FASS welcomes 22 new continuing faculty members

Adrian Ivakhiv

Professor

Global Humanities

Formerly a Professor of Environmental Thought and Culture, and Steven Rubenstein Professor in Environment and Natural Resources, at the University of Vermont, Ivakhiv’s work is focused at the intersections of environmental philosophy, cultural theory, and visual studies. His books include Claiming Sacred Ground: Pilgrims and Politics at Glastonbury and Sedona (2001), Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature (2013), and Shadowing the Anthropocene: Eco-Realism for Turbulent Times (2018). He was recently a Fulbright Scholar and Cinepoetics Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin, and is editing a volume entitled Terra Invicta: Ukrainian Wartime Reimaginings for a Habitable Earth.

Amanda Watson

Assistant Professor

Sociology and Anthropology

Watson's research interests include care, labour, social reproduction, disability, climate crisis, media representation of maternal labour and identity, and feminist pedagogy. She teaches on politics of family, global problems and the culture of capitalism, and power and conflict in Canadian society. Watson is an Associate Member of the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies. She serves on the editorial board of Gender & Society.

Current projects include Politics of Birthstrike, exploring how young adults reconcile their desires for ethical family life with resurging population control initiatives to reduce their climate footprint by having fewer children; Imagine Kin Project, investigating how young adults talk about their future relations in the context of interlocking crises; and Politics of Social Justice Parenting, new research exploring the experiences of parents of young children through pandemic closures and trends in parenting.

Amy Conroy

Lecturer

Criminology

Conroy completed her PhD in Law at the University of Ottawa. Her doctoral research focused on the discriminatory impact of familial searching of Canada’s National DNA Data Bank, particularly for Indigenous peoples in Canada. She also completed a master's degree focusing on health law & policy and more specifically on provincial substitute decision-making models relating to life-sustaining treatment.

Conroy has a broad range of teaching interests, including human rights law and social justice issues that include the criminalization of sex work, reproductive rights, privacy, intimate partner violence, and more. Prior to joining SFU, Amy worked in the healthcare sector as a researcher and privacy specialist and has consulted for the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada on various privacy-related matters.

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Amy Krauss

Assistant Professor

Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies

Krauss earned a PhD in Anthropology from Johns Hopkins University in 2017. Before joining the faculty at SFU, she held postdoctoral positions at Princeton University, the University of Chicago, and the University of California, Santa Cruz where she taught courses on critical histories of global health and humanitarianism, illness and embodiment, and feminist theories of justice and care. Her first book, Friendship as Disobedience: Abortion Law and Feminist Worldmaking in Mexico draws on collaborative activist-ethnography with acompañantes—abortion care workers and doulas—to trace how people seeking to end pregnancy navigate jurisdictions of rights and criminalization and the bonds of complicity that form in the process. Her writing has been published in South Atlantic Quarterly, American Anthropologist, Revista Direito GV, Feminist Theory, and Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness. 

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Anas Atakora

Lecturer

French

Atakora holds a PhD in French studies and African francophone literatures from Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS. Author of 7 books and numerous collaborations, his research focuses on theories of fantasy, image, postcolonial and extreme contemporary in African literatures written or translated into French. Atakora is a 2015 University of Iowa Honorary Fellow for International Writing Program.

Andrea Krusi

Assistant Professor

Criminology

Krüsi leads a research program at the intersection of criminal law, policing, and public health. Her research focuses on how criminal laws, policing and stigma interact with structural vulnerabilities to shape experiences of gender-based violence, HIV/STI risks, and access to healthcare in criminalized and marginalized populations.

Krüsi’s research is grounded in principles of community-based research and draws on critical social science scholarship, including the intersectionality paradigm. She uses multiple research techniques, including qualitative/arts-based methods and longitudinal cohort data from two longstanding cohort studies of sex workers and women living with HIV. 

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Cynthia Xie

Senior Lecturer

World Languages and Literatures

Xie's research focuses on Chinese language pedagogy and learning dispositions rooted in the Confucian learning tradition. She completed her MA in Applied Linguistics at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland and her PhD in Education at SFU.

Since 2005, Xie has been responsible for the Chinese language training in the SFU-ZJU (Zhejiang University) Dual Degree Program in Computing Science. In addition to language instruction, her work encompasses curriculum design, course development, assessment, and coordination with the partner university.

