LA&S Welcomes New Faculty
LA&S is pleased to welcome 21 new faculty members.
Laurie Bonjo is joining the Graduate Counseling Program as an assistant professor within the Department of Psychology. Bonjo received her Ph.D. in counselor education and supervision from Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. She holds a master’s degree in school counseling and mental health counseling from Pennsylvania State University. At New Paltz, she teaches Counseling Skills, Group Dynamics, Multicultural Counseling, Psychopathology, Couple and Family Counseling, Human Development and School Counseling Internship. Her research interests include pedagogy in counselor education and supervision, social justice and advocacy for underrepresented groups, and affirmative, competent counseling for alternative sexualities. Bonjo likes to take opportunities to build community and take learning outside of the classroom. In summer of 2014, her graduate counseling class on alternative sexualities marched in the New Paltz Pride Parade to show their support for the LGBTQQIA community. She is passionate about teaching and research, and she welcomes opportunities to collaborate with students as well as other faculty on research and service projects.
Thomas Cznarty, an award-winning filmmaker, began his career in television and film, whilst earning a bachelor’s degree in film and photography at The Park School of Communications at Ithaca College. His student film, Wonderland, was chosen for Previews 5, a compilation of the seven best films made at the Park School in 2004. Wonderland also went on to win Best Cinematography at the Honey and Buddy Film Festival. Cznarty went on to earn his M.F.A at The City College of New York, where his thesis film, The Other Path, screened at festivals around the country. Over the past decade, he has worked on the PBS series History Detectives and Clash of the Choirs for BBC and as a camera operator for the PBS documentary, Upaj. He now produces and directs his own work. His documentary, After the Sweat Dries, recently won Best Documentary at the Kingston Film Festival as well as an Accolade Award from the Accolade Film, Television and New Media Competition. His other documentary, Uneasy Sisters: Voodoo and Christianity in New Orleans, recently won a 2014 Telly. Cznarty has taught a variety of classes while teaching at SUNY New Paltz including Digital Storytelling, Audio Production, Milestones in Documentary and Media and Society.
Sam Fallon will receive his Ph.D. in English this spring from Yale University. A specialist in Renaissance poetry and prose, his research focuses on fictional personae, authorship, and the growth of literary culture in print in early modern England. He has written articles on John Milton and Philip Sidney.
Rebecca Hansen recently earned her doctorate in philosophy at Emory University. Her dissertation “Transforming the Sensible: Dilthey and Heidegger on Art” addresses the role art plays in our everyday lives and in understanding the world by explicating the relation between factical life and art in Dilthey’s and Heidegger’s philosophy. She argues that art illuminates the overlooked features and unarticulated meaning of everyday life by exposing the connections between sensation, feeling, and thought. Her current research focuses on the relation between sensation and ideas in art and experience by tracing the reconceptualization of sensory experience in continental thought.
Todd Holmes has joined the Department of Digital Media and Journalism as a lecturer of digital media management. Holmes comes to New Paltz from the University of Florida (UF), where he has been pursuing a Ph.D. in mass communications. Over the course of this academic year, he will be teaching Introduction to Media Programming and Management, Media Research Methods and Digital Media Convergence. He is currently ABD and plans to complete his dissertation by the end of the calendar year. His dissertation explores the influence of self-image congruity, ad position and ad length on the effectiveness of online video advertisements. While a doctoral student at UF, Holmes taught media management and media research courses in addition to introductory courses in telecommunications. He has served as the project manager for a longitudinal study that UF is doing in conjunction with Nielsen Audio, which investigates the perceptions and media habits of the Class of 2015. Other areas of interest for Holmes are how media corporations implement and monetize new technologies and the effectiveness of new advertising vehicles. Prior to pursuing his Ph.D., Holmes worked in a variety of sales and sales management positions in broadcast television and radio as well as satellite television. In his spare time, he enjoys running, hiking, spending time with friends and family, watching sports, traveling, and singing karaoke.
