FELLOWS

Luis F. Alvarez León (Ph.D., UCLA 2016) is Associate Professor of Geography at Dartmouth College. His work examines the geographic, political, and regulatory dimensions of digital economies under capitalism with an emphasis on spatial technologies. He is the author of the book The Map in the Machine: Charting the Spatial Architecture of Digital Capitalism (University of California Press, 2024) and is currently working on two book projects: The Digital Growth Machine: Cities and Technology in the 21st Century, under contract with University of California Press, co-authored with Jovanna Rosen; and From Lithium to Lidar: Supply Chain Geographies of the Electric and Autonomous Vehicle Industry, under contract with Palgrave Macmillan, co-edited with Yuko Aoyama. His next book, Parallax Power, will explore how satellite sensing and communication regimes are products of geopolitical and economic orders, while simultaneously maintaining and disrupting them through the creation of extra-planetary networks of information, technology, and power. A teacher-scholar committed to Liberal Arts education and to the interdisciplinary intellectual project of geography, he believes in breaking down disciplinary and access barriers to foster engaged pluralism, both as a normative aspiration and as a practical necessity to address some of the most urgent problems of our time.

Consuelo Amat is the SNF Agora Institute Assistant Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. Her research interests include the study of state repression, armed and unarmed resistance, political violence, and the development of civil society in authoritarian regimes. Her first book, Power in Autonomy: The Political Strategy of Constructive Resistance, argues that nonviolent movements can build power in contexts of extreme repression by focusing on delivering goods and services. She has also studied the impact of nonviolent action and peacebuilding trainings to build civic capacity in six countries in Latin America and Africa, in partnership with the United States Institute of Peace (USIP). Dr. Amat teaches the introductory course to the Minor in Civic Leadership at SNF Agora for Hopkins undergraduates. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in journals such as Nature Human Behaviour, Comparative Political Studies, and Comparative Politics. The United States Institute of Peace, the John F. Enders Foundation, the Tinker Foundation, and Yale University’s MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies have supported Dr. Amat's research. She received a PhD in political science with distinction from Yale University and holds an MA in conflict resolution from Georgetown University, and BA degrees in international affairs and philosophy from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Before starting graduate school, Dr. Amat worked at the Brookings Institution, the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, Peace Action West, and Human Rights Watch.

Jacqueline Arthur-Montagne is an Assistant Professor of Classics and the John L. Nau III Assistant Professor of the History and Principles of Democracy at the University of Virginia. She is a scholar of Greek literature and cultural history, and a member of the inaugural faculty cohort in the Karsh Institute of Democracy. Her research centers on the texts and practices of ancient education, and how educational institutions shaped the legacy of Classical Greece to the present. She is the author of Fiction and Education in the Roman World: The Cultivation of the Reader (Cambridge University Press, 2026), as well as several edited volumes and articles. In addition to her faculty position, she serves on the Board of the Colloquium for Ancient Rhetoric, co-edits the “Democratic Ideals in Global Perspective” series with the University of Virginia Press, and is a charter member of the Alliance for Civics in the Academy at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Her work reflects a sustained interest in liberal education and the role of the humanities in cultivating critical thinking, cultural memory, and civic responsibility.

Emily Austin is an Associate Professor of Classics and the College at the University of Chicago, where she has taught since 2016. She received a B.A. in Classics from the University of Dallas and a Ph.D. in Classical Studies from Boston University. Her teaching and research focus on Homer, especially emotions, as well as literary depictions of solitude in ancient Greece. Her first book, Grief and the Hero: the Futility of Longing in the Iliad, explores the nexus of grief, longing, and anger in the Iliad. She is currently working on a second book, Solitude and its Powers in Ancient Greece, which identifies surprising moments when ancient Greek poetry conceives of solitude as a good thing. In addition, she has written articles on Homeric similes and their relation to the narrative; meaningful variation in Homeric formulae; and the power of inactivity in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. Emily is the happy daughter of two graduates from St. John’s College, Santa Fe, who taught her to love good books and great conversation. She has served as her department’s Director of Undergraduate Studies for several years, where she welcomes the opportunity to think through the whys and hows of liberal education.

