Boston University Arts & Sciences

Matt Cartmill joins us from Duke University, where he developed a distinguished reputation as a leader in biological anthropology. He challenged the long-held arboreal theory of primate origin in his 1974 paper, “Rethinking Primate Origins,” and his alternative visual predation theory reshaped the field. His recent work includes books and articles about evolutionary psychology, animal consciousness, the probabilities of human origins, and other problems in the study of human evolution, including a forthcoming textbook of hominid paleontology. His 1993 book, A View to a Death in the Morning, won numerous awards for its broad questioning of the cultural assumptions behind the hunting hypothesis in human evolution. He has received numerous teaching prizes, and he is past president of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. Dr. Cartmill joins us with the long-term goal of building a world-class biological anthropology program at Boston University.

Fallou Ngom earned a Maîtrise in Grammar & Linguistics from the University of Saint-Louis, Senegal, an M.A. in French (with emphasis on linguistics) from the University of Montana-Missoula, and a Ph.D. in French Linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His current research interests include the interactions between African languages and non-African languages, the Africanization of Islam, and Ajami literatures—records of West African languages written in Arabic script. His work has appeared in the International Journal of the Sociology of Language, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, and Language Variation and Change, among others. He hopes to help train the first generation of American scholars to have direct access into the wealth of knowledge still buried in West African Ajami literatures, and the historical, cultural, and religious heritage that has found expression in this manner.

Jeffrey A. Becker is a Mediterranean archaeologist who received his doctorate from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2007. The focus of his research is the archaeology of first-millennium B.C. Italy. Dr. Becker has excavated in Italy’s Cecina Valley and on the northeast slope of the Palatine Hill. He serves as managing director of the Gabii Project, a multi-institution initiative focused on the ancient Italian city of Gabii. Having completed an intensive geophysical survey, the project begins excavations in 2009, intent on exploring the remains of the city’s road network, as well as an area that may be the forum of the city.

Francesco Berna is a geoarchaeologist specializing in the investigation of archaeological soils and deposits using soil and sediment chemistry and geochemistry. He is currently a postdoctoral research associate at Boston University and holds a Marie Curie Fellowship from the European Union. He has written about archaeological soils from numerous important sites, covering topics such as the use of fire by hominids at Hadar, Ethiopia, and the stratigraphy and use of space at a Neolithic site in Israel.

Timothy Gardner was an undergraduate in physics at Princeton. He then obtained his Ph.D. at Rockefeller University in the Laboratory of Mathematical Physics in 2002, working on both modeling and experimental analysis of vocal dynamics. He remained at Rockefeller as a postdoctoral fellow with Fernando Nottebohm for two additional years, pursuing behavioral studies of learning in songbirds, and then moved to the laboratory of Michale Fee at MIT, continuing studies of learning in songbirds. He is the recipient of a prestigious Burroughs Wellcome Fund fellowship. His publications include papers in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Science.

Matt Wachowiak received his Ph.D. from the University of Florida in neuroscience in 1996. He was a research associate at the University of California, Berkeley, and a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University prior to joining our faculty in 2002. His research is dedicated to understanding the sense of smell, in particular addressing the question of how the nervous system represents and processes information derived from the large number of odor molecules detected by animals. He has pioneered the development of novel optical methods to visualize the activity of neurons in intact animals, and he has exploited these methods to understand the mechanisms by which odorant information is encoded. His publications include papers in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Neuron, and Nature Neuroscience. His contributions have been recognized by receipt of the Outstanding Young Researcher in Olfaction Award from the Association of Chemosensory Sciences in 2005.

Sean Elliott received his Ph.D. in bioinorganic chemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 2000, then conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Oxford as a European Molecular Biology Organization Postdoctoral Fellow and a tutor of biological chemistry to first-year undergraduates at St. John’s College, Oxford. Although he was an English major as an undergraduate at Amherst College, his present research focuses on biological electron transfer and understanding how iron- and copper-containing enzymes work as electronic devices, hard-wired for function. With scientific interests spanning redox enzymology to biological fuel cells, he has published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Angewandte Chemie, and the Journal of Biological Chemistry. Dr. Elliott has been named a Smith Family Young Investigator, an NSF CAREER awardee, and a recipient of Boston University’s Gitner Award for Distinguished Teaching.

Stephanie Nelson came to Boston University in 1995, having received her Ph.D. in 1992 from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. She teaches jointly in classical studies and the Core Curriculum, and her areas of specialization include Greek and Latin epic, drama, ancient philosophy, and the classical tradition. She has published widely in the fields of classics and the humanities. Her works include God and the Land: The Metaphysics of Farming in Hesiod and Vergil (Oxford University Press, 1998) and the forthcoming Aristophanes’ Tragic Muse: Tragedy, Comedy, and the Polis in Classical Athens (University of Michigan Press). She is a member of the American Philological Association and was a finalist for the Metcalf Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1999.

Alexander Coverdill joins the Core Curriculum as an instructor for the CC105-106 Natural Science series. He has joined BU after completing his Ph.D. in Zoology at the University of Washington and serving as a lecturer in the university’s Department of Biology. His research focus is centered on avian migration and the underlying behaviors and hormonal regulation of songbird movements to and from arctic breeding grounds. His current project aims to uncover potential differences in metabolic hormones in migrating and resident snow buntings, a species common in Massachusetts during winter. Through his graduate work, he has developed enthusiasm for both teaching and learning, a passion that he is eager to share with the diverse students within the Core Curriculum.

Duncan FitzGerald received his Ph.D. in Geology at the University of South Carolina in 1977. He is a coastal marine geologist who studies sediment exchange and coastal evolution of marshes, estuaries, river deltas, barrier islands, and tidal inlets. His three major research themes are coastal response to accelerating sea-level rise, the impact of major storms along the Louisiana coast, and climatic and oceanographic controls on strand plain development in Brazil. His textbook on coastal geology is used both nationally and internationally. He is a fellow of the Geological Society of America, and he has received numerous teaching awards at BU.

