The Provost Distinguished Faculty Fellows of 2022

An earlier blog in November 2020 announced that the deans of the main campus schools had created a new program for faculty recruitment. In response to students who asked to have contact with more faculty with backgrounds that resembled theirs, the Provost Distinguished Faculty Fellows program was designed.

The program sought to improve Georgetown’s capacity to attract and retain tenure-line faculty who would support the diversity, equity, and inclusion goals of the university and contribute to their academic units through their scholarship, teaching, and mentoring.

The program was competitive across schools and departments. That is, units proposed a new faculty search compatible with the goals of the program and representing the are of specialization their unit was seeking strategically. The provost office in consultation with school deans selected the units granted a search for a Provost Distinguished Faculty Fellow.

The Fellow program offers an assistant professor position at Georgetown with an unusual three-part package. First, their first year as a faculty member would be designed to assist their launch of their faculty research program. They would be released from all teaching duties; their focus would be to use the Georgetown environment optimally to maximize eventual research products in the form of books or peer-reviewed articles. Second, they would be linked to mentors from among senior faculty who were available to help them learn the ropes of scholarship in their field. Third, they could take advantage of the workshops of the Center for New Designs for Learning and Scholarship, to hone pedagogical skills and classroom strategies. They would be relieved of service duties but would be welcomed in their department or unit as a full citizen.

Georgetown is proud to announce the Provost Distinguished Faculty Fellows of 2022:

Sarah Adel Bargal, a computer scientist, is currently a research assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Boston University. Her degrees in Computer Science include a Bachelor’s degree from Kuwait University, a Master’s degree from American University, Cairo and a Ph.D. from Boston University.

Dr. Bargal’s research interests include machine learning, computer vision, and explainable artificial intelligence, with a focus on making artificial intelligence systems explainable and accountable to humans and society. She received the IBM Ph.D. Fellowship in 2017 and an Outstanding Teaching Fellow Award in the same year from Boston University.

Dr. Bargal will be an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science in Georgetown College.

Nicolas Campisi, a humanities scholar, is currently a Visiting faculty member in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Tulane University. He received his bachelor’s degree in Art History and Hispanic Studies from Washington College and a Master’s degree and Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies from Brown University.

Dr. Campisi works at the intersection of Latin American literature, environmental humanities and memory studies. His research ranges from studies of the temporal strategies used by writers to narrate apocalyptic catastrophes to contemporary art and literature of ecohorror, such as pesticide poisoning, mining, and labor conditions in meat-packing industry. His awards include the 2021 Joukowsky Outstanding Dissertation Award given by Brown University to the best dissertation in the Humanities, the 2021 best Dissertation Prize from the Center of Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Brown University, and the 2019 Lyle Olsen Graduate Essay Prize awarded by the Sport Literature Association.

Dr. Campisi will be an assistant professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese in Georgetown College.

Melinda Gonzalez, a socio-cultural anthropologist, is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University. Following a Bachelor’s degree in Anthropology from Barnard College, Columbia University and a Master’s degree in Anthropology from Rutgers’s University, she received a Ph.D. in Geography and Anthropology from Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge.

Dr. Gonzalez works on racial, class, and gender disparities in the impact of environmental disasters. She uses decolonial and indigenous research methods to study new media technologies in environmental justice studies. Dr. Gonzalez is the 2021 Mary Fran Myers Gender and Disaster Award winner, which honors research on gender issues in disaster and emergency management. She is also a performance/spoken word poet who as performed internationally.

Dr. Gonzalez will be an assistant professor in the School of Foreign Service.

Peggy Kyoungwon Lee, a creative writer, is currently a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at Berkeley in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Women’s Studies from University of California, Santa Barbara, a Master’s degree in Performance Studies from New York University, and a Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Dr. Lee’s scholarship focuses on critical race and ethnic studies in contemporary American literature, performance and media. Her works in progress include a novel inspired by early anticolonial Korean anarchist resistance, and two academic monographs, on race, femininity and performance in the post-civil rights era, and on the technological production of race and health focusing on Asians. She was awarded the 2022 Lambda Literary Fellow in Speculative Fiction with Larissa Lai.

Dr. Lee will be an assistant professor in the Department of English in Georgetown College.

Johann LeGuelte, a cultural studies scholar, is currently an assistant professor of French and Francophone Studies at Xavier University. He received his Master’s degree and Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University in French and Francophone Studies following a Master’s degree in French Language and Literature form Ohio University and a Bachelor’s in Foreign Language and Literatures from Universite Catholique de L’Ouest.

Dr. LeGuelte focuses on visual culture, colonial propaganda, and critical race studies. His research interests range from diaspora and migration studies, French and Francophone literatures, art history, media studies, and postcolonial history. His book in progress examines the production and reception of colonial photographic propaganda to determine how state-sponsored photographs became official colonial information in the minds of many French citizens. He is the recipient of the 2019 Dissertation Award from the Penn State Alumni Association and two awards for teaching excellence from Penn State.

Dr. Guelte will be an assistant professor in the Department of French and Francophone Studies in Georgetown College.

Kristia Wantchekon, a psychologist, is currently a postdoctoral fellow and a Secondary Lecturer of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and Economics from Yale University and received a Master’s in Education in Human Development and Psychology and a Ph.D. in Human Development, Learning, and Teaching from Harvard University.

Dr. Wantchekon’s research seeks to integrate work on context-embedded adolescent development, identity processes, and academic adjustment to understand the factors that inform ethnic-racial minority adolescents’ development in and out of schools. She was awarded the 2017 Frances Degen Horowitz Millennium Scholar award from the Society for Research in Child Development.

Dr. Wantchekon will be an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology in Georgetown College.

Melanie White, an interdisciplinary scholar, has recently completed her Ph.D. in Africana Studies at Brown University. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Cultural Anthropology with a minor in Africana Studies from the University of Pennsylvania and a Master’s degree in African and African Diaspora Studies from the University of Texas at Austin.

Dr. White works at the intersection of Black visual culture studies, Afro-Latin American studies and Black feminist theory. Her dissertation traces a visual and discursive history of intimate colonial violence against Black women and girls from the Mosquito Coast/present day Caribbean Nicaragua. She was awarded the Mellon/ACS Dissertation Completion Fellowship and the Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship in Women’s Studies in 2021.

Dr. White will be an assistant professor in the Department of African American Studies and the Women and Gender Studies Program in Georgetown College.

These new colleagues will be arriving at Georgetown over the coming weeks. Please welcome them to our community.