Scholarship, teaching and research in LA&PS enhanced with addition of 37 faculty members

This story is published in YFile’s New Faces Feature Issue 2019, part two (see part one here). Every September, YFile introduces and welcomes those joining the York University community, and those with new appointments.

The Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies (LA&PS) welcomes 37 new faculty members this fall.

“LA&PS is honoured to welcome these new faculty members. Each brings a passion for critical scholarship, a dedication to teaching and commitment to innovative research. We are fortunate to have them on our team,” said Interim Dean J.J. McMurtry. 

Kenzie Allen

Kenzie Allen, a descendant of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, joins LA&PS as a lecturer in the Department of English. Allen is currently an R1-Advanced Opportunity Program Fellow and PhD candidate in English creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and her research centres on enacting Indigenous sovereignties through literary cartography, documentary and creative ethnography, and visual poetics. Her current project is a multimodal book of poetry incorporating intergenerational histories and diasporic movement, Haudenosaunee traditions and archives of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School.

Allen received her MFA in poetry from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan and her BA in anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis. Her poems can be found in the Boston Review, Narrative Magazine, Best New Poets 2016 and other publications, and she is the founder and managing editor of the Anthropoid collective. 

Angele Alook 

Angele Alook joins the School of Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies as an assistant professor. She is a proud member of Bigstone Cree Nation in Alberta, where she grew up on Reserve 166D. Alook has been doing research with her home community since 2011, examining issues around race, class, gender, the environment and resource extraction industries. She is a sociologist with a PhD from York University.

Alook uses anti-racist Indigenous feminist and Indigenous research methodologies to guide her research. She has worked as a labour researcher for the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees, where she researched socioeconomic, legal, social justice, gender and human rights issues in the workplace. 

She brings Indigenous feminist perspectives and research methods to several Tri-Council initiatives funded by the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) concerned with climate and energy justice, including the Corporate Mapping Project (CMP) and the Feminist Energy Futures Project with the Just Powers team at the University of Alberta. This past year, she published a report with the Parkland Institute and CMP called “Indigenous Gendered Experiences of Work in an Oil Dependent Rural Alberta Community.” Currently, she is completing a documentary with the Just Powers team, titled It is broken, which features stories on the land with Indigenous traditional land users, environmental officers and elders. 

Sardar Anwaruddin

Sardar Anwaruddin joins the Department of Languages, Literatures & Linguistics as an assistant professor. He was born and raised in Bangladesh and has been teaching English for academic purposes (EAP) since 2007. In 2016, he received PhD from the University of Toronto. He was given the Canadian Association for Teacher Education Award for his contribution to the promotion of teacher education research.

Anwaruddin was an editor of the journal Curriculum Inquiry from 2011 to 2016. In 2018, he completed his two-year SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship at St. Francis Xavier University. His articles have appeared in such journals as Educational Philosophy and Theory, Professional Development in Education, Discourse, Reflective Practice, Teaching in Higher Education, Educational Studies, Curriculum Inquiry, International Journal of Leadership in Education, Brazilian Journal of Applied Linguistics, CALICO Journal and Oxford Review of Education. Sardar’s recent edited book is Knowledge Mobilization in TESOL: Connecting Research and Practice (Brill, 2019). His current research interests are writing pedagogy, language teacher education and knowledge mobilization.

Karen Bernhardt-Walther 

Karen Bernhardt-Walther is an assistant professor of economics at York University. She originally studied math, physics and astronomy at the Universität Leipzig with a fellowship from the German National Merit Foundation (Studienstiftung), and gravitational physics at the University of New Mexico as a Fulbright Fellow in 1999-2000. Bernhardt-Walther earned an MSc in physics from the University of New Mexico and later an MSc in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She then switched to economics and earned her doctorate in business economics and an MBA from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business in 2011.

