New faculty bring global perspectives to USC Dornsife

Seven new humanities professors join the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences this fall, bringing expertise that spans cultures, languages and centuries. Their work ranges from rethinking the nature of writing in Latin American novels to exploring Korean court histories and from translating Russian modernist poetry to uncovering the racialized and gendered representations of children in early modern England.

Romina Wainberg | Assistant Professor of Latin American and Iberian Cultures

My research explores the still unresolved question of what “writing” is. In my first book project, I argue that early Latin American novelists formulated innovative theories of writing in their fiction, debunking the myth of the author as a “spontaneously inspired genius” and reconceiving the act of penning as an effortful, embodied and ecological activity. My supplementary research examines how South American sci-fi and queer art imagine the writing technologies of the future. Before joining USC, I was a Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University and earned my PhD from Stanford.

Ricardo Jose Goncalves Duarte Filho | Assistant Professor of Latin American and Iberian Cultures

I study the connections between race, the environment and culture in Latin America, especially through literature, visual art and critical theory. My research brings together ideas from environmental humanities, critical race theory and Indigenous studies. I’m currently working on a book project titled Extracting Race, which explores how extractive industries such as mining and agribusiness have not only shaped the environment in Brazil but have also historically framed Black and Indigenous peoples as resources to be exploited. I argue that both people and land have been viewed through the same colonial logic of extraction, and I’m interested in how artists and writers challenge these harmful systems by offering alternative, land-based ways of thinking and being. In the classroom, I enjoy showing students how the topics we explore even when they come from the past or different places still connect to their own lives and experiences today. I love working with students who are curious about how art and culture help us understand the world and envision speculative futures.

Graeme Reynolds | Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures

I specialize in the history and literature of premodern Korea and the history of the book. My present project is an examination of the production and reception of court histories during the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910). By illuminating the methods scholars used to access materials, read sources and write new histories, I show how the accessibility of physical sources themselves patterns history writing and people’s historical outlook. I am also interested in the history of printing technologies, especially movable type, and am translating a 19th-century Korean historical romance.

Venya Gushchin | Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures

I am a scholar of 20th- and 21st-century Russian and Russophone poetry. My current book project investigates the concept of “late style” (the distinctive aesthetic of an artist’s later career) in the study of Russian modernist poetry using the case studies of Boris Pasternak, Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Zabolotsky. I focus on the unexamined legacies of modernist cultures in the post-Stalinist era. My other research interests include Soviet popular culture, Russian intellectual history, and university studies. In addition to studying poetry academically, I translate from Russian to English and write original poetry in English. I am currently working with the Russian-language Kalmyk poet Dordzhi Dzhaldzhireev, and my translation of his debut collection, Beyond Salvation, is forthcoming from World Poetry Books in spring 2027.

Eleanor Gordon-Smith | Assistant Professor of Philosophy

I’m a philosopher working at the intersection of ethics and epistemology. I work on the ethics of doubt and inquiry. I ask what role moral values should play in our private relationship to evidence, and how they should guide public-facing inquiries like those conducted by journalists. I’m also an advice columnist for The Guardian, and I sometimes make narrative nonfiction radio for programs and media outlets such as This American Life and ABC Australia.

Harry McCarthy | Assistant Professor of English

I’m joining USC Dornsife from the University of Exeter (in the U.K.), where I’ve spent two happy years as a lecturer in early modern English. I received my PhD from Exeter in 2019, after which I was elected to a three-year research fellowship at Jesus College, Cambridge. My research sits at the intersection of early modern performance studies, childhood studies, premodern critical race studies, and early modern trans studies. I’ve written books on boy actors in Shakespeare’s time and our own and am now working on a project which considers racialised and gendered representations of children in 16th- and 17th-century literature and culture. I was born and raised just outside of Oxford, England, and am looking forward to trading its “dreaming spires” for beautiful Los Angeles. 

Christian Campbell | Assistant Professor of English

I am a poet, essayist and cultural critic, and the author of Running the Dusk. I was a 2023–2024 Visiting Fellow at the American Library in Paris. My current research includes revising a book on poetry and diaspora, and completing a collection of essays that approaches criticism as an art form through poetic and autobiographical analysis of literature, visual art, sports, performance, travel, and cultural politics. A section of this collection will be devoted to the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. 

In the last few years, I have been commissioned to write essays for Basquiat exhibits at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada, the Nahmad Contemporary in New York City, and the Barbican Art Gallery in London. I received the Art Writing Award from the Ontario Association of Art Galleries.