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FASS welcomes 25 new continuing faculty members

September 13, 2023

This year, Simon Fraser University's Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) welcomes 25 new continuing faculty members whose diverse areas of expertise and professional experience will further advance our dedication to teaching and research excellence.

Our latest faculty additions span across 15 different departments and programs within FASS. Their combined research and teaching excellence in the arts, humanities, and social sciences will greatly improve the student learning experience, elevate FASS' research profile, and advance our understanding of the world around us.

Adele Quigley-McBride

Assistant Professor

Psychology

After completing her PhD at Iowa State University, Adele Quigley-McBride was a postdoctoral associate at the Wilson Center for Science and Justice at Duke Law. Her research centers on cognitive bias, decision making, and judgments in the legal system, such as causes of errors in forensic analyses and eyewitness identifications, lay understanding of forensic and eyewitness evidence, and plea bargaining processes.

Ali Bhagat

Associate Professor

Public Policy

Bhagat works largely on the topic of refugee/migration policy and racial equity. His forthcoming book Governing the Displaced: Race and Ambivalence in Global Capitalism examines urban refugee survival in Paris, France and Nairobi, Kenya. As an international political economist, he is interested in the intersections of race, class, and sexuality and has worked on issues pertaining to LGBTQ+ refugees in particular. Starting Fall 2023, he serves as the director for the new public policy undergraduate minor program.

Alix Shield

Lecturer

Indigenous Studies

Shield’s research uses contemporary digital humanities methods to analyze collaboratively authored 20th and 21st century Indigenous literatures in Canada. She recently published a new edition of Johnson's Legends of Vancouver, retitled Legends of the Capilano, in collaboration with descendants of the Capilanos. In her work supporting a SSHRC-funded project to build a digital database of Indigenous authors in Northern North America, she dealt extensively in archival research, digitization, Drupal website development, and digital humanities skills training.

Alyssa Croft

Lecturer

Psychology

After receiving her PhD in 2016 at the University of British Columbia, Alyssa Croft joined the University of Arizona as an assistant professor. Fascinated by social roles, identity, and group membership, Croft is on a pursuit to discover why people are constrained by invisible psychological barriers, such as stereotypes and societal norms.

Amanda Butler

Assistant Professor

Criminology

Butler’s research covers a broad range of topics at the intersections of health and justice. She specializes in mental health, substance use, criminal justice systems, health care transitions, prison health, policing, harm reduction, and epidemiology. Butler completed her MA in Criminology and PhD in Health Sciences at SFU, with her doctoral thesis examining the prevalence of mental health and substance use disorders among people who experience incarceration and the profiles of people most likely to be reincarcerated over time.

Andy Yan

Associate Professor of Professional Practice

Urban Studies

Yan has worked extensively in the non-profit and private urban planning sectors with projects in the metropolitan regions in the United States and Canada. He specializes in the fields of urban regeneration, applied demographics, geographic information systems, neighborhood development, public outreach, and quantitative research. He is a registered professional planner with the Canadian Institute of Planners. Yan is also director of SFU’s City Program and serves on the board of directors for Planning Institute of British Columbia and Jack Webster Foundation.

Bryan Myles

Lecturer

Indigenous Studies

Myles’ research focuses on the artistic expressions and material and visual belongings of Coastal First Peoples, Indigenous heritage stewardship, and the intersections of new media and Indigenous cultural heritage. He completed a MA in anthropology at Carleton University and an interdisciplinary PhD in communications, art, and technology at SFU, where he completed his doctoral thesis on Bill Reid’s Tupperware Fleet: Meaning and Agency in the Cultural Lives of Four Haida Canoes. He is also the current associate director of SFU’s Bill Reid Centre.

Cornel Bogle

Assistant Professor

English

Bogle writes, researches, and teaches in the fields of Black, Caribbean, and Canadian literatures; creative writing studies; auto/biography studies; postcolonial, Black Atlantic, and diaspora studies; and critical race, gender, and sexuality studies. Bogle’s critical and creative writing has been published in various journals, magazines, and books. Cornel also serves as an associate editor of the Journal of West Indian Literature.

