analyzes long-term planning outcomes in essential urban systems, such as subsidized housing and mass transportation. The author of several books including How States Shaped Postwar America, and co-editor of the prize-winning collection Public Housing Myths, Professor Bloom serves as Co-Editor in Chief of The Journal of Planning History. Frequently quoted in the media, he is currently researching how the demise of America’s bus transit systems have damaged the quality of life of all Americans and contributed to the rise of today’s highly segregated metropolis.
Sandra Shapshay joins Hunter as Professor in the Department of Philosophy. She has emerged as a leading expert in the new field of environmental aesthetics having published a number of related articles, as well as coediting a special issue of the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, titled “The Good, the Beautiful, the Green: Environmentalism and Aesthetics.” Professor Shapshay is also a leading scholar and on the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, having just published the book Reconstructing Schopenhauer’s Ethics: Hope, Compassion, and Animal Welfare.
Collin Craig joins Hunter as Associate Professor in the Department of English. He has researched and taught African American rhetoric, composition, gender and sexuality, and writing programs. His primary area of scholarship focuses on Black and Latinx literacy repertoires, exploring how Black and Latinx students make meaningful connections between in-school and out-of-school literacies. His forthcoming book, Lives We Tell, Revolutions We Live: Black and Latinx Literacies (SUNY Press 2020), explores what languages and literacies Black and Latinx students value, sponsor, and accumulate in their personal, civic, and academic lives.
Jillian Báez joins Hunter as Associate Professor in the Department of Africana & Puerto Rican/Latino Studies, returning to her alma mater. Her research expertise includes Latinx media and popular culture, transnational feminisms, and issues of belonging and citizenship. The author of In Search of Belonging: Latinas, Media, and Citizenship, she has been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals, including Critical Studies in Media Communication, and is co-general editor of WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly. Organizations funding her research include the Ford Foundation, Tinker Foundation, and Social Science Research Council.
Karina Moreno joins Hunter as Associate Professor in the Department of Urban Policy & Planning. Her studies focus on securitization (how immigration governance is increasingly framed as a national security threat since 9/11) and its subsequent impact on LatinX immigrants in the United States. She has also studied the privatization of immigration detention centers in the U.S., including the practical implications of upholding human rights throughout government administrative processes. Her work has been published in Crime, Law, and Social Change and the Journal of Public Affairs Education, among others.
Oyewole Oyekoya joins Hunter as Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department.· His academic work has focused on eye tracking for image search and retrieval, and on medical image retrieval. He has grant-funded projects, and his work has been published peer-reviewed media, often in collaboration with partners in telecommunication, animation, virtual environments, and computer graphics. He sees potential for his research-including in visualization, virtual reality, eye tracking, and visual perception-in such varied applications as bullying prevention, stroke rehabilitation, and treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Ashley Jackson joins Hunter as Assistant Professor in the Department of Music. An orchestral harpist, she performs with the New York Philharmonic, Metropolis Ensemble, the Qatar Philharmonic, and NOVUS NY, and has appeared on stages around the world. As a recipient of the Theodore Presser Award, she pursued her doctoral research on Black female composer Margaret Bonds and her collaboration with Langston Hughes. Interested in the nexus of musical performance and political activism, her writing has been published on NewMusicBox and in the International Journal of Women in Music.
David Fulmer joins Hunter as Assistant Professor in the Department of Music. Winner of the 2019 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Music, a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 2016 Koussevitzky Award, he has garnered accolades for his Violin Concerto at Lincoln Center and other performances around the world. He is the recipient of the Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Carlos Surinach Commissioning Award from BMI. He is the first American recipient of the Grand Prize of the International Edvard Grieg Competition for Composers.
João Liuz Rezende Lopes joins Hunter as Assistant Professor in the Department of Music. A two-time Latin Grammy-nominated guitarist and a winner of the 2006 Concert Artists Guild Competition, he has performed extensively in the United States, Asia, Europe, and Latin America. His interests include bridging Classical, Jazz, and Latin American music, and discovering ways to make classical music education more accessible to minorities.· A native of Brazil who enjoys playing, composing, and teaching, he has designed a guitar curriculum and trained instructors to educate underprivileged children in São Paulo.
Megan Hicks joins Hunter as Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology. In her research, she uses archaeology to understand interactions among local communities, their ecologies, and mercantile and capitalist economic systems, questioning how economics and ecology shape each other. Her expertise includes the study of animal remains from sites of past human activity. Her fieldwork has focused on Iceland since 2009, with additional work in the Northern British Isles, the Caribbean, and New York City. Her interdisciplinary work extends into archival research, ethnoarchaeology, landscape studies, and critical environmental anthropology.
Stephanie Levy joins Hunter as Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology. A biological anthropologist who investigates adaptation to environmental stressors and the developmental origins of variation in metabolism and cardio-metabolic disease risk, she has focused on indigenous circumpolar populations, including the Yakut of Siberia. She has also examined the relationship between energy balance, environmental conditions, and life history patterns among the Shuar, an Ecuadorian indigenous population. She is also interested in broadening diversity, both in populations researched and in research opportunities for students.
Arabella Pollack joins Hunter as Distinguished Lecturer in the Economics and Accounting Department. Her expertise spans academic administration, teaching, and the corporate world. She moved to higher education following a successful career in top-tier organizations including Diageo, PepsiCo, and The Boston Consulting Group, where she particularly focused on strategic consumer insights and marketing. Among the responsibilities she will assume at Hunter is helping launch its new Certificate Program in Business Studies, which will create stronger connections between liberal arts education and employment.
