The College of Humanities is pleased to welcome new faculty for the upcoming academic year.
“These are outstanding scholars who represent the breadth and diversity of Humanities scholarship and teaching,” said Dorrance Dean Alain-Philippe Durand. “Their expertise in languages and cultures around the world will further our mission of graduating students equipped with the skills they need to succeed on the global job market.”
Santa Arias, Professor and Department Head
Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Santa Arias (Ph.D. Wisconsin-Madison) is Professor and Head in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Her current teaching and research highlight the critical importance of space, place, and nature in cultural products produced under colonialism. She deploys a transoceanic perspective to study early modern Iberian colonial-imperial engagements (XV-XIX), focusing on historiography, geographical discourses, and visual representation. Her transdisciplinary critical approach and heavy reliance on archival research distinguish her training of students and her contributions to the advancement of scholarship in colonial studies. She has published numerous essays in academic journals and edited volumes. Her books include Retórica, historia y polémica: Bartolomé de las Casas y la tradición intelectual renacentista (2001) and five co-edited volumes: Mapping Colonial Spanish America: Places and Commonplaces of Identity, Culture, and Experience (2002), Approaches to Teaching the Writings of Bartolomé de las Casas (2008), The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2008), and Coloniality, Religion, and the Law in the Early Iberian World (2013) and The Routledge Companion to Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean (1492-1898) (2020). Her second monograph (in final stages), The Nature of Empire: Geo/graphing the Tropics during the Enlightenment, explores the centrality of geographical thinking in late colonial discourses on the tropical Americas. For this book project, she was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and a CIES/Fulbright Fellowship to Colombia. She has begun work in the book project Entanglements from San Juan: The Imperial-Colonial Paradox of Enlightenment at a Caribbean Frontier.
Jacqueline Barrios, Assistant Professor
Department of Public and Applied Humanities
Jacqueline Barrios studies the global 19th century, literature, and the city, which she extends in interdisciplinary, socially engaged projects within the public humanities. Her current scholarship investigates London-Pacific trans-urban imaginaries—geographies of East Asian Pacific Rim entanglement with the British capital. As a member and former teaching fellow of UCLA’s Urban Humanities Initiative, a research program linking architecture, urban planning, and humanities scholars, she co-leads DIGITAL SALON, using podcasts to explore emergent research and artistic practices for remaking and reimagining the city. Her interdisciplinary interests are expressed by embedding her scholarship within communities as founder of LitLabs, a public humanities project hub fusing visual performing arts and site-specific research with the study of literary texts, in order to document, animate and uplift the life-worlds of communities who interpret them.
Adrian Chubb, Lecturer
Department of German Studies
Adrian earned his PhD in Germanic Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2021. His research focuses on the interaction between the political world and literary and cultural production within the expanding public sphere in the post-War Federal Republic, and particularly in the 1960s and 1970s. Additional areas of interest include German thought from the Enlightenment to Critical Theory, theories of the public sphere, and cultural representations the German protest and terrorist movements. His dissertation analyzed the links between Günter Grass's political speeches and essays and his literary work. Adrian attended the University of Lancaster, Lancaster, UK, where he obtained a BA in German and Russian Studies and an MA in German Studies. He has taught at Illinois State University and Middlebury College and, outside of academia, has worked in corporate and marketing communications, computer programming, and data and systems analysis in Germany and the USA.
Brian Gravely, Visiting Assistant Professor
Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Brian Gravely finished his Ph.D. in Romance Languages from the University of Georgia with a concentration in linguistics (specifically, syntax) in 2021. His dissertation, Language acquisition and endogenous grammar change: the rise of Galician complementizer agreement, focused on applying empirical and theoretical data from the psycholinguistic literature in order to explain typologically rare grammar change. Outside of academia, Brian enjoys traveling, cooking, and hiking with his miniature dachshund Pep (pictured).
Harris Kornstein, Assistant Professor
Department of Public and Applied Humanities
Harris Kornstein is a scholar and artist whose research and art practice focuses on digital culture, surveillance, data and algorithms, media art/activism, visual culture, and queer theory. Their current book project documents queer and trans cultural strategies that mobilize techniques of play, misuse, and obfuscation to counter surveillance capitalism—a process he theorizes as "queer enchantment." His research has been published in Surveillance & Society, Curriculum Inquiry, Studies in Gender & Sexuality, and the International Encyclopedia of Gender, Media, and Communication, and his writing on digital culture has appeared in The Guardian, Wired, and Salon, among others. He has served as a managing editor for Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, a web designer for the NYU Center for Disability Studies project Disability & Covid Chronicles, and on the board of Drag Queen Story Hour. As a media artist, curator, and drag queen, they have presented work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Institute for Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, International Symposium on Electronic Art, ONE Archives, Apex Art, and numerous other universities, galleries, and festivals. Harris holds a PhD in Media, Culture & Communication from NYU, an MFA in Digital Arts & New Media from UC Santa Cruz, and a BA from Swarthmore College. Harris uses any pronoun.
Barbara Weinlich, Lecturer
Department of Religious Studies and Classics
Born in the U.S., and educated in four different countries, Barbara Weinlich earned her Ph.D. in Classical Philology at the Goethe University in Frankfurt / Main. Prior to coming to the University of Arizona, she has taught, among others, at the University of California at Santa Barbara and at Vanderbilt University. Barbara Weinlich is a Latinist with publications on the poetry of the post-Triumviral and proto-Imperial era as well as on Studies of the Classical Reception. She is particularly interested in pinpointing the political dimension of Roman Love Elegy. Her current book-in-progress offers a new perspective on the nature of the meta-political discourse that informs and unifies the four books of elegies of Propertius. Her research has been funded by major institutions, including Harvard’s Loeb Classical Library Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).