Bernhardt-Walther has experience inside and outside of academia. She interned and worked at the Germaon Electron-Synchrotron in Hamburg, Germany, the Thüringer Landessternwarte Tautenburk and for McKinsey (Germany). Most recently, she taught economics at Ohio State University and the University of Toronto. Since 2010, she has been a Fellow of the Beyster Foundation.

Bernhardt-Walther’s research interests include applied microeconomic theory, organizational economics, and specifically how firms address complex and uncertain problems and how firms sustainably innovate. She is deeply engaged in improving undergraduate education, has an established track record of teaching innovations and technology adaption, and frequently mentors undergraduate student researchers. 

Chaoran Chen

Chaoran Chen joins the Department of Economics as an assistant professor. Before joining York, he received a PhD in economics from the University of Toronto (2017) and taught for two years at the National University of Singapore.

Chen’s research interests lie in macroeconomics and economic development. His work focuses on understanding the observed cross-country productivity differences through the lens of resource misallocation, structural transformation and technology adoption, using both general equilibrium models and micro data. He is also interested in incomplete market models and inequality.  

James Corcoran

James Corcoran is an assistant professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures & Linguistics. Originally from Vancouver, he has called Toronto home for more than a decade and is a graduate of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto (OISE/UT).

Drawing on teaching experiences in Brazil, Mexico and Canada, his research interests include language teacher education, English for specific/academic purposes and the politics of global academic knowledge production. Corcoran’s current research projects include investigations into the following: the impact of research writing interventions on Latin American scientists’ beliefs, practices and publication outcomes; the political economy of English for academic purposes professionals across Canada; the impact of plurilingual, identity-affirming pedagogies on language teacher candidates’ beliefs and practices; and faculty “editing” processes, practices and ideologies.

He looks forward to contributing to the vibrant research, teaching and learning at York University. When not at York, Corcoran can be found enjoying spicy food, politics, baseball and spending time with his cat, Genius.

Osín Deery

Oisín Deery is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at York University. Deery’s research in the philosophy of mind and action has been published widely; he has collaborated with industry partners on ethical issues related to artificial intelligence, and he is engaged in developing new pedagogical methods.

Born in Canada and raised in Ireland, Deery’s training in philosophy was at the National University of Ireland, Galway (BA), University College Cork (MA) and the University of British Columbia (PhD). Before coming to York, he taught at Monash University in Australia, Florida State University and the University of Arizona, and he held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Montreal.

Deery recently wrote a monograph for Oxford University Press on the topic of free will. When he is not writing or teaching, Deery spends as much time as he can beneath the water, as an advanced open-water scuba diver. 

Liisa Duncan

Liisa Duncan joins LA&PS as an assistant professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures & Linguistics.

Brandee Easter

Brandee Easter joins the Writing Department as a lecturer after earning her PhD from the Composition & Rhetoric program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research brings together digital rhetoric, feminist rhetoric and software studies to ask how gendered rhetorical forces are exerted in computational infrastructures. One case study from her current project on “weird” or esoteric programming languages, published in Feminist Media Studies, considers how gendered claims to space happen not only on digital platforms but also in code.

In her teaching, Easter focuses on preparing students for the demands of 21st-century literacies. Her classes combine digital rhetorical theory with multimodal practice to help students develop critical awareness of multimodal forms, including the procedures underlying all digital media. She aims to empower students as critical producers and consumers who are prepared for writing and persuading in an increasingly digital world.  

Carlo Fanelli 

Carlo Fanelli joins York University as an assistant professor and co-ordinator of work and labour studies in the Department of Social Science, and is appointed to the graduate program in sociology. Following the completion of his PhD in sociology and political economy at Carleton University, he held postdoctoral fellowships at Ryerson University and the University of Western Ontario.

