Provost’s Distinguished Faculty Fellows

Lydia Gibson is a geographer, environmental anthropologist, and Assistant Professor of Race and Technology at Georgetown University. Lydia’s research spans across natural and social sciences to understand how social, political, and ecological change, colonial histories, and the materialisation of environmental discourses and actions come to shape the rituals, livelihoods, and bicultural experiences of traditional forest communities in the Caribbean. Lydia’s research also explores how environmental data practices – e.g. GIS, remote sensing data, and ecological methods – shape and differentiate access and power in environmental spaces. Lydia holds a bachelors degree in Mathematics and Biology from University of Bristol, and two Masters (in Sociology and Anthropology) and a PhD in environmental anthropology from UCL (University College London). Lydia remained at UCL for a postdoc, under the ESRC fellowship she was awarded by the UKRI, before moving to Columbia University for another postdoctoral position. Lydia is particularly interested in the intersection of physics and social theory and works closely with traditional communities to monitor ecosystems and document and resist the exploitation, misuse, and colonisation of traditional and indigenous knowledge. 

Jane Komori is Provost’s Distinguished Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor of Labor, Migration, and Racial Capitalism in the Walsh School of Foreign Service. She holds a PhD in the History of Consciousness, with emphases in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies and Feminist Studies, from the University of California Santa Cruz. Prior to coming to Georgetown, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of History at the University of British Columbia.

Jane’s research focuses on race, labor, and ecology. Her current book project investigates the labor history and self-organization of Asian immigrant and Indigenous workers in Western Canada’s primary resource industries from the 1850s to the mid-twentieth century. The book theorizes the way that racial forms, specifically the racialization of labor, are produced at the intersection of settler colonialism, resource extraction, and resultant environmental change.  

Jane’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Radical History Review, Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory, Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal, Critical Ethnic Studies, Asia-Pacific Journal,and Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences,as well as a number of public-facing venues, including Viewpoint Magazine, The Globe and Mail, Ricepaper Magazine, Matrix Magazine, GUTS Canadian Feminist Magazine,and The Bulletin/Geppo. 

Kaylee Matheny is an assistant professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. She uses quantitative descriptive, quasi-experimental, and qualitative methods to examine socioeconomic inequality, and her work has been published in outlets such as American Sociological Review, American Educational Research Journal, and Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. She conducts three strands of work: evaluating equitable policies and practices, understanding people’s educational experiences as classed, and analyzing how socioeconomic status intersections with other social identities. Her work is driven by her own experiences as a low-income, first-gen high school graduate, as well as the experiences of her family, the 10th graders she taught, and her former schoolmates in her hometown of Griffin, GA.  

Matheny holds a BA in Sociology and English-Creative Writing from Emory University, a MA in Sociology from Stanford University, and a PhD in Education Policy and Sociology of Education from Stanford University. Prior to graduate school, Matheny was a 10th grade English teacher and content lead at her high school alma mater. She loves collecting books (and occasionally reading them), playing board games, bingeing comedy series, and making new recipes.

Kelsey Alejandra Moore is a Provost’s Distinguished Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor of African American History and Black Studies. Her work focuses on rural black southern histories, raising questions about race, religion, and culture in the 20th century. Her current book, What the Dead Witnessed, interrogates how rural development in South Carolina’s Santee-Cooper basin inflicted spiritual, ecological, and epistemic violence against black and indigenous peoples. Through a close examination of the Santee-Cooper Hydroelectric and Navigation Project, What the Dead Witnessed demonstrates how the ritualistic nature of modernization collapsed various notions of time, space, and place.

As an inaugural 2022-2023 Crossroads Research Fellow based at Princeton University, Moore created “We Just Don’t Trust Our Memories to Stone ,” a digital project that remaps cemeteries flooded by the Santee-Cooper Hydroelectric and Navigation Project. In doing so, the digital project remembers various Conjure knowledge(s) necessary to the lives and deaths of black South Carolinians. 

Before coming to Georgetown, Moore received her M.A. and Ph.D. in History from Johns Hopkins University. She received a Dual B.A. in Africana Studies and Public Policy at New York University, where she graduated summa cum laude as the 2019 Valedictorian of the College and Arts and Science. 

When she is not researching, Moore enjoys spending time with her two cats, Liberation and Abolition and baking vegan chocolate chip cookies.

