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Office of the Dean
Division of Arts and Humanities
University of California, San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive # 0406
La Jolla, CA 92093-0406
tel: (858) 534-6270
fax: (858) 534-0091
dean-ah@ucsd.edu
2005/06 New Faculty
We are pleased to welcome the following individuals to our distinguished faculty during the 2005/06 academic year. Click on a name to view a short biographical sketch of each new appointee.
Luis Alvarez
Assistant Professor, History
Appointment Effective: 7/1/2005
Luis Alvarez joined the department in July 2005 as a specialist in modern American cultural history. Professor Alvarez’s appointment was an initiative through the University of California Faculty Enrichment Program that enables departments to appoint former UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellows into tenure-track positions. Trained at the University of Texas at Austin, where he obtained the Ph.D. in 2001, Alvarez has been teaching since that date in the Department of History at the University of Houston. His dissertation studied the history of the 1940s cultural phenomenon of the zoot suit, probing the process by which youthful and insubordinate subcultures – Mexican American as well as other ethnic groups – sought dignity, freedom of expression, and a level of autonomy within the larger structures of domination in which they were compelled to live. Professor Alvarez has published some of his findings in journal form, and he has recently won a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, which will enable him in the coming year to revise his manuscript for publication. He brings with him a stellar record of graduate and undergraduate instruction at Houston, recognized this past year by that university’s teaching excellence award.
Jeremy Prestholdt
Assistant Professor, History
Appointment Effective: 7/1/2005
Jeremy Prestholdt is a product of the most highly ranked African history program in the United States – Northwestern University in Chicago. Having graduated from there with the Ph.D. in 2003, he spent a year teaching at Northeastern University in Boston before we managed to recruit him here to UCSD this year. His dissertation studied the economic culture of East Africa in the nineteenth century – a culture that was far more fully integrated into global practice than historians have commonly assumed. Prestholdt has remarkable range – both in his geographic reach and his mastery of globalization theory as well as his chronological range, having published pieces that cover sixteenth as well as nineteenth and twentieth century history. Only one year beyond his Ph.D., Prestholdt has already published in the American Historical Review – a significant accomplishment for a young scholar. He is spending most of the forthcoming academic year, 2005-06, as a Fulbright scholar in Norway, revising his manuscript for publication, and he will take up residence here in San Diego as a permanent member of our faculty the following year.
Sarah Schneewind
Assistant Professor, History
Appointment Effective: 7/1/2005
Professor Schneewind left her position at Southern Methodist University to join us here at UCSD in July 2005. A specialist in the history of the late imperial period, she completed her dissertation at Columbia in 1999 on the history of community schools in the Ming period. She describes these institutions, not as creations of an all-powerful Chinese imperial state, but as sites where local elites actually exerted their own political power often in conflict with the aims of the central government. This dissertation has already generated several prominent articles, and a revision of the manuscript has been accepted for publication by Stanford University Press. Schneewind is an accomplished teacher, with one year as a visiting professor at Columbia and five years experience at Southern Methodist, where she handled all of the department’s East Asian offerings. She is also the president of the Society for Ming Studies, which sponsors conferences and published Ming Studies, and she is, in fact, the youngest scholar ever to hold that position.
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
Associate Professor, Literature
Appointment Effective: 7/1/2005
Ms. Bynum received her BA in English and American Literature with a concentration in Creative Writing magna cum laude from Brown University in 1995, and an MFA in Fiction Writing from the prestigious University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2000. She is the author of several highly regarded short stories, including one that was listed as a “Distinguished Story of 2000,” and another that was reprinted as one of The Best American Short Stories of 2004. Her first novel, Madeleine is Sleeping (Harcourt 2004), was a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction. Ms. Bynum joins the faculty in our Writing Section and will offer undergraduate courses and graduate seminars on such topics as writing novels, short fiction, and contemporary literature in English.
Luis Martin-Cabrera
Assistant Professor, Literature
Appointment Effective: 7/1/2005
Mr. Martin-Cabrera received his PhD in Spanish and Latin American Literature at the University of Michigan in December, 2005. His dissertation, “El No-Lugar: novella policial y testimonio en las postdictaduras de Espana y el Cono Sur” [The No-Place: Detective Fiction and the Testimonio in the post-dictatorships of Spain and the Southern Cone], explores what has become the dominant genre of contemporary Spanish-language fiction in relation to the political dictatorships of the recent past. Mr. Martin-Cabrera’s teaching will focus primarily on twentieth-century Spanish peninsular literature, culture, and film, but he can also offer courses on such topics as the Literature of the Southern Cone, Contemporary Latin American Literature, and the Latin American novel, thus adding a welcome trans-Atlantic component to our offerings on Literatures in Spanish.
Babak Rahimi
Assistant Professor, Literature
Appointment Effective: 7/1/2005
Dr. Rahimi received his Ph.D. from the Department of Social and Political Sciences at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, in 2004. In his dissertation, “Between Carnival and Mourning: The Muharram rituals and the Emergence of the Early Modern Iranian Public Sphere in the Safavi Period, 1590-1641 C.E.,” Rahimi considers the social function of public rituals performed in commemoration of the death of Husayn, the grandson of Mohammed, in 680 C.E. In addition to his research interest in the history of Islam in the early modern period, Rahimi is also a prolific commentator on contemporary Iranian culture and politics. He will teach core courses for the Program for the Study of Religion and upper-division courses on the history of Islam and Islamic civilization. Future teaching may include courses on Persian literature and lectures for the Making of the Modern World.
