CEAS Affiliated Faculty Members

Kagan Arik

Ayasli Lecturer in Turkish Language
Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations

Pick Hall #306
5828 S. University Ave.
Chicago, IL 60637

Dr. Kağan Arık has 25 years experience in language pedagogy for Modern Turkish Language and Literature. He has designed courses and teaching materials  for intensive Elementary, Intermediate, and Advanced Turkish language, as well as Modern Turkish literature. He also has interest in the historical development of the Turkish language and its various dialects, and is a member of the American Association of Teachers of Turkish and Turkic Languages. For more information, please visit his website.

Nadine Chan

Collegiate Assistant Professor
Humanities

Gates-Blake 308
5845 S. Ellis Ave.
Chicago, IL 60637

Nadine Chan received her PhD in Cinema and Media studies with a certificate in Visual Studies from the University of Southern California. Prior to joining the University of Chicago, she conducted research in Southeast Asia as a Global Asia Postdoctoral Fellow at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her areas of research and teaching include: global media historiography, media archaeology, visual studies, media anthropology, nontheatrical film, materiality of media, postcolonial theory and new empire studies, studies in Global Asia, Asian/Southeast Asian film and media, religion and new media, and cultural studies. Please visit her website for more information.

Yoonsun Choi

Associate Professor
School Of Social Service Administration

SSA E13
969 E. 60th St.
Chicago, IL 60637

Prof. Choi researches how  race, ethnicity and culture fundamentally shape the development of minority and immigrant youth, a growing demographic in the US. She is interested in how these preteens and teens manage family and peer group pressures and wrestle with stereotypes, and how these pressure impact their mental health and academic performance. For more information, please see her faculty page. 

Johan Chu

Assistant Professor of Organization and Strategy
Booth School of Business

5807 S. Woodlawn Ave.
Chicago, IL 60637

Johan Chu’s research focuses on understanding large-scale change and stasis. In one stream of research, he explores the factors leading to the durable dominance of companies, products, ideas, and people. This work not only suggests strategies for dominants and would-be dominants, but also sheds light on the causes of inequality and stratification in society. Other streams of research investigate: 1) how dominant actors can change institutions, 2) the changing role of elites in corporate governance and society, and 3) new sources of competitive advantage in the twenty-first century. For his empirical studies, Chu uses very large datasets, social network analysis, simulation, and computational text analysis. For more information, please visit his faculty page.

Rachel DeWoskin

Lecturer in Fiction
Department of Creative Writing

935 E. 60th St.
Chicago, IL 60637

Rachel DeWoskin is the award-winning author of the novels Blind (Penguin 2014); Big Girl Small(FSG 2011); Repeat After Me (Overlook 2009), and the memoir Foreign Babes in Beijing(Norton 2005), which is being developed into a television series at BBC America. Her novel Second Circus, set in 1940’s Shanghai, is forthcoming from Penguin in 2018. DeWoskin’s essays, articles, and poems have been published widely, in journals including The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Ploughshares. For more information, please visit the Creative Writing at the University of Chicago.

Thomas Ginsburg

Leo Spitz Professor of International Law, The Law School
Professor, Department of Political Science

1111 E. 60th St, Room 509
Chicago, IL 60637
(773) 834-3087

Tim Ginsburg is a professor at the university's Law School, where he teaches contemporary and international law. He is also on the board of the Comparative Constitutions Project, which examines the constitutions of every independent nation-state since 1789. For more information, visit his page at the university's Law School.

Susan Goldin-Meadow

Bearsdley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor
Department of Psychology

5848 S University Ave
Chicago, IL, 60637
(773) 702-2585

Susan Goldin-Meadow is the Bearsdley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Psychology and Committee on Human Development at the University of Chicago. As a developmental psychologist, she studies the role of language and gesture in communication in both children and adults. For more information, visit her page at the university's Department of Psychology, or the page of her laboratory, the eponymous Goldin-Meadow Lab.

