Liberal Arts & Professional Studies welcomes eight new faculty members

Vikrant Dadawala

Dadawala is an assistant professor in the Department of English. His research focuses on 20th-century literature, with interests in South Asia, modernism, the Cold War and postcolonial studies. Dadawala’s research has appeared in South Asia, the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies and Safundi. He is currently working on two projects: a monograph on themes of disappointment and heartbreak in post-independence Indian literature in Hindi and English; and a new project on migration, modernism and ātmā vismriti (self-forgetting). Prior to coming to York, he was a lecturer at Harvard University, where he won the Alan Heimert Teaching Prize in 2023. He holds a PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania.

Xuan Luo

Luo is joining LA&PS as a lecturer in the School of Information Technology. She is a graduating PhD student at Simon Fraser University. She received her bachelor’s degree from Tongji University and master’s degree from the University of British Columbia. Her research interests lie in the broad area of data science, with a particular focus on data valuation in data markets and machine learning. She is also an expert in blockchain, with a focus on the scalability and interpretability of blockchain systems. Her research findings have been published in journals such as SIGMOD, VLDB, SIGKDD and Knowledge and Information Systems.

Jeff Nagy

Nagy is an assistant professor of artificial intelligence (AI) and critical data studies in the Department of Communication & Media Studies at York University. Previously, he was a DISCO Network Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan, where he collaborated with scholars, artists and policymakers to envision and build anti-racist and anti-ableist technological futures. He also ran Search Engines, a programming series centred around the arts, emerging technology and social justice. He is a historian of computing and AI, focused on the intersections between that history with disability and psychological and psychiatric science. He holds a PhD in communication from Stanford University. His research has appeared in Just Tech, New Media & Society, Technology & Culture and elsewhere.

Zissis Poulos

Poulos is an assistant professor at the School of Information Technology at York University. Prior to joining York U, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto (UofT). Poulos received his master’s and PhD degrees in electrical and computer engineering from UofT in 2014 and 2018, respectively. His research focuses primarily on machine learning applied to derivatives hedging, risk management and volatility modelling, the application of natural language processing in the analysis of financial soft information, and generative models for financial data. His research interests also extend to distributed ledger technologies and decentralized finance. In 2019, he co-founded Tartan AI, a Toronto-based startup designing compute and compression engines for energy-efficient deep learning.

Maxxine Rattner

Rattner is an assistant professor in the School of Social Work. She has been engaged in social work practice in the areas of hospice/palliative care, dying, death and grief for the past 15 years. Her current research takes a critical approach to disrupting and expanding dominant discourses about dying within palliative care. Rattner is also active in national advocacy and education efforts to de-pathologize grief.

Laura Soter

Soter is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy. Before coming to York, she completed a PhD in philosophy and psychology at the University of Michigan and a postdoc at Duke University. Her philosophical research explores topics at the intersection of cognitive science, epistemology and ethics, with focuses on questions about the nature of belief, our capacities and limitations for control over our mental states, and whether and how mental states can be morally evaluable. On the empirical side, she has training and interest in social and developmental psychology, and studies topics in moral psychology (especially how relationships to close others and the self-shape moral cognition) and how we think about others’ beliefs and thoughts. 

Daniel Wigfield

Wigfield is an assistant professor in the newly formed Sport Management Department at Markham Campus. He is joining York following his time as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Guelph and doctoral studies at the University of Waterloo with a focus on recreation and leisure studies. Previously, much of his research has focused on working with amateur sport practitioners in optimizing both internal organizational performance as well as their contributions to the broader sport system by better understanding the experiences of key constituents. At York, he will be utilizing an Insight Development Grant to study the managerial links to the persistent ethical lapses and managerial misconduct that are plaguing many of Canada’s national sport organizations. Wigfield looks forward to contributing to establishing York as a leading sport management program, both in terms of education and industry impact.

Liang Xue

Xue is an assistant professor in the School of Information Technology. She received her PhD in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Waterloo in September 2022. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Guelph’s School of Computer Science from December 2022 to June 2024. Her research interests focus on applied cryptography, cybersecurity, data security, and privacy in cloud computing and the Internet of Things, blockchain security and privacy, and privacy preserving artificial intelligence. Her research has appeared in leading security and privacy journals, including IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, IEEE Transactions on Computers, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications and IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications. She also presented her research at conferences such as the IEEE International Conference on Communications and the International Conference on Privacy, Security and Trust.