This story is published in YFile’s New Faces feature issue 2022. Every September, YFile introduces and welcomes those joining the York University community, and those with new appointments.
The Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies welcomes 28 new faculty members this fall.
“We are thrilled to welcome these very accomplished scholars to the Faculty,” says J.J. McMurtry, dean of LA&PS. “These new faculty bring a wealth of knowledge, experience and passion to LA&PS. I know our new colleagues will help us build on our reputation for research and teaching excellence.”
Eva (Evalyna) Bogdan
Eva (Evalyna) Bogdan is an assistant professor in the School of Administrative Studies at York University. Bogdan is an environmental and disaster sociologist. She has studied and practiced at the intersection of society and the environment, focusing on topics such as floods, fuels, food, and farming, around the world in the Netherlands, Namibia, New Zealand, and various parts of Canada. Her focus has been on policies, practices and power dynamics. To examine complex socio-environmental problems, she applies an interdisciplinary lens with expertise in economic development, local government administration, community-based research and education.
Bogdan is particularly interested in creating strategies to strengthen societal disaster resilience. Examples include the We’re Ready! Community Disaster Preparedness as community workshops and student practicum training, which she developed as a postdoctoral associate at the University of Calgary, and the Flood Resilience Challenge Serious Role-Playing Game which she developed as a postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Waterloo. Bogdan has a PhD focusing on flood risk governance from the University of Alberta.
Anirban Kar
Anirban Kar is an assistant professor, teaching stream in the School of Administrative Studies at York University. Prior to making a career change in academia, Kar worked as an auditor, an accountant, a finance manager, a strategist and an entrepreneur, over a period of 14 years, in agriculture, steel and telecom businesses.
Kar, along with a co-investigator, is studying the pedagogy of student’s teamwork skill development. He is currently working on two projects: a three-phase action research project to improve retention in a public sector organization and another large-scale research with a network of 431 collaborators, examining culture, trust and leadership across 143 countries (GLOBE 2020).
He has presented his work at leading conferences and won the best paper and best symposium awards. He has a PhD in international management and organization from the University of Victoria.
Cedric Dawkins
Cedric Dawkins is an associate professor in the School of Administrative Studies at York University. His research interests are in the broad area of corporate social responsibility and include connections between labour rights and human rights, labour union revitalization, and the impact of disclosure on corporate behaviour.
Victoria Daniel
Victoria Daniel is a lecturer in the professorial stream in the School of Administrative Studies at York University. She is also completing her PhD in management (OB/HRM) from the Lazaridis School of Business and Economics at Wilfrid Laurier University.
Her research examines how contemporary employees navigate the work-life interface as well as understanding barriers to workplace equity and inclusion. The research emphasizes on the intersection of gender and non-work obstacles people may face in their career advancement.
Daniel has published a book chapter, has many papers currently under peer review, and has presented her research several times at national and international conferences including the Academy of Management, Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Work-Family Researchers Network, and the Canadian Psychological Association.
Her doctoral studies were funded by SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship.
Andrew Sarta
Andrew Sarta is an assistant professor of strategy in the School of Administrative Studies at York University. He holds a PhD in strategy from Ivey Business School Western University. His research focuses on organizational adaptation and behavioural strategy within environments undergoing social or technological change and his research is published in leading journals including the Journal of Management.
He seeks to understand the early stages of adaptation in traditional sectors such as financial services, where he studies the emergence of FinTech, and healthcare, where he studies innovation in organizational forms.
Sarta’s research has been featured in several management conferences, including the Academy of Management, Strategic Management Society and the European Group for Organizational Studies. He holds an honorary research fellowship at the University College London (UCL) School of Management in the U.K. and previously held research fellowships in the Innovating Across Sectors Program at UCL and in the Digital Banking Lab at Western University’s Ivey Business School. He has also held visiting fellowships at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health.
Romi-Lee Sevel
Romi-Lee Sevel is an assistant professor and teaches financial and non-financial reporting, finance, auditing and emerging technologies in the School of Administrative Studies at York University.
