USC Dornsife welcomes 18 exceptional scholars to its faculty

Experts in the natural sciences, humanities and social sciences further strengthen the College’s already outstanding faculty.

September 27, 2016

USC Dornsife welcomes 18 new faculty members to its ranks for the 2016-17 academic year. Hailing from universities around the world, their academic research, professional experience and expertise span a wide range of disciplines.

The new faculty members will join the departments of American studies and ethnicity, art history, economics, history, international relations, linguistics, mathematics, philosophy, political science and spatial sciences. Their research interests range from social media and politics to the history of the book and print culture, the philosophy of physics, and the intertwined economic challenges of urbanization, the environment and development.

Among the group of accomplished scholars are:

A former senior economist at the International Monetary Fund
A political scientist who measures ideological polarization in the U.S. Congress by analyzing roll call voting patterns
A historian of Latin America and the Caribbean who studies Colombia’s early modern intersections with the Antilles and the Atlantic
An international relations scholar who studies Chinese foreign policy with techniques from computational social science and machine learning
A linguist who researches theoretical syntax and its connections to morphology, semantics and sentence processing
A mathematician who studies symplectic topology and mirror symmetry and who, as an undergraduate, found a solution to a long-standing mathematical problem