Emma Smith (she/her) is a development economist with a focus on refugees, migration, and social norms. One main strand of Emma’s research aims to understand how refugees make economic decisions and what interventions can meet the pressing needs of forcibly displaced people. Emma often works in collaboration with humanitarian organizations, and her research has looked at barriers to mental health care-seeking, effectiveness of shelter interventions, and access to remote work opportunities. In a second strand of research, Emma focuses on the effects of social norms broadly, with work on mental health stigma and gender norms. Emma holds a PhD in Public Policy from Harvard University and a bachelor’s in both Economics and Middle Eastern Studies from Wellesley College. Emma was born and raised on the island of St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands. In her free time she loves to backpack, cook, eat, garden, and climb.

Dr. Melinda González is a Puerto Rican scholar and poet, who was born and raised in Newark, New Jersey, with ancestral home in the lush mountains of Moca, Puerto Rico. She is a socio-cultural anthropologist who focuses on environmental anthropology/disaster studies. Dr. González holds a BA from Barnard College, an MA from Rutgers University, and a PhD in Anthropology & Geography with a minor concentration in English Literature from Louisiana State University. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Rutgers University’s Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice, and is currently an Assistant Professor & Provost’s Distinguished Faculty Fellow in the Culture and Politics major at the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.

Dr. Gonzalez works on racial, class, and gender disparities in the impact of environmental disasters. She uses decolonial and indigenous research methods to study new media technologies in environmental justice studies. Dr. Gonzalez is the 2021 Mary Fran Myers Gender and Disaster Award winner, which honors research on gender issues in disaster and emergency management. She is also a performance/spoken word poet who has performed internationally.

Dr. Crystal Luo received her PhD in History from the University of Virginia in 2023. She will be an incoming Provost’s Distinguished Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor of Asian American History. Her dissertation, “Higher Rises, Lower Depths: Asian Americans and globalization,” charted the changing roles of Asian Americans and Asian American politics within a globalizing United States.

More broadly, her research interests focus on race and urban space in the American West; Asian American labor history; and Asian American transnationalism. She received her MA in History from UVA in 2019 and a Bachelors of Music from Boston University in 2017. Her research has been supported by organizations including the UVA Scholars’ Lab, the Huntington Library, and the Jefferson Scholars Foundation. 

Lingxin Zhang specializes in ancient Egyptian languages and cultures during the Graeco-Roman period (3rd century BCE – 4th century CE). Her research uses written records and material cultures to reconstruct the early scientific, divinatory, and medical practices in ancient Egypt. She is particularly interested in approaching these data through the lens of critical gender theories and post-colonialist studies.

From 2021-2023, Lingxin was Lector of Ancient Egyptian Language at the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Yale University, where she taught different stages of ancient Egyptian language and topics on gender and identities in ancient Egypt. In 2020-2021, Lingxin partnered with the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute at Johns Hopkins University to offer two online courses aimed at promoting public engagement in ancient studies.

Dr. Amanda Sahar d’Urso is an incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of Government and a Provost Distinguished Faculty Fellow received her Ph.D. in political science from Northwestern University. Before joining Georgetown, she was a Guarini Dean Postdoctoral Fellow at Dartmouth University with joint appointments in the Department of Government and the Program in Quantitative Social Science. Dr. d’Urso studies racial and ethnic politics and American politics. She focuses on racial and ethnic identities which are ambiguous in American legal and social spheres. Her current book project details how Middle Easterners and North Africans (MENA) have been racialized throughout the 20th and 21st century, despite being legally classified as ‘White’. 

Amanda grew up in Northern Virginia and is an alumna of the University of Virginia (wahoowa). She is thrilled to be joining Georgetown University. Her hobby is trying new hobbies. She is of Iranian descent and also happily goes by Sahar.

Sarah Adel Bargal is an incoming Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Provost’s Distinguished Faculty Fellow. Previously, she was a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science of Boston University, Co-director of AI4ALL at Boston University, and a member of the Image and Video Computing (IVC) Group. In 2019, she received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Boston University. Her degrees in Computer Science include a Bachelor’s degree from Kuwait University, a Master’s degree from American University, Cairo, and a Ph.D. from Boston University.

Dr. Bargal’s research interests include machine learning, computer vision, and explainable artificial intelligence, with a focus on making artificial intelligence systems explainable and accountable to humans and society. She is a recipient of the IBM Ph.D. Fellowship, Hariri Graduate Fellowship, and an Outstanding Teaching Fellow Award, among other recognitions.

Sarah is currently serving as a guest editor for a special issue of the Frontiers in Computer Science Journal. Sarah’s research interests are in machine learning, computer vision, and explainable artificial intelligence, with a current focus on making artificial intelligence systems explainable and accountable to humans and society.

