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This story is published in YFile’s New Faces feature issue 2023. 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 34 new faculty members this fall.
“I’m thrilled to welcome new faculty members to LA&PS,” says J.J. McMurtry, dean of LA&PS. “These new faculty members bring rich and diverse expertise to the Faculty that will benefit our students and build on our reputation as leaders in teaching and research. I am immensely proud of the outstanding new cohort of colleagues joining us in LA&PS”.
Mohsen Javdan
Mohsen Javdan is an assistant professor of management information systems in the School of Administrative Studies at York. He teaches information systems courses, including management information systems and business analytics. He holds a PhD from McMaster University’s DeGroote School of Business.
Javdan’s research mainly focuses on information technology adoption, particularly in the areas of big data analytics and artificial intelligence integration within organizations. Moreover, he investigates social media analytics from different perspectives. He has worked for more than five years as an information systems and business analyst in transportation and consulting companies.
Hamid Arian
Hamid Arian is an assistant professor in the School of Administrative Studies at York. He holds a PhD in mathematical finance from the University of Toronto. His research interests include derivatives modelling, financial machine learning, deep learning, algorithmic trading, investment management and risk management.
Saikat Sarkar
Saikat Sarkar is an assistant professor in the School of Administrative Studies at York. He has been a visiting scholar at Melbourne University in Australia, and he previously taught several undergraduate and graduate finance courses at Tampere University in Finland, Jyvaskyla University in Finland and Mount Allison University in New Brunswick. He holds a PhD in economics from the University of Tampere.
Anoosheh Rostamkalaei
Anoosheh Rostamkalaei (she/her) is an assistant professor of entrepreneurship and innovation in the School of Administrative Studies at York. Before joining York, she held a faculty position at the University of Kent in the U.K. and postdoctoral positions at the University of Ottawa and Statistics Canada. Before her academic career, she worked as a system analyst, financial analyst and research associate in the private and public sectors.
Rostamkalaei’s primary research interest lies in understanding the nature and consequences of entrepreneurship. Her focus is on understanding how the experience of access to resources varies for different groups of society, and how the variations in access to resources and individuals’ priors translate into different entrepreneurial or post-entrepreneurial outcomes. Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from Canada’s research councils and published in high-impact journals. She holds a PhD in management from Lancaster University Management School.
Emma Feltes
Emma Feltes is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at York. She is a legal, political and public anthropologist. Her work examines the structure and operation of Canadian colonialism, with a focus on constitutional law, international law and transnational decolonization, environmental crisis and climate justice.
A settler scholar, writer and anticolonial activist, she draws on more than a decade of experience working in alliance with Secwépemc and Tŝilhqot’in Peoples in interior British Columbia. Her new research looks at state and Indigenous jurisdiction in times of emergency, focusing on decolonial responses to the climate crisis that spring from Indigenous legal orders. She has been a Fulbright Scholar and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow in Anthropology at Cornell University. Her scholarship and public writing has been published widely, and she holds a PhD form the University of British Columbia.
Tracy Ying Zhang
Tracy Ying Zhang is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication & Media Studies at York. Before joining York, she was a Mitacs Elevate Postdoctoral Researcher at Concordia University. Previously, she held postdoctoral fellowships at Queen’s University and Université de Montréal.
Zhang’s interdisciplinary approaches to research and teaching are informed by intersectional feminist perspectives, post-colonial theories and critical political economy analyses. Her multilingual, multi-sited research projects explore the interplays of gender, race, labour migration, body politics and cultural policy in global creative industries. Her research has appeared in many journals, and she has directed and co-produced several independent films. The Flip Side: A Global Circus Story, which she co-produced, was screened at seven film festivals, four international conferences and three college festivals. It won the best short documentary at the DisOrient Asian American Film Festival of Oregon.
Nathaniel Laywine
Nathaniel Laywine is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication & Media Studies at York. Hel is an interdisciplinary scholar, who works at the juncture of intercultural communications, critical pedagogy and media studies. By analyzing the social media, digital marketing, and recruitment strategies of volunteer tourism agencies and international service learning programs that prioritize the pursuit of fun and pleasure in international tourism, he seeks to understand how colonial and imperial legacies continue to shape global humanitarian practices, even when they aspire to rupture these histories.