She previously worked in public accounting in the audit and assurance sector, providing services to private companies, non-profits, and condominium corporations. Sevel also has experience providing clients in various industries with consulting services.
She takes a hands-on approach to teaching. Her teaching philosophy is founded on three pillars: gradual and continuous learning, building rapport with students and post-secondary interaction as a means for instilling life skills.
Nicholas Taylor
Nicholas (Nick) Taylor is an associate professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at York University. He received tenure in 2018, during his 10-year stint in the Department of Communication at North Carolina State University, where he also served for two years as the director of the interdisciplinary PhD program in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media.
Taylor combines critical and ethnographic approaches to analyze the subjectivities, communities, and industries associated with professionalized leisure practices. His work has appeared in journals such as Convergence, Critical Studies in Media Communication, and New Media & Society. He is also the lead editor of Masculinities in Play (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), the first volume on the intersections of masculinities and games, and LEGOfied: Building Blocks as Media (Bloomsbury, 2020).
During the 2022-23 academic year, he will serve as the Högskolestiftelsen Research Fellow in the Faculty of Education and Welfare Studies at Åbo Akademi University in Vaasa, Finland.
Robert W. Gehl
Robert W. Gehl is an associate professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at York University and Ontario Research Chair in Digital Governance for Social Justice. He is a Fulbright scholar and award-winning author whose research focuses on contemporary communication technologies. He received his PhD in cultural studies from George Mason University in 2010.
Before joining York University as an Ontario Research Chair of Digital Governance for Social Justice, he held an endowed research Chair at Louisiana Tech. He has published more than two dozen articles in journals such as New Media & Society, Communication Theory, Social Media + Society, and Media, Culture and Society. His books include Reverse Engineering Social Media, which won the Nancy Baym Book Award from the Association of Internet Researchers, Weaving the Dark Web, and Social Engineering, published in 2022 by MIT Press. He also has published a co-edited collection of essays, Socialbots and Their Friends.
Sadia M. Malik
Sadia M. Malik is an assistant professor, teaching stream in the Department of Economics at York University. She holds a PhD degree in economics and has more than 15 years of professional experience in pedagogy and applied research.
Prior to her current appointment as a teaching stream tenure-track faculty member, Malik served York University as sessional assistant professor where she taught a variety of core and specialized courses in economics with a high degree of teaching effectiveness. Malik has also supervised and mentored students by engaging them in her research projects. During her tenure as sessional assistant professor, she won two research grants: one from Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and the other from Dahdaleh Institute of Global Health Research, Canada. She trained and mentored three PhD candidates who built their research and analytical skills by working on these projects under her guidance.
Malik is looking forward to designing innovative pedagogical techniques to promote experiential education and enhance the student experience and learning outcomes at York University.
Yishu Zeng
Yishu Zeng is an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at York University. She has a PhD in economics from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and a PhD in mathematics from National University of Singapore. Her research interests focus on microeconomic theory, information economics and game theory.
She is working on understanding the impact of strategic information transmissions on shaping agents’ interactions. She also studies how information intermediaries’ interactions could affect market information and its outcome. Her works shed light on the design of information policies and the regulation of market participants’ behaviours from an informational perspective. In addition, Zeng develops tools and simplification techniques that facilitate the understanding of the theoretical structure of optimal information policy and equilibria in various economic settings.
Jun Zhao
Jun Zhao is an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at York University. She holds a PhD in economics from Vanderbilt University.
Her recent research covers topics including the effects of campaign financing on electoral outcomes in the U.S., non-parametric identification and inference of general Bayesian games, empirical questions in auctions like the efficacy of a bidder training program, test for collusion in procurement auctions, and newly developed causal inference methods such as doubly robust difference-in-differences estimators. Her work has been published in well-recognized journals like the Journal of Econometrics.
