New Faculty - College of Liberal Arts

Jill A. Fisher
Assistant Professor, Women and Gender Studies Program/Consortium for Science and Policy Outcomes
Dr. Fisher will receive her doctorate in science and technology studies from the Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute in 2005. She received a Kirschstein National Research Service Award from the National Institutes of Health for research on her dissertation, “Pharmaceutical Paternalism and the Privatization of Clinical Trials.” The funding enabled a research program on private practices, intermediary service providers, and pharmaceutical companies in the Southwestern United States and generated two articles which are in press. Her areas of research and teaching include gender, science and technology; health, sex, and gender; and the social studies of new reproductive technologies. In addition, Dr. Fisher will be affiliated with the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes, contributing to research on health, science, and technology and to science policy.

DoVeanna S. Fulton
Associate Professor, Department of English
Dr. Fulton received her Ph.D. in American studies from the University of Minnesota concentrating in African-American literature, women’s studies and oral discourse analysis. Prior to her appointment at ASU, she was an assistant professor at the University of Memphis and Rochester Institute of Technology. Additionally, she taught courses at Wayne State University, Lawrence Technological University, and Jimma University in Jimma, Ethiopia. She published and lectured in the United States, France, England, and Ethiopia on African American literature and manifestations of oral traditions by Black women. Her book, Speaking Power: Black Feminist Orality in Women’s Narratives of Slavery, is forthcoming from SUNY Press in December 2005. She published articles in such distinguished journals as Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers and the Journal of American Folklore. Her current research is on African American activism in the Temperance Movement. To complete this project, Radical Prohibition: African Americans Writing Race and the Anti-Drink Movement, 1860-1919, Dr. Fulton received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Association of University Women’s Educational Foundation postdoctoral fellowship.

Vanna Gonzales
Assistant Professor, School of Justice and Social Inquiry
Dr. Gonzales received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in political science. She is an expert on welfare reform, having studied contemporary Italian welfare efforts for her dissertation, “The Social Economy of Welfare Reform.” Prior to coming to ASU, Dr. Gonzales was an instructor of international politics at the University of California, Berkeley . Dr. Gonzales was active in faculty governance, serving as academic supervisor and mentor of the McNair Scholars Program and as a member of the diversity committee in the department of political science, UC, Berkeley.

LaDawn Haglund
Assistant Professor, School of Justice and Social Inquiry
Dr. Haglund joins the faculty of ASU from New York University, where she recently received her Ph.D. in sociology. Her dissertation focuses on the international movement toward privatization of essential services, specifically water and electricity. Her comparison of the political economy of water and electricity in Costa Rica and EI Salvador examined the various contending forces involved in this move toward market-based management, and its impacts on citizenship. Dr. Haglund received her B.A. in psychology from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she graduate Phi Beta Kappa, and with highest honors. She published, “Power and Luck” with Steven Lukes in the European Journal of Sociology (2005), and has several articles on Costa Rica and EI Salvador under review. Her research and teaching interests include macro- and comparative sociology, the sociology of development, international political economy, institutions and social change, and Latin America . Dr. Haglund received support for her research from the Tinker Foundation, the International Center for Advanced Studies, and the National Science Foundation.

Ulrich Häussermann
Assistant Professor, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
Dr. Häussermann earned his Ph.D. in 1995 from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich (Switzerland) in the field of solid state chemistry. His doctoral work was concerned with the crystal and electronic structure description of aluminum containing intermetallic compounds and alloys. After his doctoral studies, Dr. Häussermann performed postdoctoral research in the Department of Chemistry at Lund University in Sweden as a Feodor Lynen Fellow of the German Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. From 1998 to 2005, Dr. Häussermann accepted an appointment as assistant professor of inorganic chemistry at Stockholm University , Sweden .

Michelle Hale
Faculty Associate, American Indian Studies Program
Michelle Hale is Navajo, Laguna, Chippewa, and Ottawa, and is originally from Window Rock, Arizona. She is currently a doctoral candidate in the American Indian Studies Program at the University of Arizona and anticipates completion in 2005. Her dissertation research addresses governmental decentralization efforts undertaken by the Navajo Nation, with special emphasis on the Local Governance Act (LGA) and several community-driven efforts toward socio-economic and political empowerment, including the Kayenta Township.

Sharon Hall
Assistant Professor, School of Life Sciences/Institute for International Sustainability
After receiving her master’s degree in education from Harvard and her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, Dr. Hall served as MacArthur Assistant Professor for environmental science at Colorado College. Dr. Hall joins the faculty of SoLS and IIS to continue her research and teaching in soil science. During her doctoral studies, Dr. Hall received NASA and National Science Foundation fellowships and was the North American delegate to the International Workshop on Global Nitrogen Enrichment in 2001. Dr. Hall has taught science at the high school and college levels, dealing with subjects such as marine ecology, environmental science, and biological science. Dr. Hall has received research funding from such agencies as the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Howard Hughes Program for Undergraduate Research in Biological Sciences and has published in journals such as Nature and the Journal of Geophysical Research.

Christiane Harzig
Associate Professor, Department of History
Dr. Harzig received her doctorate from the Technical University of Berlin. She has conducted extensive research in migration studies, and the history of migration. Her first project focused on German immigrant women in 19 th century Chicago, addressing social and cultural positionings and gendered insertions in an immigrant-receiving urban environment. Her next project was in conjunction with an interdisciplinary group of researchers from Sweden, Ireland, Poland, and Germany . The project analyzed migration patterns of women, relying on an anthropological life course approach. Her most recent book length publication focuses on post World War II immigration policies, examining different migration policies in Canada, Sweden, and the Netherlands in the years 1960-1990. Further emphases in her work include the theoretical reflection of gender research, U.S. and Canadian social history, transculturalism, cultural studies (jazz history), and the construction of multicultural societies in Europe. Her current project addresses the global migration of household workers. She joins ASU from Canada where she was a recipient of the Canada Council’s distinguished John G. Diefenbaker Award, working at the University of Winnipeg.