Fanelli’s work is interdisciplinary and broadly comparative, focusing on work and labour market restructuring, public policy, political economy and social inequality. He is the author of Megacity Malaise: Neoliberalism, Public Services and Labour in Toronto and co-editor (with Bryan Evans) of The Public Sector in an Age of Austerity: Perspectives from Canada’s Provinces and Territories and (with Mark Thomas, Leah Vosko and Olena Lyubchencko) Change and Continuity: Canadian Political Economy in the New Millennium. Since 2009, he has been editor-in-chief of Alternate Routes: A Journal of Critical Social Research. A collection of Fanelli’s writing can be found at carlofanelli.org. 

Farimah Hakem Zadeh

Farimah Hakem Zadeh joins the School of Human Resource Management as an assistant professor. She is an engineer by training, has an MBA, and received her PhD in management of organizational behaviour and human resources from the DeGroote School of Business at McMaster University. Before joining York University, Hakem Zadeh was an assistant professor at the Lazaridis School of Business & Economics at Wilfrid Laurier University and the School of Business & Economics at Thompson Rivers University.

She is passionate about joining forces to tackle wicked problems and therefore loves getting involved in multidisciplinary research. Hakem Zadeh is currently a co-investigator in a pan-Canadian study, funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, aimed at improving the retention rate of midwives. She is also working closely with the Institute for Global Health, Equity & Innovation at the University of Toronto on issues of health, happiness and well-being of workers.

Her areas of interest are evidence-based human resource management, health-human resources, work-life interface and health of workers. She loves learning new things together with her colleagues and students and asking interesting critical questions. 

Manar Jammal

Manar Jammal is an assistant professor in the School of Information Technology. She received a BESc in electrical and computer engineering from Lebanese University, an MESc in electrical and computer engineering from the Ecole Doctorale des Sciences et de Technologie in Lebanon and from the University of Technology of Compiegne, France, and a PhD from Western University. During this period, she was a researcher with a leading telecommunication industrial partner, Ericsson Research Montreal, primarily resolving strategic cloud issues related to technology process improvement. She had two inventions disclosure with Ericsson to manage carrier-grade cloud applications and achieve high availability.

After her PhD studies, Jammal worked as a postdoctoral associate in the ECE Department at Western University. She worked on developing cutting-edge data analytics techniques  and innovative machine learning models in the areas of network function virtualization  and cloud computing. She is the regional co-ordinator of IEEE Canada Women in Engineering (WIE) and Chair of the IEEE Canada WIE Committee.

Her research interests include machine learning, software engineering, distributed systems, cloud computing, network function virtualization, high availability and software defined network.

Tsvetanka Karagyozova 

Tsvetanka Karagyozova transitions from a non-tenure to a tenure-track position as an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at York University. Her teaching portfolio includes more than 20 courses, from introductory-level required courses to upper-level electives, taught in both small- and large-sized classes.

Her recent research explores the potential niche for microinsurance in Canada, the aggregate impact of microinsurance in African economies and the behavioural underpinnings of charitable giving. An aspect of her research is dedicated to pedagogical methods that enhance undergraduate student learning and experience.

Karagyozova holds a PhD in economics from the University of Connecticut as well as a master’s degree in both economics and finance. Her diverse work experience includes positions with the MicroInsurance Centre, the Bulgarian Red Cross, CARE International, and IMCC/Dimension Capital Management, as well as various teaching-focused academic positions with Lawrence University, the University of British Columbia, the University of Toronto, McMaster and Wesleyan University.

Sirvan Karimi  

Sirvan Karimi is an assistant professor in the School of Public Policy & Administration. He has written his doctoral dissertation on comparative social policy in Canada and Australia. In addition to publishing several scholarly articles, he is the sole author of two scholarly books: Beyond the Welfare State: Postwar Social Settlement and Public Pension Policy in Canada and Australia (University of Toronto Press, 2017) and The Tragedy of Social Democracy (Frenwood Publishing, 2015). 

Karimi is currently working on research papers related to democratic administration and  the interplay of charter, federalism, liberalism and social rights.   

He has been teaching courses at both the graduate and undergraduate levels since 2007, including courses in fields of Canadian government, public policy, public administration and public law. He has also supervised MRPs for several MA students in the Master of Public Policy, Administration & Law program. 

