New Faculty Members Join the Colby Community
Eight teacher-scholars bring expertise across the sciences, humanities, and social sciences
As part of its commitment to growing the faculty and offering distinctive learning opportunities to students, Colby welcomes eight new faculty members to campus this fall.
These teacher-scholars will contribute their expertise and innovative teaching strategies to Colby’s robust educational offerings. The addition of these outstanding scholars exemplifies Colby’s efforts to diversify the faculty while moving the curriculum in important new directions.
Rachel Anderson-Rabern (performance, theater, and dance) is a theater director and scholar focused on contemporary and devised performance, which involves creating original work in-process rather than staging preexisting dramatic texts. Through written and creative scholarship, she examines collaboration, ensemble-based processes, and group creativity. As department chair and professor, she looks forward to contributing to Colby’s curriculum in acting, directing, and performance history/theory. This fall, she is teaching a new course that analyzes 20th-century performance through the lens of “the real.” Anderson-Rabern was previously a tenured professor and chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance at Franklin and Marshall College, and taught at the University of New Haven, Santa Clara University, and Stanford University. She also founded the performance group Three Sheets, a devising company she continues to lead as artistic director. Anderson-Rabern received her doctorate in theatre and performance studies from Stanford University.
Mehrdad Babadi (anthropology) is a cultural anthropologist whose research explores love, intimacy, marriage, gender, and generational change in Iran and the broader Middle East. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative interviews, he examines how changing expectations of love, dating, premarital relationships, and marriage are reshaping intimate life, gender and family relations, and the transition to adulthood. A related strand of his scholarship explores Iranian society and politics through cinema, with particular attention to how Iran’s realist cinematic tradition can be understood as a form of visual anthropology. At Colby, he teaches courses on cultural anthropology, love and intimacy in the Middle East, gender and sexuality, and Iranian cinema. Before joining Colby, Babadi was the Omar Khayyam Postdoctoral Fellow in Iranian Studies at Brown University (2023-2026). He earned his doctorate in anthropology from Boston University.
Rebecca Frank (classics) studies ancient Greek and Roman religious beliefs and practices as well as the social and cultural history of the Roman Imperial era. She is especially interested in colonial landscapes and narratives, and she is currently investigating the relationship between center and periphery in the Roman colony of Cosa, as well as the Delphic oracle and oracular divination more broadly in the Roman Imperial era. Frank has been a visiting assistant professor at Colby since 2022 and, as a continuing faculty member, will teach courses on ancient Mediterranean literature, history, and archaeology, as well as on ancient Greek religion and philosophy. Before coming to Colby, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Oberlin College. Frank earned her doctorate in classics from the University of Virginia.
Eftychia “Effie” Karfaki (economics) has research interests in international finance, applied macroeconomics, and monetary economics. By combining rich microdata, empirical analysis, and structural modeling, she studies how macroeconomic shocks and policies, such as exchange rate movements and monetary policy interventions, affect economic activity and are transmitted across firms and households. Her most recent work examines the effects and welfare implications of large exchange rate appreciations, using the 2015 Swiss franc appreciation as a key case to study their impact on firms and households and the role of alternative policy responses. At Colby, she will teach International Finance, an upper-level course that examines exchange rates, international financial markets, and macroeconomic policy in open economies. Karfaki has joined Colby immediately after earning her doctorate in economics from the University of Minnesota, where she received a Distinguished Instructor Award for her teaching.
Rachel King (psychology) is a developmental psychologist whose research focuses on the development of social cognition from childhood through adulthood, with a particular emphasis on how people learn and reason about socioeconomic inequality and mobility. This fall, she’s teaching a course titled Social Identities, and in the spring, she will teach the Psychology of Wealth. King has just earned her doctorate in psychology from the University of Chicago, where she taught her own courses as a Ph.D. candidate. She also taught as an adjunct faculty member at Elmhurst University. Throughout graduate school, she worked as a teaching assistant at Cornell University and the University of Chicago.
Tristian Phillips (mathematics) is a pure mathematician who uses tools from geometry, algebra, and analysis to study properties of the whole numbers 1, 2, 3, …. He is especially interested in a special family of curves called elliptic curves, which arise when studying various properties of whole numbers and also arise in cryptography. This fall, he is teaching calculus, and in the future, he looks forward to teaching a variety of classes, especially in number theory and perhaps a class on the mathematics of magic, which explores magic tricks, especially card tricks, that use interesting mathematical principles. Phillips earned his doctorate in mathematics at the University of Arizona and completed a postdoc at Dartmouth College.
Anna Reine (physics and astronomy) works on experiments to study the properties of ultra-light and highly abundant fundamental particles known as neutrinos. By probing physics at the smallest scales, she hopes to help answer big questions about the universe, including how it evolved to become dominated by matter. Among the specialty courses she’ll teach at Colby is a nuclear and particle physics course this spring. In the future, she wants to design electives that examine the intersections of physics with the arts or with social justice. Reine earned her doctorate in physics and astronomy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Recently, she completed a post-doc at Indiana University Bloomington, where she researched neutrino properties and co-taught courses in analog and digital electronics and modern physics.
Andrea Killian Wegrzynowicz (biology) is a biochemist whose research concerns the role of the immune system in female infertility and pregnancy complications. The immune system has an important job in both successful ovulation and placental development, and she works with both patient and cell culture samples to better understand how the immune system fails to function correctly in conditions such as polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome, preeclampsia, and gestational hypertension. This fall, she is teaching Immunology, exposing students to sample gene-expression data from immune cells and teaching them to access high-performance computing clusters. Wegrzynowicz earned her doctorate in biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was later a postdoc fellow in the Integrated Program in Endocrinology in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and taught a senior seminar titled Biochemistry of Human Reproduction.