Shelley E. Haydel
Assistant Professor, School of Life Sciences
Dr. Haydel received her Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Prior to coming to ASU, she was a postdoctoral research fellow at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research focuses on molecular biology and genetics of bacterial pathogenesis, specifically the molecular mechanisms by which Mycobacterium tuberculosis is able to cause disease. Dr. Haydel is also a researcher in the Center for Infectious Diseases and Vaccinology at the Biodesign Institute and is a member of the American Society of Microbiology.

Michael Hechter
Foundation Professor, School of Global Studies
Dr. Hechter received his Ph.D. from Columbia University and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has taught at the University of Washington, the University of Arizona, and Oxford University. He has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences and the Russell Sage Foundation, and was a visiting professor at the Universities of Bergen and Ljubljana. Dr. Hechter’s research revolves around the causes of nationalism and group solidarity, rational choice explanations of macrosocial outcomes, and the role and measurement of individual values in social theory.

Alexander Henn
Associate Professor, Department of Religious Studies/School of Global Studies
Dr. Henn received his doctorate in anthropology from the Johannes-Gutenberg University in Mainz and his habilitation (second degree of higher learning) from the Reprecht-Karls University in Heidelberg, Germany. He is trained as a cultural anthropologist with strong leanings toward history and religious studies. He conducted fieldwork in India, Africa, and Europe. Dr. Henn held positions at the Universities of Zuerich, Mainz, and Heidelberg, was a German Research Council Fellow for three years, and a visiting professor at Delhi University and Goa University. The current focus of Dr. Henn’s research and teaching are processes of cultural and religious encounters. His regional focus is Goa, India, where he explores the history and culture of interchanges and synthesis between Hindus and Catholics and the effects of various global impacts through migration. Dr. Henn’s most recent book is entitled Wakefulness of Beings: Politics, Rituals and Art of Acculturation in Goa (a translation of the German title), published by LIT Press in 2003.

Mark A. James
Assistant Professor, Department of English
Dr. James received his Ph.D. in second language education from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto . Before joining ASU, he spent two years as an assistant professor of English as a second language (ESL) in the English Department at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez . He also taught various ESL, writing, and teaching methodology courses in a range of contexts in Canada and Japan. His research interests include second language curriculum design and teaching methodology, second language learning processes and outcomes, and second language education issues in science, technology, engineering, and math. Dr. James has presented his work at national and international conferences, and in journals such as TESOL Quarterly, ELT Journal, and TESL Canada Journal.

Marco A. Janssen
Assistant Professor, School of Human Evolution and Social Change/Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Dr. Janssen received his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1996 from Maastricht University , the Netherlands, on integrated assessment modeling of global change. Prior to joining ASU, he was a research scientist at the Center for the Study of Institutions, Population and Environmental Change at Indiana University, and a visiting assistant professor in the School of Informatics at Indiana University. From 1998 to 2001, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Spatial Economics of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He held various positions between 1991 to 1998 at the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment. Dr. Janssen’s research concentrates on the use of formal models, laboratory experiments, and case study analysis to assess the co-evolution of individual behavior, institutions, and ecological dynamics. Dr. Janssen is especially interested in the fundamental system characteristics of social-ecological systems to better understand resiliency and robustness of these systems. He published more than forty journal articles in various disciplines including anthropology, computer science, ecology, economics, and cognitive science and is associate editor of the journal Ecology and Society.

Stephen Albert Johnston
Professor, School of Life Sciences
Director, Center for Innovations in Medicine, Biodesign Institute
Dr. Johnston’s primary research emphasis is in inventing new solutions to basic problems in medicine. As a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin he invented pathogen derived resistance. As a postdoctoral fellow at Pennsylvania State University he first cloned the Gal4 gene and discovered functional domains. As an assistant and associate professor at Duke University he co-invented the gene gun and genetic immunization and first transformed mitochondria. As a professor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center he invented several genomics technologies including expression library immunization. Dr. Johnston also started a new type of innovation center, the Center for Biomedical Inventions. He continues in this effort as director of the Center for Innovations in Medicine at ASU, with an emphasis on cancer, infectious disease, and diagnostics.

Yuseob Kim
Assistant Professor, School of Life Sciences
Yuseob Kim completed his M.S. at Seoul National University in Korea and his Ph.D. at the University of Rochester, New York and the University of Munich. After graduating in 2002, Dr. Kim was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Rochester specializing in biology, computational biology and statistics. Dr. Kim presented invited talks at international conferences and published articles in the journals Genetics and Molecular Biology and Evolution. He joins the faculty in SoLS, where he will teach courses in population genetics and computer programming for the biologist, and the Biodesign Institute, where he will continue his research in bioinformatics and genetics with a National Science Foundation grant “Theory of Adaptation in Experimental and Natural Populations.”

Kelly J. Knudson
Assistant Professor, School of Human Evolution and Social Change/Center for Bioarchaeological Research
Dr. Knudson received her doctorate from the University of Wisconsin , Madison in anthropology, with a specialization in archaeological chemistry and Andean bioarchaeology. Prior to coming to ASU, she taught courses in physical anthropology and archaeology at Ripon College, the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the University of Wisconsin, Fond du Lac. Her work on Andean residential mobility and bone chemistry as well as archaeological activity area analysis through soil chemistry was published in the Journal of Archaeological Science and Archaeometry. This research was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Geological Society of America, and the American Chemical Society and was presented at a number of international, national, and regional conferences.

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