Williams College Welcomes Nine New Assistant Professors
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. - Williams College welcomed the following assistant professors, tenure track, beginning this fall:Quamrul Ashraf, assistant professor of economics. Ashraf received his B.A. from Trinity College in 1999 and his Ph.D. in economics from Brown University in 2009. He wrote his dissertation on Cultural, Biological, and Geographical Determinants of Comparative Development. His teaching and research focus include economic growth, macroeconomics, population economics, and computational economics.
Devyn Spence Benson, assistant professor of Africana studies and history. Benson received her B.A. in 2001 and her Ph.D. in history from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in 2009. Her dissertation was titled Not Blacks, But Citizens! Racial Politics in Revolutionary Cuba, 1959-1961. Benson specializes in Latin American history, the Caribbean, Cuba, African Diaspora studies, and global history.
Mea Cook, assistant professor of geosciences. Cook completed her A.B. from Princeton University in 1999 and her Ph.D. in marine geology and geophysics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in 2006. Her dissertation was titled The Paleoceanography of the Bering Sea during the Last Glacial Period. She is teaching global warming, carbon cycle, climate changes, and environmental science.
Justin Crowe, assistant professor of political science. He received his B.A. from Williams College in 2003 and his Ph.D. in politics from Princeton University in 2007. His dissertation is titled Building the Judiciary: Law, Courts, and the Politics of International Development. Crowe has taught at Pomona College. His interests include American Constitutionalism, political development and politics and history.
Sara Dubow, assistant professor of history. Dubow graduated from Williams College in 1991. She completed her M.A. in history at Amherst College in 1996 and her Ph.D. in U.S. history at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in 2003. Her dissertation is titled Ourselves Unborn: Fetal Meanings in Modern America. Dubow has taught at Hunter College of the City University of New York. Her areas of expertise include women's and gender history, early American history, and 19th and 20th century American history.
Nate Kornell, assistant professor of psychology. Kornell received his B.A. in psychology from Reed College in 1996 and his Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia University in 2005. His research interests include human learning and memory, memory monitoring and self-regulated study, optimizing learning, applying principles of learning and memory to educational settings, and memory and memory monitoring in animals. His work has been published in more than 20 scientific journal articles.
David Morris, assistant professor of theatre. Morris graduated from Williams College in 1996 and completed his M.F.A. in scenic design at the University of Washington, Seattle in 2001. He has done scenic design in New York City and in regional opera, on tour, industrial, at Bard College and The New School, and at may other venues. He previously taught at Bard and Williams.
Oyindasola Oyelaran, assistant professor of chemistry. Oyelaran received her B.S. from Salem College and her Ph.D. in chemistry from Harvard University in 2005. She did her postdoctoral work at the National Institutes of Health, National Cancer Institute, and Laboratory of Medicinal Chemistry. She has conducted research in pharmacology at the Wake Forest University Medical School. She was co-founder of the Harvard Women in Chemistry and was on the Women in Science and Engineering Task Force at Harvard.
Benjamin Rubin, assistant professor of classics. Rubin graduated from Macalester College in 2001 and, in 2008, received his Ph.D. in classical art and archaeology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His dissertation is titled (Re)presenting Empire: The Roman Imperial Cult in Asia Minor, 31 BC-AD 68. Rubin's teaching and research interests include: Roman urbanism and social history, Greek and Roman art and archaeology, divine kingship in the ancient Mediterranean world, the art and ideology of the Achaemenid Empire, and postcolonial theory and gender studies.