Laywine has worked as a research consultant and/or project manager on a wide range of projects with Global Affairs Canada, the Canadian Museum of Human Rights, Universalia Management Group and Experiments in Feminist Ethical Collaborative Tools & Technologies. He has also previously worked in film development and distribution, with organizations such as the National Film Board of Canada, the Toronto International Film Festival, the Canadian Film Centre and Frontières International Co-production Market.
Kasim Tirmizey
Kasim Tirmizey is an assistant professor in the Department of Equity Studies at York. He previously taught as an assistant professor (limited-term appointment) in technology and society at Concordia University’s Centre for Engineering in Society and held a postdoctoral fellowship at Queen’s University’s Department of Global Development Studies. He has a PhD in environmental studies from York.
In his teaching and research, Tirmizey draws upon anti-colonial theory and critical political economy for examining technology, food, agriculture and the environment. His teaching philosophy is inspired by popular education and critical pedagogy.
Thomas Kettig
Thomas Kettig is an assistant professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures & Linguistics at York. He studies how the sounds of language vary and change through space and time. Some of his research aims to understand why the vowel sounds of English change from one generation of speakers to the next. He has also undertaken the first large-scale, multi-speaker investigation of the vowels of Hawaiian. His work touches on issues in endangered language description, sociolinguistics, quantitative experimental methods, theoretical phonology, historical linguistics and acoustic phonetics.
Before joining York, Kettig was at the University of York in the U.K., where he conducted postdoctoral research related to forensic applications of a sociophonetic experiment and taught courses on phonetics and quantitative methods. He previously taught phonetics at Queens College, City University of New York, and he holds a PhD in linguistics from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
Etienne Lalé
Etienne Lalé is an associate professor in the Department of Economics at York. He has worked as an assistant professor at the University of Bristol in the U.K. and as an assistant and associate professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal.
His research focuses on macroeconomics and labour economics, with a special interest in understanding cyclical and secular fluctuations in labour markets. He pursues this objective using both quantitative macro-search models and empirical analyses of large-scale micro datasets, which he often combines into structural modelling of the labour market. His current work can be divided into three main topics: measuring and analyzing labour market dynamics; quantifying the impacts of labour market policies; and understanding the role of alternative work arrangements.
Lalé has published in the leading journals of his field and he holds a PhD in economics from Sciences Po Paris in France.
Jinyue Li
Jinyue Li is an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at York. She has worked as an assistant professor at the City University of Hong Kong and as an assistant professor at the University of Windsor. She has eight years of experience in teaching introductory-level courses, upper-year electives and master’s-level courses. Her work has been published in the Journal of International Money and Finance.
Li also has experience in administrative work such as recruitment, admissions, organizing events and advising students. As a woman of color, her commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion is built on her many years of international experience. She holds a PhD in economics and received the Distinguished Instructor Award at the University of Minnesota.
Vikrant Dadawala
Vikrant Dadawala is an assistant professor in the Department of English at York. He was born and raised in Kolkata, India. He specializes in world literature, South Asian literature and the global Cold War.
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 book of essays on migration, modernism and ātmā vismriti (self-forgetting).
With a PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania, Dadawala is currently a lecturer on history and literature at Harvard University, where he teaches courses on travel writing, decolonization and the global South Asian diaspora.
Sheetala Bhat
Sheetala Bhat is an assistant professor in the Department of English at York. She is a theatre researcher, artist and playwright. She specializes in South Asian theatre and politics, South Asian diasporic theatre in Canada and Indigenous theatre in Canada. She is currently working on a manuscript on theatrical performances of love as anti-colonial feminist resistance in India and Indigenous theatre on Turtle Island.
Prior to her appointment at York, Bhat was an Arts Without Borders Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Ottawa. She has also worked in professional, community and protest theatre in the state of Karnataka in India. She won the 2022 Robert Lawrence Prize from the Canadian Association for Theatre Research and the 2020 Helsinki Prize from the International Federation of Theatre Research.
