Smith Welcomes New Faculty Members

In her welcome remarks at an orientation for new faculty earlier this month, President Sarah Willie-LeBreton noted that their work carries "tremendous weight and meaning."

"The scholarship you create, the knowledge you share, the way you teach, the mentoring and service you do for each other, and for the good of the whole, advances not only Smith College, but our society and our world,” she said.

Here are brief biographies of the new faculty members:

Erica Banks, assistant professor of sociology, received her Ph.D. in sociology from Northwestern University. Her areas of interest broadly include race and ethnicity, gender, class and inequality, crime and law, and incarceration and reentry. Her research focuses on if and how Black women experience economic stability and mobility after incarceration, and how incarceration shapes other aspects of their lives. Her work highlights the unique experiences of Black women over the ages of 60 who have not experienced reincarceration for decades. Grounded in Black feminist and intersectional research methods, Banks demonstrates how reentry occurs over the life course and has no endpoint, by centering the rich narratives of Black women. Prior to earning her doctorate, Banks earned an M.A. in humanities and social thought at New York University and a B.A. in sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. She is also a proud first-generation and community college graduate who earned her A.A. in general studies from Navarro College in her hometown of Corsicana, Texas.

Kye Barker, assistant professor of government, earned his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California in political science in 2019. He is a political theorist whose research is at the intersection of the history of political thought and the history of emotions. His current book manuscript explores the emotion of “wonder” in modern political thought —particularly in the writings of theorists such as Marx, Hobbes, Kant and Arendt—as a source of both stability and also disruption within political order. Following stints as a lecturer in political theory at both UCLA and Loyola Marymount University, Barker joined the Smith government department in the fall of 2021 as a visiting assistant professor, where he taught classes on modern political thought and environmental political theory.

Casey Berger, assistant professor of physics and statistical and data sciences, earned her Ph.D. in physics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she was a Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellow and a William Neal Reynolds Fellow in the Royster Society of Fellows. She holds bachelor's degrees in physics from Ohio State University, and in philosophy and film and television production from Boston University. She was a postdoctoral research associate at Boston University in the physics department and the Hariri Institute for Computing. For the last two years, she has been a visiting assistant professor in the physics department at Smith. Her research is in computational and data science methods for many-body quantum mechanics.

Gillian Brunet ’08, assistant professor of economics, received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.  A member of the Smith class of 2008, she is interested in the intersection of macroeconomics, economic history and public economics.  Brunet uses microeconomic data to study macroeconomic questions, often in historical contexts. Her specialty is the U.S. economy during and immediately after World War II.  She studies how the wartime economy altered macroeconomic relationships during the war, as well as the mechanisms through which WWII influenced the economy after 1945.  She looks forward to teaching classes in macroeconomics and economic history.  Brunet was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and an assistant professor at Wesleyan University. 

Esther (Esa) Burson, assistant professor of psychology, is an applied developmental psychologist interested in issues of social justice and equity, with a focus on critical consciousness and intergroup solidarity among sexual and gender minority and racial/ethnic minority adolescents. Esa earned their Ph.D. in psychology and social intervention at New York University and their B.A. from Swarthmore College. They come to Smith from the Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research at Cornell University, where they partnered with a large AmeriCorps organization to evaluate the program’s impact on young adult civic and community engagement and intergroup attitudes in the national service context. Esa is excited to work with Smith students and local community-based organizations to conduct both qualitative and quantitative research on adolescents’ responses to inequity.

Naveen Bahar Choudhury, assistant professor of theatre, received her M.F.A. in playwriting at The New School for Drama. A playwright, librettist, and lyricist, she has had her work produced, commissioned, and/or developed by Ma-Yi Theater, Prospect Theater, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Second Stage Theatre, New Federal Theatre, Martha's Vineyard Playhouse, Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater, The Lark Play Development Center, New Dramatists and more.  She has been a Dramatists Guild Fellow, a LaGuardia Performing Arts Center Playwriting Resident and a Mellon Creative Research Fellow/Playwriting Resident at the University of Washington. She was most recently a visiting assistant professor in playwriting at Amherst College, and also taught playwriting and dramatic literature at Sarah Lawrence College, The New School for Drama and the Dramatists Guild Institute.

Nathan DuFord, assistant professor of government, is a political theorist who received a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from the Program in Social, Political, Ethical and Legal Philosophy at Binghamton University, Binghamton, New York. After teaching for a short time at Hobart and William Smith College in Geneva, New York and the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, North Carolina, they joined the faculty at the University of Hartford, directing that institution’s philosophy program. Their work focuses on feminist and queer theory in the context of modern social theory. Their book, Solidarity in Conflict: A Democratic Theory—which has just been published  by Stanford
University Press—explores the need for a robust conception of solidarity in contemporary democratic life, arguing against the idea that democracy is only done at the ballot box.

