New Faculty - College of Liberal Arts

Kelli Larsen
Assistant Professor, Department of Geography
Dr. Larson joins ASU’s Geography Department and the International Institute for Sustainability from Oregon State University, Corvallis, where she completed her Ph.D. in resource geography. While in Oregon she also worked with Metro, the regional government that serves 25 cities in the Portland metropolitan area. Her recently completed dissertation research, funded by the National Science Foundation, focused on dimensionality and explanations for residents’ attitudes toward water resource protection. Her expertise relates to human dimensions of environmental systems, particularly attitudes, perceptions, and behavior relating to real-world natural resource problems and policy. Dr. Larson collaborated with a variety of multidisciplinary research teams, government entities, and non-profit organizations on issues ranging from farmers’ decision-making and information usage to conflict and cooperation in international river basins. She served as editorial assistant for the Journalof the American Water Resources Association and has published in such journals as Wetlands, Water Resources Research and the Professional Geographer.

Paul G. Lewis
Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science
Dr. Lewis earned a Ph.D. in politics from Princeton University, where he held a Mellon dissertation fellowship. He is a specialist in urban politics, local government, and public policy in the United States. His book, Shaping Suburbia: How Political Institutions Organize Urban Development, was named an Outstanding Academic Book by Choice. He also published several articles in political science, urban affairs, and public policy journals, and seven reports for the Public Policy Institute of California, where he served as research fellow and director of the Governance and Public Finance program before joining ASU. Dr. Lewis also served on the faculty of Florida International University . His research examines such topics as the motivations for local government growth decisions, effects of governmental structure and revenue-raising mechanisms on urban sprawl, attempts by state and federal authorities to influence local planning for housing and transportation, the responsiveness of local officials to immigrant residents, voter turnout in city elections, and public opinion regarding land use. Dr. Lewis served on the editorial board of the State and Local Government Review and on the executive committee of the Urban Politics Section of the American Political Science Association.

Juergen Liebig
Assistant Professor, School of Life Sciences
Dr. Liebig joins the expanding group of scientists in the School of Life Sciences who study social insects. He previously served as a research group leader at the University of Wuerzburg in Germany. His studies and research in “Eusociality, female caste dimorphism, and regulation of reproduction in the ponerine ant …” led to his Ph.D. in 1998 from the same university. Dr. Liebig participated in many collaborative studies of ant, bee, and wasp behavior in the years since. He received numerous research grants from the German Science Foundation, published articles in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA and Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Series B, and mentored graduate and undergraduate students. Dr. Liebig will teach in the area of evolutionary ecology, animal behavior, and entomology.

Sangeeta Malhotra
Associate Professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy
Dr. Malhotra received her doctorate in astrophysical sciences from Princeton University. She was a National Research Council Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Caltech, and a Hubble Fellow at the Johns Hopkins University. She also worked as an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, where she led a team to perform spectroscopy of galaxies in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Dr. Malhotra works on various astronomical topics including cosmology, galaxy formation in the early universe, star-formation, dust and interstellar gas, gravitational lensing, and the structure of galaxies including our own.

Kelly McDonald
Assistant Professor, Hugh Downs School of Human Communication
Kelly McDonald received his Ph.D. from the University of Kansas in 1998. Prior to his appointment as an assistant professor and director of forensics for ASU’s nationally recognized competitive speech and debate program, he served as an academic professional in the Hugh Downs School. His principal research interests are political communication and public argument. Recent work looks at issues of participation and voter education from political debates, visual argument and the impact of images of torture from Abu Ghraib, and the role and import of political cartoons in the post-9/11 era. His interests focus at the intersections of public deliberation and public policy making, enhancing the mechanisms of deliberative democracy, and the use of forensic pedagogy to improve the learning outcomes for K-12 and university students. Dr. McDonald serves as an ex-officio member of the Arizona Interscholastic Association’s Speech & Theatre Advisory Committee, treasurer for the Cross Examination Debate Association, and research director for the National Forensic Association. He is a member of the board of the Western Journal of Communication, and recently was co-program planner and associate editor for the National Communication Association/American Forensic Association’s Alta Summer Conference on Argumentation.