Evan Freeman

Assistant Professor

Global Humanities

Freeman is also the Hellenic Canadian Congress of BC Chair in Hellenic Studies. His research focuses on Byzantine ritual objects, mobility, monumental church art, and materiality. He completed his PhD at Yale University and held an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Smarthistory, the Center for Public Art History, and an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Regensburg in Germany.

Helene Love

Assistant Professor

Criminology

Love first joined SFU in 2018 as a lecturer before moving to her current research faculty position. Prior to SFU, Love worked as a litigator at Stikeman Elliott LLP, then worked in administrative and program development roles at the University of British Columbia Faculty of Law. She has published her research on evidence, ageism, and the criminal justice system in a number of peer reviewed journals. She currently sits on the steering committee for the Centre for Restorative Justice and coordinates the SFU Criminology Field Practice Program.

Jason Brown

Lecturer

Global Humanities

Brown was born and raised in California and studied anthropology as an undergraduate at Brigham Young University. His master's work is in forestry and theology from Yale University. He completed his PhD in 2017 from the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability (IRES) at the University of British Columbia. His dissertation focused on the sense of place of Roman Catholic monks in the American West. He teaches courses in the humanities and environmental studies.

Joanna Peplak

Assistant Professor

Psychology

Peplak’s research investigates children's moral emotional development and the ways in which emotions guide children to do right or wrong. She also explores the role of group dynamics, parent and peer socialization processes, and cultural factors in children's emotional development. She incorporates both qualitative and quantitative methods in her work, and employs multiple approaches to creatively and accurately measure her phenomena in question. Her research has implications for parents, teachers, and policy makers who wish to promote child-, family- and community-level health.

Joanne Leow

Associate Professor

English

A Canada Research Chair in Translational and Decolonial Digital Humanities, Leow’s work critiques colonial conceptions of digital humanities projects by centering under-represented communities and their histories in Canada and Asia. Her research focuses on rethinking how and for whom digital archives are created, and seeks to ensure that diversity, equity, and inclusion are built into the ways in which digital data is classified, organized and disseminated. Her ongoing research uses digital tools to shape our understanding of contested (post)colonial spaces in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Vancouver, and transnational Asian food stories and pathways.

Joel Akinwumi

Instructor

World Languages & Literatures and French

Akinwumi’s current research focuses on the depiction of historical forgetting in six postcolonial African and Caribbean novels. His latest articles appeared in Nouvelles Etudes Francophones and Alternative francophone. He is currently a PhD candidate at UBC where he has worked as a research assistant on various projects and taught courses ranging from elementary to advanced levels of French. Prior to joining SFU, he also taught at Corpus Christi College in Vancouver.

Mariam Georgis

Assistant Professor

Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies

Georgis holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Alberta specializing in international relations and comparative politics of the global South. Her research is located at the nexus of global politics, critical Indigenous studies, and Middle East studies. Her work centres Indigeneity, race, and gender to look at global security issues, colonialism/decolonialism, conflict in the global South, Indigenous nationhood, and solidarity movements.

Mei Lan Fang

Assistant Professor

Urban Studies & Gerontology

Fang's primary research contribution has focused on progressing community-based participatory research concepts, theory, and methods for co-creating healthy, inclusive age-friendly places and environments. Her research approach is transdisciplinary, participatory, community-focused and qualitative through applying narrative and visual co-creation methods, and integrated knowledge translation techniques. Fang is also a Visiting Scholar in the School of Health Sciences at the University of Dundee, Scotland.

Michael Gilraine

Assistant Professor

Economics

Gilraine comes from New York University where he taught for the last five years, after earning his PhD from the University of Toronto in 2017. As a Faculty Research Fellow with the National Bureau of Economic Research, his current research focuses on the economics of education, exploring topics such as correlations between air pollution and student achievement, the effects of public housing on children, and issues surrounding school choice and intergenerational wealth.