Yona Harvey, Tammis Day Professor of Poetry, received her MFA in poetry from the Ohio State University and her B.A. in English from Howard University. She was previously the Distinguished Visiting Professor of Poetry at Saint Mary’s College of California.  Harvey uses a variety of found texts, visual materials and audio recordings to craft her poems.  Having authored and co-authored comics for Marvel and the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh, she is particularly interested in the linguistic, imagistic and structural commonalities between poetry, zines and comics. Her poems investigate lineage, resistance and multivocality in Black women’s narratives. She is the project lead for the Cave Canem Oral History Project, which documents the lives of the inaugural cohort of this historic retreat for Black poets.  

Kevin Huang, associate professor of engineering, earned his Ph.D. in electrical engineering with a focus on systems, controls and robotics from the University of Washington. His research centers on teleoperated robots, including topics in operator interface design and authentication, teleoperated legged locomotion, and robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery (RMIS). Recently, he has been interested in using computer vision and machine learning to intelligently segment endoscopic images for RMIS. Before joining the faculty at Smith, Huang was an assistant professor at Trinity College, where his research leveraged user studies to evaluate haptic feedback, virtual fixtures and usability in cyber-physical systems. Huang is excited to break barriers and address the disparities in the profession by empowering women engineers at Smith.

Rebecca Kurtz-Garcia, assistant professor of mathematics and statistical and data sciences, earned her M.S. degree in statistics at Ball State University and her Ph.D. in applied statistics from the University of California Riverside. She has worked on a variety of projects related to time series, reliability analysis, biostatistics, sports analysis and fiscal policy.  Her current research is on robust variance estimation for dependent multivariate data, which is often a critical component in hypothesis-testing procedures. Common settings with dependent data include economic indicators, steady state simulations, environmental metrics and other time series applications. Kurtz-Garcia is excited to support Smith's mission of empowering and educating the next generation of women through statistics.

Tanya Lama, assistant professor of biological sciences, received her Ph.D. in conservation biology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Prior to joining the Smith faculty, she was a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard. Lama uses field, lab and bioinformatic methods to study the evolutionary processes underlying the resilience of wildlife populations, particularly in the context of global climate change. Lama’s Wildlife Genomics Lab will focus on the evolution and genomic mechanisms underlying life history traits such as lifespan and body size, which shape evolutionary responses to rapid environmental change. Bats, many of which have evolved extraordinarily long lifespans and a variety of unique metabolic, immune and dietary adaptations, are central to the research interests of the lab. Lama's courses introduce students to current methods in genomics through the lens of evolution, ecology and human health applications.

Michele Monserrati, assistant professor of Italian, received his Ph.D. in Italian studies from Rutgers University. In his most recent book, Searching for Japan: 20th Century Italy’s Fascination with Japanese Culture (Liverpool University Press, 2020), he argues that a unique set of historical circumstances, which projected both Italy and Japan as late-comers on the modern world stage, allowed Italy to develop a “fascination” with a model of nation-building and empire-formation that, like Italy itself, was challenging the existing world order. Monserrati is dedicated to teaching Italian culture by focusing on transnational phenomena that project Italy into the larger Mediterranean and global context. In addition to those specific research topics, his teaching interests include environmental humanities, the myth of Venice, the Black Mediterranean and crime fiction as world literature. Before coming to Smith, Monserrati taught at Rutgers University, Tulane University, Bryn Mawr College and as a visiting assistant professor of comparative literature and romance languages at Williams College.

Halie Rando, assistant professor of computer science, received her M.S. in bioinformatics and a Ph.D. in informatics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She was a postdoctoral researcher at the Anschutz Medical School of the University of Colorado, where her work focused on developing tools for scientific collaboration. She also held a position as a visiting assistant professor of biology at Haverford College in 2021, where she taught bioinformatics through a project-based approach. Her research group at Smith will build computational models that integrate information across domains, especially focusing on the validation and prediction of animal models of disease through a biological data science paradigm. Rando is also passionate about providing training in computational skills for people from fields outside computer science and hopes to continue organizing workshops with the nonprofit Software Carpentry at Smith.

Michael Robson, assistant professor of computer science, earned his Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Prior to joining the Smith faculty, he was an assistant professor of computing science and technical director of the Centralized Research Computing Facility at Villanova University. His work focuses on high-performance computing, specifically on the potential for novel software and hardware architectures to facilitate innovation in solving different types of computational problems. His recent research is on utilizing alternative algorithmic approaches to accelerate and scale research applications to run on the largest supercomputers available. Robson’s teaching interests include computer systems, parallel programming and HPC outreach to the research community via short courses and tutorials.