Karimi has been recognized for his teaching efforts with a variety of teaching nominations and awards, including being nominated for the President’s University-Wide Teaching Award for 2013-14 and receiving the Dean’s Teaching Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies for 2015-16. 

Daniel Kikulwe

Daniel Kikulwe completed his PhD in social work at York University in 2014. For the past five years (2014-19), he has been an assistant professor in the University of Regina’s Faculty of Social Work. He now joins York University as an assistant professor in the School of Social Work.

His area of academic interest is in child welfare practices and policies. The focus of his doctoral research was on the work and practices of racialized child welfare workers in providing services to families and children. Other areas of research interests relate to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Children and its applicability to the global south, as well as kinship care trends in Canada. 

In the past, Kikulwe worked in child welfare, as a frontline staff and supervisor for 14 years. His child welfare experiences have been both in Ontario and the Yukon.

Ibtissem Knouzi 

Ibtissem Knouzi is an assistant professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures & Linguistics. She has a PhD in language and literacies education from OISE/UT and an MA in applied linguistics from the University of Tunis-Tunisia.

Her research interests include second-language reading and writing, discourse analysis, second-language pragmatics, sociocultural theory and second-language writing development.

Her most recent work looked at the co-construction of learning opportunities in the EAP classroom using a sociocultural theory lens. 

Amy Kwan 

Amy Kwan began her teaching career in 2012 as a lecturer of accounting at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. Her primary areas of teaching interest are management accounting and information systems and technology. She joins the School of Administrative Studies at York University as an assistant professor.

Kwan is a professional accountant and passionate educator with a diverse breadth of experience. Her business career began in the field of sport marketing, event management and sponsorship consulting. She started her accounting career at KPMG LLP before making the change from public accounting to industry, taking a role with Certified Management Accountants of Ontario (now unified under CPA Ontario). One of the highlights of her industry career was when she had the privilege to start, grow, transform and lead a team of financial operational professionals in a large IT-intensive organization in Metrolinx’s PRESTO division.

Kwan has also taken a leadership role in Metrolinx’s enterprise solution implementation as a business sponsor and transformation lead. She earned a specialized honours bachelor of science degree from York University and a master of management and professional accounting degree from Rotman. She is a member of the Chartered Professional Accountants of Ontario. 

Kevin Lande

Kevin Lande joins the Department of Philosophy as an assistant professor. His research is in the philosophy of psychology, with a focus on perception. He studies how we perceive scenes as organized, how perception is itself organized and how these relate to each other – how the structure of perception relates to the perception of structure. By looking at the findings and underlying commitments of research in empirical psychology, while drawing on work from across philosophy and other cognitive sciences, he tries to better understand the nature of our capacities to grasp the world through perception and cognition.

Before coming to York, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Philosophical Psychology at the University of Antwerp. He received a PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles, and an MA from Brandeis University. 

Audrey Laurin-Lamothe

Audrey Laurin-Lamothe holds a PhD in sociology (Université du Québec à Montréal, 2017) and joins the Department of Social Science as an assistant professor.

Her thesis created a portrait of the economic elite in Quebec in the context of increased firm financialization, through an analysis of individual profiles, compensation and social networks.

Laurin-Lamothe’s research program is informed by the understanding that financialization is a driving force of economic transformation and, more broadly, that it profoundly influences relationships among households, organizations and the state. Her previous academic contributions analyzed gender-based fiscal policies, public indebtedness and wage stagnation in Canada. 

Tuulia Law

Tuulia Law, who has been at York University with a contractually limited appointment since 2017, begins a tenure-track posting this year as an assistant professor in the Department of Social Science’s criminology program.

She received her PhD from the University of Ottawa in 2016, where she was part of a research team examining management in the indoor sex industry in Eastern Canada. She continues to be engaged with sex work research and community activism; however, her current interview-based research project examines how (and if) university students apply the sexual violence prevention training they receive in post-secondary institutions in their intimate lives.

