Meet the School of Humanities’ new faculty and visiting scholars
UC Irvine’s School of Humanities welcomes a new assistant professor, two visiting professors, two visiting scholars and a postdoctoral scholar for the 2026-27 academic year. The group holds appointments in the Departments of African American Studies, Art History, Asian American Studies, English and Film and Media Studies.
Their work ranges from seventeenth-century English literature to modern digital resistance, Afrofuturism, secularism and Black studies, contemporary Korean art and Taiwanese American history. Please join us in welcoming this accomplished group of scholars to campus.
Alex Walton, assistant professor, Department of English
Alex Walton joins the UCI Department of English with a background studying the literary, religious and political culture of the English Revolution, with a focus on the linguistic practice of 17th-century religious radicals. His interests extend to theories of rhythm in poetry and prose, the intersection of literature and linguistics and the history of capitalism and political economy.
In the classroom, Walton encourages students’ development as conversation partners as much as their growth as individual thinkers. He considers the ability to listen, think on the fly and ask clarifying questions essential to humanistic inquiry. He also hopes his students will come to value writing not only as a way to transcribe finished thoughts, but because the unruliness of language can lead them to think along paths they otherwise wouldn’t.
This fall, Walton will teach two seminars: one on the prose and poetry of John Milton amid the upheavals of early modern Europe, and another on the theory and practice of description, a longstanding concern for poets, critics, scientists and philosophers of language.
Walton earned his Ph.D. in English from UC Berkeley, an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Iowa and a B.A. in English from the University of Washington in his hometown of Seattle. He has spent the past year at the Harvard Society of Fellows.
Fun fact: Alex is an enthusiastic practitioner of and evangelist for randonneuring, a long-distance, non-competitive style of cycling.
Ahlam Muhtaseb, visiting professor, Department of Film and Media Studies
Ahlam Muhtaseb is a filmmaker who joins UCI from California State University, San Bernardino, where she is a professor of Media & Communication and was recently named a 2026 Outstanding Professor for Scholarly, Research & Creative Activities. Her interdisciplinary research explores the role of digital media in society, with a focus on virtual reality and artificial intelligence. Within this, she studies digital resistance, decolonization, social justice and diasporic communities.
Her documentaries include 1948: Creation & Catastrophe, which won a Special Jury Award at the Jerusalem International Film Festival, and 36 Seconds: Portrait of a Hate Crime, which premiered at DOC NYC and examines Islamophobia and racism in the U.S. through the 2015 killings of three young Muslims in Chapel Hill. As a senior data justice fellow at Princeton’s Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, Muhtaseb is co-founder and co-director of “The Phoenix of Gaza XR,” a virtual reality project documenting life in Gaza pre- and post-genocide through 360-degree videos and a 3D replica of the city.
At UCI, Muhtaseb plans to write a book proposal on the militarization of the tech industry and continue her work on two films about Palestinian-Japanese solidarity, past and present.
She holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies and an M.A. in Journalism from the University of Memphis.
Fun fact: Ahlam enjoys hiking, traveling and reading, and she’s looking forward to spending time with new friends in Orange County.
Petna Ndaliko Katondolo, visiting professor, Department of Film and Media Studies
Petna Ndaliko Katondolo is an award-winning Congolese filmmaker, educator and ancestral ecologist whose work is known for its decolonial African futurism. Questions of sovereignty and narrative control have been at the heart of his filmmaking, teaching and community organizing for decades.
Katondolo founded the Yole!Africa cultural center in 2000 while living in a refugee camp in Kampala, and later re-established it in his hometown of Goma. The center offers students training in film, theater, dance, painting and music. Katondolo is also the founder of the Congo International Film Festival. His own films have been selected for festivals worldwide, including Berlinale and FIDMarseille, with his latest documentary, Deep Cobalt, being selected for the International Film Festival Rotterdam and having its U.S. premiere at UCI earlier this year. Katondolo teaches and consults regularly for international organizations and has previously served as an artist in residence at the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
He joins the UCI Department of Film and Media Studies in January 2027.
Roy Cherian, visiting scholar, Department of African American Studies
After graduating with his Ph.D. in Culture and Theory from UCI this past spring, Roy Cherian returns to campus as a visiting scholar. His research sits at the intersection of Black studies, philosophy and religious studies to interrogate the relationship between secularization and anti-Blackness. Prior to graduate school, Cherian conducted social and behavioral research at the Center for Vulnerable Populations at UCSF.
At UCI, Cherian will complete his book manuscript and begin research for his next project, Madness and Infidelity, which examines the influence of Christian religious thought on psychiatry and psychology. The project will explore how people cast as enemies or as enslaved by secular humanism have turned to psychoanalysis to make sense of suffering.
Cherian earned his Ph.D. in Culture and Theory at UC Irvine, his master’s in Social Factors in Health from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and his bachelor’s in Cultural Anthropology at New York University.
Fun fact: Roy is a photographer, soap maker, baker and general tinkerer.
Jung-Ah Woo, visiting scholar, Department of Art History
Jung-Ah Woo is a professor of art history and chair of the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences at Pohang University of Science and Technology in South Korea, where she also directs the POSTECH Future Intellectuals Academy. She brings her expertise on the conceptual development of contemporary Korean art and its relationship to global contemporaneity to the UCI campus. She explores these topics in her latest book, The Conceptual Turn and the Origins of Contemporaneity in Korean Art.
A prolific public scholar, Woo has written a weekly art column for The Chosun Ilbo since 2011 and serves on the board of the Samsung Foundation of Culture. She was also a Getty Scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles from 2018 to 2019.
Woo holds a Ph.D. in Art History from UCLA and an M.A. and B.A. in Archaeology and Art History from Seoul National University.
Grace Ying, postdoctoral scholar, Department of Asian American Studies
Before joining UCI, Grace Ying was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Taiwan History, Academia Sinica. Her research examines the media practices of first-generation Taiwanese Americans and the emergence of Taiwanese consciousness from the 1960s through the 1980s.
With a background in theater, Ying also explores ways to make history accessible to wider audiences, including through documentary-theater projects that bring historical experiences to life on stage. Through exhibitions and public-engagement projects, she seeks to deepen public understanding in Taiwan of overseas Taiwanese activism and strengthen ties between Taiwanese communities in Taiwan and abroad.
At UCI, Ying will continue her research on newsletters and the Voice of Taiwan, a network of telephone answering machines, while expanding her work to Taiwanese American newspapers of the 1980s. She is also writing her first work of literary nonfiction, a history of the Voice of Taiwan, expected to be published in Taiwan in 2027.
Ying earned her Ph.D. in Social Research and Cultural Studies from the Institute of Social Research and Cultural Studies at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University in Taiwan.
Fun fact: Outside of academia, Grace and her husband enjoy snowboarding and look forward to exploring new mountains across the United States.
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