Lucas Rambo Bender studies medieval Chinese literature and thought. He has published one monograph on the great Tang-dynasty poet Du Fu (712–770), has a second forthcoming on the large medieval literature on imperial frontiers, and is currently writing a third on the pluralism of medieval Chinese culture. He is Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures and Humanities at Yale University, where he currently leads the "Six Global Perspectives" program of cross-cultural introductory humanities seminars.

Fannie Bialek is an Assistant Professor at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. Her work focuses on contemporary religious and philosophical approaches to interpersonal relationships marked by love, justice, and care, or their absence. Her first book, Love in Time (Chicago, 2025), argues for a consideration of love as a relationship of uncertainty. Her next book, Waiting with Others: Vulnerability as Imagination, develops a view of vulnerability as a description of how we imagine possible futures and how our anticipation of them defines our social practices. Bialek teaches a popular gateway course for undergraduates, “The Good Life between Religion and Politics,” among other courses in religious ethics and political thought. She also directs Washington University’s Knowledge for Freedom Summer Seminar, “Citizenship and Freedom,” an intensive humanities program for Saint Louis-area high school students. After graduating from Princeton University summa cum laude, Bialek earned a Ph.D. in Religion and Critical Thought from Brown University, where she then taught as a Visiting Assistant Professor. Alongside her teaching and research, Bialek has worked in sexual health education and intimate violence response and prevention for over two decades.

William Deringer is a historian and STS scholar who studies how numbers and calculations organize political and economic life. He is Associate Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at MIT. His first book, Calculated Values: Finance, Politics, and the Quantitative Age (2018) reveals how numerical “facts and figures” became an authoritative form of public reasoning in Britain after 1688. Calculated Values was awarded the Oscar Kenshur Prize (Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies) and the Joseph J. Spengler Prize (History of Economics Society). His current project, The Formula That Rules Our Future: A Social History of Discounting, is a multi-century history of one calculation that would come to dominate how the future is valued across myriad domains, from finance and engineering to public administration and climate policy. An article from that project, “Mr. Aecroid’s Tables: Economic Calculations and Social Customs in the Early Modern Countryside” (Journal of Modern History, 2024), won the Walter D. Love Prize from the North American Conference on British Studies. In 2026-27 he will be a Member at the Institute for Advanced Study. As a NAFFLE Fellow, he is interested in how humanistic scholarship and liberal education can foster civic responsibility within technical domains like finance and engineering.

Michael A. Dichio is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Utah, where he teaches constitutional law, American political thought, and judicial politics. His research focuses on American political and constitutional development, particularly how judicial institutions are created and evolve, and how political actors inside and outside of courts use these institutions to shape constitutional change, federalism, and state building. His work has been published in SUNY Press’s American Constitutionalism Series, Studies in American Political Development, Publius: The Journal of Federalism, and Just Security, among other venues. He also serves as Special Issue Editor for Publius’s “Annual Review of American Federalism.” He holds a Ph.D. in Government from Cornell University and an honors degree in Political Science and History from Boston College.

Michel Estefan is an Associate Professor of Teaching and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the sociology department at the University of California, San Diego. His teaching and writing combine philosophical humanism, sociological theory, and the scholarship of teaching and learning to produce systematic frameworks for critically understanding and addressing some of the most daunting challenges facing instructors and students in today’s higher education landscape. His published work has appeared in Teaching Sociology, Sociological Focus, TRAILS: Teaching Resources and Innovations Library for Sociology, First Publics, Inside Higher Ed, and Teaching/Learning Matters, and has been featured multiple times in The Chronicle of Higher Education. 

He has trained close to 2,000 graduate students, faculty, lecturers and postdocs across the University of California and California State University systems on various aspects of teaching and pedagogy. His teaching and mentoring have been recognized with awards from the University of California, San Diego, the University of California, Berkeley, SAGE publishing, and the Teaching and Learning Section of the American Sociological Association.

Sahar Heydari Fard is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at The Ohio State University and a Residential Faculty Fellow at the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. Her research focuses on the dynamics of social change, with particular attention to how societies transform while sustaining the forms of coordination they depend on. She studies how societies change and how institutions can evolve while preserving the conditions that make cooperation and learning possible. Her work focuses on when change strengthens institutions and when it risks undermining them. Her publications include articles in Philosophy of Science, Synthese, Philosophy Compass, and Critical Review, as well as chapters in volumes published by Oxford University Press. Her interest in higher education centers on how its institutional and epistemic infrastructure can adapt responsibly under conditions of rapid social and technological change, while preserving the forms of inquiry and collective knowledge production that make it valuable.