This project further develops her interest in gendered violence and feminist legal and social responses to sexual assault, about which she recently co-authored a textbook (with Chris Bruckert) titled Women and Gendered Violence in Canada: An Intersectional Perspective (UTP, 2018). 

Ahrong Lee

Ahrong Lee is an assistant professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures & Linguistics. She received a PhD in English (2009) from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, concentrating in linguistics.

Her research areas of interest include Korean linguistics, second-language acquisition, foreign language pedagogy, curriculum development and integration of technology in foreign language education. She has taught a wide range of courses at York University since 2011, including Korean linguistics, Korean sociolinguistics, Korean contemporary culture and Korean language courses from elementary through advanced levels.

Lee has received grants from York University (Teaching-Learning Development Grant) and the Ontario government (Ontario Online Initiative Fund) for developing online and blended courses in the Korean program. Currently, she is developing innovative e-textbooks and other teaching materials to meet the needs of Canadian learners who are interested in Korean culture and language by incorporating Canadian context and culture, as part of the $1.1-million project “Korea in the World, the World in Korean Studies (2018-2023).” 

Na Li

Prior to joining York University, Na Li taught at the Singapore Management University in Singapore. She comes to York as an assistant professor in the School of Administrative Studies.

Li received her PhD in accounting from the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management in 2014, her MA in economics and MS in accounting from Kent State University in the U.S., and her BA in accounting from DUFE in China. Her research interests include the economic consequences of accounting standards, disclosure, debt contracting, corporate governance, executive compensation and auditing. She has published her research in leading scholarly accounting journals such as Contemporary Accounting Research. While she was teaching at the Singapore Management University, she was on the Dean’s List for Teaching Excellence in 2018 and 2019. 

Li is a member of the American Accounting Association and the Canadian Academic Accounting Association. She holds a CPA licence from the state of Ohio in the U.S. 

Hyunwoo Lim 

Hyunwoo Lim, an assistant professor of marketing in the School of Administrative Studies, holds a PhD in marketing from the University of Toronto.

He taught courses on the principles of marketing, marketing research, marketing analytics and global marketing at Pennsylvania State University in the U.S. and at Ajou University in South Korea. Lim received an honourable mention in the Alden G. Clayton Doctoral Dissertation Proposal Competition in 2010.

His research areas include content analysis, the impact of publicity, machine learning, structural modelling, information spillover and pharmaceutical marketing. His recent scholarly works were published in Marketing Science, Management Science and the European Journal of Marketing. 

Olga Makinina 

Olga Makinina is delighted to join the English as a Second Language (ESL) program faculty in the Department of Languages, Literatures & Linguistics as an assistant professor. She holds a PhD in applied linguistics and discourse studies from Carleton University and an MA from California State University, Chico. She has been teaching English as a second language for academic purposes and conducting research at different post-secondary academic institutions in Canada and the U.S.

The highlights of her academic career include developing the classification of factors that influence collocation acquisition by ESL speakers (read about her research findings in the TESL Canada Journal) and designing workshops on how to teach academic English collocations (presented at multiple conferences, including the TESOL International Convention, AAAL and TESL Ontario Conferences, and the TESL Ottawa professional development event). 

Her research interests include formulaic language acquisition in academic English; L2 writing: code-switching and multimodality; and technology-enhanced teaching and learning.

Robert McKeown

Robert McKeown is an assistant professor in the Department of Economics. He earned a doctorate degree from Queen’s University in 2017, where his research focused on financial stability and banking, both in Canada and the U.S.

In the past year, he has taken part in a number of experiments to better understand how students in economics learn. Of particular interest are how students learn to learn and whether bonus marks can incentivize performance. He believes empirical research should be applied to the classroom.

McKeown uses technology to enhance the classroom experience for his students; for example, classroom response systems facilitate communication between him and his students. It also encourages communication between students, which is a fundamental element of the university experience.   