Thomas Gunning

Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor
Department of Cinema and Media Studies
Department of Art History

1010 E. 59th St.
Chicago, IL 60637

Prof. Gunning works on problems of film style and interpretation, film history and film culture. His published work (approximately one hundred publications) has concentrated on early cinema (from its origins to the WW I) as well as on the culture of modernity from which cinema arose (relating it to still photography, stage melodrama, magic lantern shows, as well as wider cultural concerns such as the tracking of criminals, the World Expositions, and Spiritualism). For more information, please visit his faculty page.

Angie Heo

Assistant Professor of the Anthropology and Sociology of Religion
Divinity School

Swift Hall 228
1025 E. 58th St.
Chicago, IL 60637

Angie Heo is an anthropologist of religion, media, and economy.  Her research and teaching at the Divinity School covers a range of topics related to the critical study of global Christianities in the modern world.  These topics explore the intersection of everyday religious practices with colonial and national institutions of rule, along with political economies of development and globalization. For more information, please visit her faculty page.

Dwight Hopkins

Alexander Campbell Professor of Theology
The Divinity School

1025 E 58th St
Swift Hall 304
Chicago, IL 60637
(773) 834-0006

Professor Hopkins is a theologian working in the areas of contemporary models of theology, various forms of liberation theologies (especially black and other third-world manifestations), and East-West cross-cultural comparisons. For more information, see his page at the university's Divinity School. 

Dwight Hopkins

Woowon Kang

Professor
Department of Physics

929 East 57th Street
Chicago, Illinois 60637

Prof. Kang pursues research on fraction quantum Hall effect connected to topological computation. For more information, please visit his website.

Young-Kee Kim

Louis Block Distinguished Service Professor
Department of Physics

5640 S. Ellis Ave.
Chicago, IL 60637

Prof. Kim dopes research on particle physics to understand how the universe works at the most fundamental level by discovering and understanding the fundamental constituents (elementary particles) and the forces acting among them and on accelerator physics to design and build much more powerful accelerators for future particle physics and other sciences. For more information, please visit her website.

Valarie Levan

Lecturer, Humanities Core Teaching Coordinator

Dr. Levan's dissertation was titled Forbidden Enlightenment: Self-Articulation and Self-Accusation in the Works of Yu Dafu (1896-1945) (2010). She currently teaches Readings in World Literature - Epic, Readings in World Literature - Autobiography, Reading Cultures - Collecting, and Reading Cultures - Exchange.

Jonathan Lio

Assistant Professor of Medicine
Section of Infectious Diseases and Global Health

5841 S. Maryland Ave.
MC 5000
Chicago, IL 60637

Dr. Lio’s academic interests fall in the area of postgraduate medical education in China. Specific interests include the development of competencies for medical trainees, workplace-based assessment, and faculty development in teaching skills. Dr. Lio spends part of the year in Wuhan, China working with the Wuhan University Medical Education Reform (WUMER) Project as co-program director of residency reform. He has worked with Wuhan University to develop a physician competency framework and implement a milestones-based assessment system for residents. For more information, visit the Infectious Diseases and Global Health webpage.

Thomas Manning

Lecturer in Law
The Law School

Tom Manning is a board director, corporate advisor, and former CEO.  Based in Hong Kong for 17 years, he served CEO of Cerberus Asia, Indachin Limited, Capgemini Asia, and Ernst & Young Consulting Asia.  He was also a senior partner with Bain & Company and member of the firm’s China board.  For more information, please visit his faculty page.

Jiwoong Park

Professor
Department of Chemistry

929 E. 57th St.
Chicago, IL 60637

Prof Park's research focuses on the science and technology of nanomaterials. Our research is multidisciplinary; the group includes researchers with diverse backgrounds, including chemistry, physics, material science, and electrical engineering. For more information, please visit his website.

Raaj Sah

Professor of Public Policy and Economics
Harris School of Public Policy

1155 E. 60th Street
Chicago, IL, 60637

Professor Sah is a recipient of the “Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon.” This honor was conferred by the Government of Japan, on behalf of the Emperor of Japan, for his contributions to Japan’s national economic and financial policies. Please visit his faculty page on the Harris School’s website for more information.

