New Junior Hires

Arts and Humanities welcomes four new junior faculty in the Departments of Germanic Languages and Literatures, English, History of Art, and French and Italian this year: Katra Byram, Lynn Itagaki, Kris Paulsen, and Cheikh Thiam.

Katra Byram, Assistant Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, comes to us from the University of California, Berkeley, where she completed a dissertation on "Other People's Stories: Ethics, Identity, and Coming to Terms with the Past, 1871-Present," under the direction of Robert Holub. Texts in play in that dissertation included work by Theodor Storm, Wilhelm Raabe, Günter Grass, and W. G. Sebald. Professor Byram has published on a wide range of subjects from lyric poetry to literacy and is the winner of several awards for her graduate work, including the Horst Frenz Prize, the Steinway Award, and an award for Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor.
Lynn Itagaki, Assistant Professor of English with a joint appointment in Women's Studies, graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University with a thesis on Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey, under the direction of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. She then completed a dissertation at UCLA on "Race and Writing in Post-Civil Rights America," a study of law, literature, and the media in relation to the 1992 Los Angeles uprisings, under the direction of King-Kok Cheung. Since 2004 she has been Assistant Professor at the University of Montana at Missoula. Professor Itagaki has been a W. E. B. Du Bois Fellow at Harvard University and is an active lecturer on contemporary American literature, particularly by Asian American and African American authors.
Kris Paulsen, Assistant Professor of History of Art, studies contemporary art with a specialization in time-based media. She comes to us from the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Paulsen has presented on the works of Bruce Nauman, Chris Burden, Dan Graham, and the moral, legal, and political implications of new media from photography to computational art. Her current work addresses artistic engagements with television and experiments with telepresence. Like Katra Byram, she was designated an Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor while at UC Berkeley; she has also received the Albert Arnold Bennett Award for Outstanding Honors Thesis in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University.
Cheikh Thiam, Assistant Professor of French & Italian with a joint appointment in African American and African Studies, has been Assistant Professor of Francophone African Studies at Linfield College, Oregon since 2007. Before that time he received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at SUNY Binghamton, a Master of Arts in Modern Literature at the University of Provence at Aix-en-Provence, and a Bachelor of Arts in Modern Languages and Literature at the University Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar, Senegal. His work includes analysis of negritude in Léopold Séder Senghor and a study of folly in Rabelais; he has also written on Sartre, Sarcozy, and Senegalese socioeconomics. A book-length project on Senghor is under review. Professor Thiam teaches on a wide range of subjects from Du Bois to Gangsta Rap.