The Division of Arts & Humanities is thrilled to welcome the following 19 new faculty to the UC Berkeley campus:
Rama Alhabian joins the division of Arts and Humanities as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Culture. She was most recently an Assistant Professor of Arabic at Hamilton College. Her research focuses on modern and premodern Arabic literature, drawing on prior training in English, Anglophone, postcolonial East African, comparative, and world literatures. Her first book project focuses on the Arab Nahda (Renaissance) maqama, a rhymed-prose narrative genre centered on the ruses of a trickster figure, originally invented by Badi' al-Zaman al-Hamadhani in 10th-century Baghdad. She has published her research in academic journals such as Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies and Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies. She was also the recipient of Hamilton College’s 2023 John R. Hatch Excellence in Teaching Award. Professor Alhabian received her BA from Effat University, her MA from King Saud University and Cornell University, and her PhD from Cornell University.
Thomaz Amancio joins the division of Arts and Humanities as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese. Most recently, he was a Teaching Follow in the Department of Romance Languages and Literature at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on Rural Latin America, literature and social sciences, environmental humanities, critical animal and plant studies. His manuscript, entitled Field Work: Labor and Culture in Rural Brazil, historicizes field research in the countryside as an epistemic and aesthetic practice informed by class. His research interests also extend to the representation of animals, plants, and spirits, especially as it pertains to contemporary environmental and social concerns. He has published his research in academic journals such as philia, Revista Porto Alegre, Topoi, the Journal of Lusophone Studies, and the forthcoming volume Plants and Animals in Latin American Cultural Production. Professor Amancio received his BA and MA from Universidade Estadual de Campinas, and his PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of Chicago in 2024. His dissertation was awarded the Best Dissertation prize by LASA Brazil in 2025.
Marjorie Burge joins the division of Arts and Humanities as an Assistant Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. She was most recently an Assistant Professor of Japanese at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research focuses on Pre-modern Japanese literature and culture, Pre-modern Korean literature and culture, early inscriptions, vernacular writing systems, vernacular literature, archaeology of proto/early historic Japan and Korea, waka poetry, Silla hyangga, Man’yōshū, elegiac verse, women’s diary literature. Her current book project, titled Unearthing Written Cultures of Early Korea and Japan, explores writing in the Korean kingdoms of Paekche (ca. third century CE-660CE) and Silla (ca. third century CE-935CE) and early Japan through inscriptions on wood slips known as mokkan. Her publications include Visions of the Eastland: Reading the Azuma uta of Man’yōshū in Japanese Language and Literature, and Wooden Inscriptions and the Culture of Writing in Sabi Paekche in Asian Perspectives. Professor Burge received a BA in Asian Studies and Japanese from the George Washington University, and a MA and PhD from the Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures at UC Berkeley.
Joseph Cross joins the division of Arts and Humanities as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Culture. He was most recently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the European Research Council-funded project From Texts to Literature: Demotic Egyptian Papyri and the Formation of the Hebrew Bible (DEMBIB) at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (PI Bernd U. Schipper). His current research focuses on novellas written by Judeans in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, and by Egyptians in Demotic, during the Achaemenian and Hellenistic periods. He is the author of the forthcoming book Ruly Stories, Unruly Plots: A Poetics of Storytelling in the Judean and Demotic Egyptian Novella, expected in 2026 as part of the Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis series. His recent scholarly publications include Appearance and Reality in Setna’s Dialogue with ‘Pharaoh’ in First Setna 5.31–35 in (Im)politeness in Ancient Egypt; Esther as Novella in Esther: Themes and Issues; and Mouvance and the Art of Fiction in Performance in Manuscripts of a Demotic Novella in Manuscript and Text Cultures. Professor Cross received his BA in Classics from the University of Texas at Austin, his MA in Theology from the University of Dallas, and his second MA and PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago.