Natalie Neill 

Natalie Neill is an assistant professor in the Department of English who specializes in undergraduate teaching and learning (especially the first-year experience) and 19th-century literature.

She received an MA in film studies from Carleton University and a PhD in English from York University.

Her period-specific interests include the gothic, satire, women and literature, and film adaptation. She has published articles, book chapters and book editions related to these topics.

Neill is currently preparing an edited collection on gothic mash-ups and researching the use of video games in the classroom.   

Phuong-Anh Nguyen

Phuong-Anh Nguyen joins LA&PS as an assistant professor in the School of Administrative Studies.

Nathanael Ojong

Nathanael Ojong is an assistant professor of international development in the Department of Social Science. He holds an MA in development management (London) and a PhD in developmental studies (Geneva).

As an interdisciplinary scholar, he draws on economic sociology and economic anthropology to understand the everyday practices of low-income people in sub-Saharan Africa. His work has appeared in journals such as Third World Quarterly, the Journal of Economic Issues and Forum for Social Economics.

Ojong is currently working on a book project that examines how low-income people in Cameroon use social relationships to to meet their everyday needs. Additionally, he is interested more broadly in questions related to the livelihood dynamics of marginalized groups of people in sub-Saharan Africa. He has also worked with institutions such as the World Bank and the International Labor Organization on issues such as social finance and women entrepreneurship. 

Selçuk Ozyurt

Selçuk Ozyurt is a microeconomic theorist whose expertise is mechanism design and dynamic games with incomplete information. He joins York University in the Department of Economics as an assistant professor. His research interests overlap with industrial organization, political economy, international relations, and behavioural, experimental and development economics.

Ozyurt received his undergraduate degree in mathematics (BS) and master’s degree (MA) in economics, both at Bogazici University in Istanbul. He received his PhD in economics at New York University in 2009. Ozyurt worked at Sabanci University in Istanbul between 2009 and 2019 as an assistant professor of economics. He visited Harvard University’s Economics Department between August 2015 and 2017 under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship program (by the European Commission). He was a visiting assistant professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business during the 2017-18 academic year. 

Sarah Rotz

Sarah Rotz received her PhD in geography from the University of Guelph, a master’s degree in environmental studies from York University and a BA in environmental management from the University of Toronto. Prior to joining the Department of Social Science at York as assistant professor, Rotz was an SSHRC postdoctoral Fellow with A SHARED Future, an interdisciplinary, community-based research team investigating Indigenous strength, health and autonomy in renewable energy at Queen’s University. 

Her work focuses on political ecologies of land and food systems and how they intersect with climate change within structures of settler colonial patriarchy and neoliberal capitalism. She also explores the consequences of these processes for sovereignty, justice and resistance movements more broadly. Rotz is embarking on an SSHRC-funded collaborative research project that explores accountable relationships and alliances between settler and Indigenous Peoples aimed at building sustainable, equitable food systems in Canada through Indigenous-led land rematriation and food sovereignty processes. 

Mohamed Sesay 

Mohamed Sesay graduated from McGill University with a PhD in political science, specializing in international relations and comparative politics. He is an assistant professor in criminology and international development studies, both programs in  York University’s Department of Social Science.

Sesay is also a UKRI Visiting Fellow at the LSE Centre for Women, Peace & Security, where he serves a co-investigator in the Global Challenges Research Fund, Gender, Justice & Security Hub. His research and teaching interests are in development, transitional justice, international criminal justice, rule of law, customary justice, peace-building and post-conflict reconstruction. His works have appeared in African Affairs, International Studies Perspectives, Cooperation & Conflict, and the European Journal of International Security, which recently published “Hijacking the Rule of Law in Postconflict Environments” (2019).  

Rich Shivener

Rich Shivener is an assistant professor in the Writing Department. His latest research investigates the relationship between digital media practices and emotions, most recently turning to authors of webtexts and digital comics.