Will Hong is an assistant professor of digital media in the Department of Digital Media and Journalism at SUNY-New Paltz. He began his career in the fine arts with positions at the National Gallery of Art and the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, D.C. before returning to graduate studies in art history at Princeton University, where he received his M.A., specializing in the History of Photography and Cinema. He then shifted toward filmmaking and studied at the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, where he earned his M.F.A. from the Department of Graduate Film and Television. He has spent most of the last two decades in the film and television industry in New York City, working on short and feature-length films, TV commercials and promos, reality TV, as well as corporate (Telly Award winner) and web-based content. He has taught the fundamentals of filmmaking and digital media at The Lee Strasberg Theater and Film Institute, the New York Film Academy (NYC), the Dalton School, and Marist College in Poughkeepsie, NY. In addition to his work in production, his research interests include behavioral design, and media in sustainable development, and he lives in the mid-Hudson Valley, where he is an avid Gunks climber.
Kristopher Jansma is the winner of the 2014 Sherwood Anderson Award for Fiction. His first novel, The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards (Viking/Penguin), received an Honorable Mention for the 2014 PEN/Hemingway Award and was long-listed for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence and the Flaherty-Dunnan Debut Novel Prize. His second novel, What Can Go Wrong, will be published in 2016. He has written for The New York Times, Johns Hopkins Magazine, Slice Magazine, The Believer, Adult Magazine and the Blue Mesa Review. He is a graduate of the Writing Seminars program at Johns Hopkins University and got his MFA in Fiction at Columbia University. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.
Scott Le Vine received his Ph.D. in transport studies from Imperial College London (UK) in 2012. His research focuses on emerging forms of personal mobility and the implications for infrastructure provision, energy usage, and well-being. Scott is a trustee of the charity Carplus, and serves on the National Academy of Sciences’ standing committees on Public Transport Innovations, Intelligent Transportation Systems, and Vehicle Automation. He is a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP) and holds a Professional Planning (PP) license in New Jersey. Scott will play an instrumental role in revamping the planning concentration and teach a number of related courses in the geography department.
Rubén Maillo-Pozo completed his Ph.D. in Spanish with a dissertation on Alfonso de Palencia, an Early Modern Iberian writer, at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He has a wide variety of experience teaching Spanish language, literature and culture courses at Brooklyn College, Lehman College, Fordham University, Manhattan College and Sarah Lawrence. He will teach courses on Spanish language, literature and culture.
Sharina Maillo-Pozo recently finished her Ph.D. in the Department of Hispanic and Luzo-Brazilian Literatures and Cultures at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Her dissertation, entitled “Quisqueya de New York: A Literary Dialogue between two islands,” is a study of representations of gender and national identity in works by authors and performers from the Dominican Republic and the Dominican diaspora, predominantly located in New York. She has taught previously at Lehman College, Baruch College, Manhattan College, and Fordham University. At New Paltz, she will teach courses in Spanish language, literature and culture.
Jessica Pabón joins the faculty of the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program. She has a Ph.D. in performance studies from New York University and an M.A. in women’s studies from the University of Arizona. She is an interdisciplinary feminist scholar who specializes in hip hop studies, Latin studies, LGBTQ studies and visual art. She is currently preparing an ethnography, Graffiti Grrlz: Performing Feminism in the Hip Hop Diaspora, for publication. She blogs about her work at www.jessicapabon.com. She teaches Women: Images and Realities, and Feminist Theory, along with a number of upper division electives related to her research.
Stephen Pampinella is a new assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations. He received his doctorate in political science from the State University of New York at Albany in May 2014 and also received his bachelor’s from the same institution in 2006. Pampinella’s dissertation examines the effectiveness of different counterinsurgency strategies in conflicts from 1945 to 2006. His research interests include insurgency and counterinsurgency, international security, state building, development, social constructivism, and international relations theory. He has also been involved in New York State politics performing communications and organizing work for campaign finance reform and K-12 advocacy. He is currently supervising the Legislative Internship Program, which places SUNY New Paltz students as paid interns in legislative offices located in Albany. In his spare time, Stephen enjoys running, reading, listening to music, and one day will find time to resume fencing.
James Pasternak is a one-year lecturer in German. He finished his Ph.D. in 2012 at the University of Minnesota with a dissertation titled, “Apocalypse or Utopia: Representations of the Medieval in German Nineteenth-Century Historical Fiction.” He has taught previously at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Drexel University, Temple University and the University of Maryland. This year, he will teach courses in German literature, culture, and language.