Amy Appleford earned her B.A. and M.A. at the University of Guelph (Ontario), and her Ph.D. at the University of Western Ontario. Her field is medieval in the broadest sense, primarily in Old and Middle English, but also stretching up into the Renaissance. Her publications include essays on John Lydgate and Julian of Norwich. Among her works in progress are essays on Thomas More, the Wakefield cycle plays, and Shakespeare and medieval romance, as well as a book entitled This Corruptible Body: Arts of Dying and the Poetics of Community in Fifteenth-Century London. She has teaching experience at Trent University, the University of Toronto, and Harvard University.

Ian Sue Wing received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and M.Sc. from Oxford University, where he was the Commonwealth Caribbean Rhodes Scholar. Dr. Sue Wing conducts research on the economic analysis of energy and environmental policy, with emphasis on climate change and computational general equilibrium (CGE) analysis. His current research investigates impacts of current U.S. proposals to mitigate climate change, sources of long-run change in the energy intensity of the U.S. economy, theoretical and empirical analyses of induced technological change, and implications of different methods of representing endogenous technological change in CGE models for climate change policy. He has been supported by the California Energy Commission and the U.S. Department of Energy and has been a member of advisory panels for the DOE, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Research Council. He was a 2005-6 REPSOL-YPF Energy Fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

Suzanne O’Brien joins the History Department as Assistant Professor of Modern Japanese History. She received her B.A. in Japanese History from Stanford University and her Ph.D. from Columbia University in East Asian languages and cultures. She also studied at Keio University and the University of Tokyo. She is the author of book chapters and a translation relating to the movement for redress by victims of the imperial Japanese military during World War II, and has published articles on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japanese cultural history. Her academic interests include social and cultural history, theories of gender and embodiment, and contemporary popular culture. Her research focuses on changes in daily life in modern Japan. Her extracurricular pursuits include salsa dancing, fencing, and cooking. She previously taught at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

Abigail Gillman is Associate Professor of German and Hebrew in the Department of Modern Languages and Comparative Literature. She came to Boston University after receiving her Ph.D. in German at Harvard in 1994, and has taught courses on modern German and Hebrew literature and on Hebrew Bible. Her research focuses on German Jewish writing, Bible translation, the art and architecture of memory, and the historical dialogue between two languages and literatures, German and Hebrew. Her book Viennese Jewish Modernism: Freud, Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler and Beer-Hofmann will appear early in 2009. She is now writing a cultural history of German Jewish Bible translation from 1783 to 1937.

Kerim Yasar, Visiting Assistant Professor of Japanese, earned a B.A. in Music from Wesleyan University and an M.A. in Japanese Literature from Columbia University. He expects to receive his Ph.D. in Japanese Literature from Columbia in October 2008. His research interests include media theory and history, translation theory and praxis, auditory culture, body/culture interfaces, temporality, and performativity. He is currently preparing a book manuscript entitled Electrified Voices: Media Technology and Discourse in Modern Japan that examines the reception and cultural functions of various media technologies in Japan from the late nineteenth century to the present. He is also an active translator, with two novels and dozens of feature-film subtitle translations to his credit (including the Criterion Collection releases of Kurosawa’s High and Low, Ozu’s Late Spring, and Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu).

Tulika Bose received her Ph.D. in Experimental High-Energy Physics from Columbia University in 2006. Her postdoctoral research focused on direct searches for new phenomena at the D0 experiment at the Fermilab Tevatron and at the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. She has also worked on trigger and data acquisition for both D0 and CMS and is currently playing a leading role in the commissioning of the CMS Trigger. She is an author of numerous publications in refereed journals and is actively involved in preparations to extract physics from CMS using early LHC data. She has published extensively on her research using functional magnetic resonance imaging methods to examine memory systems in humans. She serves on the editorial boards of the journals Behavioral Neuroscience and Hippocampus.

Andrew Reeves is Assistant Professor of Political Science. He studies electoral politics in America and Great Britain and is interested in how electoral institutions shape political outcomes. He has written on topics including electoral reforms, campaign behavior, political behavior, voting technology, and legislative politics. These writings have appeared in, among other places, the Journal of Politics and the Los Angeles Times. His dissertation examines how politicians used democratic electoral reforms to create strong political parties in Victorian England. He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2008.

Stefan G. Hofmann received his Ph.D. in 1993 from the University of Marburg, Germany. He held appointments at Stanford University, the University of Dresden, and the State University of New York at Albany. He has published widely in the area of clinical psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience. His scientific work has been supported by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health and various private foundations. His research focuses on the mechanisms of psychological treatments for mental disorder, such as anxiety disorders, and the effects of emotion-regulation strategies on psychological well-being.

Thomas Michael graduated from Portland State University with a B.A. in English Literature, French Language and Literature, and Philosophy, and a minor in Chinese language. He went on to pursue an M.A. in Religious Studies from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in the History of Religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School, spending a year at the National Taiwan Normal University along the way. He comes to us from George Washington University where he taught in the Department of Religion and the Honors Program. Dr. Michael will teach courses on Chinese religions, including Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism, and popular religions. With his longstanding interest in literary studies, he will also make an important contribution to our offerings in religion and literature. His first book, The Pristine Dao: Metaphysics in Early Daoist Discourse (published in 2005 in the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture) has garnered the attention of scholars in a range of disciplines for its bold and innovative re-thinking of Daoist tradition. He is currently engaged in an equally provocative study of shamanism in early Chinese sources with attention to oracle bones, myth, poetry, song, and official bureaucratic writings.