Shivener completed his PhD in rhetoric and composition at the University of Cincinnati in 2019. His writing has appeared in Writer’s Digest, Publishers Weekly, Kill Screen, and the edited collections Perspectives on Digital Comics and Critical Insights: The Graphic Novel. He edits for the online journal Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy.

Before starting his doctoral work, he directed a freshmen reading program and taught composition and journalism courses at Northern Kentucky University. Years prior, he wrote technical support documents with software developers and reported for local newspapers and national magazines. He takes pride in being a flexible colleague who can research and teach a range of writing inquiries. 

Heejin Song 

Heejin Song is an assistant professor in the English as a Second Language (ESL) program in the Department of Languages, Literatures & Linguistics at York University. She holds a PhD in language and literacies education from OISE/UT and an MA in applied linguistics from York University.

Her teaching and research interests include EAP, ESL/EFL, action research, multiliteracies pedagogy, critical pedagogy, critical discourse analysis, intercultural education and multicultural education for social justice. 

Her recent research focuses on the themes of culture and identity, equity and diversity, and culturally relevant and multiliteracies-enhanced teaching in content and language integrated learning EAP classrooms.    

Jesse Thistle

Jesse Thistle is Métis-Cree from Saskatchewan and raised in Brampton, Ont. He is a PhD candidate in history at York University and recent hire in York’s Department of Equity Studies as a lecturer.

Thistle’s doctoral work on Métis road allowance communities has won the Pierre Elliott Trudeau and Vanier doctoral scholarships, and he is a Governor General’s Academic Medal winner. He is the author of a paper titled “Definition of Indigenous Homelessness in Canada,” published through the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness, and his historical research has been published in numerous academic journals, book chapters and featured on CBC Radio’s “Ideas” and “Unreserved,” and CBC’s “Campus” podcast.

His debut memoir, From the Ashes, was published by Simon & Schuster and released on Aug. 6.

Tyler Totten

Tyler Totten is an assistant professor in the Department of Social Science’s Law & Society program. He completed his doctoral studies in the Department of Law & Legal Studies at Carleton University, where his dissertation was an expansive cultural studies analysis of animals in Canadian law.  

Prior to his doctoral work, he obtained degrees in philosophy and literary studies and, as such, he brings the rigorously theorized interpretative frameworks of the humanities to bear on current issues of social justice in his scholarship.  

Before coming to York, he was a sessional lecturer in the Department of Women’s Studies & Feminist Research at Western University from 2017 to 2019. At York, his teaching will draw on his research background in cultural studies of law, animal studies, and gender and sexuality studies, as well as his training in the scholarship of teaching and learning. 

Jeffrey R. Webber 

Jeffery R. Webber is a Marxist political economist and regional specialist in Latin America.

He is the author of several books, including most recently The Last Day of Oppression, and the First Day of the Same: The Politics and Economics of the New Latin American Left.

Prior to joining the Department of Politics at York as an associate professor, Webber taught at Goldsmiths, University of London; Queen Mary University of London; and the University of Regina. 

Cary Wu  

Cary Wu (PhD, UBC) is a lecturer of sociology at York University. He is a research Fellow affiliated with the UBC Big Data & Computational Social Science Research Cluster, the Urban Scenes Group at the University of Chicago and the Laboratory for Comparative Social Research at the Higher School of Economics in Russia. He was a Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation Fellow in 2017-18 and a visiting researcher at GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Germany in 2015.  

His research on political sociology, migration and urban studies has appeared in peer-reviewed journals including: PNAS, Social Forces, Urban Studies, Geoforum, International Political Science Review, International Journal of Comparative Sociology and Chinese Sociological Review. He has also published opinion articles in Maclean’s, Global Dialogue, and The Ubyssey, and shared his research with the public via national and international radio and newspaper forums, including CBC Radio, Roundhouse Radio, Fairchild Radio, the Financial Times and the University Herald.