Pomona College welcomes eight new faculty to tenure-track and tenured positions this fall. Several have been teaching at the College as postdoctoral fellows, lecturers and visiting professors; one is returning to the College as an alumna; and three are new to Pomona.
Malachai Bandy, assistant professor of music, has a vibrant performing career on many historical instruments, including the viola da gamba, violone and Renaissance double reeds. His current scholarly projects concern musical expressions of occult philosophy and number symbolism in the North-German Baroque, as well as viola da gamba technique, repertoire and iconography. As a lecturer at Pomona the last two years, he taught several courses, including Listening to Queer Voices: Radical Identities, Performance, and Transgression in Music, from Hildegard to House, which he is also teaching this semester in addition to Engaging Music.
Cristina T. Bejarano, assistant professor of anthropology, works in the areas of medical anthropology and science and technology studies. She conducts research on biomedical practices, technologies and infrastructures in Mexico. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Academies of Science Ford Foundation. As a Mellon Chau Postdoctoral Fellow and visiting professor at Pomona the last four years, she has taught Introduction to Sociocultural Anthropology, Medical Anthropology, and Science, Medicine, and Technology.
Shannon Burns ’15, assistant professor of psychological science and neuroscience, graduated from Pomona with a major in psychology and received a Ph.D. in social psychology from UCLA. Her research interests largely center on investigating the neural and behavioral dynamics of interpersonal collaboration and coordination—how people’s affective and cognitive content align, how they exchange and distribute information in team contexts, and how these findings can be used to improve interpersonal communication.
Chanchal Dadlani, professor of art history, specializes in Islamic and South Asian art. This semester she is teaching Building Empires as well as South Asian Art & Architecture. Her first book, From Stone to Paper: Architecture as History in the Late Mughal Empire (Yale University Press, 2018), received the Society of Architectural Historians’ Mellon Author Award and distinctions from the College Art Association and Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. She has taught at Wake Forest University and Columbia University.
Esther Hernández-Medina, assistant professor of gender and women’s studies and Latin American studies, is a feminist academic, public policy expert and activist from the Dominican Republic. She was a visiting lecturer and visiting assistant professor at Pomona since spring 2019, during which she taught classes including Sociology through Literature, Globalizing Participation, and Women and Power in Latin America. She is currently teaching Introduction to Gender and Women’s Studies and The Right to Choose? Abortion Rights in Latin America and the U.S.
Jun Lang, assistant professor of Asian languages and literatures, received a Ph.D. in East Asian Linguistics from the University of Oregon, where she taught Languages and Societies of East Asia and Chinese language courses at all levels. Prior to joining Pomona, she taught at the University of Richmond, the United States Naval Academy Chinese summer program, the University of Wisconsin-Madison Chinese summer program, and the China Studies Institute at Peking University. Her research interests include language and gender, second language acquisition, sociolinguistics, and cognitive linguistics.
Preston McBride, assistant professor of history, will serve as the early U.S. specialist in the history department. He earned his Ph.D. in history at UCLA, where his dissertation focused on diseases and deaths in Native American boarding schools. As a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer at Dartmouth College and the University of Southern California, he taught classes on Native American history and researched the history of Native American education in the United States
Bilal Nasir, assistant professor of Asian American studies, is a South Asian American and critical Muslim studies specialist. He researches race, policing and surveillance, social movements, and the anthropology of Muslims and Islam in the United States. As a Chau Mellon postdoctoral fellow at the College the last two years, he taught Islamophobia and its Discontents as well as South Asian American Studies.