New social sciences faculty joining USC Dornsife bring diverse scholarship

Ten new tenure-track professors join the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences this semester, bringing with them a broad range of scholarship focusing on subject such as the Armenian experience in contemporary Turkey, institutional politics and family demography.

Meng Chen | Assistant Professor of Psychology

Chen uses dynamic models to study changes in human behavior over time. She also develops tools for analyzing intensive longitudinal data. In particular, she examines the use of modeling and statistical methods to capture changes within individuals, differences between them, and processes across different time scales. Chen was born and raised in Dalian, China. She received her PhD in human development and family studies from Penn State University.

Wendy Cheng | Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity

Cheng is a geographer and scholar of ethnic and American studies. She is interested in how everyday landscapes of power and inequality are produced, and the ways in which relational, global and historical approaches to studies of race and ethnicity challenge hierarchies of power that are often taken for granted. These concerns are interwoven with an ongoing commitment to exploring forms of popular education and critical pedagogy. Her 2023 book _Island X_ explores the compelling political lives of Taiwanese migrants who came to the United States as students from the 1960s through the 1980s.

Eduardo Romero Dianderas | Assistant Professor of Anthropology

Dianderas is a Peruvian anthropologist specializing in the study of tropical rainforests, global environmental governance and climate change politics, with a particular geographic concentration in the contemporary Amazon basin. His current book manuscript, _Calculating Amazonia, _examines how knowledge about tropical rainforests is being rearticulated today as Amazonia becomes a critical international site for climate change governance. He holds a PhD in sociocultural anthropology from Columbia University and previously served as a postdoctoral fellow in the USC Society of Fellows in the Humanities.

Joanna Huey | Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Relations

Huey studies legal institutions. Her research aims to produce policy-relevant findings that contribute to ongoing debates about the design of criminal justice institutions and procedures. Current projects examine processes for misconduct reporting, jury selection, plea bargains and sentencing. Huey received a PhD in social science from Caltech and a JD/MPP from Harvard Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School.

Sandy LaTourrette | Assistant Professor of Psychology

LaTourrette studies how humans learn language and use language to learn more about the world. His research uses behavioral and computational methods to determine how infants and children navigate the many challenges of language learning — including variation across speakers, language switching, and the ambiguity of most word-learning contexts. His work addresses how children learn the meanings of words and how labeling objects or individuals changes the way children categorize and remember them.

Kyuwon Lee | Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Relations

Lee’s research interests include bureaucratic and interest group politics in the United States. Her current research focuses on strategic interactions between bureaucracies and organized interests in settings such as government contracts, environmental regulatory enforcement and public advisory meetings. Her work leverages a range of research designs and data sources, including game theory, causal inference methods for observational data, and administrative data. She earned her PhD from the Wilf Family Department of Politics at New York University.

Joanne Nucho | Visiting Associate Professor of Anthropology

Nucho is an anthropologist and filmmaker who specializes in the politics of the built environment and infrastructure, nonfiction and experimental film and video as well as visual ethnography. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in Lebanon and is the author of Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon: Infrastructures, Public Services and Power, part of the Princeton University Press series on culture and technology. Her current research focuses on energy transition in California. Her nonfiction and experimental films have screened in various contexts, including the London International Documentary Film Festival and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions.

Hrag Papazian | Turpanjian Early Career Chair in Contemporary Armenian Studies and Assistant Professor of Anthropology

Papazian researches Armenian experiences in contemporary Turkey. Examining various Armenian factions, including Christian Armenian and Muslim Armenian citizens of Turkey, as well as labor migrants from the Republic of Armenia in Istanbul, he studies intra-Armenian diversity, relations and boundaries. His research probes the official categorization of Armenian-ness and treatment of Armenians in post-genocide Turkey and addresses issues of religion, conversion, racialization, migration, citizenship, diasporicity, and activism. More recently, he has been conducting research in Armenia, studying Turkish Armenians who have established residence there and investigating perceptions of and attitudes towards Turkey and Turks in Armenian society and politics.

Estefania Castaneda Perez | Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Relations

Perez is an interdisciplinary scholar at the intersection of law, sociology and political science. Her research investigates how Latinx communities experience the law through policing and surveillance systems, and the consequences of these experiences on their racialization, well-being and legal consciousness. In particular, she focuses on the perspectives of transborder commuters, who are U.S. citizens and non-citizens that reside in Mexican border cities but regularly cross the border to the U.S. for work, education or commerce.

Daniela Urbina Julio | Assistant Professor of Sociology

Urbina studies family demography, gender inequality, education and quantitative methods. One strand of her work explores the demographic implications of the rise of women’s education relative to men in Latin America, particularly for union formation and within-household inequalities. A second strand focuses on the role of cultural beliefs about family and gender on assortative mating, the division of household labor, and students’ career choices. She completed a PhD in sociology and social policy at Princeton University and a masters in applied quantitative research at New York University.