Jackie Elliot joins the division of Arts and Humanities as a Professor in the Department of Ancient Greek and Roman Studies. She was most recently an Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research focuses on the history of Roman literature from its inception, specializing in the epic and historiographical traditions of republican Rome. Her first monograph, Ennius and the Architecture of the Annales, retraces what we think we know of Rome’s first and massively influential but now fragmentary hexametric epic to its ancient sources. This study was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement (4 June, 2014) and won several awards, including the Society for Classical Studies’ Goodwin Award. She is also the author of Early Latin Poetry (Leiden, 2022), an introduction to the fragmentary record of Roman poetry from its origins through roughly the first hundred and twenty years of its existence. She has received fellowships from the Humboldt Foundation, the American Academy at Rome, the Loeb Foundation, and has contributed articles to the Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, the Classical Quarterly, Histos, and the American Journal of Philology. Professor Elliot received her BA in Classics from University College, Oxford, her MA in Greek from Columbia University, and her PhD in Classics from Columbia University.
Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier joins the division of Arts and Humanities as a Professor in the Department of Music. Most recently she was a Professor and Chair of the Department of Music, and faculty member at the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University. She writes on music and cultural policy, forced silence and armed conflict, and genealogies of listening and sound in Latin America and the Caribbean. Her recent book, Aurality, Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia (Duke University Press, 2014) was awarded the Alan Merriam Prize by the Society for Ethnomusicology. She is also the author of Músicas locales en tiempos de globalización (Buenos Aires: Norma 2003) and Entre los Deseos y los Derechos: Un Ensayo Crítico sobre Políticas Culturales (Bogotá: Ministerio de cultura, 2003). Her current projects explore the bioacoustics of life and death in colonial histories of the Americas. She has been a Distinguished Greenleaf Scholar in Residence at Tulane University (2016) and a Guggenheim Fellow (2007-2008). She has served on the advisory boards of the Society for Cultural Anthropology, the Démos project at the Cité de la Musique - Philharmonie de Paris, and the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. Professor Gautier received her BM from the University of British Columbia, and her MA and PhD in Ethomusicology and Folklore from Indiana University Bloomington.
Linda Gosner joins the division of Arts and Humanities as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Ancient Greek and Roman Studies. She was most recently an Assistant Professor of Classical Archaeology at Texas Tech University. Her research focuses on responses to Roman imperialism in rural and industrial landscapes of the western Mediterranean. Her work largely focuses on the mining industry in Iron Age and Roman Iberia. She co-authored the book, Local Experiences of Collectivity and Mobility in the Ancient West-Central Mediterranean with Jeremy Hayne in 2024. She has additionally published academic writing in journals such as Open Archaeology, European Journal of Archaeology, Journal of Social Archaeology, and Journal of Field Archaeology. Gosner is the recipient of the ACLS, Barrington Foundation Fellowship in Classical Studies. Professor Gosner received her BFA in dance from the University of Arizona, her BA in Classics and Anthropology from the University of Arizona, and her PhD in Archaeology and the Ancient World from Brown University.
Katerina Korola joins the division of Arts and Humanities as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Film & Media. She was most recently an Assistant Professor of German Media at the University of Minnesota. Her research and teaching focuses on the history of photography, cinema, and modern art from the nineteenth century to the present. She is completing her first monograph, Picturing the Air: Photography and the Industrial Atmosphere, which tells a history of air pollution as a photographic problem. An excerpt of this project has been published as The Air of Objectivity: Albert Renger-Patzsch and the Photography of Industry in Representations, where it received the 2023 Emerging Scholars Publication Prize from the Historians of German, Scandinavian, and Central European Art. Concurrently, she has also begun work on a second book project, Heliotropic Media: Botanical Experiments in Photography, which examines the intersections of botany, photochemistry, and energy from the nineteenth century to the present. Other research interests include the visual culture of science, early and silent cinema, educational and sponsored film, socialist photography and film, archival theory and aesthetics, eco-criticism, and abstraction across media (especially the monochrome format). Professor Korola received her joint-PhD in Art History and Cinema & Media Studies from the University of Chicago.
