Faculty Expands with 10 New Professors

Tahiya Chowdhury (computer science) conducts research at the intersection of multimodal sensing of humans and nature. She uses computer vision, often augmented with language, speech, and spatial data, to extract insights from images and videos to answer questions about humans, nature, and society. Last year, she completed a post-doc at Colby’s Davis Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Now in the classroom full time, she will teach a new course on computational thinking with computer vision and a two-course sequence to introduce students to current research in computer vision, AI, and data science and how to apply them to broadly understand how humans, machines, and nature can co-exist. Chowdhury completed her master’s and doctorate in computer engineering at Rutgers University.

Evan Dethier (geology) studies how river systems respond to disturbances such as floods, landslides, climate change, and human impacts. He uses a combination of fieldwork directly in rivers and satellite analysis to answer questions about rivers worldwide. At Colby, his projects will focus on Maine rivers, and he will teach a course on surface processes, which is the study of how the earth is shaped by water, gravity, wind, and time. He will also teach a class on spatial analysis of earth systems. Before arriving at Colby, he completed a post-doc at Dartmouth College and the Neukom Institute for Computational Studies. Dethier received his master’s and doctorate in earth science from Dartmouth.

 Vivian Ferrillo (government) researches the intersections of American political behavior, race and ethnic politics, media and politics, and data science. Her research explores timely topics within the overlap of political psychology and digital politics, such as the management of misinformation and hate speech on social media platforms and the effects of artificial intelligence systems on political polarization. Previously, Ferrillo was the postdoctoral fellow of race and ethnic politics at Texas Tech University (2021-23) and a visiting assistant professor of government at William & Mary, where she served as associate director of an interdisciplinary data science lab. At Colby, she’s teaching Ethics of Data Science and Digital Extremism and will teach AI-themed courses through the Davis Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Ferrillo earned her doctorate in political science, specializing in American politics, from Indiana University.

Rio Katayama (East Asian studies) examines the multi-layered construction and deconstruction of Japan-ness—the global/local popular image of Japan that signals nationalism as well as exclusionism—and its relations to bodily responses elicited in Japanese audiovisual media. She completed a yearlong post-doc at the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University. Now on Mayflower Hill, she’ll teach courses in Japanese cinema and culture among other specialty courses. Katayama received her doctorate in East Asian languages and cultures at the University of Southern California, concentrating in Japanese cinema and media studies.

Elizabeth “Liz” Hill (philosophy) focuses her research on Plato and the history of the Platonic tradition both in and of itself and in conversation with contemporary issues pertaining mainly to aesthetics and religion. She is also interested in philosophies of sex and gender and the nature of philosophy as a fully integrated way of life. Moreover, she highlights feminist receptions of Platonism and Aristotelianism in contemporary scholarship as a lens through which she reads these thinkers. Previously, she taught in both the philosophy and women’s and gender studies departments at Canada’s Memorial University of Newfoundland, and she spent the last two years as a visiting assistant professor in Colby’s Philosophy Department. Hill earned her doctorate in philosophy from Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John’s, specializing in ancient Greek philosophy.

Kristen Nolting (biology) is a plant evolutionary ecologist fascinated by the diversity of form and function plants exhibit globally. She uses a trait-based approach in her work to “ask the organism” how they are making a living in a given environment (i.e., how trait variation contributes to the persistence of populations and communities in the face of abiotic and biotic challenges). She wants to understand better the processes that generate, structure, and maintain plant diversity in natural and human-impacted systems. Nolting most recently comes from the University of Georgia, where she completed a postdoc in plant biology investigating the loss of stress tolerance in cultivated sunflowers; she plans to extend that work with Maine blueberries. At Colby, she will teach courses on the taxonomy of flowering plants and evolutionary analysis. Nolting earned her doctorate in ecology and evolutionary biology from the University of Connecticut.

Quỳnh Pham (global studies) centers her research on the politics and entanglements of decolonization, between places and movements, and between past and present. One of her research projects investigates contemporary peasant struggles against systemic agrarian displacement. Another project examines under-studied aspects of the Vietnamese struggle for self-determination, including women’s experiences and contributions and subterranean connections among anti-colonial struggles. At Colby, she will teach courses on postcolonial Asia, global feminist and queer politics, slow violence in global politics, and subaltern struggles. Before coming to Mayflower Hill, Pham taught at the University of San Francisco. She earned her doctorate in political science, with a double focus on international relations and political theory, at the University of Minnesota.

Emmalouise St. Amand (music) examines issues of popular music, race, and voice in 20th-century American girlhoods. Currently, she is preparing a book project about Black teenage girl singers in midcentury New York City. This research combines archival work and oral history interviews to examine how Black girls used music to forge subjectivities from within several marginalized identities. The courses she’ll teach at Colby use music as a way to think about (and sometimes re-think) our shared histories. Titles include Sounding the Great Migration, Music and Childhood, and Sound and Scandal: 800-1600. St. Amand previously taught at the Eastman School of Music, the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Rochester, and the Rochester Institute of Technology. She earned her doctorate in musicology from the Eastman School of Music.

Anna Tybinko (Spanish) is trained in modern and contemporary Peninsular culture and specializes in the movement of people and ideas between Africa and the Iberian Peninsula. Her research focuses on migration and border studies in the Iberian context, exploring questions of race, racialization, and urban bordering in contemporary Spain. Many of the narratives of migration that she studies emerge from the Global Hispanophone, Spanish-speaking areas of the world beyond Spain and Latin America. Prior to Colby, Tybinko was a National Endowment Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at Vanderbilt University, where she co-directed an interdisciplinary urban humanities seminar. At Colby, she will teach courses on modern and contemporary cultures of Spain and Global Hispanophone countries. She earned her Ph.D. in romance studies from Duke University.

Yiying “Gloria” Xiong (government) specializes in economic statecraft, sanctions, and great power competition, with a regional focus on East Asia. Her current book project investigates the drivers and consequences of China’s coercive economic statecraft. She is new to teaching, and at Colby, she will teach upper-level thematic courses on economic statecraft in U.S.-China relations and East Asian politics. Xiong earned her doctorate in government, concentrating on international relations, at Cornell University.