Nadia Hasan
Nadia Hasan is an assistant professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies at York. She is an anti-racist, transnational feminist, and critical secularism studies scholar and educator. Her research and activism focus on systemic racism and Islamophobia in legal, administrative and discursive regimes, and their relation to Muslim life.
Her focus on feminist and anti-racist research brought her to work in the human rights non-profit sector, where she has led major public advocacy campaigns against Islamophobia in Canada and directed research initiatives in partnership with academic institutions.
A frequent media commentator on issues related to Islamophobia, Hasan co-authored a groundbreaking SSHRC-funded report on systemic Islamophobia at the Canada Revenue Agency, titled “Under Layered Suspicion: A Review of CRA Audits of Muslim-led Charities.” Her current project examines how Muslim women navigate the compounding impact of Bill 21 on employability in the context of COVID-19 lockdowns.
Rukmini Barua
Rukmini Barua is an assistant professor of South Asian history in the Department of History at York. Before joining York, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.
Barua’s research examines questions at the intersection of urban politics, labour and emotions, with a focus on colonial and postcolonial India. Her first monograph, In the Shadow of the Mill: Workers’ Neighbourhoods in Ahmedabad, 1920s to 2000s, analyses urban change through the prism of everyday political practice and property relations in the Indian industrial city of Ahmedabad. Her second book project is a historical ethnography of working-class intimacy, conjugality and domesticity in 20th- and 21st-century India. She has a PhD in history from the University of Göttingen.
Elisha Lim
Elisha Lim
Elisha Lim (they/them) is an assistant professor in the Department of Humanities at York. Lim researches the intersection of social media, theology and critical race theory, and is currently working on a book called Pious about the rise in distorted identity politics, from ethnic fraud and polarizing populism to hyperbolic corporate solidarity statements.
Lim is also an award-winning claymation filmmaker, and their queer and transgender films, comic strips and graphic novel (100 Crushes, Koyama Press) are documented by Duke University Press and Inanna Press monographs. They have written about algorithms and identity economics in academic journals and the media (the Daily Beast, hyperallergic, Document Journal, TEDxUofT), as well as thematically in their upcoming graphic novel, 8 Dreams About You.
Kael Reid
Kael Reid is an assistant professor in the teaching stream in the Department of Humanities at York. With a background in teaching and learning, they teach core and elective courses in the Children, Childhood, and Youth Studies (CCY) program. Using various ethnographic songwriting methods they developed, Reid conducts research that involves collaborating with children and youth to assist them in documenting and sharing their perspectives and stories through originally composed and recorded songs. Reid uses these songs they compose and record with their research participants as curriculum texts to teach CCY students about the value of learning directly from young people through lyrics and music.
Reid also combines public pedagogy with musical activism related to queer and trans equity by delivering workshops, concerts, and musical keynote addresses to universities and colleges, secondary schools, youth conferences, unions and community service organizations.
Zeyad El Nabolsy
Zeyad El Nabolsy is a lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at York. He specializes in the history of Africana philosophy with a focus on modern African philosophy. He has published on Amílcar Cabral’s philosophy of culture, methodological debates about racism and ideology in the historiography of philosophy, Paulin Hountondji’s philosophy of science, modern African political and social philosophy (with a focus on African Marxism), and ancient Egyptian philosophy. He is currently working on a comparative intellectual history of 19th-century African philosophy, with a focus on James Africanus Beale Horton (in West Africa) and Rifa’a al-Tahtawi (in Egypt).
His research interests include Africana philosophy, classical German philosophy, and Marxist approaches to the history, philosophy of science and Arabic philosophy.
Tamanisha J. John
Tamanisha J. John is an assistant professor in the Department of Politics at York. She joined York from Clark Atlanta University, where, since 2021, she held the position of assistant professor of international political economy in the Mack H. Jones Department of Political Science. She received her PhD in international relations at Florida International University.
