New Faculty - College of Liberal Arts

Gro V. Amdam
Assistant Professor, School of Life Sciences
Dr. Amdam earned her M.S. and Ph.D. from the Norwegian University of Life Sciences in Theoretical Regulatory Biology, with an emphasis in object-oriented programming of aging. Prior to coming to ASU, she was associate professor of model animal biology in the Department of Animal and Aquacultural Sciences at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences and a visiting scholar at the University of California , Davis . Included in her publications are articles on the regulation of lifespan and the evolution of sociality, which have appeared in the Journal of Theoretical Biology, FEBS Letters, PNAS, and Science.

J. Marty Anderies
Assistant Professor, School of Human Evolution and Social Change
Dr. Anderies received his doctorate from the Institute of Applied Mathematics at the University of British Columbia, Canada, with a specialization in mathematical bioeconomics. Prior to coming to ASU, he held a three-year appointment as a postdoctoral researcher at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation Australia. Dr. Anderies studies a range of archaeological, historical, and contemporary examples of social-ecological systems using formal mathematical modeling and analysis. Other areas of interest include economic growth, demographics and the environment, and mathematical modeling in community ecology. His current research interests focus on robust institutional design for coupled social ecological systems. Dr. Anderies is an associate editor for Ecology and Society, a journal of integrative science for resilience and sustainability.

Lin Bian
Assistant Professor, Department of Speech and Hearing Science
After six years of training and receipt of his medical degree from Beijing Medical University in China, Dr. Lin Bian started practicing medicine with a specialty in otolaryngology at Lanzhou Medical College in 1987, where he became interested in audiology. He entered the graduate program in audiology at the University of Kansas in 1995 and received his Ph.D. in 2000. He continued conducting research in cochlear physiology at the University of Kansas Medical Center and was appointed a research assistant professor there in 2003. His research on noninvasive measures of inner ear function has been awarded a grant from the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Bian came to Arizona State University as an assistant professor of audiology in the Department of Speech and Hearing Science in August 2005.

Heather Bimonte-Nelson
Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology
Dr. Bimonte-Nelson received her doctorate from the University of Connecticut in 2000. Prior to coming to ASU, she was a postdoctoral fellow and then research assistant professor at the Medical University of South Carolina in the Neuroscience Institute and the Center on Aging. Her research area focuses on the cognitive and brain changes that occur during aging, incorporating this information to develop behavioral, pharmacological, and dietary strategies to attenuate mnemonic and neurobiological age-related alterations using animal models. One of her primary interests is to determine the roles that sex, hormones, and brain chemistry play in brain function and cognition in the young versus the aged, with special relevance to Alzheimer’s disease-related variables.

Janet Bond-Robinson
Associate Professor, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
Dr. Bond-Robinson received her doctorate from the University of Iowa in science education with a specialization in chemical education. She held a postdoctoral position in chemical education for one year at the University of Kansas in Lawrence and was subsequently hired as an assistant professor of chemical education in the Chemistry Department there. Her Career Grant (2001-2006) funded by the National Science Foundation explores learning in two contexts: pedagogical chemical knowledge (PCK) learned as graduate students teach chemistry and empirical chemical knowledge gained in the research laboratory over five years of work. Her publications identify fundamental aspects of pedagogical content knowledge required to be an effective constructivist teacher in the laboratory as well as coaching methods to catalyze performance of PCK, and characteristics of the learning environment of a research laboratory and the kinds of reasoning acquired over time that spur development of a scientist.

Christopher G. Boone
Associate Professor, International Institute for Sustainability and School of Human Evolution and Social Change
Dr. Boone joins us from Ohio University where he was associate professor of geography. Dr. Boone received his Ph.D. in 1994 from the University of Toronto, and was a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University . As co‑principle investigator of the Baltimore Ecosystem Study, he researches urban-environmental change with a particular emphasis on environmental justice, land use decision-making, spatial analysis, and public health. His forthcoming book, entitled City and Environment, will be published by Temple University Press in 2006. Dr. Boone is also a member of the Urban Ecology Collaborative, based at Boston College, and is an active member in the Long Term Ecological Research network.

