The Office of the Dean at the College of the Holy Cross announces the hiring of 13 new faculty members— one endowed professor, 10 tenure-track positions and two postdoctoral teaching fellows—for the 2013-14 academic year. They are:
Faisal Baluch (Charles Carroll Postdoctoral Teaching fellow, political science) received an M.A. in political science from the University of Houston, an M.A. in finance from the University of Western Sydney, and his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Notre Dame. He was a Loescher fellow at Notre Dame, where he taught courses titled “Arab Spring” and “Politics and the Novel.” His main area of research is the history of political thought. He is currently working on a book-length study of Machiavelli’s political thought.
Geoffrey Findlay (assistant professor, biology) earned his Ph.D. in genome sciences from the University of Washington and his B.A. in biology from Carleton College. His postdoctoral research used genetic, genomic and molecular approaches to identify interactions between reproductive proteins in fruit flies. He has been published in numerous journals, including PLoS Biology and Molecular Biology and Evolution, and he has presented his research at national and international meetings, most recently at the 54th Annual ‘Drosophila’ Research Conference in Washington, DC, in April 2013.
Selina Gallo-Cruz (assistant professor, sociology and anthropology) earned a Ph. D. and an M.A. in sociology from Emory University, where she was a visiting assistant professor in the 2012-2013 academic year. Her teaching and research interests focus on international organizations, and include culture, global change, methods, nonviolence, peace and justice, social movements, social theory, and political sociology. Gallo-Cruz conducted Spanish-speaking recruitment, interview, and ethnographic observation in a study of middle class Latin American immigrants to Atlanta, Ga., as co-investigator through a National Science Foundation grant. She is a member of the American Sociological Association, the International Sociological Association, and Sociologists for Women in Society, among others.
R.L. Green (assistant professor, religious studies) holds a Ph.D. in religious studies from the University of California at Santa Barbara. He joined the Holy Cross faculty in 2011 as the Bishop James A. Healy Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow. His area of specialization is religion in the Americas.
William Holmes (postdoctoral teaching fellow, biology) earned his Ph. D. in molecular biology, cellular biology and biochemistry at Brown University and his B.S. from LeMoyne College in biological sciences. Prior to joining the College, he was a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Holmes received the John G. Peterson pre-doctoral Fellowship award in 2012 to support the final year of his dissertation, an award given annually to one graduate student in the biological sciences at Brown University. His publications include “Crystal Structure of Inositol Phosphate Multikinase 2 and Implications for Substrate Specificity” with Gerwald Jogl in the Journal of Biological Chemistry (2006).
Ellis Jones (assistant professor, sociology and anthropology) received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Colorado and his M.A. in international peace studies from the University of Notre Dame; his specialty area is social responsibility, explored in his dissertation “Social Responsibility: People Taking Everyday Actions to Change the World.” He has been a visiting assistant professor in the sociology department at Holy Cross since 2009, where has taught Consumer & Corporate Social Responsibility, Sociology of Television & Media, The Development of Social Theory, and the Montserrat course, You – The Global Citizen (Fall), You – The Ethical Consumer (Spring). His books include “The Better World Handbook” (New Society Publishers, 2nd Ed. 2007) and “The Better World Shopping Guide” (New Society Publishers, 4th Ed. 2012), and recent publications include “Lifestyle Movements: The Intersection of Lifestyles & Social Movements” in Social Movements Studies, January 2012.
Jeremy Jones (assistant professor, sociology and anthropology) earned his Ph. D. and his M.A. in anthropology from the University of Chicago. Prior to graduate school, he spent seven years working in the non-profit and non-governmental sector, both in the U.S. and in Africa. His academic research is broadly concerned with the interweaving of economic action and everyday life. His recent publications include “Freeze! Movement, Narrative and the Disciplining of Price in Hyperinflationary Zimbabwe” in Social Dynamics, 2010, and “‘Nothing Is Straight in Zimbabwe’: The Rise of the Kukiya-Kiya Economy 2000-2008” in the Journal of Southern African Studies, 2010.