Johann Frick is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. He works in moral and political philosophy, practical reason, and applied ethics, with current research focusing on population ethics, the ethics of risk, moral dilemmas and moral luck, interpersonal justification, and the ethics of immigration and national partiality. His publications include “Contractualism and Social Risk” and “What We Owe to Hypocrites” in Philosophy & Public Affairs, “On the Survival of Humanity” in Canadian Journal of Philosophy, “National Partiality, Immigration, and the Problem of Double-Jeopardy” in Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy, “Conditional Reasons and the Procreation Asymmetry” in Philosophical Perspectives, and “Authority Without the Duty to Obey” in Mind. He is currently completing a monograph, The Two Faces of Morality, on relational and non-relational morality. He is especially interested in the role philosophy can play in a liberal education that prepares students for democratic citizenship, serious moral reflection, and intellectually meaningful lives beyond the university. He is particularly concerned with how these aims can be sustained in a time of rapid technological change, including the challenge posed by generative AI.

Dr. Hyeryung Hwang is Associate Professor of Global Literature in the Interdisciplinary General Education program in the Department of Liberal Studies at Cal Poly Pomona. A multidisciplinary teacher-scholar, her work spans world literature and cinema, theories of imperialism and colonialism, and peripheral aesthetics and politics. Her research, engaging East Asia and South America, examines the persistence of realist forms in the global periphery and how heterogeneous forms of peripheral neo-realism offer alternative cultural analyses of global capitalism. Deeply invested in the future of liberal and higher education, she develops interdisciplinary, student-centered curricula that connect humanistic inquiry with global and comparative perspectives. Her publications include articles in Journal of Criticism and Theory (2024), Midwest Quarterly (2022, 2020), The Global South (2017), and Telos (2017). She is a two-time winner of the Victor J. Emmett Jr. Memorial Award (2020 and 2022) and a 2023 recipient of Cal Poly Pomona’s Wall of COOL (Celebrating Outstanding Opportunities for Learning) Award for excellence in course design and student success. Before joining Cal Poly Pomona, she taught at McNeese State University, Georgia Tech, and the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, where she earned her Ph.D. in English.

Lauren Jarvis is an Associate Professor of History, with an adjunct appointment in African, African American, and Diaspora Studies, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Jarvis studies the history of South Africa, with special interest in how people lived through and with extreme economic inequality. Her first book, A Prophet of the People (MSUP 2024), explored religious change in South Africa during the country’s industrial revolution. Jarvis is also an editor of a forthcoming volume entitled Agency in African History (Ohio University Press) and is completing a book about the global history of anti-apartheid, geared toward non-specialist audiences. Jarvis’s new research explores how South Africans have influenced international debates about economic inequality. At UNC, Jarvis teaches courses in South African, African, and world history. She serves as the faculty director of the Lab at UNC History (the LAUNCH), a digital humanities lab, and on the editorial boards of the journals Church History and Safundi. Jarvis’s practice explaining the values of a liberal education began decades ago, when she told her supportive, but skeptical family that she planned to study history. Their blue-collar sensibilities shaped her commitment to sharing those values widely – and to fostering them inside and outside of academia.

Khalil Anthony Johnson, Jr. is an Associate Professor and Chair of African American Studies at Wesleyan University. His is at the intersection of African American and Indigenous histories, with a focus on the historical role of schooling in shaping the global modernity. Dr. Johnson is currently finalizing his book manuscript, Schooled: A History of American Education and Empire, which is under contract with the University of North Carolina Press. His work explores the dual nature of schooling as both a tool of colonial dispossession and a potential tool for social change. Dr. Johnson is deeply invested in the future of liberal education. He views the classroom as a critical space for cross-disciplinary inquiry and is dedicated to fostering academic environments that challenge and expand foundational narratives. By bridging historical scholarship with pedagogical practices deeply informed by both Black Studies and Native American Indigenous Studies, he aims to cultivate higher education models that empower students to engage critically with the complex, overlapping histories of the United States. You can find his published essays and reviews in American Quarterly, American Historical Review, Native American and Indigenous Studies, Pacific Historical Review, and a forthcoming edited volume titled Campuses and Colonialism.

