Anthropology
Colleen O’Brien
Assistant Professor
Colleen O’Brien is a linguistic anthropologist interested in Indigenous languages and practical approaches to reconciliation after conflict. Her PhD dissertation is the most comprehensive grammatical description of Kamsá, an Indigenous language isolate spoken in Colombia and she has also worked on the Gorontalo language (Indonesia). Her award-winning documentary film Strangers to Peace follows three ex-guerrilla fighters from the FARC-EP as they attempt to return to civilian life in Colombia. More recently, she has been funded by NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) to conduct fieldwork in the US Caribbean with fishery stakeholders often left out of the fishery management process.
Art & Art History
Abigail Lapin Dardashti
Assistant Professor
Abigail Lapin Dardashti is Assistant Professor of Art History and Digital Humanities at the University of Miami. Her research examines modern and contemporary Latin American and Latinx art, with a focus on international exchange, cultural diplomacy, migration, and racial and ethnic formation. More specifically, her work explores how migration and travel have shaped African and Jewish diasporic artistic production in the Americas during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her research has received support from the Fulbright Program, the Mellon Foundation, and the Getty Research Institute, among others. She has curated exhibitions in Brooklyn and Philadelphia and has held curatorial fellowships at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Studio Museum in Harlem.
Classics
Charles Bartlett
Assistant Professor
Charles Bartlett received his Ph.D. in Ancient History from Harvard University and subsequently taught at Duke University and at Harvard before joining the University of Miami in 2021. His research focuses on ancient law, the ancient economy, and ancient empires; he is most interested in the afterlives of these traditions and phenomena in later periods of history. His publications examine the formation of political institutions, the history of the corporation, economic crises, and the importance of Roman law to the history of political economy.
Brian Bigio
Visiting Asst. Professor
Chemistry
Zachary Goldsmith
Assistant Professor
Zachary Goldsmith is an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at the University of Miami. He earned a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania before obtaining a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, during which he also was a Visiting Associate in Research at Yale University. His graduate studies focused on theory and simulation of proton-coupled electron transfer. He has since then held positions as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University and an Associate Research Scientist in the Columbia Center for Computational Electrochemistry. His research interests include first-principles and machine learning modeling of molecules, materials, and electron transfer.
Computer Science
Morris Alper
Assistant Professor
Morris Alper is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Miami. His research explores the intersection of multimodal machine learning and linguistics, with an emphasis on applications to digital humanities and low-resource languages. His work spans textual, visual, and audio modalities and includes research on ancient and constructed languages, automatic analysis of writing systems, and interpretability of vision-language models. Morris previously earned his PhD from Tel Aviv University and his BSc. from MIT, with a postdoctoral appointment at Carnegie Mellon University.
English & Creative Writing
Joel Childers
Assistant Professor
Joel Childers is Assistant Professor of Romantic Literature in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Miami. He received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 2021 and taught for several years in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Joel has published essays, books reviews, and an academic monograph with Stanford University Press.
Emmy Waldman
Assistant Professor
Emmy Waldman is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, where she researches and teaches contemporary graphic narrative and Jewish American literature. Her first book, Filial Lines: Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel, and Comics Form is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in September 2026. She received her PhD in English from Harvard University, after which she served as Postdoctoral Fellow in the Fellowships and Writing Center of Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Her work appears in Twentieth Century Literature, Contemporary Literature, New Literary History, Post45 , Harvard Divinity Bulletin, ASAP/Review, among other venues.
History
Hannah Katherine Hicks
Assistant Professor
Hannah Katherine Hicks specializes in nineteenth and early twentieth century U.S. history and her research and teaching interests center on gender, law, race, and medicine in the U.S. South. She received her PhD in History from Vanderbilt University. Dr. Hicks' work has been published in the B ulletin of the History of Medicine, Journal of Family History, Women's History Review, and the American Historian magazine. Her research on women and law in the U.S. South has received generous support from the American Society for Legal History, the American Historical Association, the South Caroliniana Society, and the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center.
Mathematics
Abhraneel Dutta
Full-time Lecturer
Sunday Esebre
Full-time Lecturer
Sunday Esebre is a mathematician, educator, software engineer, and AI trainer whose work bridges advanced mathematical research, innovative teaching, and modern technology. Holding a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Texas Tech University, I have taught mathematics across multiple academic levels while contributing to artificial intelligence training and backend software development. Passionate about transforming complex ideas into practical solutions, I combine scholarly rigor, student-centered mentorship, and technical expertise to inspire learning, advance research, and develop intelligent systems that connect mathematics with real-world impact.
Jose Medel
Full-time Lecturer
The Michele Bowman Underwood Department of Modern Languages & Literatures
Mourad Abdennebi
Full-time Lecturer
Chloe Edmondson
Assistant Professor
Chloe Summers Edmondson is Assistant Professor of French in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. Her research is situated at the crossroads of cultural history, literary criticism, media studies, and the Digital Humanities. Recent projects have examined letter-writing practices, the social networks of the French Enlightenment, and Paris history. Her work has been published by Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, the Journal of Modern History, Digital Humanities Quarterly, and the series Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, including the volume she edited, with Dan Edelstein, Networks of Enlightenment: Digital Approaches to the Republic of Letters (Liverpool University Press, 2019). She holds a PhD in French from Stanford University, where she was previously a lecturer in the Department of French & Italian.