Alexandra Brewis-Slade
Professor, School of Human Evolution and Social Change
Alexandra Brewis-Slade completed her B.A. and M.A. at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, in anthropology. She was awarded a Rockefeller scholarship and went on to complete her Ph.D. at the University of Arizona where she specialized in biological and medical anthropology. As a Mellon postdoctoral fellow, she conducted research at Brown University in the Population Studies and Training Center. Much of her initial fieldwork has been conducted in the rural areas of Kiribati, Samoa, and Fiji as well as in the urban areas of New Zealand. Subsequent fieldwork has been conducted in the United States and Mexico. Her current National Science Foundation project is on population variation in children who have hyperactive, inattentive, and impulsive behavior. She has established programs in her field at the University of Auckland and the University of Georgia. At the University of Georgia, she developed an extensive studies abroad program with international exchanges in the South Pacific and the Caribbean . Her research is based on the interface between environment, culture, and society. She has published 2 books and over 30 refereed articles in major journals. At ASU, she is interested in building a social science program on health issues.

Jane E. Buikstra
Professor, School of Human Evolution and Social Change
Dr. Buikstra joins the faculty from the University of New Mexico, where she was the Leslie Spier Distinguished Professor of Anthropology. Previously, she served on the faculties of Northwestern University and The University of Chicago, where she was the Harold H. Swift Distinguished Service Professor. Her B.A. is from DePauw University and both the M.A. and the doctorate degrees were awarded by The University of Chicago. Elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1987, Dr. Buikstra recently received The Pomerance Medal from the American Institute of Archaeology (2005). She has also served as President of the American Anthropological Association, the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, the Paleopathology Association, and is currently President of the Board of the Center for American Archeology. Her most recent book (2004, with Charlotte Roberts) is entitled The Bioarchaeology of Tuberculosis: A Global View on a Reemerging Disease. Other articles, chapters, and monographs treat a variety of subjects, such as forensic anthropology, mortuary site archaeology, paleodemography, genetic relatedness, diet, and health. She currently conducts bioarchaeological research in the North American Midcontinent, Mexico, Honduras, and Perú.

John Carlson
Assistant Professor, Department of Religious Studies
John Carlson joined the religious studies faculty in 2005 after completing his doctorate in ethics from The University of Chicago Divinity School. While at The University of Chicago, he taught political philosophy in the Division of the Social Sciences. He was a founding member of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, serving as the project coordinator for its University of Chicago Divinity School office from 2000-2003. From 2004-2005, he was a fellow at the Erasmus Institute at the University of Notre Dame. He is co-editor of, and contributor to, two books as well as series editor of Eerdmans’ Religion, Ethics, and Public Life series. His dissertation, “The Case for Limited Justice: Human Nature, Irony, and Transcendence in Political Ethics,” examines through a moral-theological frame how views of human nature and God shape our political understandings of justice.

Mark Cruse
Assistant Professor, Department of Languages and Literatures
Dr. Cruse received his doctorate with honors from New York University in medieval French literature, with a specialization in manuscript culture. He received the NYU Outstanding Teaching Award, a Bourse Chateaubriand, and a Belgian American Educational Foundation Grant. While at NYU, he lectured at The Cloisters museum for eight years. His published works include articles in Studies in Iconography and Gesta (forthcoming 2006), a translation of Michel Pastoureau’s Blue: The History of a Color ( Princeton , 2001), and a co-translation of Catherine the Great’s memoirs (Random House, 2005).