Sarah Lease joins the division of Arts and Humanities as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese. She was most recently a Joseph H. Greenberg Endowed Research Fellow in the Department of Linguistics at the University of New Mexico. Her research focuses on testing exemplar models of lexical representation for the purposes of understanding language acquisition, language variation, and language change, especially in bilingual populations. Her recent publications include Do Changes in a Form’s Ratio of Conditioning During Childhood Coincide with Changes in Children’s Lexical Representations? in First Language and Linguistic Convergence in U.S.-Raised Spanish–English Bilinguals’ Nominal Demonstrative Use in Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. Professor Lease received her BA in Spanish from the University of Colorado, and her MA in Spanish and PhD in Linguistics from the University of New Mexico.
Mark Minch-de Leon joins the division of Arts and Humanities as an Associate Professor in the Department of Film & Media. He was most recently an Assistant Professor of Indigenous studies in the Department of English at UC Riverside. His current research focuses on the intersections of Indigenous Studies, Rhetorical Theory, and Narrative and Visual Studies. His forthcoming book looks at the anticolonial, nonvitalist dimensions of California Indian intellectual and cultural resurgence. His publications include Race and the Limitations of ‘the Human’ in After the Human, and Atlas for a Destroyed World: Frank Day’s Painting as Work of Nonvital Revitalization in Native American and Indigenous Studies. Professor Minch-de Leon received his BA in Philosophy from CSU Chico and his PhD in Rhetoric with an Emphasis in Gender, Women, and Sexuality from UC Berkeley.
Carlotta Moro joins the division of Arts and Humanities as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Italian Studies. She was most recently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the UKRI-funded project Cultures of Philosophy: Women Writing Knowledge in Early Modern Europe at the University of Exeter. She aims to uncover women’s contributions to philosophy – and particularly to natural philosophy – in seventeenth-century Italy, as well as their transnational exchanges with female intellectuals. Her current project is a monograph on The Religious Writings of Lucrezia Marinella (ca. 1571/9-1653): Feminism, Theology, Philosophy (Amsterdam University Press). She is also editing the Special Issue of Renaissance Studies on Moderata Fonte (1555-92): Feminism, Genres and Networks, and producing a bilingual critical edition of Camilla Bonfiglio's Book in Praise of Women and On the Cruelty of Men for The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe (Iter Press). Professor Moro received her PhD in Italian at the Universities of Edinburgh and St Andrews.
Dima Nasser joins the division of Arts and Humanities as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Culture. She was most recently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University. Her research focuses on Modern and contemporary Arabic literature, comparative translation studies, postcolonial studies, visual culture studies, and world literature. She is interested in theories of visuality as well as experimental literary and artistic practices, feminist and postcolonial critiques of power, in addition to exile and displacement in the twentieth century. She is also an academic and literary translator between Arabic and English, and co-editor of the anthology, Arab Women Voice New Realities (2017). Professor Nasser received her BA and MA in English from the American University of Beirut and her PhD in Comparative Literature from Brown University.
Rafe Neis joins the division of Arts and Humanities as a Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Culture. They were mostly recently a Professor in the Department of History and Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. Their research focuses on the culture of the rabbinic movement of the first centuries C.E. in Roman Palestine and Sasanian Mesopotamia. They seek to instigate inquiries about more than human worlds, ritual, gender, and classification. They are committed to multi-media forms of knowledge-making and sharing, from websites to workshops and from comics to collaborative zines. Their first book, The Sense of Sight in Rabbinic Culture: Jewish Ways of Seeing in Late Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2013), won the Salon Baron Prize for best first book in Jewish Studies and an honorable mention for the Jordan Schnitzer Award for books published in Biblical Studies, Rabbinics, Jewish History and Culture in Antiquity in 2010-2013. Their second book, When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis and the Reproduction of Species (University of California Press, 2023), investigates "generation" (aka reproduction) and the creation of species in ancient Jewish writings and other sources in the Mediterranean, Southwest Asia, and North Africa. Professor Neis studied painting at the Bezalel Academy of Arts & Design, at Camden Working Men’s College, received their MA in Religious Studies from Boston University, and their PhD in Jewish Studies from Harvard University.
