Faculty

New Blood

Seven new professors bring new talents and energy to the Pomona College faculty.

If the faculty are the lifeblood of the College, new faculty are a transfusion of new talent and energy. During 2003–04, Pomona welcomed seven new professors on continuing contracts. Here is a brief introduction to each.

Oona Eisenstadt
The Fred Krinsky Professor of Jewish Studies and Assistant Professor of Religious Studies
Oona Eisenstadt approaches religious studies as “the queen of the disciplines,” she claims. “We borrow texts and approaches from everyone; we read slowly, closely, rigorously and critically; we make room for students to think about themselves and their own experiences in light and in terms of the texts at hand.” She pursued religious studies at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, where she received both her undergraduate and Ph.D. degrees. Much of Eisenstadt’s current research centers on the postmodern Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, and she embraces a cross-disciplinary approach to Levinas that is “fairly controversial,” as she puts it. “I think about Levinas’ Jewish roots as philosophy; and I think about Judaism as philosophy; and I think about philosophy as a Judaism,” she says. Eisenstadt has published Driven Back to the Text: The Premodern Sources of Levinas’s Postmodernism, a book that argues this fundamental claim, in addition to articles in a number of texts and journals. She teaches Jewish Mysticism and Modern Jewish Thought.

Jennifer Friedlander
Assistant Professor of Art and Art History
Jennifer Friedlander, who teaches media studies and media theory classes, seeks to bring media studies together with psychoanalysis in order to “bridge the cultural with the psychic.” Her research and articles focus on contemporary art controversies, cultural studies, film theory and psychoanalytic theory, combining the fields, as she puts it, to “explore ways in which media and cultural products not only create and embody social and economic practices, but also precipitate viewer anxieties and pleasures.” She has published a number of articles, including most recently, “How Should a Woman Look? Scopic Strategies for Sexuated Subjects,” in the Journal for Psychoanalysis of Society and Culture. She earned her Ph.D. in communication and rhetoric and a certificate in cultural studies from the University of Pittsburgh, and her B.A. degree, magna cum laude, in literature and rhetoric from Binghamton University.

Stephanie Harves
Assistant Professor of Russian and Linguistics
After falling in love with Russian literature as a teenager during the Cold War, Stephanie Harves studied Russian language and literature in college and continued in graduate school, learning Czech and Bulgarian. It was in graduate school that she gained an interest in the formal analysis of language that took over her academic interests. What fascinated Harves was the concept of “universal grammar” and the linguistic principles that Noam Chomsky first proposed in the late 1950s in order to account for our innate capacity to acquire human language. She found that the principles Chomsky proposed had not been tested as rigorously in Slavic languages as in English, and now specifically seeks to uncover the syntactic similarities underlying various Slavic and Germanic languages. For understanding language acquisition, especially by children, Harves says, “the task of uncovering any shared syntactic features between languages as seemingly different as English and Russian becomes an extremely challenging but important one.” As a faculty member doing research in both the Linguistics/Cognitive Science and German/ Russian departments, this year Harves teaches the following courses: Language and Thought, Acquisition of Language, Comparative Slavic/Germanic Linguistics, and Elementary Russian. Her articles have been published in Journal of Slavic Linguistics and Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics. Harves earned her Ph.D. in general and Slavic linguistics from Princeton University, as well as an M.A. in Slavic linguistics from the University of Michigan.

Frank Pericolosi
Assistant Professor of Physical Education
Frank Pericolosi has been a globetrotter in his professional career, promoting America’s pastime in Europe during breaks from coaching the Pomona-Pitzer varsity baseball team. After completing his master’s degree, Pericolosi served as the Varsity Baseball Coach at The International School of Brussels in Belgium, where he also coached at the top level at the Brussels Kangaroos Baseball Club. This past summer, he served as an envoy coach for Major League Baseball in Sweden and Denmark. There he hosted clinics in playing and coaching baseball, as well as promoting the game. During 2002–03, Pericolosi served as Pomona’s assistant football coach and the interim head baseball coach; currently, he also teaches courses in Beginning Archery, Weight Training and Racquetball. He completed his M.Ed. in physical education with a concentration in sports management from Springfield College in Springfield, Massachusetts, and his B.A. in history from Williams College.

Jennifer Scanlon
Assistant Professor of Physical Education
For her recently completed master’s thesis, Jennifer Scanlon focused on the influences on girls’ playground behavior and activity choices. Observing fourth-grade girls at recess, she found that gender matters significantly in the games that children choose to play. At Pomona, Scanlon coaches the Pomona-Pitzer women’s soccer team and teaches courses in Weight Training, Archery and Speed and Agility. Her research interests include girls and women in sports; speed and agility training; and strength and conditioning. She completed her M.S. in kinesiology at the University of New Hampshire and her B.A. in history from Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Slavi Slavov
Assistant Professor of Economics
Slavi Slavov says he “stumbled” onto his dissertation topic by noticing the economic crisis in his home country of Bulgaria. “Bulgaria has been pegging its currency to the euro for the past seven years,” he explains. “At the same time, the country has borrowed a lot of dollars. When the dollar was very strong and the euro was very weak in the late 1990s, inflation in Bulgaria picked up, while making the payments on the dollar debt became harder.” Slavov researches the economic transition of Eastern Europe in the last few years, the relationship of Eastern countries to the European Union and ways that smaller countries can manage their exchange rates to protect themselves against the impact of UN sanctions on third-world countries. Currently, he sees two questions as crucial to the outcome of global economics: “First, how does the volatility of the world’s three major currencies (dollar, euro, yen) affect small open economies around the globe? Second, what is, then, the optimal way for these economies to manage their currencies, given the imperfections and incompleteness which typically afflict their financial markets?” Slavov received his Ph.D. in general and Slavic linguistics from Princeton University and his B.A. in economics and political science from Grinnell College.

Olga Vaysman
Instructor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science
Olga Vaysman spends her summers far away from sunny Southern California—far away from civilization, in fact. The Cornell alumna conducts fieldwork in the Tamyr Peninsula in Western Siberia Russia’s Ural Mountain region, studying the phonology of Nganasan and Eastern and Western branches of the Mari languages. Articles on this research have been published in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory and in two editions of the Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. Vaysman is completing her Ph.D. in linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and earned her B.A. in linguistics from Cornell University. At Pomona, she currently teaches Introduction to the Study of Language, Language Change and Variation and Introduction to Phonology.