Alexandra Kieffer is Associate Professor of Musicology and Associate Vice Provost for Academic Programs at Rice University. Her work centers on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French musical and intellectual culture. Her first book, Debussy's Critics: Sound, Affect, and the Experience of Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2019), explores ideas about the psychology of emotion and sensory experience in the reception of Debussy's music. More recently, her work has focused on theories of music and ritual in twentieth-century social science. At Rice, she is a member of the committee currently working to reform the undergraduate general education curriculum.

Athena Kirk is Associate Professor of Classics at Cornell University. Her research focuses broadly on ancient Greek literature. She studies the intersections between literature and documentary texts, the material qualities of ancient texts, and public interaction with them; her book Ancient Greek Lists (Cambridge, 2021) connects the discourses of literary and epigraphic texts to elucidate a poetics of Greek list-making across poetry, prose, and inscriptions. Her current book project focuses on questions of materiality in the nonhuman world, and the operations of ancient animals and objects. She is also preparing a translation of selected essays of the Roman philosopher and biographer Plutarch. Professor Kirk is interested in the public-facing humanities and the future of literature and foreign language in higher education, and more generally in the balance of interior intellectualism and interpersonal connection in liberal education.

Jonathan Lande earned a Ph.D. from Brown University in 2018 and is an assistant professor of history at Purdue University. He is the author of Freedom Soldiers: The Emancipation of Black Soldiers in Civil War Camps, Courts, and Prisons (Oxford University Press, 2024) and the forthcoming Valiant Men of War: Black Soldiers’ Fight for Family, Honor, and Nation in the Civil War South (Yale University Press, 2026). He has contributed seven peer-reviewed articles to the Journal of American History, Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, Journal of Southern History, Journal of American Ethnic History, Journal of Social History, Journal of African American History, and Civil War History. He has also written for The Washington Post and Time Magazine and appeared on C-SPAN.

Raisa Rexer is Associate Professor of French at Vanderbilt University. Her research focuses on literature and the history of photography in nineteenth-century France, with an emphasis on representations of sexuality and the body. She is the author of art criticism and articles that have appeared in art magazines, museum catalogues, and scholarly publications. In 2025, her article “The Other Feminism: Literature, Sex, and the Novels of René Maizeroy in Fin-de-siècle France” was awarded the inaugural Dix-Neuf journal prize. Her first book, The Fallen Veil: A Literary and Cultural History of the Photographic Nude in Nineteenth-Century France, was published by University of Pennsylvania Press in 2021. 

Her teaching spans everything from first-semester French to nineteenth-century crime narratives to the history of photography, and she is passionately committed to humanities education across fields and disciplines.

Dustin Schroeder is an Associate Professor of Geophysics and of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. His research focuses on advancing the scientific and technical foundations of ice penetrating radar and its use in observing and understanding the interaction of ice and water across the solar system. On Earth, he investigates the evolution, behavior, and stability of Earth’s ice sheets. He is also a science team member on NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, which will explore Jupiter’s icy moon Europa. He is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and recipient of the AGU’s James B. Macelwane Medal. 

He is a proud first-generation college student and grateful beneficiary of liberal arts education and holds a BS in Electrical Engineering and BA in Physics (with minors in Math and Philosophy) from Bucknell University and PhD in Geophysics from the University of Texas at Austin. At Stanford, he is a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education, serves as Director of COLLEGE 102: Citizenship in the 21st Century (part of Stanford's new first-year core) and is vice-chair of the Faculty Senate. He is also Chair of Earth and Space Sciences for the National Science Olympiad (the nation’s largest team-based K-12 science competition).

William Sturkey is the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Associate Professor of American History at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studies and teaches about the history of race in the United States. Professor Sturkey is the author of several books and articles, including Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White (2019) and, most recently, The Ballad of Roy Benavidez: The Life and Times of America’s Most Famous Hispanic War Hero (2024). Dr. Sturkey’s writing has appeared in academic journals such as The Journal of African American History and Southern Cultures and in major news venues such as The New York Times and The Atlantic. Professor Sturkey is currently at work on a new book project, Precious Lord, Take My Hand: A People’s History of the 1960s. At the University of Pennsylvania, Professor Sturkey teaches a wide range of undergraduate and graduate courses in Southern History, African American History, Modern United States History, and Historical Methods. Sturkey is also an ardent supporter of K-12 teachers and has participated in numerous K-12 workshops, including those sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Children’s Defense Fund.

