5 Tenure-Track Faculty Hired for Fall 2016

Wesleyan recently hired five additional tenure-track faculty who will begin their appointments during the Fall 2016 semester. They join eight other faculty who were hired in February.

The new faculty include:

Joan Cho, assistant professor of East Asian studies. Cho’s BA is from the University of Rochester, and she is completing her dissertation at Harvard, titled “The Dictator’s Modernity Dilemma: Modernization and Generation Turnover under Authoritarianism.” Her research interests include authoritarian regimes, comparative democratization, civil society and social movements, and democracy and dictatorship, with a regional focus on Korea and East Asia.

Victoria Manfredi, assistant professor of computer science. Manfredi, who holds a BA from Smith College and a PhD and MS from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, is currently a scientist at Raytheon BBN Technologies. Previously she served as a postdoctoral researcher in the Web and InterNetworking Group in the Computer Science Department at Boston University. The main theme underlying her research is how to design network protocols that work effectively in dynamic network conditions.

Reda Moursli, assistant professor of economics. Moursli holds a BA from Al Akhawayn University, Morocco, and an MS and PhD from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. His dissertation was titled “Corporate Governance and the Design of Board of Directors.” He is interested in corporate governance, empirical corporate finance, investor protection and financial econometrics.

Gabrielle Ponce, assistant professor of letters. Ponce completed her BA at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and her MFA and PhD at The Johns Hopkins University, where she is completing her dissertation on “The Unknown History of the Invention of Don Quijote: The Primacy of Poetry in the Prose of Miguel de Cervantes: 1567-1615.” Her research interests include cultural and intellectual history in the Spanish Golden Age, Spanish theater and Renaissance and Baroque Spanish poetry, and Cervantes and Freud.

Hirsh Sawhney, assistant professor of English. Hirsh holds a BA from the University of Michigan, and an MFA from Rutgers-Newark University. He is an author whose writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, The New York Times Literary Supplement, as well as numerous other periodicals, and his first novel, South Haven, was published this year. Sawhney has been a visiting faculty member at Wesleyan since 2013.