Photo: Back row, from left: Fernando Carvalho, Joseph Cassara, William Clark, Artel Great, Alexandra Hinck, Andrew Hongo and Lissette Jiménez. Front row, from left: Abigail Lapin Dardashti, Amanda Roberti, Macy Salzberger, Virginia Schwarz, Saromita Sengupta, Omar Sosa-Tzec and Mayuran Tiruchelvam.
The College of Liberal & Creative Arts has brought 14 new tenure-track faculty members to a mostly virtual campus, beginning their SF State careers from a distance. They include an Emmy-winning journalist from “Dateline NBC,” a researcher of anti-abortion legislation, a new Ethics Bowl adviser, two social media scholars and more.
Three of the College’s new faculty hold the first endowed chairs funded by the George and Judy Marcus Funds for Excellence in the Liberal Arts. Alumni George and Judy Marcus’ $25-million donation to SF State in 2018 established their positions. These new chairs include an activist and screenwriter who won the Audience Award at South by Southwest, an Independent Spirit Award nominee who also is an expert on African American film history and an acclaimed novelist and essayist.
The 14 assistant professors are among 37 tenure-track and tenured faculty joining SF State this year.
Fernando Carvalho is an award-winning designer, researcher and educator with more than 15 years of product-design experience. He has worked in a wide variety of professional and academic settings in the U.K., USA, Brazil, Spain, Portugal, Chile and São Tomé e Príncipe.
As a postdoctoral fellow at the University of the Arts in London, Carvalho participated in a project aimed at re-envisioning infection practices in nursing, funded by the U.K. Arts and Humanities Research Council.
He has published in European Geriatric Medicine; a forthcoming article will appear in the Journal of Research in Nursing. Carvalho has also published and presented at the Design Research Society’s Catalyst Conference, International Association of Societies of Design Research, Rio Academy and TEDxRio.
Carvalho earned his doctorate in health-care design from Loughborough University in England.
He will begin teaching in spring 2021.
Award-winning author Joseph Cassara is the George and Judy Marcus Endowed Chair in Fiction and Nonfiction.
Cassara’s “The House of Impossible Beauties” (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2018) is an imagining of characters from the 1980s documentary “Paris is Burning,” which explored New York City’s drag ball scene. It won the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, two International Latino Book Awards and the National Arts and Entertainment Journalism Award for Best Fiction Book. It was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction. Entertainment Weekly named the book of one of 2018’s best literary debuts, writing “Cassara’s brash approach is big-hearted; he seamlessly blends Spanish and English in scenes that range from mundane to painful, and builds out his cast of performers with palpable empathy.”
Cassara has also written short fiction, essays and criticism for The New York Times Style Magazine, The Boston Review and a London-based anthology, “The Queer Bible.” He has appeared at campus events presented by The Poetry Center.
He holds a Master of Fine Arts in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Will Clark comes to SF State after teaching English and American Studies at College of William and Mary. Previously, he taught at UCLA, where he received his doctorate. Before entering academia, Clark served as a grants officer for the Palo Alto-based Peninsula Open Space Trust.
Clark’s teaching emphasizes how historical formations around sexuality, race, gender and nationality provide context in helping understand today’s social, legal and literary movements. His courses trace evolutions in queerness and examine literature alongside documents in U.S. politics and law.
Clark focuses his research on modes of legal, literary and social belonging and/or exclusion. His book project is titled “Perverse Citizens: U.S. Fiction and the Conception of Queer Rights.” His work has appeared in the Henry James Review. Clark contributes reviews and essays frequently for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Artel Great is the George and Judy Marcus Endowed Chair in African American Cinema and an assistant professor of Critical Studies.
Great researches the phenomenons of Blackness and the history of Black cinema across the African diaspora. He is a contributor and editor of the forthcoming anthology “Black Cinema and Visual Culture: Art and Politics in the 21st Century” (Routledge).
As a fellow at the Cinema Research Institute, Great created Project Catalyst, an app that distributes alternative cinema created by and for communities of color.
Great is also an Independent Spirit Award-nominated filmmaker. He is the star and director of “Love Like Winter,” selected for national and international film festivals this year.
Great has held academic positions at New York University; University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; and Spelman College. His doctorate in cinema studies is from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.
Alexandra Hinck teaches courses in interpersonal communication and quantitative methods. Her research centers on identity and relational management, through the use of communication and information technologies.
Hinck explores the effects on stigma on perception of self, well-being and relationships, as well as ways individuals manage their stigma online. She is also interested in incarceration reform. Her goal is to develop a better understanding of how emerging technologies accentuate and dissipate stigmatized people, and to explore how technologies can create more inclusive communities.
One of Hinck’s manuscripts in progress is titled “Disclosing too much: Perceptions of audience and decision-making of intimate disclosures on Twitter.” Her 2017 co-written paper for CyberPsychology, Behavior and Social Networking experimented with the effects of Facebook selfies on how people judge each other. Hinck has also co-written articles Communication Theory and Communication Studies.
She earned her doctorate in communication from Cornell University.
Andrew Hongo is an Emmy Award-winning television news and documentary producer who is passionate about telling stories that matter — stories that can, he hopes, make a difference.
Hongo worked for NBC News’ “Dateline” for five years. As field producer for the primetime newsmagazine, he won an Emmy Award for Lester Holt’s interview with Barack Obama, held shortly before the president’s 2017 farewell speech. Hongo received three additional Emmy nominations for his work on “Dateline.”
