Seven profs tenured and promoted

Seven members of the faculty started the fall semester as newly tenured associate professors.

Steven Arkonovich, associate professor of philosophy and humanities, received his Ph.D. from U.C.-Berkeley and his B.A. from U.C.L.A. Arkonovich teaches classes in moral psychology and ethics, as well as in the philosophy of psychoanalysis, the history of modern philosophy, and the philosophy of mind.

Evgenii V. Bershtein, associate professor of Russian, received his Ph.D. from Berkeley and his M.A. from Tartu University in Estonia. He offers courses in twentieth-century Russian literature, Russian and European Symbolism, Soviet and post-Soviet culture, St. Petersburg and myth in Russian literature, as well as seminars in Russian poetry. He also teaches intermediate and advanced Russian. Bershtein, a Kone Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies in Finland last summer, is currently editing a book of essays on Vasilii Rosanov.

Jay Dickson, associate professor of English and humanities, received his Ph.D. and M.A. from Princeton and his A.B. from Harvard. His field of expertise includes the novel, British and Anglo-phone twentieth-century fiction, modernism, Victorian literature, postcolonial studies, queer studies, gender studies, and film studies. He is currently finishing a book-length manuscript, “Modernism Post Mortem: Narrative and Sentimental Bereavement after Victoria.”

James D. Fix, associate professor of computer science, received his Ph.D. and M.S. from the University of Washington, and his B.A. from Carnegie Mellon. His primary research is in the design and analysis of algorithms and data structures, and the theory of computation. He has also worked with parallel algorithms and scientific computing, computer graphics and computational geometry, experimental computer science and systems modeling, and parsing algorithms for categorical grammars.

Hugh M. Hochman, associate professor of French, teaches courses on twentieth-century French poetry and prose, Francophone literature, as well as Humanities 220. He received his Ph.D. and M.A. from the University of Wisconsin and his B.A. from Columbia. Hochman’s main area of research is twentieth-century French poetry and theories of the lyric. He has published articles on poets Yves Bonnefoy, Eugene Guillevic, Robert Desnos, and Paul Eluard, and is working on a book about rhetoric and morality in the work of Francis Ponge.

Jay Mellies, associate professor of biology, received his Ph.D. and B.S. from the University of California at Davis. Mellies’ long-term research goal is to study the molecular mechanisms by which enteropathogenic E. coli causes disease. EPEC, a leading cause of infant diarrhea in developing countries, also serves as a model system for the ways other E. coli pathogens cause disease. He has received significant federal funding to support his research, including $371,000 from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and $230,000 from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Paul Silverstein, associate professor of anthropology, received his Ph.D. and M.A. from the University of Chicago, and his A.B. from Princeton. Silverstein’s ethnography, “Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race, and Nation,” examines immigration policy, colonial governance, urban planning, corporate advertising, sports, literary narratives, and songs for what they reveal about postcolonial Algerian subjectivities. His research has been supported by grants from the U.S. Department of Education’s Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad (FRA) Program and the United States Institute of Peace.