Pasha Malla
Pasha Malla is an associate professor in the Department of English at York University. He is the author of seven books of poetry and fiction, most recently a novel Kill the Mall and is a contributor to the New Yorker and The Globe and Mail. He has been shortlisted for the Amazon Best First Novel Award and a Commonwealth Prize; longlisted for the Giller Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and twice had stories in the Journey Prize anthology.
He has taught at the University of Toronto, the University of Guelph, Brock University and McMaster University, where he was the 2021-22 Mabel Pugh-Taylor Writer-in-Residence, and he has mentored writers through PEN Canada, the Writers’ Trust of Canada, the Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity, and Diaspora Dialogues.
Tiana Reid
Tiana Reid is an assistant professor in the Department of English at York University. She holds a PhD from the Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University. Prior to her return to Toronto, she was a presidential postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English at Brown University.
Her current book project examines figurations of black women’s labors as sites of tension in literatures of the African diaspora. Reid has published in scholarly journals, including American Quarterly, Feminist Formations, Theory & Event, and Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory. In addition to her academic work, her writing has appeared in a range of publications, including The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Teen Vogue, The Paris Review, Canadian Art, Dissent, and The Nation.
A former editor at The New Inquiry and Pinko: A Magazine of Gay Communism, Reid has also spent several years doing editorial work at academic journals, including Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism and Women & Performance.
Some of the awards she received include Langston Hughes Thesis Award for Humanities, Columbia’s Institute for Research in African American Studies and a four-year doctoral Fellowship from the SSHRC.
Bianca Beauchemin
Bianca Beauchemin is an assistant professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at York University. She holds a PhD in gender studies from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She is currently completing a postdoctoral Fellowship in Black Feminist Thought at Queen’s University.
She has published a book review of Brittney C. Cooper’s Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women in Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography and is currently working on an article for the Journal of Canadian Studies’ special issue on Black Studies in Canada. In her book manuscript Arousing Freedoms: Re-Imagining the Haitian Revolution through Sensuous Marronage, she re-narrates the Haitian Revolution through Black feminist and Black queer epistemologies and methodologies. Disrupting the authority of the colonial archive and of prevalent masculinist framings of insurgency discourses, she explores the ways in which embodiment, labour, sensuousness, spirituality, marronage, resistance and alternative sexualities and genders, re-imagine the edicts of freedom and Black liberation.
Natasha L. Henry
Natasha L. Henry is a lecturer in the professorial stream in the Department of History at York University. She is also a PhD candidate in the Department of History. The 2018 Vanier Scholar is researching the enslavement of African people in early Ontario. Her publications include Emancipation Day: Celebrating Freedom in Canada (June 2010), Talking about Freedom: Celebrating Freedom in Canada (2012) and several entries for the The Canadian Encyclopedia on African Canadian History. She has developed educational resources for several projects on the Black experience in Canada. Through her various professional, academic and community roles, Henry’s work is grounded in her commitment to research, collect, preserve, and disseminate the histories of African Canadians.
Hannah Johnston
Hannah Johnston is an assistant professor in the School of Human Resources Management where her research focuses on the digitalization of work. Prior to joining York, Johnston was a postdoctoral Fellow at Northeastern University in Boston. She holds a PhD in geography from Queen’s University.
She has also worked professionally at the International Labour Organization and with trade unions and workers’ organizations on issues related to collective organizing, algorithmic management and technological change. Johnston has a long-standing interest in the platform economy and is a collaborator with Oxford University’s Fairwork Project. Her recent publications can be found in journals, including Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Work and Occupations, and the International Labour Review.
Jeremy Green
Tehota’kerá:ton, Jeremy D. Green, is Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk), wolf clan and from the Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory. An assistant professor in the Department of Humanities at York University, Green is both a scholar and Ontario Certified Teacher (OCT) of Indigenous language learning and acquisition in adult and youth learners over the past 25 years. Green’s transformative research and teaching are at the forefront of efforts to ensure that Canadian Indigenous languages and traditional cultures not only survive but thrive.