Hongo filmed, produced and edited Legacy, a documentary about street children in Cambodia and the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge genocide.
He received his Master of Arts in broadcast news and documentary film from New York University.
Lissette M. Jiménez has conducted research on collections in the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, Archaeological Museum of Nemea, British Museum and Ägyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung in Berlin. As an archaeologist, she has excavated at the sites of el-Hibeh and Amheida in Egypt, Ancient Nemea and Aidonia in Greece and Pompeii in Italy.
She teaches Introduction to Museums, Introduction to Exhibits and Introduction to Museum Education Methods and Community Engagement. She also serves as an adviser for the minor in Museum Studies.
Previously, Jiménez was an associate curator at the Badè Museum of Biblical Archaeology at the Pacific School of Religion. She was also a visiting lecturer of Egyptian art and archaeology at UC Berkeley.
Jiménez earned her master’s and doctoral degrees in Near Eastern studies from UC Berkeley.
Art historian Abigail Lapin Dardashti examines modern and contemporary Latin American, Latinx and African diasporic art with a focus on international exchange, migration, racial formation and activism. Her work has received funding from the Social Science Research Council, Fulbright Program, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Mellon Foundation and the Smithsonian Institution.
Lapin Dardashti has curated exhibitions at BRIC in Brooklyn and Taller Puertorriqueño in Philadelphia. She was a curatorial fellow at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Studio Museum in Harlem and Museo de Arte Moderno in Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic.
Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals and exhibition catalogues. She has also edited volumes in Brazil, the Dominican Republic and the U.S.
Lapin Dardashti received her doctorate in art history from City University of New York.
Amanda Roberti’s areas of expertise focus on federal and state legislation on reproductive politics. She has developed a database tracking and analyzing every abortion-related bill introduced in all 50 U.S. states from 2008 to the present.
Her article “Women Deserve Better: The Use of the Pro-Woman Frame in Anti-Abortion Policies in U.S. States” will be published soon in the Journal of Women, Politics and Policy. Roberti is co-director of The Informed Consent Project, a collaboration that assesses the medical accuracy of state-mandated informed consent literature.
At SF State, Roberti teaches courses on gender and politics and the politics of sex and reproduction. For the past three years she taught political science and public policy courses at Ramapo College in New Jersey.
Roberti earned her doctorate in political science from Rutgers University.
Macy Salzberger’s research interests are in ethics and social/political philosophy, with specific interests in applied ethics, philosophy of gender and philosophy of education.
In addition to teaching, Salzberger will serve as adviser to the Ethics Bowl at SF State.
While at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Salzberger led and participated in several campus-wide events using philosophy to discuss matters of public interest, ranging from the school choice to Beyonce’s “Lemonade.” She won the university’s Tanner Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching and was an Adams Fellow with the Carolina Public Humanities.
Earlier this year Salzberger completed her Ph.D. in philosophy from University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her thesis explores the meaning and moral significance of domestic violence.
Virginia Schwarz’s research focuses on assessment, evaluation and the social and rhetorical construction of merit. Her most recent project explores contract grading and the different ways writing teachers engage this classroom practice depending on their beliefs, values, identities and contexts.
Her work appears in Composition Studies, Journal of Writing Assessment, College Composition and Communication and Critical Theory and Qualitative Data Analysis in Education.
Before SF State, Schwarz taught technical and general education writing courses at community colleges in Los Angeles; Portland, Oregon; and Madison, Wisconsin.
Schwarz earned her doctorate in composition and rhetoric from University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Paromita Sengupta, assistant professor of Media, Theory and Criticism, specializes in new media and participatory politics, humor studies and politics of the media platform. This fall she teaches Critical Study of Popular Culture and Age of Information.
Two of her forthcoming scholarly articles examine the cultural impact of the Humans of New York social-media phenomenon. They will appear in a special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures and “In Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: A Casebook” (New York University Press). Sengupta’s article on feminist humor and rape culture is accepted for publication in Feminist Media Studies later this year.
Sengupta works with activist organizations in the U.S. and India to create multimedia projects to increase social consciousness and media literacy.
She graduated with a Ph.D. in communication from University of Southern California this year. Her dissertation explores the activism behind humorous hashtags on social media.
Omar Sosa-Tzec studies design delight: how a product’s appearance and use captivate, surprise, amuse, win over and reassure people. He is passionate about interfaces, symbols, diagrams, colors, typography and flavors.
Sosa-Tzec has taught a variety of design topics in Mexico and the United States. He has developed courses for user experience, design methods and research, information architecture, human-computer interaction and interaction design.
Sosa-Tzec earned a Ph.D. in informatics, human-computer interaction design from Indiana University, Bloomington.
Tiruchelvam, the George and Judy Marcus Endowed Chair in Social Justice Fiction Filmmaking, is an award-winning screenwriter and producer with a background in activism.
His feature screenwriting debut, “The Girl Is in Trouble” (2015), starred Columbus Short and Wilmer Valderrama. Tiruechelvam’s documentary producing credits include “The Untold Tales of Armistead Maupin” (Audience Award, South by Southwest 2017) and “To Be Takei” (Sundance, 2014).
Tiruchelvam earned a Master of Fine Arts in film from Columbia University. A Sundance Institute fellow, he previously taught producing and screenwriting at Columbia and Sacred Heart universities.