Melissa Yang Rock received her Ph.D. in geography and women’s studies (dual degree) from Penn State in 2012 with a dissertation titled “Splintering Beijing: Socio-spatial fragmentation, commodification and gentrification in the Hutong neighborhoods of old Beijing.” After completing her dissertation she took a post-doctoral fellowship at Dartmouth for a year followed by an appointment at Bucknell. Prior to completing her doctorate, she received an M.A. in international relations from the Maxwell School at Syracuse and a B.A. in environmental studies and international studies at the University of Oregon. She will teach a number of courses in human geography and work closely with both Asian Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She joins the Department of Geography.
Sarah Shuwairi received her Ph.D. in experimental psychology (in the Cognition and Perception Program) from New York University and her research is centered primarily on perceptual preferences, object recognition and shape categorization in infants, children and adults. She teaches courses in Introductory Psychology, Perception, Memory and Thinking, Physiological Psychology, and a seminar in Infant Development.
Rachel Somerstein comes to New Paltz from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School, where she earned her Ph.D. in mass communications and taught in the graduate program in arts journalism. Somerstein holds an MFA from New York University and a BA from Cornell University. She researches and writes about photography, film, and public memory. Somerstein teaches classes in journalism and feature writing and is looking forward to offering interdisciplinary courses in visual culture.
Annie Swafford specializes in digital humanities, Victorian literature and culture, and sound and gender studies, and received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia. Her book project, “Transgressive Tunes and the Gendered Music of Victorian Poetry,” traces the gendered intermediations of poetry and music. Her articles appear in Victorian Poetry, Victorian Review, the Victorian Institute’s Digital Annex, and Literary and Linguistic Computing. She has held multiple digital humanities fellowships and has developed two digital humanities tools—”Songs of the Victorians” and “Augmented Notes”—to facilitate interdisciplinary music and literary scholarship.
Julie Taylor earned her B.A. in communication and secondary education and her M.A. in communication and women’s studies from Colorado State. Julie just recently finished her Ph.D. in communication at the University of Utah with a dissertation titled, “Prostitution Policy and the Function of Silence: The Communicative Constitution of a Clandestine (un)Organization.” Broadly, Julie’s research interests lie in organizational communication, gender studies, and interdisciplinary studies. Julie has published articles utilizing “communication in the disciplines” framework examining current trends and practices in engineering education. More recent efforts have been turned to examining the hidden organizational aspect of sex work and the gendered implications of both policy and practice of prostitution.
Katherine Thweatt received a bachelor’s in mass communication from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, an M.A. in communication studies from West Virginia University (WVU), and a doctorate in interpersonal/instructional communication, also at WVU. After leaving academe in 2001, she began a career in healthcare research in cardiology and diabetes. Patients received care via telemedicine and video conferencing at 13 VA medical centers in Northeast Ohio. This experience led to a position overseeing clinical quality in the U.S.’s third largest Medicare Part D sponsor, where her efforts led to two national awards for the addition of ACE-inhibitors in diabetes patients and improved medication possession ratio in HIV patients. From 2009-2011, she conducted an assessment of the Veteran’s Affairs Medical Center National Improvement Initiative which included 130 sites in the U.S. and Puerto Rico. In 2010, she returned to academe full-time and has been awarded grants from the Appalachian College Association and the National Communication Association to examine employer expectations for new hires and the goals of universities. Her most recent research focuses on bullying and the intersection of communication and love.
Kenji Tierney received his Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley. His research focuses on the intersections of society, culture, history, and the body. Currently, he is finishing his book manuscript, Wrestling with Tradition: The Spaces and Histories of Sumo, which examines sumo wrestling in Japanese culture and history. His next project examines the relationships among food, identity, and commensality in contemporary Japan. Also, locally, he is starting a project on the anthropology of Lyme Disease, examining how illness and disease inform social citizenship.
Jessica Welsh, M.S., CCC-SLP, holds a master’s degree in communication sciences and disorders from Arizona State University. She is a licensed speech-language pathologist and recently worked with graduate students at Adelphi University and at Seton Hall University and with clients with communication disorders at the Hospital for Special Surgery and the Adler Aphasia Center. Her clinical and research interests include aphasia and neurogenic communication disorders, aphasia advocacy and community education.