Meet Our New Faculty
The College of Humanities and Sciences is full of talented faculty—an amazing group of educators, academics and researchers. We invite you to meet our newest faculty members for the 2020-21 academic year. Their disciplines and backgrounds are varied, and we have no doubt they will make their mark on the College, VCU and beyond.
African American Studies
Grace Gipson, Ph.D.
Dr. Gipson is a Black future feminist/pop culture scholar whose area of research interest centers on black popular culture, digital humanities, representations of race and gender within comic books, Afrofuturism, and race and new media.
English
Jessica Nelson
Nelson's research and scholarship interests include the science of story and the practice of innovative pedagogy.
Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies
Jayme Canty, Ph.D.
Dr. Canty's research focuses on the social, economic and political experiences of Black queer women in the American South and creating a framework to establish a Black queer lesbian South.
Julian Glover, Ph.D.
Dr. Glover's research focuses on Black/brown queer cultural formations, performance, ethnography, embodied knowledge and performance theory.
History
Daniel Morales, Ph.D.
Dr. Morales' research focuses on the social and economic history of migration between Latin America and the United States.
Mathematics and Applied Mathematics
Michael Robert, Ph.D.
Dr. Robert’s current research is focused on studying how climate and human movement contribute to the emergence and spread of mosquito-borne pathogens such as dengue, Zika and chikungunya.
Oyita Udiani, Ph.D.
Dr. Udiani's research focuses on the mathematical models of self-organizing systems in ecology, epidemiology and evolutionary biology.
Media and Culture
Minhee Choi, Ph.D.
Dr. Choi's research focuses on probing the effects of advocacy messages and communication strategies related to controversial social issues in social media on individuals’ perceptions, attitudes and behaviors.
Derek O'Leary
O'Leary's career has been focused on concept development and strategy, with experience in UX, advertising, social media and experiential advertising.
Philosophy
Yuan Yuan, Ph.D.
Dr. Yuan's areas of research are ethics, political philosophy and philosophy of law, with an emphasis on the interface between them.
Political Science
Jessica Trisko Darden, Ph.D.
Dr. Darden's most recent work focuses on the role that women play in violent, armed conflict as combatants, rather than victims.
Jatia Wrighten, Ph.D.
Dr. Wrighten conducts research on black women, state legislatures and leadership, with an emphasis on intersectionality.
Statistical Sciences and Operations Research
Ya Su, Ph.D.
Dr. Su conducts research related to modern statistical methodology including nonparametric and semiparametric modeling, measurement error and Bayesian inference.