New year, new faces: Meet the incomi
Susana Antunes
Jue Chen
Jonah Gaster
Assistant professor, Spanish and Portuguese
Assistant professor, Foreign Languages & Literature
Assistant professor, Mathematical Sciences
PhD 2017, University of Massachusetts-Amherst Previously Coordinator of the Portuguese Program and lecturer at UWM Research focus: Portuguese, Brazilian, and Lusophone Contemporary Literature, with a specialization in Travel Poetry. Current projects: I am working on a book based on the idea of itinerancy as a vital element of human existence. This book scrutinizes and reevaluates the corpus of poems integrating Jorge de Sena’s and Cecília Meireles’ “travel poetry,” proposing poetic itineraries bearing their own itineraries. My research establishes the itineraries from “travel poem” to “walk-poem,” redefines the idea of “travel poem” and proposes new perspectives of analysis for poems that can be classified as “walkpoems”. Fun fact: Jorge de Sena’s birthday, one of the two authors I worked in my dissertation, is on the same day I was born.
10 • IN FOCUS • September, 2019
PhD 2016, Princeton University Previously Visiting Assistant Professor at Kalamazoo College Research focus: Chinese literature, with current focus on medieval and early modern (700-1400) Chinese poetry. Research discoveries: In recent years I have been researching the literary activities of Chan Buddhist monks in early modern China. So far they have not been well studied as participants in literary activities; I hope my work will in the end be able to achieve a new account of the literary and intellectual history of China from the 10th to the 14th centuries. Current project: After finishing my first project on Du Fu (712-770), who is often referred to as “China’s Shakespeare,” I am now about to start a new project on Chan Buddhist communities and Chan poetry in Song (960-1279) and Yuan (1271-1368) China. Fun fact: I like cooking! I’m looking forward to inviting colleagues to my home and enjoy beer, wine, and homemade Chinese cuisine.
PhD 2014, University of Illinois Chicago Previously CRM-ISM Postdoctoral Fellow at McGill University Research focus: My work is in geometric topology and geometric group theory. Broadly speaking, this subject is about shapes of spaces. Specifically, I tend to spend my time thinking about geometric structures on surfaces and three-dimensional spaces, and curves and graphs associated to such spaces. Current project: In ongoing work with Brice Loustau, we are studying combinatorial approximations of harmonic maps (aka very wellbalanced maps) between hyperbolic surfaces -- these are surfaces that are endowed with a particularly nice kind of geometry. Fun fact: My wife, Elly Fishman, is an award-winning journalist (formerly an editor of Chicago Magazine) who will also be joining the campus community this fall. She’ll be teaching a class about magazine feature writing in the Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies Department.