Olga Solovieva

Assistant Professor
Department of Comparative Literature

Wieboldt 412
1050 E. 59th St.
Chicago, IL 60637

Olga Solovieva works on Russo-Japanese cultural relations. Her current book project, Russian Kurosawa, will offer a new historical and thematic perspective on the work of the renowned Japanese director Akira Kurosawa through a detailed discussion of the films he made on the basis of Russian sources. The book’s major goal is to show that Kurosawa’s Russian output deals with the most politically sensitive topics of postwar Japan.The book will challenge prevalent views of Akira Kurosawa as an apolitical art house director or a conformist studio filmmaker by offering a much more complicated picture of the director’s participation in the post-war cultural and political debate. Olga Solovieva also teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on Kurosawa and his literary sources. Her articles on Kurosawa's Russian films appeared in the Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema. Her comparative articles on Russian and Japanese nuclear experience are forthcoming: “Chernobyl, the Unheard Prayer: Svetlana Aleksievich and the Little Voices of Fukushima,” boundary 2, 45:4 (2018) and “Horror Old and New: Nakata Hideo’s Ringu (1998) between J-Horror and Hibakusha Cinema,“ A Companion to Japanese Cinema, ed. David Desser, New York: Wiley-Blackwell. For more information, please visit her faculty page.

Grace Tsiang

Senior Lecturer
Department of Economics

1126 E 59th St
Rosenwald 229A
Chicago, IL 60637
(773) 702-3410

Professor Tsiang studies labor economics and the dynamics of spatial wage distributions. For more information, visit her page at the university's Department of Economics.

Christian Wedemeyer

Associate Professor of the History of Religions
The Divinity School

Swift Hall 310B
1025-35 E. 58th St.
Chicago, IL 60637

Christian Wedemeyer is an historian of religions whose interests comprehend theory and method in the human sciences, the history of modern scholarship on religion and culture, and issues of history, textuality, and ritual in the Buddhist traditions. Within these very general domains, much of his research has concerned the esoteric (Tantric) Buddhism of India and Tibet. For more information, please visit his faculty page.

Jake Werner

Collegiate Assistant Professor
Social Sciences (History)

Gates-Blake 437
5845 S. Ellis Ave.
Chicago, IL 60637

Jake Werner is a historian of modern China with interests in the twentieth-century global history of capitalism, labor, urban space, and everyday life. He received his PhD in history from the University of Chicago. Prior to joining the Society of Fellows, he was a Fulbright Postdoctoral Scholar at National Chiao-Tung University in Taiwan. For more information, please visit his faculty page.

John E. Woods

Professor of Iranian and Central Asian History
Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations

Pick Hall 115
5828 S. University Ave.
Chicago, IL 60637

Professor Woods focuses primarily on the history of Turkey, Iran, and Central Asia from the thirteenth to eighteenth century. He is particularly interested in aspects of the encounter of sedentary and nomadic people in those regions during that time period. He is at present working on several projects dealing with the age of Chinggis Khan and Timur (Tamerlane). He has played a central role in the Center for Middle Eastern Studies since 1980. For more information, please visit his faculty page.

Lynn Xu

Collegiate Assistant Professor in Poetry
Creative Writing

935 E. 60th St.
Chicago, IL 60637

Lynn Xu is the author of Debts & Lessons (Omnidawn, 2013), which was a finalist for theL.A. Times Book Prize. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fulbright Foundation. For her doctoral studies at the University of California at Berkeley, she was awarded a William L. Magistretti Fellowship and a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship. Xu has a BA from UC Berkeley and an MFA from Brown University, and is an editor at Canarium Books. For more information, please visit her faculty page.

Chun-Su Yuan

Professor
Department of Anesthesia & Critical Care
Director, Tang Center for Herbal Medicine Research

5841 S. Maryland Ave.
MC 4028
Chicago, IL 60637
(773) 702-1916

Dr. Chun-Su Yuan is a recognized expert in herbal medicine, and is actively researching the benefits and adverse effects of commonly used herbal medicines. Dr. Yuan has published numerous scientific articles, including more than 100 papers on herbal research. In addition, he is the primary Editor of the Textbook of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (1st & 2nd editions) and he serves the Editor-in-Chief of The American Journal of Chinese Medicine. For more information, visit his profile at the university's Department of Anesthesia and Critical Care, or his page at the Tang Center for Herbal Medicine Research.