UCI School of Humanities welcomes ten new faculty

UCI School of Humanities welcomes ten new faculty

  Office of the Dean December 12, 2016

New faculty join our Departments of Comparative Literature, English, European Languages and Studies, History, and Philosophy

Aijaz Ahmad, Chancellor's Professor, Comparative Literature

Aijaz Ahmad joined us in February from the Asian School of Journalism in Chennai where he was a visiting professor. Ahmad is a renowned cultural theorist whose contributions to literary theory and commentaries on contemporary politics have been seminal. He is the author of several books on Marxist theory, literature and politics, including, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (Verso, 1992), and has held positions at York University (Toronto), Jamia Millia University and Jawaharlal Nehru University.

Ahmad received his M.A. from Punjab University in Lahore.

Houri Berberian, Professor and Meghrouni Family Presidential Chair in Armenian Studies, History

Houri Berberian joins us from California State University, Long Beach, where she was professor of Middle Eastern history and director of the Middle Eastern Studies Program. Berberian's research interests lie in Iran, specifically Armenian participation in the Iranian Constitutional Revolution, which is the topic of her first book. Her interests also include Iranian-Armenian women's education and activism and issues of Iranian-Armenian identity and memory. Her current project is a connected-histories approach to the early twentieth-century revolutions in the Russian, Iranian, and Ottoman empires explored through the circulation of Armenian revolutionaries, arms, print, and global ideologies like constitutionalism and socialism.

Berberian received her Ph.D. and M.A. in history from UCLA.

Annalisa Coliva, Professor, Philosophy

Annalisa Coliva joined us in March from the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in Italy where she was an associate professor in the Department of Culture and Language Studies and co-director of Cogito Research Centre in Philosophy at Bologna University.

Coliva focuses her research on epistemology, philosophy of mind and language and the history of analytic philosophy. At UCI, she co-directs the minor in medical humanities with Professor Sven Bernecker. She is currently preparing a monograph on relativism with Maria Baghramian for Routledge and is increasingly interested in social epistemology and more specifically in issues such as testimony, the role of trust and experts, and in knowledge dissemination in the digital era. She is the author or co-author of nine monographs, including The Varieties of Self-Knowledge (Palgrave, 2016), Extended Rationality: A Hinge Epistemology (Palgrave, 2015) and Moore and Wittgenstein: Scepticism, Certainty and Common Sense (Palgrave, 2010).

Coliva received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of St. Andrews and Ph.D. in Philosophy of Language from the University of Eastern Piedmont, Vercelli. She received her M. Litt. in philosophy from the University of St. Andrews and M.A. in philosophy from the University of Bologna, Italy.

Alicia Cox, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature

Alicia Cox joins us from UC Davis where she completed a postdoctoral fellowship in their Department of English. Cox's research focuses on American Indian narratives, decolonization and queer studies. She is currently completing a book on the autobiographies of three Hopi Indians who attended either Sherman Institute in Riverside or Phoenix Indian School in Arizona between 1906 and 1909. The autobiographies are written in the as-told-to genre, with individual oral histories recorded by non-Indians.

Cox received her Ph.D. in English with a concentration on Native American studies, and M.A. in English, from UC Riverside.

Peter Frei, Assistant Professor, European Languages and Studies

Peter Frei joins us from the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, where he was a senior lecturer and researcher in the French department. Frei specializes in the French Renaissance of the sixteenth-century as well as 20th-century French literature and thought. He is the author of François Rabelais et le scandale de la modernité: Pour une herméneutique de l'obscène renaissant (Geneva, 2015). He is currently working on a book on the notion of a littérature engagée and the political dimension of early modern fictions and images.

Frei received his Ph.D. in French literature from the University of Fribourg and M.A. in French, philosophy and English from the University of Zurich.

Christophe Litwin, Assistant Professor, European Languages and Studies

Christophe Litwin joins us from Princeton University where he was a Fellow at the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts. His research focuses on early modern French literature and culture, early modern European moral and political philosophy, and Montaigne, Pascal & Rousseau studies. His current book project (Justice et amour de soi. Montaigne et Pascal au démêlé [Justice & Self-Love: Disentangling Montaigne & Pascal], Classiques Garnier, 2017) is an inquiry into the passion of self-love and the quarrel over its interpretation that emerges after the Renaissance between the Augustinians and the Humanists. His second book project focuses on Rousseau's critique of early utilitarian quantitative approaches to human pains and pleasures.

Litwin holds a dual Ph.D. in French literature from New York University and in philosophy from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. He graduated from the Paris Ecole Normale Supérieure and completed an M.A. in German philosophy at the Sorbonne.

Theodore Martin, Assistant Professor, English

Theodore Martin joins us from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee where he was an assistant professor of English. Martin specializes in post-1945 American and British fiction. His work on issues of history, temporality, and politics in the contemporary novel has appeared in Modern Language Quarterly, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, nonsite, the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, and the edited volume Postmodern/Postwar and After (University of Iowa Press). His book, Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press in spring 2017.

Martin received his Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley and B.A. in English and philosophy from Brown University.

Annie McClanahan, Assistant Professor, English

Annie McClanahan joins us from University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee where she was an assistant professor of English. Her first book, Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and 21st Century Culture (Stanford University Press, 2016), explores the ways that U.S. culture-from novels and poems to photojournalism and horror movies-has responded to the collapse of the financialized consumer credit economy in 2008. She is currently at work on two new projects, one on the discourse of economic stagnation and another on the cultural history of microeconomics. Her work has appeared in Representations, The Journal of Cultural Economy, Theory & Event, Journal of American Studies, Post45, South Atlantic Quarterly, symploke, and qui parle.

McClanahan received her Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley and B.A. in English from Indiana University, Bloomington.

Liron Mor, Assistant Professor, Comparative Literature

Liron Mor joins us from the University of Toronto, Canada where she was the Anne Tanenbaum Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Jewish Studies and Center for Diaspora and Transnational Studies. Her research focuses on politics, contemporary Israeli and Palestinian literature and film, continental philosophy and postcolonial theory, theories of conflict, occupation and sympathy, and questions of translation and literary adaptation. Before her graduate studies at Cornell, Mor conducted research at The Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University in Israel.

Mor received her Ph.D. in comparative literature with a concentration in Near Eastern studies and M.A. in comparative literature from Cornell University.
 
Duncan Pritchard, Chancellor's Professor, Philosophy

Duncan Pritchard joined us in July from the University of Edinburgh where he served as chair in epistemology. In addition to his role as chair, Pritchard was elected to a Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (awarded in 2011), and Director of the Eidyn Research Centre, which he founded in 2012. Pritchard's research is mainly in epistemology with particular focus on the following issues: the problem of scepticism, the epistemic externalism/internalism distinction; the rationality of religious belief; testimony; the relationship between epistemic and content externalism; virtue epistemology; epistemic value; modal epistemology; the history of scepticism; and epistemological contextualism.

Pritchard is the author of Epistemic Luck (Oxford UP, 2005), The Nature and Value of Knowledge (co-authored with Adrian Haddock and Alan Millar, Oxford UP, 2010), Epistemological Disjunctivism (Oxford UP, 2012), and Epistemic Angst: Radical Skepticism and the Groundlessness of Our Believing (Princeton UP, 2015).

Pritchard received his Ph.D. and MLitt in philosophy from the University of St. Andrews.