Philosophy
Syed Waliullah Hussaini
Full-time Lecturer
Physics
Cheng-Ju (Jacob) Lin
Assistant Professor
Cheng-Ju (Jacob) Lin received his Ph.D. in Physics from the California Institute of Technology in 2019. Before joining the University of Miami, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (2019–2022) and the University of Maryland (2022–2025). His research focuses on the classical and quantum simulation of quantum many-body systems, using both classical and quantum computers to study topics such as quantum dynamics, quantum phases, and quantum materials.
Political Science
Ariel Powell
Full-time Lecturer
Ariel T. Powell is an incoming Lecturer in the Department of Political Science in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Miami. Previously, she held a Postdoctoral Scholar position in the Department of Public Policy and Administration from Florida International University. She earned her doctorate in Public Affairs from Florida International University in August of 2025. She also holds a Master's degree in Public Administration from FIU and a Bachelor of Arts with a concentration in Political Science from New College of Florida. Broadly defined, Ariel's research focuses on issues of democratic governance and how individuals interact with government institutions. Currently, Ariel more specifically focuses on education policy, criminal justice policy, and local governments.
Psychology
Marie Barnes
Full-time Lecturer
Marie Barnes is thrilled to join the University of Miami as a lecturer in Psychology, where she helps students discover their potential in careers and beyond. She earned her B.A., M.S., and Ph.D. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology at FIU, and brings expertise in leadership coaching, talent management, and organizational development. Previously a professor at FIU and Barry University, and a consultant at Baptist Health and the Broward County Sheriff's Office, Dr. Barnes is passionate about mentorship. She encourages students to explore new paths, seek out inspiring mentors, and never stop learning—every experience adds to their growth.
Diondra Straiton-Webster
Assistant Professor
Diondra Straiton-Webster, PhD is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology. She holds a PhD in clinical psychology from Michigan State University and completed her postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Psychiatry. Dr. Straiton-Webster’s research focuses on methods to improve the quality of autism interventions delivered in publicly funded settings, with a particular focus on caregiver coaching interventions for autism. Her work is based in implementation science, community-engaged research, and human-centered design. Her projects focus on early autism interventions in the Medicaid system, the community mental health system, the early intervention system, and public elementary schools.
Sociology and Criminology
Megan Stubbs-Richardson
Associate Professor
Megan Stubbs-Richardson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology. Her research interests occur at the intersection of crime, technology, and society, including artificial intelligence and social media analyses.
Natalia Pires de Vasconcelos
Full-time Lecturer
Natalia Pires de Vasconcelos, Lecturer, Associated Faculty, in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Miami. Her research spans the sociology of law, punishment, and health, examining how legal institutions affect health and well-being. She holds a Ph.D. in Law and a B.A. in Social Sciences from the University of São Paulo, an LL.M. from Yale Law School, and an M.A. in Sociology from the University of Georgia, where she is a Ph.D. candidate (expected Spring 2027). Previously, she was an Assistant Professor of Law at Insper and a Global Health and Rights Project Affiliated Researcher at the Petrie-Flom Center at Harvard Law School.
Theatre Arts
Kevin Thiel
Full-time Lecturer
Kevin Thiel is a professional actor, teacher, and voice coach from Toledo, Ohio. Before joining the faculty at the University of Miami, he worked professionally as an actor in New York City and regionally at theatres including the Texas Shakespeare Festival, New Art Theatre, and The Secret Theatre. He is a Miller Voice Method Certified Teacher and a Lessac Kinesensic Voice and Body Practitioner. Kevin holds an MFA in Theatre Performance from the University of Southern Mississippi and a BFA in Musical Theatre from Otterbein University.
Writing Studies
Wendi Bootes
Full-time Lecturer
Wendi Bootes is a Full-time Lecturer in the Writing Studies Department at the University of Miami. Her research focuses on global literary modernisms, narrative theory, and the novel, spanning early twentieth-century Soviet and Anglophone literatures of Britain, Ireland, and South Asia. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, New Literary History, and The Journal of Narrative Theory, among other venues. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley, with an emphasis in Critical Theory, and is currently working on a book about narrative form and imperial collapse.
Mary Ann Benites Kaplan
Full-time Lecturer
Mary Ann Benites Kaplan is an experienced lecturer specializing in writing in the disciplines across undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral levels. At the University of Miami, she teaches evidence-based writing, while at Northeastern University, she guided doctoral candidates through scholarly inquiry and manuscript preparation as an instructor and dissertation committee chair. Previously, at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences, she designed specialized writing curricula and prepared international physicians to publish clinical research. She holds an Ed.D. in Higher Education Administration and Curriculum Leadership from Northeastern University, focusing on advanced pedagogical frameworks.