Nazanin Shahrokni

Associate Professor

International Studies

Shahrokni has a Ph.D in Sociology from UC Berkeley. She is a feminist scholar who uses the ethnographic moment as an entry into global processes, linking the local and the personal to the global, and discerning the global in the vernacular and the personal. Her scholarly work is located at the intersection of feminist geography, gender and globalization, gender politics, and ethnographies of the state in Iran, the Middle East, and beyond.

Nicholas Reo

Associate Professor

Indigenous Studies

Reo is an enrolled member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians. He uses Indigenous methodologies to study and participate in Indigenous knowledge, Indigenous land and sea tenure, and Indigenous language revitalization. His research interests include the ways traditional ecological knowledge, ecosystem stewardship, and socio-ecological adaptation contribute to sustainability in the context of rapid environmental change. Reo’s recent work studies tribal participation in polycentric environmental governance and large-scale, Indigenous-led stewardship of riparian ecosystems.

Prof-Collins Ifeonu

Assistant Professor

Sociology & Anthropology

Ifeonu is nearing the completion of his doctoral degree in sociology from the University of Alberta. He has a broad range of academic interests, particularly on the intricate connections between Canada’s labor, migration, and education policy, and their subsequent effects on the lived experiences of racialized international students. His doctoral research is a qualitative exploration of the social and political integration of international students from sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean in Canada. This project centers the sense-making processes of these students as they assess their decisions to further their education in Canada, relationship to Black-themed racial justice organizing, and navigation of several forms of precarity.

Sepideh Fotovatian

Lecturer

Economics

Fotovatian completed her PhD in education from Monash University, Australia and her postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Calgary. When she joined the Department of Economics, Fotovatian redesigned and redeveloped a new interdisciplinary course while advocating co-teaching as an effective delivery method. Since then, she has been co-teaching the course while serving as a teaching and curriculum development resource for the department. In her pedagogy, she applies her knowledge of sociocultural theory and identity negotiation in teaching academic literacy.

Shivaji Mukherjee

Assistant Professor

Political Science

A Somjee Chair in Indian Political Development, Mukherjee’s research interests lie in state formation, legacies of colonial institutions, and other types of political violence in South Asia like the Kashmir insurgency and Hindu-Muslim violence and vigilantism. His research shows that historical legacies of state formation and land inequality matter to explain post-colonial insurgency and conflict, and urges the civil war scholarship to take history seriously – a topic he explored in his book, Colonial Institutions and Civil War: Indirect Rule and Maoist Insurgency in India.

Spyros Sofos

Assistant Professor

Global Humanities

Sofos’ research explores the intersection of societal insecurity, identity, and collective action and, to date, it has focused on Turkish politics and society, nationalism and populism in Europe and the Middle East, European Muslim identities and politics, and the theory of populism. His latest book, Turkish Politics and ‘The People’: Mass Mobilisation and Populism (Edinburgh University Press 2022), explores the emergence of populism in contemporary Turkey from a genealogical perspective. Sofos also initiated #RethinkingPopulism, originally in partnership with openDemocracy, and is its lead editor.

Theresa Pauly

Assistant Professor

Gerontology

Pauly is a Canada Research Chair in Social Relationships, Health, and Aging who studies how psychosocial factors shape health and well-being across the adult lifespan. She completed her PhD in daily stress hormone secretion in older couples at the University of British Columbia and worked as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. Her work is interdisciplinary – in psychology, gerontology, physiology – and as such she has expertise in health and aging from a biopsychosocial perspective, including interconnections between biomarkers of health, psychological aspects of well-being, and daily social contexts.

William Scott

Assistant Professor

Public Policy

Scott’s research interests focus on analyzing climate and energy policy to help us better understand how alternative approaches to decarbonization manage trade-offs between environmental, economic, and social objectives. He has also testified before Canada's Senate Committee on Energy, Natural Resources and the Environment and presented to the federal environment ministers of Canada, the United States, and Mexico at the Commission for Environmental Cooperation Ministerial. Prior to joining SFU, Will worked at the University of Ottawa's Smart Prosperity Institute and the United Nations Environment Programme in the Economy and Trade Branch.

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