Brandon M. Terry is John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University and co-director of the Institute on Policing, Incarceration, and Public Safety at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. A graduate of Harvard, Oxford, and Yale, Terry is an award-winning scholar of African American ethics and political thought, political theory, and the politics of race, inequality, and justice. He is the author of Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope: A Tragic Vision of the Civil Rights Movement (Harvard), one of the New York Times’ Notable Books of 2025. He is editor of Fifty Years Since MLK (MIT, 2018) and, with Tommie Shelby, of To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Harvard, 2018). He is working on two books: Home to Roost: Malcolm X Between Prophecy and Peril (Penguin/Random House), and To Save the Soul of America: Martin Luther King and a New Public Philosophy. His writing and interviews have appeared in New York Review of Books, Time, The Point, The Ezra Klein Show, New York Times, and elsewhere. He currently serves on the boards of Boston Review, Embrace Boston, and NOMOS. His interests in higher education include academic freedom, expanding access, and efforts to build mutually enriching ties between universities, cities, and communities of concentrated disadvantage.

Dr. Kaustubh Thirumalai is an Associate Professor of Geosciences at the University of Arizona. As an Earth scientist working at the intersection of paleoclimatology, paleoceanography, climate dynamics, and stable isotope geochemistry, he investigates how past changes in oceans, rainfall, and climate variability can illuminate future risks. His research integrates geochemical records from natural archives with climate-system questions focused on monsoons, ENSO, hydroclimate extremes, and Earth-system changes. He serves as an Editor for the journal, Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology. At the University of Arizona, he directs the Paleo² Lab and has taught classes at the undergraduate and graduate levels in paleontology, geochemistry, paleoclimate, and oceanography, and is interested in mentoring student education and research at all levels. His honors include the American Geophysical Union's Nanne Weber Early Career Award and election as Fellow National of The Explorers Club. Kaustubh believes that Earth science is central to liberal education because it connects short-term human and societal change with the deep-time histories of Earth’s climate, tectonics, and biodiversity, offering a richer understanding of today’s environmental challenges and future human–environment relationships.

Henry Thomson is an Associate Professor in the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University. In 2025-26, he also serves as Acting Director of the Melikian Center for Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies. His research focuses on authoritarian regimes and transitions to democracy. His most recent book, Watching the Watchers: Communist Elites, the Secret Police and Social Order in Cold War Europe won Harvard's Davis Center prize in 2025. Originally from New Zealand, Thomson studied political science, economics and German literature at Minnesota, Berlin and Wellington. This broad training across the social sciences and humanities is reflected in his similarly broad interests in higher education. Currently, he is most actively engaged in promoting civil discourse and debate among undergraduates on campus via discussion-based courses and public events. He is also part of a broad coalition in Phoenix and at ASU fostering interest in international affairs and foreign languages and cultures.

Dr. Ja’La Wourman is an assistant professor of English at Howard University where she teaches and researches at the intersections of African American rhetoric, writing, digital media and emerging technologies. Born in Waukegan, IL, Dr. Wourman has used her military upbringing in Japan to offer a global perspective into the way writing and communication shifts from cultures and communities, informing the way we teach, think, and research. 

With these interests. Dr. Wourman has presented her work at numerous academic conferences and published in journals such as Kairos, Spark:4C4E, Technical Communication Quarterly, College Composition and Communication, and the Journal of African American Studies. She has served on several national committees and is an advocate for mentoring the next generation of scholars and leaders through higher education and the liberal arts. Dr. Wourman is also the recipient of many awards and honors such as the 2025 writing and creative works summer academy at Howard University, 2024 College of Arts and Letters Provost award at James Madison University, 2021 King- Chavez-Parks fellowship and 20220 Excellence in Interdisciplinary Scholarship for study abroad at Michigan State University. She received her PhD from Michigan State University’s Writing, Rhetoric, and Cultures program.