Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Professor Alvarez Astacio's research focuses on ethnography and filmmaking, multimodal ethnography, and experimental ethnographic methods. She is currently working on a manuscript about the Peruvian alpaca wool supply chain and is also a documentary filmmaker.

Professor Anjaria teaches and researches South Asian literature and film. Her first book was a study of progressive writing, a movement that became dominant in mid-20th century India. Her second book considers the relationship of contemporary Indian literature and film to new politics in India. Her most recent book is an introduction to Bollywood cinema.

Professor Chakraborty is a condensed matter theorist who is interested in systems far from equilibrium. Her recent research has been focused on exploring emergence in the macroworld where thermal fluctuations are irrelevant, analyzing the origin of glassy dynamics in supercooled liquids, and the collective behavior of active matter.

Professor Chang is an award-winning composer. Her music has been performed across continents, and she has received a large range of commissions, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship and multiple awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Professor Fai’s research is focused on the modeling and simulation of biological phenomena, including the fluid dynamics inside of cells and membrane growth and form in cellular precursors. To model these phenomena, he uses ideas from subjects such as partial differential equations, graph theory, and differential geometry.

Professor Han’s research focuses on developing a wide range of unique optically controlled molecular switches for energy conversion/storage and optoelectronic applications. Photo-switchable molecular systems absorb light and respond via structural change that provides control over a broad array of properties in diverse organic and soft materials systems. 

Professor Horton is a cultural anthropologist who works in queer studies, critical theory, popular culture, digital anthropology, and South Asian studies. His research focuses on sexual, gender, and racial minority subjects and the social worlds they build.

Professor Kondev is a theoretical physicist who works on problems in molecular and cell biology. His research is driven by quantitative experiments on single molecules and single cells. The goal is to provide a mathematical framework that can explain the available quantitative data, and makes testable predictions that can guide new experiments.

Professor Richey is a scholar of myth, magic, and religion in the Hebrew bible and ancient Middle Eastern sources of the first millennium BCE. Her work explores both written and visual artistic sources, and she is also an epigrapher of late second- and first-millennium BCE Northwest Semitic languages.