Tehota’kerá:ton’s completed research to date has focused on diverse localized language acquisition and status planning for Indigenous language proficiency development for Rotinonhsión:ni (Six Nations) and other Indigenous nations and communities. Tehota’kerá:ton also provides training and information to support these localized Indigenous language acquisition planning efforts to create new speakers of Indigenous languages focusing primarily on strategic planning for teaching, learning, assessment, evaluation, language use and conversational and ceremonial language and dynamic cultural practices.
Jean-Thomas Tremblay
Jean-Thomas Tremblay is an assistant professor in the Department of Humanities at York University, teaching across environmental studies, sexuality studies, literary, screen and media studies. They are the author of the forthcoming Breathing Aesthetics (Duke University Press, October 2022) and, with Andrew Strombeck, a co-editor of Avant-Gardes in Crisis: Art and Politics in the Long 1970s (State University of New York Press, 2021).
Tremblay’s scholarship has appeared or is set to appear in such journals as differences, Discourse, SubStance, Modernism/modernity, American Literature and GLQ. Their public writing has been relayed by venues that include the Los Angeles Review of Books, Chicago Review, Public Books and Full Stop. Tremblay is working on two books that seek to render theories of negativity and non-sovereignty responsive to the pressures of life under climate crisis: The Art of Environmental Inaction and, with Steven Swarbrick, Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction.
Marc Herman
Marc Herman is an assistant professor at York University in the Department of Humanities. Herman’s research focuses on the interactions of Jewish and Islamic intellectual history in the medieval Mediterranean, with a particular interest in the overlapping sacred histories of Jews and Muslims. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, he has held postdoctoral fellowships at Columbia University, Fordham University, Harvard University, the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale Law School. He is the coeditor of Accounting for the Commandments in Medieval Judaism: Studies in Law, Philosophy, Pietism, and Kabbalah (Brill, 2021) and is finishing a monograph titled After Revelation: The Rabbinic Past in the Islamic World.
Carolyn Steele
Carolyn Steele is an assistant professor, teaching stream in the Department of Humanities at York University. Steele’s research specializes in the National Film Board’s educational production unit Studio G, interactive and immersive art forms, the digital humanities and modes of experiential education. Her interactive digital productions have received accolades nationally and internationally. She created the Humanities capstone course (Doing Culture HUMA 3207/4207 6.0), in which students gain real-world experiences in the cultural sector through course placements and community-focused projects, as well as Digital Culture in the Humanities (HUMA 3140 6.0).
For several years, Steele has partnered with York University’s Media Creation Lab and Canadian virtual artist Bryn Oh in the development of a high-impact humanities course exploring immersive art forms in virtual and augmented reality (VR, AR), and Second Life (In Other Worlds HUMA 2205 3.0).
Steele has received several Academic Innovation (AIF) and Experiential Education grants along with the Humanities Award for Teaching Excellence (2020), Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching (2020) and President’s University-Wide Teaching Award (2022).
Ayana Samuel
Ayana Samuel is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at York University. Her broad research interests are in meta-ethics, and her recent work focuses on related issues in action theory and speech-act theory. Samuel holds a PhD from University of California, Los Angeles.
Teshager Dagne
Teshager Dagne joins the School of Public Policy and Administration as an Ontario Research Chair in Governing Artificial Intelligence (AI) and associate professor, with tenure, in the professorial stream. He has previously taught at the Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University, where he earned his doctoral degree and was a Schulich Research Fellow. He has extensively published in areas of knowledge governance in intellectual property law, emerging technologies regulation, and big data governance. His current research explores legal, ethical, and regulatory considerations in the challenges and opportunities that the deployment of AI and related technologies bring in different spheres of activities.
Dagne is interested in researching the intersection between intellectual property and privacy norms about access and control of data, investigating frameworks for allocating rights and AI.
Johanne Jean-Pierre
Johanne Jean-Pierre is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at York University and holds a PhD in sociology from McMaster University.