Janice Jeong

Assistant Professor

History

Jeong’s research has focused on diasporic and diplomatic networks forged by Chinese Muslim (Hui) actors between the western coasts of Saudi Arabia, mainland China (including Shanghai, Beijing, and Gansu/Qinghai regions), and Taiwan over the twentieth century. Her broad interests include history and anthropology, Muslim societies and their transnational entanglements, and inter-Asian connections. Her works have appeared in journals such as History and Anthropology and Modern Asian Studies. Before joining Simon Fraser University, she earned her PhD degree in History at Duke University and was a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Göttingen, Germany.

Jaskwaan A. Bedard

Instructor

Linguistics - Indigenous Languages Program

Bedard is a Haida language educator and advocate from G̱aw Tlagée – Massett, Haida Gwaii. Her PhD is in Individualized Interdisciplinary Studies spanning Education, Linguistics, and Indigenous Studies. Bedard's research looks to strengthen Indigenous languages, and her dissertation is titled “X̱aad Kíhlga Tl’a Guusuugiigang: A Haida Research Framework Applied to X̱aad Kil Immersion” and aims to provide a pathway for specialized Massett Haida language immersion guided by Haida community, laws, and values. Bedard is a translator of X̱aad Kíl and teaches the Haida language as well as Indigenous languages and histories.

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Jeanne Essame

Assistant Professor

History

Essame was born and raised in Tours, France. She went to the University of Tours for her undergraduate and graduate studies. Before heading to Madison, WI for a MA in Afro-American studies and a PhD in History, Essame taught French as a second language at the University of Pittsburgh and at CU Boulder, worked in banking, and worked at a middle-school in southern France. In Madison, she grew interested in topics related to the Caribbean, black activism, the Black diaspora, and visual culture. Between 2019 and 2023, Essame held positions in American History at Bates college and Africana Studies at WPI.

Kamala Todd

Practitioner Associate Professor

Urban Studies

Todd is a Métis-Cree mother, community planner, filmmaker, curator, and educator born and raised in the unceded lands now known as Vancouver. She has a Master’s degree in urban Geography from UBC. Todd was the City of Vancouver’s first Indigenous Arts and Culture Planner and first Aboriginal Social Planner. She was part of the team who created the Vancouver UNDRIP Strategy and works as an advisor on Indigenous relations. She is Director of Indigenous City Media, and her film and TV credits include Indigenous Plant Diva, Cedar and Bamboo, and Coyote Science. In 2024, Todd was selected for the Indigenous Arts: Story Sharing residency at Banff Centre. She is a research collaborator on the SAGA project, an international project looking at more-than-English languages of sustainability. 

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Kevin Laughren

Lecturer

Economics

Laughren returns to SFU from Queen's University, where he spent the last three years as a lecturer and postdoctoral fellow. At Queen's, he developed new courses in principles of economics for business students, and machine learning for MSc students. Laughren received a PhD in economics from SFU in 2021 under the supervision of David Freeman (with whom he recently published a paper on procrastination in Experimental Economics) and the late Jasmina Arifovic (who inspired him to learn, and subsequently teach, machine learning).

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Maral Augilera-Moradipour

Assistant Professor

World Languages and Literatures
Global Asia

Aguilera-Moradipour is an assistant professor in Asian refugee literatures and cultures. After completing her PhD at the University of Western Ontario in English Language and Literature and a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Toronto Scarborough, in Media Studies, she joined Simon Fraser University in the Department of World Languages and Literatures and the Global Asia Program. She has published in literary and academic journals such as English Studies in Canada (ESC) and Postcolonial Text and is a member of the interdisciplinary Critical Refugee and Migration Studies network of Canada.

Margaret Hall

Professor - BC Notaries Chair in Applied Legal Studies

Criminology

Hall BA, LLB, LLM, PhD is a professor in the School of Criminology, and holder of the Society of Notaries Public of British Columbia Endowed Professorship in Applied Legal Studies. Hall’s research brings together doctrinal analysis with qualitative research methods. Her areas of research interest include: tort law; health law; vulnerability theory; mental capacity; law and aging; and medical assistance in dying. Prior to joining SFU, Hall was an Associate Professor in the Thompson Rivers University Faculty of Law (where she was a founding faculty member) and, prior to that, worked in law reform.

