FASS welcomes 19 new faculty members to our departments, schools, and programs

According to her research website, Dr. Chelsey Geralda Armstrong’s work includes “the identification and study of ancient forest garden ecosystems, impacts of logging and mining on ethnobotanically important plants and Indigenous lifeways, and the evolution of the Malus genus.”

Dr. Nadine Attewell joins SFU as an Associate Professor in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies and incoming director of the undergraduate program in Global Asia. Although Nadine’s arrival at SFU marks a new chapter in her life, it also represents a return, since she was born and grew up in suburban Vancouver (on xʷməθkʷəy̓əm land/in Richmond, to be more precise). After completing her PhD at Cornell, she spent ten years in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster, where she published and taught in the fields of Asian and Asian diasporic studies, feminist and queer theory, visual studies, postcolonial and Indigenous studies, and British imperial studies.

Dr. Beauvais is interested in how inequalities shape communication and action, producing unequal political influence between different social group members. Her research areas include the study of political communication, deliberation and democratic innovation; gender and politics; and racial, ethnic and settler-colonial politics. 

Dr. Nicolas Bommarito’s research focuses on questions in virtue ethics, moral psychology, and Buddhist philosophy with a focus on Tibetan Buddhism. He speaks Tibetan and has language certification from Tibet University. Bommarito’s most recent book, Seeing Clearly: A Buddhis Guide to Life was release by Oxford University Press in July 2020. 

Dr. Minjie Deng's research interests focus on in international macroeconomics specifically on topics related to the sovereign debt crisis and its interactions with households and firm dynamics. 

Dr. Encalada Grez is a transnational labour scholar and community-labour organizer committed to critical sociology and decolonial theories of knowledge production that centers diverse ways of knowing and precarious workers’ experiences within the margins of the global economy. 

Dr. May Farrales is an interdisciplinary scholar whose teaching and research are animated by questions of racialization, queer politics, and logics of power fundamental to colonial, empire-building, and capitalist projects.

As a new instructor in the School of Criminology, Dr. Colton Fehr's research includes; criminal law, criminal procedure, constitutional law, philosophy of law, evidence, privacy, comparative law.

Dr. Sarah Henzi is a settler scholar whose research focuses on Indigenous popular culture, futurisms, and new media, in both English and French. She is also Assistant Editor for Francophone Writing for Canadian Literature, a member of the editorial board of Studies in American Indian Literatures, and Secretary of the Indigenous Literary Studies Association.

Dr. Brianne Kent is a translational neuroscientist who comes to SFU having completed a postdoc at the University of British Columbia. She has a PhD from the University of Cambridge, an MSc from Yale University and BA from Simon Fraser University. Her research areas include learning and memory, sleep, circadian rhythms, and memory loss associated with Alzheimer's disease.

Dr. Diana Lim joined the Department of Psychology this year as a lecturer. She comes to SFU with a PhD in Neuroscience from the University of British Columbia and her research interests include a focus on neuroplasticity, network analysis and stroke recovery. 

Dr. Shannon Linning's research and teaching interests include environmental criminology; crime and place; crime prevention; crime science; place management; urban redevelopment; community criminology.

Helene Love, S.J.D. joins the School of Criminology as a lecturer. Prior to coming to SFU she completed her LL.B. and LL.M. at the University of British Columbia and her S.J.D. at the University of Toronto. She has also worked as a litigator at Stikeman Elliott LLP and worked in administrative and program development roles at the University of British Columbia Faculty of Law. Her research interests include evidence, ageism, and the criminal justice system. 

Dr. Mohsen Javadani is a labour economist/applied econometrician with wide research interests that include economics of gender, economics of immigration and minorities, economics of education, and personnel economics. He has also been interested in examining different aspects of the economics discipline, including views among economists and economics students, and the role of ideological bias in shaping these views.

Dr. Maureen Kihika is a race and labour scholar with teaching and research interests in Africa/African Diaspora, global political economy, migration, Race and ethnicity, gender, feminism, labour/work and identity formation. Her work analyses how categories of social difference shape the experiences and identities of racialized Black workers and their communities.

Dr. Alexandra King is interested in moral and aesthetic oughts, reasons, and normativity. Within the field of aesthetics philosophy, she is interested in an assortment of issues, including subtlety, high and low art, aesthetic/artistic agency, and applied arts. She also runs and writes for the aesthetics and philosophy of art blog Aesthetics for Birds, which aims to make concepts and arguments in academic aesthetics accessible to a wide, public audience.

Dr. Megan MacKenzie is an expert on women in war and military culture, with a focus on military sexual violence, women in combat roles, military suicide, as well as issues related to post-conflict transitions and feminist solutions to ending war. MacKenzie’s research questions stem from an interdisciplinary perspective and she is interested in generating conversations between diverse areas of study, which she believes are required to truly understand complex security issues.

Dr. Cristina Moretti is an urban anthropologist who is interested in the politics of public space and in the relationship between sensory emplacement, vision, local visual cultures, and city spaces. Her other research interests include experimental ethnography; the Anthropology of education and schools as institutions; bureaucracy, archives and texts; the Anthropology of time; neoliberalism, precarity, and immigration; and the Anthropology of Italy.

Dr. Kyle Willmott's research is focused on questions of political and economic sociology, and Indigenous policy. His research for his doctoral thesis specifically focused on how people come to see their relationships with others through the prism of taxation. His examination of the interaction between taxpayer identity with liberalism and settler colonialism sheds light on how and why people talk about politics through the lens of taxation.