This academic year, 14 tenure-line scholars join 13 departments and programs in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. They join a cohort of 30 new faculty members across Dartmouth.
“This cohort of faculty represents some of the most innovative and promising thinkers in their respective disciplines,” says President Sian Leah Beilock. “They are committed to bringing those talents to teaching and will also impact scholarship in fields ranging from health care policy to large-language models to philosophy to renewable energy systems. I am proud to welcome them to the Dartmouth community.”
“I am delighted to welcome this extraordinary group of scholars and artists,” says Interim Dean of Faculty John Carey. “Their diverse expertise will profoundly enrich our intellectual community through innovative scholarship, creative practice, and teaching. I look forward to the conversations, discoveries, and connections they will spark across our campus.”
Dartmouth’s largest academic unit, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences encompasses more than 40 academic departments, programs, and centers.
Associate Professor of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Studies
Education: BA, Moscow State University | MA, University of Southern California | PhD, University of Southern California | Dr Habil, Institute of Russian Language
“I study how language reflects our patterns of attention, thought and feeling, and how it can, in turn, be used to manipulate our attention or evoke certain feelings and reactions. My recent work explores cross-cultural responses to clickbait headlines. My current project focuses on moral emotions—shame, guilt, conscience, honor—across several languages and cultures. I am also interested in language acquisition and contact, and how speaking one language affects our performance in another.”
Assistant Professor of Quantitative Social Science
Education: BA, National Taiwan University | MS, University of California San Diego | PhD, University of California San Diego
“I use computational tools, including AI and large language models, to study how technology and media influence politics. My work explores censorship circumvention, online image-sharing behaviors, and the recommendation of short-form video content by algorithms. I’m fascinated by how our digital world is reshaping democracy and the possibilities—and risks—it creates for political and social life.”
Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing
Education: BA, Mills College | MS, Columbia University
“I’m a journalist and former NPR correspondent covering race and identity with a focus on reporting through the lens of systems of power. I’ve investigated police misconduct and chronicled social justice movements. I’ve been reporting on our country’s crisis of grief and examining how a politics of power and domination has found purchase in some communities of color. I’m currently focusing on the push to undo civil rights, investigating how civil rights law and language have been captured and co-opted in order to end civil rights entirely.”
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Education: BA, Amherst College | MA, Tufts University | PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
“I work in philosophy of language, feminist philosophy, and social and political philosophy. I am increasingly thinking about philosophy of film, philosophy of psychology, cognitive science, queer theory, and the places where those areas overlap.”
Assistant Professor of Mathematics
Education: BA, Wellesley College | PhD, Harvard University
“As a statistician, I study how to extract insights from data in an effective and reliable way. I specialize in Bayesian and computational statistics, with an emphasis on provably fast, scalable, and robust methods. My current projects address emerging challenges in statistical inference under data privacy constraints.”
Emily Lacroix ’15
Assistant Professor of Earth Sciences
Education: AB, Dartmouth College | PhD, Stanford University
“I am a mechanism-focused, ‘big-picture’-motivated soil biogeochemist. My work connects microscale processes to field-scale measures in both managed and unmanaged ecosystems. Through studying soil biogeochemical processes and their spatiotemporal heterogeneity, I hope to improve predictions of greenhouse gas, nutrient, and contaminant mobilization after human-induced disturbance. Right now, I am particularly interested in how oxygen heterogeneity and root-soil interactions alter the fate of soil organic carbon, nutrients, and contaminants.”
Assistant Professor of Mathematics
Education: BSc, Ramakrishna Mission Vidyamandira | MSc, RKMVERI | PhD, Michigan State University
“My research explores the geometry and topology of the mysterious four-dimensional space, which is uniquely positioned between the familiar three-dimensional world and the higher dimensions. This makes four dimensions especially intriguing, as it hosts exotic geometric phenomena unseen in any other dimension. I employ mathematical tools from gauge theory and symplectic geometry to investigate longstanding open problems and conjectures about four-dimensional shapes. Some of these questions have remained unsolved for over 100 years.”
Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences
Education: BA, University of Florida | PhD, Florida State University
“I am an evolutionary ecologist interested in how plants interact with other organisms, particularly herbivorous insects and belowground fungi. I study feedbacks that arise between traits of individuals (e.g., defenses, movement) and characteristics of populations (e.g., density, demographic structure), and ultimately the role these feedbacks play in driving ecological and evolutionary dynamics in natural systems. To do this, I integrate field studies, lab and greenhouse experiments, and mathematical models.”
Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Education: BA, University of California, Berkeley | MA, New York University | PhD, University of California, Berkeley
“My training in transnational feminist cultural studies is as a method for yielding insights about historico-philosophical concepts and ontological distinctions of the human through specific studies—for instance, of liberalism, aesthetics, empire, and war and other forms of political violence. Through such inquiry, the traffic in ideas, concepts, or social goods including freedom, beauty, sovereignty, and community, are interrogated not as unambiguous values but as transnational and transactional categories. Thus, the central query guiding my own approach to is: How do claims about gender, sexuality, and racialization—each intimate with other schema of difference—delineate what forms of life and for life are valuable and which are not, and how do these claims act upon the historical present to imagine or build another future?”
Associate Professor of Studio Art
Education: BA, University of Saskatchewan | BFA, Concordia University | MFA, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston & Tufts University | Independent Study Program, Whitney Museum
“I work across photography, sculpture, video, sound, and performance to probe the layered histories of colonialism, modernity, and media. My research explores how historical events endure in their material remnants and political afterlives. By engaging multiple forms and sites of production, I aim to reveal the instability and generative potential of these histories as they shape contemporary experience.”
Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Education: BA, Harvard University | MEng, Harvard University | PhD, Harvard University
“My research is focused on optimizing robotic systems at all scales by developing, optimizing, implementing, and evaluating next-generation algorithms and edge computational systems, through algorithm-hardware-software co-design. I also want to promote a responsible, sustainable, and accessible future for robotics and edge computing, including the development of new interdisciplinary, project-based, open-access courses that lower the barriers to entry for cutting-edge topics like robotics, parallel programming, and embedded machine learning.”
Assistant Professor of Government
Education: BS, United States Air Force Academy | MA, University of Arizona | PhD, Harvard University
“As a political theorist, I trace the development of foundational concepts such as liberalism, nationalism, and conservatism in U.S. political thought since the Revolutionary Era. My research also draws on African American intellectual traditions to rethink current debates. My first book, American Dark Age (2024), explored enduring medievalisms that haunt U.S. democratic ideals, and my forthcoming one reinterprets “the Enlightenment” through the eyes of early Black Americans. Before academia, I was a military nuclear operations officer.”
Assistant Professor of History
Education: AB, Harvard College | MPhil, University of Cambridge | PhD, Princeton University
“I am a historian of science and society in modern South Asia. My work draws together histories of medicine and health; histories of decolonization and the Cold War; and histories of race, gender, caste, and the body. I am currently working on a book about South Asia’s global biomedical trade in rhesus monkeys.”
Assistant Professor of Geography
Education: BS, Vermont State University, Lyndon | MS, Stony Brook University | PhD, Columbia University
“I am an atmospheric scientist studying precipitation variability—past and present—to improve projections of future changes. My research investigates the relative contributions of human activities and natural climate variability to historical precipitation trends. By deepening our understanding of the historical record, we gain valuable insights into what future precipitation patterns may look like. Much of my research is done by comparing observations to output from Earth system models.”
Link to Source: Meet Dartmouth’s Newest Professors