Robert Joe Cutter
Chair and Professor, Department of Languages and Literatures
Dr. Cutter received his doctorate from the University of Washington in Chinese, with a specialization in early medieval Chinese literature. Prior to coming to ASU, he was a professor of Chinese in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he was on the faculty for twenty-two years. Now professor emeritus at Wisconsin , he served terms as chair of his department and director of the Center for East Asian Studies. An internationally recognized leader in the field of early medieval Chinese literature and history, Dr. Cutter has numerous books and articles on those topics, as well as on other periods, including modern Chinese literature. His most recent monograph is a book in Chinese entitled Cockfighting and Chinese Culture published by China ’s leading scholarly publishing house. It is a cultural history of this blood sport based on both literary and historical sources. Dr. Cutter serves on a number of boards and is the East Asia Sectional Chair of the American Oriental Society, the third oldest scholarly organization in the United States .

Christopher R. Duncan
Assistant Professor, Department of Religious Studies/School of Global Studies
Dr. Duncan received his Ph.D. from Yale University in cultural anthropology, specializing on religion and social change in Indonesia. His other research interests include communal violence and forced migration, as well as the environmental impacts rural-rural migration. Prior to coming to ASU he was a visiting research fellow at the Australian National University, as well as at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and taught courses at the University of Missouri, Columbia, and George Washington University. Included in his publications are articles on missionaries and conversion and on forced migration in Ethnology and the Journal of Refugee Studies. He also edited a volume on Southeast Asian government polices for the development of ethnic minorities, Civilizing the Margins (Cornell University Press, 2004). In 2004, he and Pamela McElwee, also from the School of Global Studies, were awarded a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Program on Global Security and Sustainability to undertake a comparative study of the environmental impact of rural-rural migration in Vietnam and Indonesia .

Alesha Durfee
Assistant Professor, Women and Gender Studies Program
Dr. Durfee comes to ASU from the University of Washington, where she earned her Ph.D. in sociology with a certificate in women’s studies in 2004. She received a Woodrow Wilson Foundation Dissertation Grant in Women’s Studies for “Domestic Violence in the Civil Courts” and was a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Washington. Her research interests include the sociology of law, social inequality, public policy, domestic violence, gender, and poverty. She is currently working on several projects related to state policies, economic inequalities, and child care utilization. She has a publication forthcoming in the Journal of Marriage and the Family and co-authored a book chapter in Agenda for Social Justice Solutions.

Craig Enders
Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology
Dr. Enders received his doctorate from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln with a specialization in quantitative methodology. Prior to coming to ASU, he spent four years as an assistant professor at the University of Miami, and spent the last two years at the University of Nebraska. Dr. Enders has an active research agenda in the area of missing data analyses, and has had articles published in methodological journals such as Psychological Methods, Multivariate Behavioral Research, and Structural Equation Modeling.

Aurelio Espinosa
Assistant Professor, Department of Religious Studies
Dr. Espinosa received his doctorate in 2003 from the University of Arizona in medieval and Renaissance European history, with a specialization in political praxis and religious culture in sixteenth-century Spain . His published articles and submissions address Muslim piracy in the Mediterranean and Spanish naval policy, Spanish clerical culture, and the colonial project. His manuscript, Constitutionalism and Absolute Power in Imperial Spain: Bureaucracy, Parliament, and Political Culture during the Reign of Charles V (r. 1519-1556) is under review at Brill Academic Publishers. Dr. Espinosa’s research interests include women and daily life in Renaissance Spain, the Inquisition, the colonization of Mesoamerica , and Hispanic material religion.

Randall Eubank
Professor, Department of Mathematics and Statistics
Dr. Eubank received his doctorate from Texas A&M University in statistics. Prior to coming to ASU, he was a professor of statistics at Texas A&M University, an appointment he held for seven years. He also taught courses at Southern Methodist, and previously, ASU. He was a consultant for the Texas Lottery. His main areas of expertise and interest are Kalman filter, lack-of-fit testing, nonparametric smoothing and function estimation, high-dimensional data analysis, and functional data analysis. He has published numerous books and journal articles on statistical topics. He is an Institute of Mathematical Statistics Fellow, an American Statistical Association Fellow, and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. He is a coordinating editor for the Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference, associate editor for Computational Statistics, an associate editor for the Journal of the American Statistical Association, and has been associate editor for the American Statistician.

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