John studies Caribbean development, sovereignty and politics, as well as Canadian foreign policy, economic imperialism, financial exclusion and corporate power. She has published in leading peer-reviewed journals and was the recipient of the 2023 Summer Faculty Residency Award with UNCF Mellon/Programs. She also won the 2022 Best Dissertation Prize from the Caribbean Studies Association for her work “Canadian Banks and Imperialism in the English-Speaking Caribbean.”
Joe Pateman
Joe Pateman is an assistant professor in the Department of Politics at York. He joined York from the University of Sheffield in the U.K., where he held the position of teaching associate in the Department of Politics & International Relations. His graduate and undergraduate teaching has included courses on oppression and resistance, race and racism in world politics, as well as global politics. He received his PhD in politics from the University of Nottingham.
Pateman is the recipient of two research excellence awards and has published numerous peer-reviewed articles, as well as two co-authored books, including Public Libraries and Marxism (Routledge, 2021).
Amanda van Beinum
Amanda van Beinum is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology. She previously worked as an SSHRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Ottawa Centre for Health Law, Policy & Ethics.
Beinum conducts research projects in the fields of sociology of health and medicine, science and technology studies, critical posthumanism and medical ethics. She has been involved in clinical and ethnographic studies in hospitals and clinics and is an advocate for the incorporation of critical social science perspectives into medical research and practice. She received her PhD in sociology from Carleton University. Her current work, which is part of the international HYBRID-MINDS research consortium, explores embodied social and technological aspects of brain stimulation technologies as emerging therapies for the treatment of psychiatric illnesses.
Safiyah Rochelle
Safiyah Rochelle is an assistant professor in the Department of Social Science at York. She is a researcher whose areas of interest and teaching centre on contemporary political and legal theory, critical visual and race studies, state violence and criminalization, and the relationship between law, violence and marginalized populations. She received her PhD from Carleton University and is currently working on two projects: the first examines racial governance and redress in the aftermath of state violence; and the second explores the spatial, visual, and imaginative boundaries of mourning and memorialization for victims of mass violence.
Asmita B. Vij
Asmita B. Vij is an assistant professor in the Work and Labour Studies Program in the Department of Social Science at York. Her current project delves into the role of gender, race and class in the proliferation of the automation industry and data production platforms. It focuses on transnational platform labour chains underpinning AI, highlighting the experiences of women platform workers in India. She is interested in how the processes of digitization and platformization impact the conditions of work, workers and working-class communities.
Vij holds a PhD from the University of Toronto. Her work is interdisciplinary, bringing the fields of labour studies, adult learning, science and technology studies and digital sociology into conversation.
Steffi Hamann
Steffi Hamann is an assistant professor in the Department of Social Sciences at York, specializing in international development and food security. She has a PhD in political science and international development studies from the University of Guelph. Prior to pursuing her doctoral studies, she worked as a consultant for the German development agency GIZ, providing policy advice to the Federal Ministry for Development and Cooperation.
Hamann’s research combines her academic background as a political scientist with an interest in agrarian change and sustainable livelihoods. She has been awarded an Ontario Trillium Scholarship, CASID’s Kari Polanyi-Levitt Prize and an SSHRC Insight Development Grant. Her work has appeared in various peer-reviewed outlets and she is a co-author of the book Commodity Politics, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Iván Dario Vargas-Roncancio
Iván Darío Vargas-Roncancio is an assistant professor in the Department of Social Science at York. Previously, he acted as associate director for the Centre for Indigenous Conservation & Development Alternatives and held a postdoctoral position with the Leadership for the Ecozoic program at McGill University. He also worked for the Everyday Peace Indicators Project as an institutional ethnographer at George Mason University and was a Francisco José de Caldas Scholar.
Vargas-Roncancio’s research focuses on Earth law and the rights of nature, Indigenous legal cosmologies in Amazonia, anthropology of plant-human relations and critical pedagogies. He has published in the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, the Australian Feminist Law Journal, Sustainability and the Boletín de Antropología, among others, and he has two forthcoming books: Pedagogies for the Ecozoic (Cambridge University Press, co-author) and Law, Place and Plants in Amazonia: Sentient Legalities (Routledge Law, Justice and Ecology book series). He has a PhD in natural resource sciences from McGill University.
