Bryn Mawr Welcomes New Faculty for 2024-25 Academic Year

Tenure-Track Appointments:

Alex Alston

Assistant Professor of Literatures in English
Alex Alston’s research and teaching explore the political ecologies and eco-literary elements of 19th- and 20th-century African American and Afro-Diasporic literature. His work is especially interested in ecofeminist thought and practice in Black literature, with an attention to the entanglements between questions of geography and genre. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Scholar and Feminist Online, American Quarterly, and Black Agenda Report. He is working on a book project that charts the resounding ambivalence of Black eco-political and eco-social critiques throughout 20th-century African American literature.

Olivia Chu

Assistant Professor of Mathematics
Olivia Chu is an applied mathematician interested in building models to study social and biological systems. The questions she aims to explore span a wide range of applications in distinct systems, from human populations (e.g., the evolution of cooperation, polarization, activism) to animal populations (e.g., altruism in social animal groups) to ecological settings (e.g., symbiotic plant-fungi associations). Common to all of this work is that it is necessarily done in collaboration with researchers across a wide array of disciplines.

Chu's teaching and mentoring philosophy is centered around the question: how can she foster an equitable and supportive environment where students are able to learn what they need to learn, what they want to learn, and get closer to achieving their dreams? She sees herself as an instructor of how to think mathematically; math gives us a beautiful language that we can use to understand and interact with the world and solve problems, and the desire to share this with her students underlies all of her teaching.

Lawrence Dallman

Assistant Professor of Philosophy
Lawrence Dallman is a philosopher interested in questions about knowledge, science, technology, and history. Most broadly, he is interested in how we can attain knowledge in a world that is hostile to being known. His recent work explores these issues in connection with 19th- and 20th-century European philosophy. He is currently pursuing two research projects related to the philosophy of Karl Marx. The first concerns Marx's theory of human nature. Dallman argues that Marx understands the nature of a species in terms of its distinctive capabilities and that he takes the human capability of will, especially as expressed in production, to dominate all other human capabilities. Dallman's second project, which builds upon his dissertation research, concerns developments in Marx's theory of knowledge and method. 

Dallman follows Kant in maintaining that “[n]o one at all can call himself [or herself] a philosopher who cannot philosophize” and that “philosophizing can be learned … only through practice and through one’s own use of reason” (Kant, “Jäsche Logic” in Lectures on Logic, trans. J. Michael Young, Cambridge University Press, 1992: 538). Accordingly, whether he is teaching a lecture-focused course or an open-discussion seminar, he plans his teaching around the goal of cultivating independent engagement on the part of his students. 

Hayden Dawes

Assistant Professor of Social Work, GSSWSR
Dr. Hayden Cedric Dawes' (He/Him) overarching aim is to use research to develop inclusive practices and policies that leverage individual and community power to enhance mental health for oppressed people. Dawes’s scholarship has three threads: 1) developing and evaluating psychosocial interventions that promote mental health and well-being among oppressed populations, particularly queer people of color; 2) digital mental health interventions and using online research methods; 3) examining and increasing cultural humility and anti-oppressive practices among mental health professionals. His work has been published in journals such as Frontiers in Psychology, Frontiers in Psychiatry, and the Journal of Social Work and Social Research.

Dr. Dawes’s research and teaching are informed by ten years of experience as a clinical social worker within multiple sectors, including community mental health and substance abuse, veterans’ health, and private practice. He teaches practice and research courses and regularly provides professional development lectures on mental health equity for LGBTQ+ People of Color and the foundational skills of cultural humility, in addition to advanced clinical practice. He wants students to embrace becoming lifelong learners about themselves and the world.

Elizabeth Dinella

Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Elizabeth Dinella's research interests are in Software Engineering and Machine Learning, focusing on the integration of symbolic program analysis and neural techniques to improve software correctness. Methods to productively write secure and correct programs are imperative in our society, which is underpinned by software systems. Software bugs and vulnerabilities are commonplace and can have devastating impacts. Currently, existing techniques to analyze programs for faults have fundamental limitations, preventing widespread deployment. Dinella seeks to address their shortcomings with the strengths of neural models. Her foundational work on AI for software engineering has been highly cited, patented, and deployed in industrial systems.

