2023-2024 Provost’s Distinguished Faculty Fellows

The Provost’s office is proud to announce the inaugural cohort of Provost’s Distinguished Faculty Fellows for the 2023-2024 academic year:

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
Classics, College of Arts & Sciences

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.