Kate Kaul
Kate Kaul is the assistant professor of writing and critical disabilities, teaching stream, in the Writing Department at York. This new position extends her role as accessibility specialist for the Writing Centre into the life of the Writing Department and the Faculty. Kaul brings experience as an interdisciplinary teacher and scholar of writing and interdisciplinary disability studies, with interests in access-focused teaching, critical theory, disability and the connections between them.
Nicholas Taylor
Nicholas (Nick) Taylor is an associate professor in the Department of Communication & Media Studies at York. 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 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). His areas of interest include gendered politics of place in new media industries, as well as media practices of artists and entrepreneurs who work with building blocks.
Bianca Beauchemin
Bianca Beauchemin is an assistant professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies at York. Her research interests include Black feminist thought, Black queer studies, queer of colour critique, Black diaspora studies, Black radical tradition, Black Atlantic history, histories of resistance and revolution, and postcolonial studies. She has a PhD in gender studies from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Beauchemin 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 embodiment, labour, sensuousness, spirituality, marronage, resistance and alternative sexualities and genders re-imagine the edicts of freedom and Black liberation.
Johannes Mahr
Johannes Mahr is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at York. Before joining York, he was a postdoctoral Fellow in philosophy and psychology at Harvard University. His work uses theoretical and experimental methods to understand human-specific cognition in the light of social practices. He has applied this perspective specifically to the cognitive architecture and function of episodic memory, imagination and temporal cognition. The results of this work have appeared in various journals at the intersection between philosophy and psychology such as Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Perspectives on Psychological Science and Cognition.
Mahr received his PhD in cognitive science from the Central European University. Some of his research interests include philosophy of cognitive science, cognitive psychology and philosophy of memory.
Antulio Rosales
Antulio Rosales is an assistant professor in the Department of Social Science at York. Before joining York, he was an assistant professor of political science at the University of New Brunswick. He has a PhD in global governance from the University of Waterloo and the Balsillie School of International Affairs.
Rosales’ research focuses on the politics of state and global capital actors’ interactions in the energy sectors of Latin American countries. His new research is concerned with the expansion of emerging financial assets such as cryptocurrencies and their link to energy infrastructures and political incentives in the Global South.
Bobbi-Jo Virtue
Bobbi-Jo Virtue is an assistant professor in the School of Public Policy at York. She is Ininew (Cree) from St. Peter’s/Peguis Community in Treaty 1 territory. She earned a master’s degree in public administration from Queen’s University and a bachelor of science in criminal justice from Lake Superior State University. She has more than 15 years of work experience in various levels of government, including Indigenous governance.
Virtue has been working as a helper with traditional knowledge carriers and Elders for most of her life. She honours reciprocal relationships with her community, both locally and back home. She is a strong advocate and an active grassroots community member.
Her research interests include public administration, politics and government, policy, Indigenous pedagogy, anti-colonial education, Indigenous governance, justice, Indigenous justice, law, criminal justice, Indigenous language revitalization, gender-based violence and Indigenous matriarchs.
Ilya Archakov
Ilya Archakov is an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at York. His research interests include multivariate and high-dimensional econometrics, with a special focus on big-data analysis in economics and finance. A substantial part of empirical applications based on this research are related to the field of financial econometrics.
Archakov obtained a master’s degree in economics from the New Economic School in Moscow and a PhD in economics from the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. Before joining York, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Vienna.
Tom Hooper
Tom Hooper is an assistant professor in the Department of Equity Studies and a historian of 2SLGBTQ communities in Canada. His research has explored the Feb. 5, 1981, bathhouse raids where over 300 gay men were arrested and criminally charged for their sexuality, with a focus on the community resistance to these raids both on the streets and in the courts. Hooper critically examined the construction of dominant queer historical narratives, including the myth that legal changes in 1969 represented the decriminalization of homosexuality in Canada. He also investigated the use and misuse of heritage grants provided to 2SLGBTQ organizations.