Nicolás Campisi is an incoming Assistant Professor and Provost’s Distinguished Faculty Fellow in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. He works at the intersection of contemporary Latin American literature, visual arts, and the environmental humanities, and is currently preparing a book manuscript entitled The Return of the Contemporary: The Latin American Novel in the End Times. He received a BA in Art History and Hispanic Studies from Washington College, and an MA and Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies from Brown University. Before coming to Georgetown, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Tulane University. Nicolás is originally from Argentina. In his free time, he likes to play tennis, watch soccer, visit art museums, and learn about the life of birds. His awards include the 2021 Joukowsky Outstanding Dissertation Award given by Brown University, the best dissertation in the Humanities, the 2021 best Dissertation Prize from the Center of Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Brown University, and the 2019 Lyle Olsen Graduate Essay Prize awarded by the Sport Literature Association.

Peggy Kyoungwon Lee is a scholar in contemporary American literature, performance, and media. She is currently a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at Berkeley in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies. Her research has been previously supported by pre- and post-doctoral fellowships from the University of Pennsylvania, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Mellon Foundation.

Dr. Lee’s current book project examines the politics, performance, and protest of composure for women of color during the rise of multicultural institutionalization in the US. Following her B.A. in Women’s Studies from UC Santa Barbara and M.A. in Performance Studies from New York University, Dr. Lee earned her Ph.D. in American Culture from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

 Dr. Lee will join as Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies in the Department of English at Georgetown University.

Johann Le Guelte, a cultural studies scholar, is an assistant professor of Francophone Studies in the Department of French and Francophone studies. He received his Master’s degree and Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University in French and Francophone Studies following a Master’s degree in French Language and Literature from Ohio University. From 2019 to 2022, he was an assistant professor of French and Francophone studies and directed the French and Francophone studies program at Xavier University (Cincinnati). 

Dr. Le Guelte’s research focuses on visual culture, colonial history and propaganda, and critical race studies. His academic interests range from diaspora and migration studies, French and Francophone literatures, art history, media studies, and postcolonial history. His book in progress, Uncovering the Colonial Lens: Creation and Subversion of the French Visual Empire, examines the production and reception of colonial photographic propaganda to determine how state-sponsored photographs became official colonial information in the minds of many French citizens. His work explores the nuanced ways in which photography has been used both as a device for colonial propaganda in interwar France and a powerful mode of resistance for colonized peoples who used the camera to reclaim their subjugated identities. He is the recipient of the 2019 Alumni Association Dissertation Award from the Penn State Alumni Association and two awards for teaching excellence from Penn State.

In his free time, he enjoys reading, craft beer, horror films, spending time with family and cats, and unsuccessfully trying to start a collection of good wine bottles.

Kristia Wantchekon is an incoming Assistant Professor of Psychology and a Provost’s Distinguished Fellow at Georgetown University. Broadly, her research seeks to integrate the literatures on context-embedded adolescent development, identity processes, and academic adjustment to understand the factors that inform ethno-racially minoritized adolescents’ positive development in and out of schools. She was awarded the 2017 Frances Degen Horowitz Millennium Scholar award from the Society for Research in Child Development. Kristia earned her B.A. from Yale University and received her Ed.M. in Human Development and Psychology from Harvard University in Spring 2017. She received her Ph.D. in Human Development, Learning, and Teaching in Spring 2021 from Harvard University as well.

Melanie White holds a Ph.D. in Africana Studies from Brown University, an M.A. in African and African Diaspora Studies from the University of Texas at Austin, and a B.A. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania.

Her research and teaching interests include hemispheric Black feminist politics, Black diasporic women’s art, and the histories, politics, and visual cultures of Black Latin America and the Caribbean. Her first book project traces a history of sexual and gender-based colonial violence against Black and Afro-Indigenous women and girls from what is today the Nicaraguan and Honduran Mosquitia. Linking this genealogy of racialized, gendered, and territorial dispossession with the centuries-long struggle for autonomy on the Mosquito Coast, White juxtaposes the history of intimate colonial violence in the region with the “counter-colonial intimacies” of Afro-Mosquitian women past and present.

Specifically, she explores the historical record and contemporary artistic production to highlight Afro-Mosquitian women’s embodied and creative practices of colonial refusal and intimate autonomy. Her research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Council for Learned Societies, and the Institute for Citizens and Scholars. Her work is published or forthcoming in Caribbean Quarterly, Latin American Music Review, The E3W Review of Books, and the edited volumes Critical Social Science Research on Black Women in the Americas and Black Feminisms Beyond Borders: Cultivating Knowledge, Solidarity, and Liberation. White has served as an instructor in the Departments of English and Africana Studies at Smith College, where she taught courses on Black diasporic women writers.