The College of Liberal & Creative Arts welcomes three tenure-track faculty members to its ranks this year: an endowed chair of poetry, a historian and theorist of animation and a health-care service designer.
Tonya M. Foster, Creative Writing
Tonya M. Foster is the George and Judy Marcus Endowed Chair in Poetry. Her books include “A Swarm of Bees in High Court” (Belladonna, 2015), the bilingual chapbook “La Grammaire des Os” (joca seria, 2016) and the full-length collection “A Mathematics of Chaose: Thingification” (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2021).
During a fellowship last year at Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, Foster completed a “AHotB,” a book-length poetry manuscript that explores Fannie Lou Hamer’s idea that “a Black woman’s body is never hers alone.”
Foster has also landed fellowships from the Ford Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, MacDowell Colony, Headlands Center for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts and Pan-African Literary Festival. She received the 2020 Creative Capital Award for “Monkey Talk,” a multidisciplinary project on surveillance, aesthetics and race. She is an editor of Fence Magazine and the African American Review. She earned her Ph.D. in English from the City University of New York.
Foster is among four 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.
Mihaela Mihailova, Cinema
Mihaela Mihailova focuses her research on animation history and theory, film and media theory, aesthetics, visual effects and emergent media, Soviet and post-Soviet cinema, and video games.
She is editor of the book “Coraline: A Closer Look at Studio LAIKA’s Stop-Motion Witchcraft” (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021). She also serves as co-editor of a journal, Animation Studies, and secretary of the Society for Animation Studies. Recent articles have been published in Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, and Feminist Media Studies.
Mihailova joins SF State from University of Michigan. There, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the film, television and media and a faculty associate in the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.
She holds three degrees from Yale University, including a Ph.D. in film and media studies and Slavic languages and literatures.
Fernando Carvalho, Design
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. He will teach courses in product design.
Carvalho’s work explores how design in health-care environments can foster healthier relationships and behavior. 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.
Carvalho has published in European Geriatric Medicine and the Journal of Research in Nursing. He has also published and presented at the Design Research Society’s Catalyst Conference, the International Association of Societies of Design Research, Rio Academy and TEDxRio.
Carvalho earned his doctorate in health-care design from Loughborough University.