Marie Ouellet

Assistant Professor

Criminology

Ouellet's research uses network science to explore how relationships and interactions shape offending patterns, criminal mobility, and group evolution. She is currently leading a longitudinal study on police networks that aims to understand how officers form social relationships, and the impact of these networks on police behavior, particularly in relation to misconduct and weapon use. Her work on these topics has received more than one million dollars in support from the National Science Foundation's Early CAREER Award, the National Collaborative of Gun Violence Research, and the US Department of Homeland Security.

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Peter Leavitt

Lecturer

Psychology

Since completing his PhD at the University of Arizona in 2016, Leavitt has held teaching positions at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania and at Indiana State University in Terre Haute, Indiana. Leavitt's teaching and research interests include a range of topics in social and cultural psychology, such as the psychology of social class and socioeconomic inequality, intergroup relations, and connecting across differences. His work is motived by a fascination with all the subtle but fundamental ways in which human psychology is shaped by the places and groups we are part of.

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Qiu Lin

Assistant Professor

Philosophy

Lin completed her PhD at Duke under the advising of Katherine Brading in July 2022. Lin's main research areas are early modern philosophy, history and philosophy of science, and Chinese philosophy, especially Chinese Islamic philosophy (yes it exists, and richly so!).

Lin's work has received awards from the Philosophy of Science Association Women’s Caucus (now renamed as the DEI Caucus), the British Society for the History of Philosophy, and the Metaphysical Society of America; additionally, she has also won two sub-grants from major John Templeton projects (see “Awards” section on her CV).

Lin obtained her BA from St. John’s College in Maryland, where she did the Great Books Program and fell for philosophy because it was so much fun. Lin then went to Tufts University for an MA in Philosophy to start trying to turn this fun-to-do thing into a career.

Robert Bandringa

Assistant Professor of Professional Practice

Indigenous Studies

Faculty profile

rupak shrestha

Assistant Professor

International Studies
Global Asia

rupak is a political geographer primarily interested in questions of sovereignty, territory, indigeneity, borders, and placemaking in South Asia and in diasporic spaces globally. His research is centered around the question: How is sovereignty realized in the everyday? His ongoing research is situated among Himalayan Indigenous peoples and Tibetan refugees, who share memories of kinship and intimate partnerships that shape the communal pasts and futures of these two groups. rupak completed a PhD in Geography from the University of Colorado Boulder. He has previously taught at Eckerd College and Macalester College.

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Sev Hou

Assistant Professor

Economics

Hou obtained his PhD from the Vancouver School of Economics, UBC, in July, 2021. He is currently an assistant professor at the Department of Economics, SFU. Before joining SFU, Lin was an assistant professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen.

Lin's research interest is in Macroeconomics, Monetary Economics, and Macro-Development, with specific focus on expectation formation, learning, and information acquisition. He also has a special interest in utilizing Deep Learning tools to solve economic problems.

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Victor Aguiar

Associate Professor

Economics

Aguiar earned his PhD in Economics from Brown University and began his academic career as an Assistant Professor at the University of Western Ontario (UWO). His research, blending Microeconomic Theory and Econometrics with computational methods, earned him tenure and promotion to Associate Professor, Grimes Fellow, and Professor of the Year at the graduate level at UWO. In 2024, he joined SFU Economics, where he continues exploring decision-making models that account for stochastic human behavior and measurement imperfections. Aguiar has published extensively in top academic journals and taught courses in decision theory, microeconomics, and computational economics.

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Zara Anwarzai

Assistant Professor 

Philosophy

Anwarzai received her PhD from Indiana University in Philosophy and in Cognitive Science in 2024. Her current work focuses on the social dimension of skill and expertise. Specifically, Anwarzai is interested in how to apply traditional inquiry into the cognitive and epistemological mechanisms involved in skill (which mainly focuses on individual skilled performers) to skills acquired and expressed by pairs or groups, like team sports or ensemble performances. She has done empirical work on the evolution of human tool use and manufacture. She also has broad interests in social ontology (e.g. the nature of collectives, shared agency, and group dynamics) and the philosophy of work (e.g. the phenomenology of automaticity in the workplace, the structure of skilled action at work, the relationship between standards of expertise and capital).