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Arts & Sciences welcomes the 39 new faculty members who have joined our community in 2025.

Aleisha Barton, Visiting Assistant Professor of History of Art & Architecture, has been appointed the 2025-26 Rayand Margaret Horowitz Visiting Professor in American Art at Boston University. In this role, Barton will teach two arthistory courses related to her area of specialization and participate in Boston University’s broader Americanist community. Barton will also continue to pursue her research on postwar psychedelia in the United States, a topic with strong ties to Boston and its surrounding areas.

Sophie Hao, Assistant Professor of Linguistics, is a specialist in computational linguistics.Professor Hao does research on issues related to deep neural network models including interpretability, explainability, and bias. You can learn more about her research interests on her website. Sophie Hao has a remarkable educational background, including a joint PhD in Computer Science and Linguistics from Yale (2022), where she was advised by Bob Frank and Dana Angluin — the first joint CS and Linguistics PhD at Yale ever! But this was not *her* first joint degree; she also holds a BA in Mathematics and Linguistics from UChicago. She was most recently a postdoc at NYU, where among other things she collaborated with Tal Linzen on a project showing that statistically trained language models like BERT form representations of morphosyntactic features during training.

Rafael Hernández, Lecturer of English, considers modernism’s interest in embodiment—notably, how modernism envisioned the body as under regular threat of disease, disability, gender flux, and racial slippage. Throughout his work, Hernández locates the medical and quasi-medical origins undergirding long-form narratives about health and disability in the early twentieth century. Nineteenth century socio-medical discourses rapidly reached a fever pitch of paranoia in the moment of early modernism and newly framed the body as the site of social and moral deviance, from disease and disability to miscegenation and gender play. In his research, he traces this story as rendered in the literature and popular discourse of the time to show how the political, social, and cultural instability of the modernist moment was attached to disruptions in bodies along with their representations in art and literature. Alongside his research, Hernández teach courses in British and Irish modernism, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Anglophone literature, and special topics courses on disability studies and the works of James Joyce.

Arianna Q. James, Assistant Professor of English, also has affiliations in the African American & Black Diaspora Studies Program and the Cinema and Media Studies Program in the College of Arts & Sciences. Professor James specializes in African American and Asian American literature and film studies. Her book project, A Sense of AfroAsia: Blackness, Asianness, and the Speculative, collapses the boundaries between African American and Asian American literature and theory to experiment in the expansive field of Afro-Asian studies. Invested in ways of reading and being beyond institutionalized field delineation, A Sense of AfroAsia argues that aesthetic markers of AfroAsia beyond bodily encounters speak to a long tradition of crossing and speculative race-making in the U.S. Outside of her primary fields of study, Arianna’s other research and teaching interests include media and fan work, speculative fiction, and digital humanities, as well as constellating theories around queerness, mixedness, and the body.

Daniel Munro, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, has main interests in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of cognitive science. Much of his research is about the imagination. In addition to foundational questions about the imagination’s nature and epistemic value, he’s interested in how theorizing about the imagination can help us better understand domains such as conspiracy theorizing, religious cognition, and artificial intelligence. Daniel received his PhD from the University of Toronto and his BA from the University of British Columbia. Before coming to BU, he held a postdoctoral fellowship at York University.

Miguel Ohnesorge, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, is a philosopher and historian of science. You will often find him busy writing his book (under contract at Oxford University Press), which is tentatively titled “Newton’s Open Problem: Earth’s Figure and Universal Gravitation.” In it, he reconstruct how they tested whether Newtonian gravitation is a ‘universal’ force. Ohnesorge’s other research explores the foundations and limits of quantitative measurement in science. You can use this website to discover his research and teaching.

Steven D. Smith, Professor of Classical Studies, is the William Goodwin Aurelio Professor of Greek Language and Literature at Boston University. He received his PhD from Boston University in 2004 and is thrilled to be back in his home department. Before returning to Boston, Professor Smith spent two decades at Hofstra University, where he held the John Cranford Adams Endowed Chair in the Humanities (2017-2023), and where he was named Teacher of the Year in 2023. He is the author of Greek Identity and the Athenian Past in Chariton (Barkhuis, 2007) and Man and Animal in Severan Rome: The Literary Imagination of Claudius Aelianus (Cambridge, 2014). In 2020, Professor Smith received the Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit for his book Greek Epigram and Byzantine Culture: Gender, Desire, and Denial in the Age of Justinian (Cambridge, 2019).

Carolyn White, Professor of History of Art & Architecture, is director of the Preservation Studies Program and Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Boston University. Her scholarship focuses on cultural heritage, the materiality of daily life, the built environment, active site archaeology, and the intersection of and collaboration between art and archaeology. Her research spans four centuries, focusing on personal adornment and the construction of identity in 18th century England and America, 19th-century ranching in Hawaii, daily life in 1860s Aurora, Nevada, and on the built environment of Black Rock City. Her new research project focuses on squatted buildings and the right to the city in Rome, Italy. Her most recent books are The Archaeology of Burning Man (University of New Mexico Press, 2022) and Distant Voices: On Steven Seidenberg’s Architecture of Silence (Contrasto Press, 2024), the latter with her frequent collaborator, photographer Steven Seidenberg.

Anthony Yacovone, Assistant Professor of Linguistics uses psycholinguistic methods like neuroimaging, eye-tracking,and computational modeling to better understand how language develops, functions, and adapts in complex, real-world environments.

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