Introducing new faculty members

The following are among the new faculty members at the University. Others will be introduced periodically in this space.

Charly Coleman, Ph.D., joins the Department of History in Arts & Sciences as assistant professor with a joint appointment in the Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Trinity University in San Antonio in 1998 and his doctorate from Stanford University in 2005. For the past two years, he has been a Harper Schmidt Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at the University of Chicago. The main lines of his research center on the intellectual and cultural history of 18th-century France. In particular, Coleman is interested in the influence of religious thought on a crucial strain of Enlightenment individualism. He will teach courses on the Ancien Regime, the European Enlightenment and the rise of the European state.

Clifton R. Emery, Ph.D., joins the George Warren Brown School of Social Work as assistant professor. He earned a master’s degree in women’s studies from Dongduk University in Seoul, South Korea, and master’s degrees in social service administration and statistics from the University of Chicago and a doctorate in social service administration from the University of Chicago. Before joining the University, Emery served as a research assistant at the National Opinion Research Center and as a statistical consultant for the Project on Youth Mentoring. His research interests focus on the impact of domestic violence on child outcomes and the mediating role of parenting, deviance theory as it relates to causes of domestic violence, policy interventions for violence, the role of social theory in social work and empirical and nonempirical methods for evaluating theories relevant to social work.

Carl Minzner, J.D., joins the School of Law as associate professor. He earned a juris doctorate and a master’s degree in international affairs in 2000 at Columbia University. Before joining the University, Minzner served as senior counsel on the Congressional-Executive Commission on China and was an International Affairs Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He also taught law at the Xibei Institute of Politics and Law in Xi’an, China, as a Yale-China Legal Education fellow. Minzner previously practiced intellectual property law in the San Francisco Bay Area and clerked for Raymond Clevenger, judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. His published works include articles on citizen petitioning institutions in China and reforms to the regulations governing Chinese civil society organizations.

John Orrock, Ph.D., joins the Department of Biology in Arts & Sciences as assistant professor. He earned his doctorate from Iowa State University in ecology and evolutionary biology as an Environmental Protection Agency Science to Achieve Results (STAR) fellow. He also was a postdoctoral research associate at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis. His research centers around how individual-level behaviors can give rise to population and community-level patterns. His research utilizes a strong experimental approach to evaluate existing ecological theory.

Thomas Sattig, Ph.D., joins the Department of Philosophy in Arts & Sciences as assistant professor. He earned his doctorate in philosophy from Oxford University in 2002. He remained in Oxford for three years as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow and a Junior Research Fellow at Brasenose College. Before joining the University, Sattig held a visiting position at the University of California, Los Angeles and a tenure-track position of assistant professor of philosophy at Tulane University. His primary research interests fall in the areas of metaphysics and philosophy of language. He currently works on topics in the metaphysics of material objects.

Vincent Sherry, Ph.D., joins the Department of English in Arts & Sciences as professor. He teaches and writes in the fields of modern British and Irish literature. Previously, he has been Distinguished Professor of English at Villanova University and the Pierce Butler Professor of English at Tulane University. He has edited “The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War” (2005) and several volumes on post-World War II British and Irish Poets for the “Dictionary of Literary Biography” (1984, 1985). He is writing the Blackwell biography of Ezra Pound and a book-length study of English Modernism and pan-European Decadence.

Julie Singer, Ph.D., joins the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures in Arts & Sciences as assistant professor of French. She earned a master’s degree and doctorate in Romance studies from Duke University and two bachelor’s degrees from the University of Maryland, College Park. She previously was appointed as a visiting assistant professor of Italian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her primary fields of research include medieval French and Italian lyric, particularly intersections of lyric and medical-scientific discourse, as well as the cultural history of science, medicine and technology.

Ying Xie, Ph.D., joins the Olin Business School as assistant professor of marketing. She earned her doctoral degree from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Her recent research focuses on pharmaceutical marketing, customer satisfaction and word of mouth, and consumer behavior in financial decision-making. Before joining the University, Xie was an assistant professor at Rutgers Business School at Rutgers University and an adjunct lecturer at Northwestern University.