Isis Costa McElroy
Assistant Professor, Department of Languages and Literatures
Dr. McElroy received her doctorate from New York University in comparative literature, with a specialization in Afro-Brazilian poetry and culture. Her dissertation and current research focus on cultural transnational linkages between Afro-Caribbeans, African-Americans, and Afro-Brazilians. Prior to coming to ASU, Dr. McElroy taught at New York University; Rutgers University, New Brunswick; the United Nations School; and Kean University. Her teaching experience includes courses in Brazilian culture, language and literature, world literature, and Anglophone Caribbean literatures. Some of her publications include “ Nam ” (in Kamau Brathwaite’s Magical Realism, 2002) and “Roaring River of Reflections” (in Timothy Reiss’s For the Geography of a Soul, 2001).

Pamela McElwee
Assistant Professor, School of Global Studies
Dr. McElwee received her Ph.D. from Yale University and was honored as a Rhodes Scholar, Truman Scholar, and Goldwater Scholar. Her research and teaching interests focus on the globalization and internationalization of environmental problems, particularly in the fields of biodiversity conservation, environmental governance, and environmental security. Her dissertation work, which she completed in 2003, was concerned with how biodiversity conservation is defined and implemented in developing countries. She spent over three years in field research in Viet Nam. Dr. McElwee is also interested in the area of migration, environmental change, and environmental security. Before becoming an academic, she worked for Al Gore in the United States Senate and in the Clinton White House on environmental policy. She also worked with numerous non-governmental organizations seeking sustainable development in Southeast Asia .

Ian Miller
Assistant Professor, Department of History
Dr. Miller received his doctorate in 2004 from Columbia University in modern Japanese history. His research examines the social construction of modernity at Japan’s first zoological garden that opened in 1882. He studies the interaction of government officials, scientists, publishers, and patrons that transformed the artificial world of the zoo into the “natural” foil of modern metropolitan life in Japan . By the 1930s, millions streamed into the zoo to participate in the pageantry of fascist expansionism. The symbolic power of the zoo was deployed in the service of diverse political, social scientific, and diplomatic ends as Japan modernized. His approach is comparative and interdisciplinary. He breaks down such essentialized dichotomies as nature and culture, ideology and practice, and science and society. His study of modern Japanese history is complemented by work in Japanese literature, Chinese history, and Korean history. His teaching interests include colonialism in East Asia , Japanese popular culture, Japanese intellectual history, and comparative environmental history.

Soe W. Myint
Assistant Professor, Department of Geography
Dr. Myint received his doctorate in geography from Louisiana State University. He also worked for four years in the United Nations Environment Program–Environment Assessment Program for Asia and the Pacific as a research scientist. Prior to joining ASU’s Department of Geography, he was an assistant professor of Geographic Information Science (GIScience) in the Department of Geography at the University of Oklahoma for four years. He received four best student paper awards and two second place paper awards from professional societies during his Ph.D. study. He also received a U.S. Geological Survey Scholar award at the first international conference on GIScience in 2000 and an Intergraph Young Scholar award at the University Consortium for GIScience (UCGIS) 2002 meeting. He received a research grant from the NASA EPSCoR program to examine and develop fractal and lacunarity-based approaches, and from NASA’s Institute for Advanced Education in Geospatial Sciences to develop a model curriculum in geospatial sciences highlighting the application of GIScience technologies for community growth. His most recent research, funded by the National Science Foundation, focuses on frequency-based, multi-scale, multi-decomposition techniques in comparison to other advanced geospatial approaches to identify land-use land-cover classes effectively.

Jamie L. Newhard
Assistant Professor, Department of Languages and Literatures
Dr. Newhard received her doctorate in Japanese literature from Columbia University . Her dissertation was entitled “Genre, Secrecy and the Book: A History of Late Medieval and Early Modern Literary Scholarship on Tales of Ise.” She has presented her work at conferences both here and in Japan , and has contributed to Classical Japanese Reader (Columbia University Press, forthcoming) and Early Japanese Literature, An Anthology: Beginnings to 1600 (Columbia University Press, forthcoming). In addition to the history of literary scholarship, her research interests include medieval, early modern, and modern reception of classical literature; literature produced by women writers in the classical period; and early modern print culture.