She conducts research projects in English and in French in the fields of sociology of education, sociology of race and ethnicity, youth studies, and research methodology. More specifically, she focuses on school and post-secondary trajectories, alternative school discipline interventions, the scholarship of learning and teaching, and qualitative research. Her current research projects investigate the social-cultural dynamics that can inform promising policies and practices to work with Francophone minority communities, refugee and immigrant youth, and Black Canadian communities.
Jean-Pierre is also a co-founder of the Canadian Sociological Association Black Caucus and a co-founder of the first Canadian Sociological Association Francophone award: Prix d’excellence en sociologie de langue française de la Société canadienne de sociologie. She is also a co-investigator in the Empowering Next-generation Researchers In perinatal and Child Health (ENRICH) initiative.
Wendy Makoons Geniusz
Wendy Makoons Geniusz is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at York University and holds a PhD in American studies from the University of Minnesota. Makoon Geniusz is an Indigenous woman of Cree and Métis descent. She was raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, but her Cree family comes from the Pas, a Reserve in Manitoba. To honor her Ojibwe namesake, Keewaydinoquay, Geniusz was raised with Ojibwe language and culture. Before coming to York, Geniusz was a professor of Ojibwe Language at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, where she taught for 14 years.
Since childhood, Geniusz has worked on Ojibwe language and culture revitalization projects in Indigenous communities throughout the Great Lakes Region. All her publications and research focus on creating decolonization tools for Indigenous language and culture revitalization. Geniusz is the authoress of: Our Knowledge is Not Primitive: Decolonizing Botanical Anishinaabe Teachings, the editor of: Plants Have So Much to Give Us, All We Have to Do is Ask by Mary Siisip Geniusz, and the authoress of the Ojibwe plant name glossary found in that text. She is the co-editor with Brendan Fairbanks of Chi-mewinzha: Ojibwe Stories from Leech Lake by Dorothy Dora Whipple.
Marsha Rampersaud
Marsha Rampersaud is an assistant professor in the Department of Social Sciences at York University. She is doing a postdoctoral Fellowship with the Rights for Children and Youth Partnership Project in the School of Social Work at Toronto Metropolitan University. Rampersaud is a sociolegal researcher who combines insights from the critical race, punishment, and abolition theories to examine issues of racial and social justice, the purpose of punishment, and the impacts of societal structures on differently situated groups. Her approach to research is firmly rooted in praxis, and she works closely with the communities who inform her research to cultivate projects from the ground up. Rampersaud also holds a PhD in sociology from Queen’s University.
Tanja Juric
Tanja Juric is an assistant professor, teaching stream in the Department of Social Science at York University. Juric specializes in moral philosophy and political subjectivity, with reference to social diversity and the law. Her current research focuses on human rights and citizenship in multicultural democracies and asks how values of cultural neutrality and inclusion might be impacted by changes in legislation, such as those recently seen in Bill C-24 and Bill C-51. Her research interests are human rights, multiculturalism, religion and citizenship.
Christopher Morris
Christopher Morris is an assistant professor in the Writing Department at York University. His research interests include rhetoric, poetry, and technical and professional communication, with his current project exploring the rhetoric of housing and economic development. His poems have appeared in Northwest Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Transition Magazine. Morris holds a PhD in English from The Ohio State University.
Matthew Bucemi
Matthew Bucemi is an assistant professor in the Writing Department at York University. He is an award-winning editor, writer and instructor and holds a PhD in English literature from Cornell University. He has held creative leadership roles at publishing houses, production studios, ad agencies, and newspapers and was the founding managing editor at Sutherland House Books. Bucemi taught courses about topics that range from philosophy, cultural studies, and history to kung fu movies and video game theory. Bucemi has given talks on literature, film, music, comics, and games at conferences all over North America. He has also won Dean’s Prize for Distinguished Teaching, Martin Sampson Teaching Award and Instructor of the Year award.