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New Faculty

Connecticut College welcomes six new tenure-track professors this fall who bring a breadth of expertise in their respective fields, which include dance, English, philosophy, economics, government and statistics. They are joined by two lecturers and 13 visiting faculty members.

Meet the New Faculty:

Tenure-track

Rachel Boggia

Associate Professor of Dance

Education
B.S. Cornell University
M.F.A. The Ohio State University

Rachel Boggia comes to Connecticut College from Bates College in Maine, where she was an associate professor and director of dance. She also taught and performed at Wesleyan University, Dickinson College and The Ohio State University.

Boggia specializes in making multidisciplinary and mediated performance; performing in collaborative creations, improvisation, and dance documentary/experimental dance documentation. Her research interests also include cross-disciplinary collaboration with theater, the sciences and humanities; video editing; dance technique pedagogy; embodiment in on-line education and performance as research.

Hubert Cook

Sue and Eugene Mercy Jr. Assistant Professor of English

Education
B.A. Carleton College
M.A., Ph.D. Vanderbilt University

Hubert Cook’s research focuses on affect, emotion and performativity in late 19th and early 20th century African American and Caribbean literature. He is completing his book project, “Empathy’s Dark Labor: Feeling, Fact, and the Black Subject in Late Nineteenth Century Black Narrative.”

Cook has participated in Cornell’s School of Criticism and Theory, and he has presented at Dartmouth’s Futures of American Studies Institute. His work has been supported by the Mellon Mays Foundation and the Provost’s Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania.

Lindsay Crawford

Assistant Professor of Philosophy

Education
B.A. Mount Holyoke College
Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley

Lindsay Crawford specializes primarily in epistemology and metaethics, and has serious secondary interests in the history of philosophy.

Much of Crawford’s current research aims to make sense of what we mean when we make claims about what people ought to believe (e.g., “People ought to believe that climate change is real,” or “You ought to take his medical advice with a ‘grain of salt.’”) Can such claims be true, if we by and large do not have any direct control over what we believe? If these claims can be true, what makes them true?

She has also recently started working on the topic of epistemic injustice: the idea that one can wrong another person by not according that person’s word sufficient credibility, owing in part to an identity prejudice against that person.

Mark Stelzner

Assistant Professor of Economics

Education
B.A. Boston University
M.A. University of Denver, Josef Korbel School of International Studies
Ph.D. University of Massachusetts

Mark Stelzner has been working on better understanding income inequality in the United States—trying to find answers to questions like the following: How has inequality changed over time in the United States? What causes income inequality to rise and fall? What is the relationship between inequality and growth? And what are the political underpinnings that support the current extreme levels of inequality in the United States?

He has taught Introduction to Microeconomics, Introduction to Macroeconomics, Intermediate Microeconomics, Economic Development, Public Economics, Game Theory, and U.S. Economic History.

C. Mara Suttmann-Lea

Assistant Professor of Government

Education
B.A. DePaul University
M.A., Ph.D. Northwestern University

Mara Suttmann-Lea studies American politics and is primarily interested in the relationship between election laws, political parties and campaigns, and political participation. Her research aims to develop concrete ways to improve the electoral process and increase access to participation in politics, particularly for vulnerable populations.

Her current research has two tracks. One is a book manuscript that examines how campaigns and party organizations have adapted to expansive voting reforms like early voting and same-day voter registration. She argues that we cannot fully comprehend the consequences of expansive voting reforms for citizen participation without examining how they shape (and are shaped by) political actors—campaigns, party organizations, elected officials and election administrators—who have a vested interest in the voter behavior that are altered by these reforms.

Yan Zhuang

Assistant Professor of Statistics

Education
M.S. Renmin University of China
Ph.D. University of Connecticut

Yan Zhuang specializes in the areas of sequential analysis, sampling strategies, sample size determination, and statistical inference. She also enjoys working with people from other disciplines to conduct interdisciplinary research. Her current interdisciplinary collaboration projects include violations of drinking water quality and Medicare quality analysis.

Zhuang’s research involves combinations of important topics and concepts including information, sufficiency, maximum likelihood estimation, ancillary complement, confidence interval estimation, and two-sample tests for comparisons.

Lecturers

Laura Little

Faculty Director of the Global Learning Lab and Lecturer of Slavic Studies

Education
B.A. University of Missouri-Columbia
M.A. University of Wisconsin-Madison

Laura Little teaches Russian language, Russian literature and culture, and introduction to Bulgarian. In her first-year seminars (“Modern Jewish Writers” and “Utopia/Dystopia”), the historical and social contexts of artistic works are emphasized. She often offers Languages Across the Curriculum (FLAC) sections to accompany her own and her colleagues’ courses.

As Faculty Director of the Global Learning Lab, Little engages in and promotes globally networked teaching and learning at the College. She coordinates with the Walter Commons Fellows to host events that promote language and cultural learning on campus, and manages the Structured Independent Language Study (SILS) program, which offers students the chance to study languages not taught as part of the formal curriculum. She also works with the Academic Resource Center to offer weekly drop-in group study/tutoring for language learners in the Walter Commons.

Jillian Marshall

Lecturer in Psychology

Education
B.A. Mercyhurst University
M.A. Connecticut College

Jillian Marshall, lecturer in psychology, specializes in the impact of stress and anxiety on memory formation and factors that affect circadian rhythms and sleep architecture. Her courses currently include introduction to psychology and psychology laboratories.

August 22, 2018

New Faculty

New Faculty

Meet the New Faculty:

Tenure-track

Rachel Boggia

Hubert Cook

Lindsay Crawford

Mark Stelzner

C. Mara Suttmann-Lea

Yan Zhuang

Lecturers

Laura Little

Jillian Marshall

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