Charles Perrings
Professor, School of Human Evolution and Social Change
Dr. Perrings comes to ASU from the University of York, where he founded and served as the first chair of the Environment Department. Previous appointments include professor of economics at the University of California, Riverside; director of the Biodiversity Program of the Beijer Institute, Stockholm; professor of economics at the University of Botswana; and associate professor of economics at the University of Auckland. He was founding editor of the Cambridge University Press journal, Environment and Development Economics, and is on the editorial board of several other journals in the field. Other advisory posts include serving as president of the International Society of Ecological Economics and vice chair of the Scientific Committee of Diversitas (an international program of biodiversity science), as well as advising various governmental, non-governmental, and research funding organizations around the world. His research interests in environmental, resource and ecological economics include the modeling of dynamical ecological–economic systems, the management of environmental public goods under uncertainty, and the environmental implications of economic development. Dr. Perrings will be honored in an upcoming special edition of the International Journal of Ecological Economics & Statistics.

Armando A. Piña
Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology
Dr. Piña joins the faculty from Florida International University where he received his doctorate in applied developmental psychology. He studies intra-individual level risk factors in the development of anxiety disorders in youths and the evaluation of psychosocial interventions for use with this population. Dr. Piña’s work integrates Hispanic/Latino ethnocultural and child-adolescent anxiety research and is aimed at developing empirically informed, culture specific assessment and intervention services for the growing Hispanic/Latino population residing in the United States . His publications have appeared in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and the Allied Disciplines, and Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Dr. Piña is a fellow of the American Psychological Association Minority Fellowship Program and currently serves as an initial review board member.

Pori Park
Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Religious Studies
Dr. Park came to ASU as a visiting assistant professor in 2002 and is contracted to begin her tenure-track position in 2006. Prior to coming to ASU, she taught at Carleton College and the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her research interests include Buddhism and modernity, Buddhism and politics, Buddhism and women, and Zen Buddhism. Her monograph, Buddhist Revival and Change Under the Japanese Rule, is currently under review by the University of Hawaii Press .

Douglas W. Portmore
Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy
Dr. Portmore received his doctorate from the University of California, Santa Barbara, with a specialization in moral philosophy. Prior to coming to ASU, he was an assistant professor of philosophy at California State University, Northridge, an appointment he held for five years. He also taught courses at the College of Charleston. He published several scholarly articles on ethical theory, which have appeared in Ratio, Ethics, Utilitas, Philosophical Studies, and Pacific Philosophical Quarterly.

Helen L. T. Quan
Assistant Professor, School of Justice and Social Inquiry
Dr. Quan received her Ph.D. in 2002 from the University of California, Santa Barbara in political science. From July 2002 to July 2004, Dr. Quan was a full-time faculty member in the Urban Studies Program at Associate College of the Midwest in Chicago. Dr. Quan’s publications include “Beyond Oppositions: Grassroots Urban Responses to the Global Spectre of Savage Developmentalism,” in Global Africa and the Challenge of Globalization: Democratization and Transition, “Cedric Robins, Feminist Consciousness and the Making of the Black Radical Tradition,” in Race & Class: A Journal for Black and Third World Liberation, and “Race, Nation and Diplomacy: Japanese Immigrants and the Reconfiguration of Brazil’s ‘Desirables’” in Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture. Dr. Quan has been a regular correspondent and host for the Weekly Public Affairs Cable TV News Program in Santa Barbara California . She is the co-founder and a member of QUAD Productions, a not-for-profit production company dedicated to producing grassroots, progressive media.

Kyeong Hah Roh
Assistant Professor, Department of Mathematics and Statistics
Dr. Roh joins the faculty from The Ohio State University, where she was a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics. Dr. Roh earned a Ph.D. in mathematics majoring in differential geometry in 2000 from Seoul University and a Ph.D. in mathematics education in 2005 from The Ohio State University. Her research and teaching interests include students’ conceptions about calculus, application of cognitive science to mathematics, the role of intuitive cognition in mathematics, the role of visualization in teaching and learning mathematics, computer aided geometric design, and computational geometry.

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