Denis V. Kennedy (assistant professor, political science) received a Ph.D. and an M.A. in political science from the University of Minnesota. Prior to his arrival at Holy Cross, he was a visiting professor in the Williams School at Washington and Lee University and a visiting researcher at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs (UPI) in Helsinki, Finland. Kennedy’s research and teaching interests range broadly in the areas of international organization, global governance, and international relations theory, with a specific focus on humanitarianism. His dissertation and current book project charts the development of humanitarianism into a professional, rule-governed field of endeavor through an analysis of the most significant international self-regulatory initiatives. He has published work in the Journal of Global Change and Governance and Journal of Humanitarian Assistance and has made more than a dozen presentations of his research to a variety of national and international audiences.
Min Kyung Lee (assistant professor, visual arts) earned a Ph. D. and an M.A. in art history from Northwestern University. Prior to Holy Cross, she was a post-doctoral teaching fellow in the department of art at Swarthmore College, and an adjunct instructor in the department of critical studies at Parsons Paris School of Art and Design. Her research addresses histories of modern built environments of Europe and the Americas, and her teaching is geared towards social and critical histories of architecture and urban planning. Her recent publications include “An Objective Point of View: the orthogonal grid in 18th-century plans of Paris” in the Journal of Architecture, RIBA (February, 2012), and her current book manuscript is titled, “The Tyranny of the Straight Line: mapping modern Paris.”
Tat-Siong Benny Liew (Class of 1956 Professor of New Testament Studies, professor, religious studies) earned a Ph. D. and an M.A. in New Testament and early Christianity from Vanderbilt University and is the Class of 1956 Professor of New Testament Studies. Before joining the Holy Cross faculty, he was most recently the vice president of academic affairs and the academic dean, as well as a professor of New Testament, at the Pacific School of Religion. Liew’s fields of study include synoptic gospels, gospel of John, cultural and racial interpretations and receptions of the Bible, apocalypticism, and Asian American history and literature. He is the author of “Politics of Parousia” (Brill, 1999) and “What is Asian American Biblical Hermeneutics?” (University of Hawaii Press, 2008). Liew has also edited “The Bible in Asian America” (Society of Biblical Literature, 2002; with Gale Yee); “Postcolonial Interventions” (Sheffield Phoenix Press Limited, 2009); “They Were All Together in One Place?” (Brill Academic Pub, 2009; with Randall Bailey and Fernando Segovia); and “Reading Ideologies” (Sheffield Phoenix Press Limited, 2011). Currently, he is serving as the series editor of the “Phoenix Guides to the New Testament” (Sheffield Phoenix Press) and the executive editor of the journal Biblical Interpretation (Brill).
Eric Ruggieri (assistant professor, mathematics and computer science) received a Ph. D. and a Sc. M. in applied mathematics from Brown University. Specializing in statistics, his recent publications include “A Bayesian Approach to Detecting Change Points in Climatic Records” in the International Journal of Climatology (2013), “On Efficient Calculations for Bayesian Variable Selection” in Computational Statistics and Data Analysis (2012), and a number of published software programs. Prior to joining the Holy Cross faculty, Ruggieri was an assistant professor of statistics at Duquesne University, and a special lecturer of mathematics at Providence College.
Aaron Seider (assistant professor, classics) received a Ph. D. in classics from the University of Chicago. His fields of interest include late Republican and Augustan Latin literature; mythology; and competition and gender in Greco-Roman antiquity. Seider first joined the College as a lecturer in the 2010 academic year, then as a visiting assistant professor from 2011-2013. His recent publications include “Competing Commemorations: Apostrophes of the Dead in the ‘Aeneid'” in the American Journal of Philology (2012), and a forthcoming book titled “Memory in Vergil’s ‘Aeneid’: Creating the Past” (Cambridge University Press, Oct. 2013).
Shannon Stock (assistant professor, mathematics and computer science) holds a Ph.D. in biostatistics from Harvard University and graduated summa cum laude/Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California, Los Angeles with a B.S. in mathematics. While at Harvard, her research focused on the development of flexible statistical methods that can be used to analyze HIV viral genetic data. Her work has been published in numerous journals including Statistics in Medicine, PLOS ONE, and the Journal of Clinical Microbiology. Prior to coming to Holy Cross, she was a biostatistician in the department of biostatistics and computational biology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
The College of the Holy Cross has the fifth highest four-year graduation rate among all colleges and universities in the country according to U.S. News & World Report. At 89.9 percent, Holy Cross is part of an elite group of institutions that graduate an average of nine in 10 students in four years, saving families money in additional tuition costs. In comparison, the average graduation rate of all 1,207 schools that provided graduation rate data to U.S. News for the same period (2006-10) was just 41 percent.
