Meet the new Letters & Science faculty

Susana Antunes

Assistant professor, Spanish and Portuguese

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.

Jue Chen

Assistant professor, Foreign Languages & Literature

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.

Jonah Gaster

Assistant professor, Mathematical Sciences

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.

Derek Handley

Assistant professor, English

PhD 2018, Carnegie Mellon University

Previously Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at Lehigh University

Research focus: African American Rhetoric, Rhetorical History, and Rhetorics of Place. I’m currently looking at responses to urban renewal in the 1950’s and 1960’s within the context of the Black Freedom Movement.

Goals for the year: To make significant progress on my book project, “The Places We Knew So Well Are No More:’ A Rhetorical History of Urban Renewal and the Black Freedom Movement,” which looks at the rhetorical strategies and tactics used by African-American communities in Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, and St. Paul as they resisted urban renewal. The book shows how African Americans have used places, narratives, and civic engagement to lend force to their arguments about their neighborhoods.

Fun fact: I’m a Navy Veteran with 28 years of total service. Go Navy! Beat Army!

Maria Novotny

Assistant professor, English

PhD 2017, Michigan State University

Previously Assistant Professor of English at UW-Oshkosh

Research focus: My research explores how discourses and technologies silence some embodied experiences of health and medicine. I co-direct a community organization, The ART of Infertility, which hosts art workshops for reproductive loss patients to depict their experiences with grief and the reproductive healthcare industry. The organization has over 200 pieces of narrative art from which I curate art exhibitions around the U.S.

Research discoveries: My research offers visual examples of how individuals identify with infertility. However, as they reach a “resolve”, such as having a child, they no longer selfidentify as infertile. As such, advocacy work around infertility and access to alternative family-building is not very sustainable. The exhibits that I curate offer a more sustainable advocacy infrastructure to increase public awareness about infertility.

Fun fact: I am an avid musky fisherwoman. In the spring, I help a family friend on their maple syrup farm in Northern Wisconsin.

Charles Paradis

Assistant professor, Geosciences

PhD 2017, University of Tennessee - Knoxville

Previously Post-doctoral Research Associate at Los Alamos National Laboratory

Research focus: Contaminant hydrogeology

Research discoveries: The mixing of native surface water with uranium-contaminated groundwater can effectively mobilize uranium and may lead to enhanced uranium recovery and remediation of radionuclide-contaminated sites.

Current projects: Radionuclide concentrations and isotopic signatures in leachate from coal flyash stabilized soils.

Goals for the year: Successfully teach Physical Hydrogeology (GEO SCI 463) in the fall, begin flowthrough column experiments in my lab, and secure external research funding

Fun fact: I had a brief career as a commercial truck driver.

Rebecca Shumway

Associate professor, History

PhD 2004, Emory University

Previously Associate Professor of History at College of Charleston

Research focus: My research focus is West Africa in the 18th and 19th centuries, particularly the transatlantic slave trade and its aftermath in Ghana and other Anglophone West African countries.

Research disoveries: In the records of the British slave trading company, I found that in addition to buying and selling enslaved Africans to slave ships, the company also owned hundreds of enslaved Africans who lived and worked in the coastal trading forts their entire lives. Many of these “castle slaves” were women, and many were raising their children (some fathered by Europeans) within the castle walls.

Current projects: My book project examines the development of nationalist ideology and racial (African/black) consciousness in southern Ghana in the early and mid-nineteenth century.

Fun fact: My family has recently adopted a very sweet 5-year-old Labrador retriever named Obi!

Sarah Vigeland

Assistant professor, Physics

PhD 2012, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Previously Postdoctoral Researcher at UWM

Research focus: I study black holes, neutron stars, and white dwarfs. Most of my research involves gravitational waves, which are ripples in spacetime produced when massive objects accelerate. I develop techniques to detect gravitational waves and use those observations to study the systems that generated them.

Research disoveries: I recently led a paper that searched our data for gravitational waves from supermassive black hole binaries. We didn’t find any, which lets us constrain how many supermassive black hole binaries exist in the local universe. Supermassive black hole binaries form when two galaxies merge, so this also tells us something about the merger histories of local galaxy clusters.

Current projects: I am part of a collaboration called NANOGrav, which detects gravitational waves by monitoring a collection of pulsars.

Fun fact: I’m an avid knitter. I started knitting when I was a college student in Minnesota, and I realized how important it was to have a warm hat and mittens.

Jarett Wilcoxen

Assistant professor, Chemistry & Biochemistry

PhD 2013, University of California- Riverside

Previously Postdoctoral Researcher at UC-Davis

Research focus: I study enzyme mechanisms and how the structure of an enzyme active site can influence the overall reaction. All of the enzymes I study use metals in the active site to generate a highly reactive intermediate to accomplish difficult chemical reactions.

Research disoveries: Using electron paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy, I gained molecular level detail of several enzyme intermediates that are too unstable to be observed by any other method. One of these intermediates helped shed light on a new reaction type in a family of enzymes.

Current projects: I will be looking at interesting reactions with poorly understood reaction mechanisms. One enzyme is important in the global nitrogen cycle and another in tRNA modifications.

Fun fact: I’ve lived in California my whole life. Winter will be a little colder than I’m used to.