Dinella's teaching approach emphasizes bridging theory and practice and breaking down complex concepts in an accessible way. In many computer science courses, understanding how abstract, mathematical concepts apply to real-world scenarios can be challenging. Dinella strives to connect high-level theory with hands-on experiences.

Joshua Fox

Assistant Professor of Philosophy
Joshua Fox's research focuses on human wellbeing. In order to approach this topic, he studies historical debates about life’s value. In understanding why philosophers have taken particular doubts about life’s value seriously, Fox hopes to learn more about what is involved in living well. The central figures in his research are Mill, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. However, he is interested in historical and contemporary accounts of human well-being quite broadly, and has also published on the thought of Plato and Amartya Sen.

In his teaching, Fox uses these questions about life’s value to help students see the importance of engaging with historical texts, introducing them to work in ancient philosophy, 19th-century philosophy, classical Asian philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics.

Minuk Kim

Assistant Professor of Economics
Minuk Kim is an industrial organization economist, combining both theory and empirical analysis to understand how firms respond to policy changes and how these responses impact consumers. His research aims to inform the discussions on competition and tariff policy, with a focus on how firm size and scope influence their reactions to policy changes.

Kim enjoys teaching courses that connect with policy-making and consumer welfare, such as industrial organization and international trade. In his classes, Kim strives to link theoretical concepts to real-world issues, with the goal of encouraging interest in policy-relevant topics.

Neus Penalba

Assistant Professor of Spanish
Neus Penalba's research interests include Contemporary Iberian Fiction and Film, viewed through the lens of Environmental Humanities. She is especially interested in how different cultural traditions intersect and find commonalities among similar or shared questions on topics like identity or society’s connection to nature. Penalba explores these interrogations through various disciplines and methodologies, from Comparative Literature to Cultural Anthropology, from Film Studies to Art History. She has put into practice this multidisciplinary approach in her first book, in which she examined the aesthetic elements of major Catalan novelist Mercè Rodoreda’s posthumous work, using European 20th-century ethnofiction (literature and cinema) and the pictorial primitivism of the avant-garde. Since its publication last April, her book has received significant media attention in Barcelona.

Penalba's new project investigates the imaginaries of extinction in contemporary Iberian literature, analyzing how the representations of ecosystems and cultural loss are interlaced in the works of many Spanish, Catalan, and Galician authors.

Yeon Soon Shin

Assistant Professor of Department of Psychology
Yeon Soon Shin’s research centers on understanding how our brains make sense of complex experiences by inferring the underlying structure when we cannot directly observe the intricate inner workings of the world. Shin studies how reliance on inference can introduce biases in human memory and decision-making. Shin is particularly interested in biases in social contexts, such as interpersonal and intergroup biases in evaluations. She primarily uses computational modeling–a powerful method for examining the underlying mechanisms behind human behaviors–to investigate these phenomena. By modeling human decisions and inference processes, Shin aims to identify cognitive and neural components that drive biases. Through identifying precise components, Shin plans to develop theory-driven intervention strategies to reduce biases.

In addition to her research, Shin is passionate about making computational methods accessible to emerging scholars. Shin is excited to teach computational modeling and integrate it into research and teaching practices at Bryn Mawr College.

Stephen Vider

Associate Professor of History and Program Co-Director of Gender and Sexuality Studies
Stephen Vider's research examines the social practices and politics of everyday life in the 20th-century United States, with a focus on intersections of gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. His first book, The Queerness of Home, traces how American conceptions of the home have shaped LGBTQ relationships and politics from 1945 to the present. He is currently working on a new book that examines the aftermath of psychiatric deinstitutionalization and the rise of community mental health in the United States.