Andrei Pohorelsky joins the division of Arts and Humanities as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Music. Most recently, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Music at Stanford University. His research focuses on music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a particular interest in American vernacular music and the prospect of a materialist musicology. His current book project, In Search of Ragtime theorizes ragtime music and its afterlives as a musical mediation of American industrial capitalism. From the emergence of ragtime in the Gilded Age to its revival in the economic turmoil of the 1970s, the book charts transformations in musical value and social structure, revealing how ragtime enabled and frustrated historically specific fantasies of belonging and collectivity. His other research projects include source sound and music in cinema verité and love songs in periods of social transformation. Professor Pohorelsky received his BA in Religion from Oberlin College and his PhD in Music History/Theory from the University of Chicago.
Katie Ritson joins the division of Arts and Humanities as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Scandinavian. She was most recently an Assistant Professor in the Institute for Scandinavian Studies and affiliated researcher at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment & Society at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) Munich. Her research focuses on Northern European Literature & Environmental Humanities. Her first book, The Shifting Sands of the North Sea Lowlands: Literary and Historical Imaginaries, explored the coasts of the North Sea in literatures written in German, Danish, Norwegian, Dutch, and English over almost two centuries. She has continued to research and write about the North Sea, most recently in the context of fossil fuel extraction. Her publications include Doggerland Rising: Oil, Literature, and Resilience in Narratives of Resilience / Narrative der Resilienz, and, with Nicola Thomas ‘past-past time’: Anthropocene Arrhythmia and Reparative Philology in Ulrike Draesner’s Doggerland in German Life & Letters. Her other interests include conservation and landscape protection; energy history; and literature and interdisciplinarity. Professor Ritson received her BA in Modern and Medieval Languages from the University of Cambridge, her MA in Comparative Literature with Nordic Philology from LMU Munich, and her PhD from the Institute for Nordic Philology at LMU Munich.
Lea Schroeder joins the division of Arts and Humanities as an Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department. She was most recently an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University. Her current research focuses on ancient Greek philosophical psychology, especially perception and its relation to cognition, and topics at the intersection of metaphysics and ancient Greek science, mostly in the works of Plato. Her main research project is a monograph on perception (aisthēsis) in Plato's so-called later dialogues. Her publications include Plato on Object Perception in the Journal of the History of Philosophy, and Proportionate Atomism: Solving the Problem of Isomorphic Variants in Plato’s Timaeus in Phronesis. Professor Schroeder received her BA in Philosophy & Classics from Dartmouth College, her MA and PhD in Philosophy & Classics from Yale University.
Latanya d. Tigner joins the Division of Arts and Humanities as the Mary Tu Assistant Professor of Dance in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies. A performer, choreographer, and educator, she has performed professionally with Dimensions Dance Theater since 1986 in multidisciplinary works rooted in African diasporic dance forms. Her research explores African dance retentions in African American social dance and has led to the creation of Dancing Cy(i)phers, an annual symposium examining the coded languages of African-rooted dance. Over the course of her more than 30-year career, she has created commissioned works for Dimensions Dance Theater, the Black Choreographers Festival, Robert Moses' Kin, UC Berkeley, and Mills College, among others, and her choreography has been presented at the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival, CubaCaribe, and the Mabina Dance Festival in Congo-Brazzaville. She has also choreographed productions for Cal Shakes, San Francisco Shakespeare Festival, Ubuntu Theater Project, and Contra Costa College.
Yingxue Wang joins the Division of Arts and Humanities as an Assistant Professor in the Department of History of Art. She earned her Ph.D. and M.A. from Harvard University and her B.A. from Yale University. An art historian, her research explores the interconnected histories of premodern East Asian art, with a particular focus on artistic exchanges between the Korean peninsula and the Japanese archipelago. Her broader research interests include material culture, color, animal-human relations, and the intersection of art and resource extraction. Her dissertation, Jewel Beetle Ornament: Art, Animals, and Power in East Asia, 5th–8th Centuries, examines the widespread use of iridescent jewel beetles in elite artifacts to illuminate the entanglement of animals and animal bodies in the construction of political and religious power in premodern East Asia.