Aine Zimmerman joins Hunter as Doctoral Lecturer in the German Department. Her interests include pedagogy and technology, and she has designed and authored an e-textbook used for third year German composition and conversation courses. She has her own Youtube channel for German language learning and has developed supplemental textbook materials. Her research and teaching focus on German literature of the 18th to 21st centuries, in particular German-Jewish literature and relations, with an area of expertise in German-Jewish love stories in literature and film after the Holocaust.
A.K. Burns joins Hunter as Doctoral Lecturer in the Department of Art and Art History. An interdisciplinary artist who views the body as a contentious domain wherein issues of gender, labor, ecology, and sexuality are negotiated, she is currently producing Negative Space, a cycle of video-installations that take speculative fiction as a point of departure. Other works of hers can be found in the Museum of Modern Art in New York NY and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among other museums. An advocate for labor issues in the arts, she was a founding member of W.A.G.E (Working Artists in the Great Economy).
Alexandro Segade joins Hunter as Doctoral Lecturer in the Department of Art and Art History. An interdisciplinary artist, his solo work has been presented in venues and events in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, among other locations. His work in the collective My Barbarian, since 2000, has been presented in the Whitney Biennial and other international art exhibitions, as well as the subject of a solo exhibition at the New Museum. He has founded other collectives in Norway, Colombia, and Germany, as well as New York. His recent writing on comics, science fiction, and Chicanx zines has been published in Artforum and Yale Theater Journal.
Christina Mekonen joins Hunter as Doctoral Lecturer in the German Department. In addition to foreign language pedagogy, her research interests include Diaspora Studies, Genocide Studies, Critical Race Studies, and Transnational Literature. A proponent of a learner-centered environment that allows for collaborative learning, she has taught a wide range of courses on culture, film, and literature, as well beginning to advanced German language courses. Focused on Black-Jewish poetic encounters vis-à-vis the Holocaust, her dissertation explores how Black and Jewish authors have imagined each other in poetry.
Yuan (Judy) Yin joins Hunter as Doctoral Lecturer in the Economics and Accounting Department. In addition to teaching financial and managerial accounting, she will serve as an academic advisor for the B.S. program in accounting. Her research has been published in Abacus, Accounting and Business Research, Journal of Investing, and Accounting and Finance. Her research interests are in financial analysis, equity valuation, fundamental analysis, forecasting, and financial reporting.
The new appointments in the School of School of Education:
Nell Scharff Panero joins Hunter as Associate Professor in the Department of Curriculum & Teaching. With 28 years of experience working at CUNY, she is happy to be returning to Hunter, having started her career in education teaching English at Hunter College High School. Her accomplishments include co-developing the Scaffolded Apprenticeship Model of School Improvement, which forms the basis of Hunter’s current CLASS program.· She is active in school reform in New York City, and her practice and research focus on literacy and school improvement, especially for high schools.
Catherine Kramarczuk Voulgarides joins Hunter as Assistant Professor in the Department of Special Education. Her scholarship spans the fields of special education, disability studies, sociology, race and ethnic studies, educational leadership, and policy and law. She focuses on understanding how schools are sites of both educational opportunity and marginalization for non-dominant students. In addition to her book Does Compliance Matter in Special Education: IDEA and the Hidden Inequities of Practice, her articles have been published in Theory into Practice, Review of Research in Education, and Teachers College Record.
Imani Irving-Perez joins Hunter as Lecturer in the Department of Special Education. With over 10 years of experience in early childhood and special education, she has held teaching and director positions in different preschool settings, including charter schools and a preschool for children with special needs. A doctoral student, her research interests include developing interventions for developmental dysgraphia, critical literacy in early childhood, and teacher development.
The new appointment in the School of Health Professions:
Jaya Rachwani joins Hunter as Assistant Professor in the Physical Therapy Program. With more than 10 years of clinical experience in pediatric physical therapy, she received her training in Spain and the United States. Her research focuses on the development of postural control and the coordination of visual and manual actions. She is a member of the Spanish Society of Pediatric Physical Therapy and the American Physical Therapy Association.
The new appointments in the School of Nursing:
Ellen McCabe joins Hunter as Assistant Professor in the Nursing Program. She completed the PhD, Master’s, and Baccalaureate degrees in Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania and received her Master’s in Education from NYU.·· Her dissertation addressed asthma care in schools. Her clinical background includes experience as a school nurse and a pediatric nurse practitioner.
Carolyn Sun joins Hunter as Assistant Professor in the Nursing Program. She received her PhD in Nursing from Columbia University, her Master’s in Nursing from NYU, and her Bachelor’s in Art from Seattle Pacific University. She has also done post-doctoral work in global health at Columbia.· She is the principal investigator of a grant-funded study to develop a culturally appropriate, palliative care module for Chinese-Americans with end-stage-renal disease.
The new appointment in the Silberman School of Social Work:
Robyn Brown-Manning has been appointed Doctoral Lecturer in the Department of Social Work, following 16 years as an adjunct professor at Hunter, where earlier she had earned her MSW and PhD degrees. Her academic work focuses on African American families, particularly women and mothers. Her dissertation explored the experiences of African American mothers raising sons, through extensive ethnographic and qualitative research. She is a seasoned practitioner of child welfare and family/group social work.