Vider has also contributed to a range of public history projects. At the Museum of the City of New York, he curated the exhibition AIDS at Home: Art and Everyday Activism (2017), exploring how activists and artists have mobilized domestic space and redefined family in response to HIV/AIDS, from the 1980s to the present. A Place in the City, a short film he co-directed with Nate Lavey for the exhibition, has since been featured in film festivals and programs in New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, and Istanbul. Vider was also co-curator of the exhibition Gay Gotham: Art and Underground Culture in New York (2016­) and co-author of an accompanying book, a Lambda Literary Award finalist. He is currently working on a new exhibition on lesbian feminist architecture for the Center for Architecture in New York, to open in Summer 2025.

Zhenlan Wang

Assistant Professor of Psychology
Zhenlan “Lan” Wang is a cultural psychologist whose research focuses on everyday coping. Wang investigates how people respond to stressful situations in their daily lives and how the strategies that people use for coping are socialized with children in different cultures.

The goal of her research is not just to bring more cultural sensitivity to the field, but also to go beyond a dichotomous understanding of culture (e.g., East-West, Individualist-Collectivist, etc.). Wang employs a mixed methods approach that integrates experimentation, open-ended reasoning, and analyses of cultural artifacts and practices. In her spare time, Wang likes to dance ballet, read Russian literature, and play with her cat, Liza.

Continuing Non-Tenure Track Appointments

Evan Arena

Lecturer in Physics
Physics is often viewed as intimidating and difficult to understand. Evan Arena's role as a physicist and a lecturer is to give everyone the opportunity to learn about this exciting and fascinating domain of science. He is passionate about teaching physics to non-physics majors in an accessible way. He is a proponent of using evidence-based STEM pedagogical practices in his classroom, striking the right balance between traditional lecture to disseminate information and active learning to facilitate student collaboration. Through compassionate instruction, Arena believe that anyone can have a fulfilling experience while learning physics.

As a researcher, he specializes in cosmology and astrophysics. He has played a leading role in the theoretical discovery of novel signals in weak gravitational lensing cosmology. In his capacity as an external collaborator of the Dark Energy Survey, he has developed computational tools in order to measure these signals for the first time. This big-data challenge involves measuring the apparent shapes of hundreds of millions of galaxies across the sky. Arena's work allows us to better understand the statistical distribution of matter in our Universe and the theories of gravity that guide its evolution through time.

Margaret Strair

Lecturer in German and German Studies
Margaret Strair is a Lecturer of German at Bryn Mawr College. She received her Ph.D. in 2022 from the University of Pennsylvania with a dissertation on synesthesia and intermediality in the literature of German Romanticism, as well as certificates in Cinema/​Media Studies and College Teaching. Her research interests include the inter-arts, visual and scientific culture, German literature and philosophy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and foreign language pedagogy. She is currently an assistant editor of the Goethe Lexicon of Philosophical Concepts. Her research and writing have appeared in or are forthcoming in Unterrichtspraxis, The Goethe Yearbook, The German Quarterly, The Language Educator, and in edited volumes on anti-Idealism, German Romanticism, and New German Cinema. Since Fall 2019, she has been teaching in the Bi-Co, offering courses at all levels on language, literature, and culture.

Tenure-Track Appointments for January 2025

Hannah Shoenhard

Assistant Professor of Biology
Lack of sleep impairs our ability to consolidate long-term memories. This is true not only of humans but of a myriad of other animals including our distant cousins, fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster). Hannah Shoenhard’s lab uses the powerful and precise genetic tools available in the fruit fly to discover the cellular and molecular mechanisms by which sleep facilitates long-term memory consolidation. Specifically, we compare two forms of long-term memory – one sleep-dependent and one sleep-independent – to gain insights into how sleep affects cellular physiology and metabolism in the context of memory consolidation. This research allows students to gain experience in modern genetic techniques, confocal microscopy, and model organism behavioral experiments while advancing our fundamental understanding of how the brain uses sleep to cope with the challenge of memory consolidation.

Shoenhard teaches courses in the field of cellular and molecular neuroscience, such as neurobiology (with an emphasis on cell biology of the neuron), a laboratory course in Drosophila neurogenetics, and an advanced seminar on the cellular and molecular basis of learning and memory.