Twelve New Faculty Join Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts

Posted August 17, 2020

The Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts has welcomed 12 new faculty members to the 2020/2021 cohort.

Brian An 

Dr. An is an assistant professor in the School of Public Policy, and he will serve as a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta in fall 2020. His research examines urban policy, public finance, and broader governance and social equity issues; he is currently working on Covid-19 pandemic and global governance research. Before joining Georgia Tech, Dr. An taught in the Department of Political Science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville as an assistant professor. He holds a doctorate in public policy and management from the University of Southern California.

Whitney Buser

Dr. Buser is an academic professional and associate director of Academic Programs in the School of Economics. Her research focuses on gender differences in financial literacy, performance evaluation, confidence in mathematical abilities, and behavioral economics as well as formal and informal institutional impacts on policy and economic well-being. Prior to joining the faculty at Georgia Tech in 2020, Dr. Buser was the Chair of the Business and Public Policy Department at Young Harris College and as well as an Associate Professor of Economics. Her Ph.D. is from Florida State University.

Daniel Dench

Dr. Dench is assistant professor in the School of Economics. His research investigates how incentives affect health and education behavior. Dr. Dench's health work focuses on how policy affects the demand for tobacco products such as electronic cigarettes. His education work focuses on how instructor inputs motivate students to complete independent work. Dr. Dench received a Ph.D. in Economics from the Graduate Center CUNY in 2020.

Kelley Fong

Dr. Fong is assistant professor in the School of History and Sociology. She studies social inequality and family life, focusing on how families engage with state systems and how these systems affect families. Dr. Fong is currently drafting a book manuscript on child protective services and has also studied residential and school selection. She received a Ph.D. in sociology and social policy from Harvard University in 2020.

Hyoun-A Joo

Dr. Joo is assistant professor of German in the School of Modern Languages. She was previously assistant professor of German and Linguistics at Furman University, SC. Her research focuses on theoretical aspects of second language acquisition as well as its use in migration contexts. Her previous work investigated the acquisition of the asymmetric verb placement in German by Korean immigrants. Dr. Joo's recent research projects include intercultural competencies manifested in pragmatic speech acts of German immigrants in the US. She earned her Ph.D. from Penn State in 2018.

Melissa Ianetta

Dr. Ianetta is director of Writing and Communication and Class of '58 Professor in Writing and Communication Program in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication. She was the founding director of Writing-Across-the-Curriculum and the Unidel Andrew B. Kirkpatrick Jr. Chair of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Delaware, where she directed the writing center and writing program over a fifteen-year period. She currently serves at the editor of College English, the flagship journal of the National Council of Teachers of English. Dr. Ianetta received her Ph.D. from Ohio State University in 2002.

Andrea Jonsson

Dr. Jonsson is assistant professor of French in the School of Modern Languages. Her research focuses on sound and poetics and engagement with Interdisciplinary Voice Studies in Contemporary French Literature, Media, and Culture. Dr. Jonsson latest book project, is an investigation of Frenchspeaking cis- and trans-women’s amplified voices in five different areas: digital assistance, documentary, performance poetry, stand-up comedy, conversation podcasts from 2005- 2020. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in 2014.

Nadia Kostyuk

Dr. Kostyuk is an assistant professor of Information and Communications Technology in the School of Public Policy. Her research focuses on modern warfare, cyber conflict, and cyber capability. Her methodological areas of interest include mathematical and computational modeling, and in particular network and text analysis. Her recent research projects explore why states develop their cyber capacity and what effects this capacity has on domestic and foreign policy. Dr. Kostyuk earned her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2020.

Amit Prasad

Dr. Prasad is associate professor in the School of History and Sociology. He specializes in transnational and post/de-colonial sociology of science, technology, and medicine. His research focuses on the complex, contested, and yet, often, hidden role of transnational/global flows of knowledge, technological artifacts, and people in constituting subjects, in imagining geographies, and in laboratory practices. His research has been funded by grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the American Institute for Indian Studies/National Endowment for Humanities, among others. Dr. Prasad received his Ph.D. in Sociology from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2004. Prasad started in the College as of January of 2020.

Lelia Glass

Dr. Glass is an assistant professor of Linguistics in the School of Modern Languages. Her research focuses on word meaning, world knowledge, and reasoning about the speaker's intentions, drawing on rich empirical data to investigate how language is understood in context. Dr. Glass held a dissertation fellowship from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the American Council for Learned Societies in 2018. She also earned her Ph.D. in 2018 from Stanford University, where she won the prestigious Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Abigail Vaughn

Dr. Vaughn is an assistant professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs. Her research focuses on the role of coercion in international financial governance. She investigates how security partnerships condition how countries respond to financial crises. Dr. Vaughn is a research affiliate at the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation and was formerly a research fellow at Princeton’s Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from University of California at San Diego in 2019.

Casey Wichman

Dr. Wichman is an assistant professor in the School of Economics. His research interests sit at the intersection of environmental and public economics with a focus on how people interact with the natural and built environment and what that behavior reveals about the value of environmental amenities. He studies water and energy demand, valuation of environmental resources and infrastructure, urban transportation, public goods provision, recreation, climate change policy, and applied econometrics. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, Dr. Wichman served as research director of the Energy and Environment Lab at the University of Chicago and as a fellow at Resources for the Future, an environmental economics think tank. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in 2015.