Support the CollegeCollege of Arts & Science at Miami University
Meet Some of Our New Faculty 2010-11
Read the fall 2011 updates to find out what these new faculty have to say about their teaching and research.
H. Louise Davis
American Studies
Dr. Davis (PhD, Michigan State University) has a joint appointment on the Hamilton and Middletown campuses. She is an interdisciplinary American studies scholar who specializes in media and visual cultural studies, gender studies, and youth studies.
Erin Edwards
Department of English
Dr. Edwards' (PhD, University of California, Berkeley) teaching and research interests include 20th century American literature, film, modernism, literary and film theory, theories of the body, autobiography, and utopian and dystopian fiction.
August 2011 Update: Dr. Edwards was thrilled to get to know both English majors and students from other disciplines in her literature classes. She taught courses on American literary modernism, a graduate seminar entitled "Modernism's Bodies," and a cross-listed course on American women writers. She also developed a capstone entitled "The Question of the Posthuman," and she is looking forward to working with her students to question the meaning of "the human" in texts as diverse as Ovid's Metamorphoses and William Gibson's cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer. Professor Edwards's article, "The Anoptic Corporeality of As I Lay Dying," appeared in Faulkner and His Critics in the fall of 2010, and she is working on a book manuscript on the figure of the corpse in modern American fiction. She also wrote an article on technological audition in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds; her interest in sound and noise has taken on such a life of its own that she is planning a second book project on sound in twentieth-century American literature and culture.
Daniel Farley
Department of Mathematics
For the past four years, Dr. Farley (PhD, State University of New York-Binghamton) taught at Miami in a visiting capacity; he now joins the department as an assistant professor. His research area is geometric group therapy, which combines algebra, topology and geometry.
Natosha Finley
Department of Microbiology
Dr. Finley (PhD, University of Cincinnati) joins the department after a one-year appointment as a Heanon Wilkins Fellow at Miami. Prior to joining Miami's faculty, Dr. Finley held a postdoctoral position at the University of Cincinnati. Her research interests include NMR and biophysical studies of bacterial pathogenesis and protein structure-function relationships in inheritable muscle defects.
Anna Ghazaryan
Department of Mathematics
Before coming to Miami, Dr. Ghazaryan (PhD, The Ohio State University) held a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and taught at the University of Kansas. Her area of research is analysis of applied dynamical systems and nonlinear partial differential equations, specifically nonlinear waves.
Aaron Luebbe
Department of Psychology
Dr. Luebbe (PhD, University of Missouri-Columbia) was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Missouri. His research interests are in systemic factors that contribute to the development, maintenance, and treatment of youth internalizing disorders, as well as parent and peer socialization of positive emotions in children and adolescents.
Vahagn Manukian
Department of Mathematics
Dr. Manukian (PhD, The Ohio State University) joins the faculty at the Hamilton campus. He was a postdoctoral associate at North Carolina State University and taught at the University of Kansas. His area of research is dynamical systems.
Tobias Menely
Department of English
Dr. Menely (PhD, Indiana University) comes to us from Willamette University. His research and teaching focus on British literature and culture between 1688 and 1832, with special emphasis on British poetry of the Romantic period.
October 2011 Update: Last fall, Professor Menely taught Introduction to Literary and Cultural Studies, which is the gateway course for new majors. The class focused on form, understood as both a specific element of literature (such as prosody or narrative) and a theoretical principle (such as the commodity form). He was immensely impressed with his students' willingness and capacity to think through difficult ideas. In Dr. Menely's course on Romanticism, the class examined the literature of the early 19th century in terms of personification: the figural conditions of personhood. He spent the spring working on his forthcoming book, The Community of Creatures: Sensibility and the Voice of the Animal.
Tory Pearman
Department of English
Dr. Pearman (PhD, Loyola University Chicago) joins the faculty at the Hamilton campus. Her research interests are medieval literature and culture, feminist and gender theories, disability studies, and women in literature.
Byran Smucker
Department of Statistics
Dr. Smucker's (PhD, The Pennsylvania State University) research interests are design of experiments, response surface methodology, statistical disclosure limitation for tabular data, and estimation in angler surveys.
October 2011 Update: Dr. Smucker has enjoyed teaching Probability, an important class for undergraduates whose degrees emphasize statistics. In addition to the classic course material, he has emphasized the integration of probabilistic thinking into interesting, real-life situations (Is it really such a coincidence that someone has won the lottery twice?). In addition to his pedagogical responsibilities, Dr. Smucker is excited by the knowledge he has acquired in the course of his research since he came to Miami. In addition to publishing an article in the Journal of Quality Technology, he has continuing research projects in areas of interest to him: experimental design and statistical disclosure limitation. In May, he presented his research at the International Conference on Design of Experiments, a meeting that was even more scintillating than it sounds.
Nicole Starosielski
Department of Communication
Dr. Starosielski (PhD, University of California, Santa Barbara) will play a key role in building comparative media studies at Miami. Her research interests are in the areas of global and digital media, history of communication, technology and culture, and environmental studies.
August 2011 Update: Dr. Starosielski enjoyed teaching two courses that bring together critical studies with production work in the Communication Department: "Media Technologies" and "Mediated Environments." She also published two essays, one on the history of environmental animation 
in the International Communication Gazette, as well as an essay on
Fiji's DVD stores in Media Fields Journal.
Hiesun Suhr
Department of Communication
Dr. Suhr (PhD, Rutgers University) joins the faculty on the Hamilton campus. Her research interests are in social media, music industry, celebrity culture, and convergence culture.
Ellen Yezierski
Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
Before joining Miami's faculty, Dr. Yezierski (PhD, Arizona State University) was a tenured associate professor at Grand Valley State University. Her research interests include improving teacher quality by concentrating on the promotion of scientific inquiry in secondary classrooms.
September 2011 Update: Professor Yezierski had an exciting year of teaching and research. She taught first semester college (general) chemistry and graduate courses focused on special topics in chemistry education and in chemistry education research. Yezierski launched her research program at Miami with graduate and undergraduate students, studying the effects of novel high school chemistry teacher professional development on students. She had two papers published in Chemistry Education Research and Practice, and recently received a $1.35M National Science Foundation Discovery Research K-12 award to bring the Target Inquiry teacher professional development model to the university. Yezierski continues her national service on the American Chemical Society (ACS) Division of Chemical Education Board of Publication, Journal of Chemical Education Editorial Advisory Board, and ACS-Hach Board. She continues to build and nurture collaborations at Miami by chairing the Chemistry and Biochemistry Assessment Committee and through service on the department's graduate recruitment committee and Miami's Institutional Review Board.
Miami University
College of Arts & Science
- Office of the Dean
143 Upham Hall
Oxford, Ohio 45056
(513) 529-1234
cas@MiamiOH.edu
Events
-
Film Noir: Double Indemnity
(June 4)
News
- Geography department honors students for academic excellence
- Ohio makes progress in delivering long-term services; challenges remain
- Cracks reveal earthquake history in northern Chile - Miami geologist part of study
- Miami and Northeast Ohio Medical University together create MD Pathway Program
- Miami students receive honors from department of classics
- Miami sophomore wins Boren Scholarship for International Study
- Political science students honored with awards and scholarships
- First-year student wins Pearson COM 135 Speech Showcase
- Students receive French and Italian awards
- Goldman Prize winner to study and create energy narratives, promote sustainable energy use
- Miami to form office of research for undergraduates
- Seniors receive President's Distinguished Service Award
- David Tierney named Sigma Xi Researcher of the Year