Cluster Hire

Professor, Performing Arts & American Culture Studies, Fall 2023 | Elaine Peña’s teaching and research interests include border studies, hemispheric Latinx performance, and religious studies. She is the author of Performing Piety: Making Space Sacred with the Virgin of Guadalupe (University of California Press, 2011), an ethnographic study of transnational devotional practices between central Mexico […]

Assistant Professor, Art, Fall 2023 | Chris Dingwall is a historian of American and African American design with particular interest in race, material culture, political economy, and the relationship between art and power in scenes of everyday life and labor. Currently, he is writing Selling Slavery: Race and the Industry of American Culture, a book […]

Professor, African and African American Studies and Gender and Women’s Studies, Fall 2022 | Marlon M. Bailey is a Black queer theorist and critical/performance ethnographer who studies Black LGBTQ cultural formations, sexual health, and HIV/AIDS prevention. Marlon’s book, Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit, was published by the University […]

Walter D. Coles Professor of Law, Law, Fall 2022 | Rafael I. Pardo researches and teaches in the areas of bankruptcy, commercial law, contracts, and legal history. His published work over the last five years has focused on the intersection of the 1841 Bankruptcy Act, slavery, and race in the antebellum United States. This research […]

Assistant Professor, Biology, Fall 2022 | Liz’s research focuses on the causes and consequences of variation in the gut microbiome both within and between species. Much of her research examines how diet, environmental change, and host physiology influence wild nonhuman primate gut microbiomes, but her recent work identifies factors shaping microbiome variation in adults and […]

Assistant Professor, Architecture, Fall 2022 | Seth Denizen is a researcher and design practitioner trained in landscape architecture, evolutionary biology, and human geography. His published work is multidisciplinary, addressing art, design, soil science, urban geography, and the politics of climate change. He is currently a member of the editorial board of Scapegoat Journal: Architecture | […]

Associate Professor, Law, Fall 2023 | Sheldon A. Evans focuses his teaching and scholarship on criminal sentencing, punishment theory, and its intersection with immigration policies. He earned his undergraduate degree with honors from the University of Southern California, his JD from the University of Chicago Law School, and served as a federal law clerk on […]

Assistant Professor, English and Comparative Literature, Fall 2021 | G’Ra Asim, a writer and musician, is the author of Boyz n the Void: a mixtape to my brother (Beacon Press). He has served as a writing director at the African American Policy Forum and a graduate teaching fellow in Columbia University’s Undergraduate Writing Program. His […]

Associate Professor, Sociology, Fall 2021 | Zakiya Luna is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Dean’s Distinguished Professorial Scholar at WashU. Her research, teaching and community work focus on social movements, reproduction, human rights and intersectionality. She has published multiple peer-reviewed articles and chapters and secured multiple grants including from the National Science Foundation. Her […]

Assistant Professor, Musicology, Fall 2023 | Parkorn Wangpaiboonkit will join WashU as Assistant Professor of Musicology in Fall 2023. His innovative research in the emerging field of global music history examines musical and intellectual exchanges between Europe’s colonial powers and the empire of Siam (present-day Thailand) in the decades around 1900. Parkorn has been awarded […]

Assistant Professor, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Fall 2023 | Allison S. Reed’s work connects Black Feminist Studies with Disability & Mad Studies. She aims to help Black Feminist Studies more actively grapple with everyday lived experiences of madness, sickness, and disability as neglected categories within the intersectionality discourse, particularly in the domain of political […]

Assistant Professor, Education and African and African American Studies, Fall 2023 | Nichols Lodato’s mixed methods research examines how shock events (e.g., the Great Recession, COVID-19) impact identity development and education outcomes among diverse adolescents and young adults. In her study of the effects of shocks, which have had enduring negative impact on African American […]

Assistant Professor, Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies, Fall 2023 | Mona Kareem (she/they) holds a PhD in comparative literature from the State University of New York at Binghamton. Her research focuses on literary cultures of race, class, and gender in the Global South, with a focus on Afro-Asian encounters in the Arabian Peninsula/Persian Gulf […]

Assistant Professor, African and American Studies, Fall 2023 | Themba is a scholar of African and Afro-diasporic literature and global black thought, focusing on the intersections between the histories of blackness and the politics of memory in the postcolonial world. His doctoral project looks at the significance of the SS Mendi shipwreck, the Herero and […]