Anna Joy Springer
Assistant Professor, Literature
Appointment Effective: 7/1/2005
Ms. Springer received her BA in Creative Writing and Literature from the New College of California in 1996, and her MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University in 2002. She is a talented writer who has published many short prose pieces in anthologies and journals and who is currently completing two longer fictional works. Ms. Springer has also performed in musical groups, written song lyrics, produced albums, and staged intermedia installations and performances. Her works address questions of gender and sexuality, religion, and identity-formation from a feminist perspective. Ms. Springer is a core member of the department’s Writing Section and will offer courses at the undergraduate and graduate level on such topics as experimental writing, short fiction, the novella, and creative non-fiction.
Liam Clancy
Assistant Professor, Theatre and Dance
Appointment Effective: 7/1/2005
Liam Clancy received his MFA in choreography from the University of California, Los Angeles where he was the recipient of the UCLA Glorya Kaufman Award for excellence in choreography and the S imone Forti Family Scholarship for dance improvisation. Clancy began his career in New York City dancing in Elizabeth Streb’s Ringside Company. While with Streb he participated in the PopAction National Tour performing in venues that included the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, The Wexner Arts Center in Columbus Ohio and the Joyce Theater in New York City. In 1996 he joined forces with fellow Streb dancer Alma Largey to form Largey/Clancy Dance Theater, Inc., and in 1998 began making his own work. He studied acting briefly at the University of London, in New York with Carol Fox Prescott and later at Oxford University. In New York his work has been presented as part of the New York International Fringe Festival and at the HERE Arts Center and Dance Theater Workshop. In California his work has been presented at the Skirball Cultural Center, REDCAT Theater at Walt Disney Hall and Sushi Performance & Visual Art in San Diego. His dance film, “At the Door”, was chosen for the 2005 Dance Camera West International Film Festival in Los Angeles. His hybrid style blends contemporary American dance and theater with elements of vaudeville and circus. His future work will continue to include the development of solo performance works as well as the creation of dance films. His strength as a teacher is his belief in the individual’s potential for limitless creativity and in the introduction of his students to theatrical forms which inform and expand the definition of dance choreography and performance. Professor Clancy will teach classes in contemporary dance technique, dance improvisation, and dance/theater composition.
Darko Tresnjak
Professor, Theatre and Dance
Appointment Effective: 7/1/2005
Professor Tresnjak received his MFA from Columbia University and began his career as a director at the Williamstown Theatre Festival where he received critical acclaim for his productions of The Skin of our Teeth, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and Under Milk Wood. He later branched out into opera directing for major opera companies around the country and expanded his theatre career to include projects at leading theatres including the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, the Huntington in Boston and the New York Shakespeare Festival. In 2002 he was hired to direct Pericles the Old Globe in San Diego and was subsequently named the Artistic Director of the Globe’s Summer Shakespeare Festival, a position he continues to hold at the present time. Tresnjak is known for his passion and success in reviving difficult and rarely produced classics and for his clearly spoken and meticulously staged work. His background in puppetry and dance has contributed to a directing approach which is physical, bold and strikingly visual. As a teacher, Tresnjak will bring his neo-classical sensibility to graduate and undergraduate courses in acting, directing and puppetry. In the coming season, Tresnjak’s work will be seen at New York’s Theatre for a New Audience where he will be directing Alls Well That Ends Well.
Teddy E. Cruz
Associate Professor, Visual Arts
Appointment Effective: 7/1/2005
Teddy Cruz holds a Masters degree from the Harvard School of Design and has gained national reputation for his low income housing designs. He is adept at turning overlooked and unused space within a dense, urban neighborhood into a live-able, workable environment. Cruz is a winner of the Rome Prize as well as numerous architectural awards including the Sterling Memorial Prize. Three of his more noteworthy projects are in San Diego County and those are: 1. The Casa Familiar, in the city of San Ysidro, involves transforming a church into a community and residential center along with a public plaza and open air Mercado. "This project is showing that you can raise density without compromising privacy and open space, though the result may be semi-private and semi-public areas," Cruz says. 2. La Maestra Family Clinic, in City Heights, is a small, non-profit health center serving African and Southeast Asian refugees as well as Latino immigrants. Ten old buildings are being recycled, with the spaces in-between them serving as walkways, outdoor waiting rooms, and play areas. Besides providing medical care, the clinic also hosts a job placement center. 3. Housing Corridors, in San Diego, is a plan prepared by Cruz for addressing urban sprawl with a mixed-use project that integrates housing, jobs, and the community. Cruz has received two American Institute of Architects awards for this effort. Cruz has recently been commissioned by InSite 2005 to design their information center. He will be teaching courses on site specific installation, and the Tijuana/San Diego region, public culture and architecture in the 20th and 21 st centuries.
Ricardo Dominguez
Assistant Professor, Visual Arts
Appointment Effective: 7/1/2005
Ricardo Dominguez is a co-founder of The Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT), a group who developed Virtual-Sit-In technologies in 1998 in solidarity with the Zapatista communities in Chiapas, Mexico. EDT's SWARM action was presented at Ars Electronica's InfoWar Festival in 1998 (Linz, Austria). He is Senior Editor of The Thing (bbs.thing.net). Former member of Critical Art Ensemble (1987 to 1994 - developers of the theory of Electronic Civil Disobedience in the late 80's). Currently a Fake-Fakeshop Worker (www.fakeshop.com), a hybrid performance group, presented at the Whitney Biennial 2000. Ricardo has collaborated on a number of international net-art projects: with Francesca da Rimini on Dollspace (www.thing.net/~dollyoko), and with Diane Ludin on the Aphanisis Project. His essays have appeared at Ctheory (www.ctheory.org) and recently in "Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas" (Routledge, 2000), edited by Coco Fusco. Editor of EDT's forthcoming book Hacktivism: network-art-activism, (Autonomedia Press, 2001). He teaches across performance, media , and new media and is a specialist on the use of the web as a site of tactical intervention
