2009-2010 New Faculty Profiles (Last Name Q-Z)
Back to 2009-2010 New Faculty Profiles (Last Name H-P)
James Ross
Lecturer
Department of Health and Exercise Science
James Ross received his B.S. in Exercise Science and Wellness and his M.S. in Exercise Physiology-Adult Fitness/Cardiac Rehabilitation from Ball State University. James has extensive professional experience at Wake Forest University, Winston Salem State University and Ball State University. He is currently the Director of Laboratory Services at Wake Forest Healthy Exercise and Lifestyle ProgramS (HELPS). He has also completed several publications and presentations.
Giosue Scaccianoce
Visiting Instructor
Department of Romance Languages
Giosue Scaccianoce received a Laurea with Honors in Foreign Languages and Literatures from Universita degli Studi di Catania (Catania, Italy), and a M.A. in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he is also pursuing his Ph.D. Giosue has taught several courses of Italian, Written and oral communication, and community-based advanced learners of Italian Group.
Jessica Shade
Lecturer
Department of Romance Languages
Jessica Shade received her B.A. in Spanish from Davidson College and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Spanish American Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her most recent publication, “Heterotopic Space and the Limits of Naturalist Discourse in Federico Gamboa’s Santa” is under review. She has extensive teaching experience and has made several presentations
Robin W. Simon
Professor
Department of Sociology
Robin Simon graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in Sociology from the University of Massachusetts, and earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from Indiana University. Her research and teaching interests include medical sociology, mental health, emotion, gender and the family, culture, and social psychology, which have shaped her publications and on-going manuscripts and grant proposals. In addition to receiving several national awards for her scholarship, Robin's research has attracted considerable media attention in the U.S. and abroad. Following the publication of her recent Contexts article “The Joys of Parenthood, Reconsidered,” her research was discussed in Newsweek, on CBS’ 60 Minutes, on NBC's Today Show, and NPR’s Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me among other news outlets.
Andrew Smiler
Visiting Assistant Professor
Department of Psychology
Andrew Smiler holds Bachelor’s degrees in both Mathematics and Psychology from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, a M.A. in Clinical Psychology from Towson State University, and a M.A. and Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from the University of New Hampshire. His dissertation was titled “Living the Stereotype: Connections Between Male Behavior and Male Images." He has published several articles including “Thirty years after the discovery of gender: Psychological concepts and measures of masculinity” (2004). He has made several presentations at conferences on gender issues and adolescent development.
John Tomlinson
Lecturer
Department of Chemistry
John Tomlinson received his B.A. in Chemistry from the College of Wooster and his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from Wake Forest University. John has extensive teaching experience as a professor and research assistant at Appalachain State University and Wake Forest University.
Nelly van Doorn-Harder
Professor
Department of Religion
Nelly van Doorn-Harder received a B.A. and M.A. in Classical Arabic & Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Utrecht and the University of Amsterdam respectively. She also received a B.A. in Theology from the University of Amsterdam and a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Free University of Amsterdam. She specializes in Islam, Arabic language and literature, and Middle Eastern Christianity. Her areas of concentration also include women and religion, Muslim Spirituality, human rights, and Muslim-Christian relations. Her most recent book is titled Coping with Evil in Religion and Culture: Case Studies (2007).
José Luis Venegas
Assistant Professor of Spanish
Department of Romance Languages
José Luis Venegas earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research and teaching interests include modern and contemporary Hispanic narrative, transatlantic studies, and critical theory. His book, Decolonizing Modernism: James Joyce and the Development of Spanish American Fiction, will be published in 2009 by the Modern Humanities Research Association and Oxford University. He has published articles in MLN, Latin American Literary Review, Romance Notes, and Symposium, among other venues. José Luis has teaching experience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
Theresa Ventura
Assistant Professor
Department of History
Theresa Ventura earned her B.A. in History and Women’s Studies at Brooklyn College, where she graduated summa cum laude. She received her M.A. in United States History, her M.Phil. in History and her Ph.D. in U.S. History from Columbia University. Her dissertation, entitled "American Empire, Agrarian Reform and the Problem of Tropical Nature in the Philippines, 1898-1936", argues that early twentieth-century U.S. domestic agrarian reform and imperialism in the Philippines were mutually constitutive and laid the groundwork for post-WWII modernization and development theory, culminating in the Green Revolution. Theresa has teaching experience at Columbia University and is interested in historicizing the changing relationship between the United States and the worlds beyond its borders.
C. William Walldorf, Jr. (Will)
Assistant Professor
Department of Political Science
Will Walldorf earned his B.A. in Government and Legal Studies from Bowdoin College, where he graduated magna cum laude. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. in Politics from the University of Virginia. His current research explores the conditions under which soft power constrains great power foreign policy and if investments in soft images pay dividends for United States foreign policy. His book, Just Politics: Human Rights and the Foreign Policy of Great Powers, was published in 2008 (Cornell University Press). Will has teaching experience at the University of Virginia, Gordon College, and Auburn University, where he taught prior to coming to Wake Forest.
Julie Wayne
Associate Professor of Management
Schools of Business
Julie Wayne earned her Ph.D. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology at the University of Georgia. She has taught courses in management, organizational behavior, statistics, and contemporary organizational issues such as work-life balance. She has consulted within the federal government and the insurance, financial services, telecommunications, and higher education industries, and has developed employee attitude surveys, designed and validated selection systems, and conducted workshops on personality, teamwork, and work-life balance, among others. In her research, she studies issues related to challenges created by changing demographics and roles of men and women at work. She has published research on sexual harassment, work-family balance, and workgroup diversity in numerous management journals. She has earned numerous awards for her research including the 2008 Calloway School Faculty Scholarship Award and was a finalist for the 2007 Rosabeth Moss Kanter Award for the “best of the best” in work-family research.
Jason White
Visiting Assistant Professor
Department of History
Jason White earned his B.A. in history from James Madison University, his Master of Letters in Scottish History from the University of St. Andrews (Scotland), and his Ph.D. in History from Brown University. His research interest includes early modern Scotland, early modern England, and the Origins of the British Civil War. He has published multiple articles, his most recent, “Militant Protestants: British Identity in the Jacobean Era, 1603-1625” is forthcoming.
Maria A. Windell
Visiting Assistant Professor
Department of English
Maria Windell received her B.A. in English from Purdue University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from the University of Virginia. Her dissertation was entitled The Diplomacy of Affect: Transamerican Sentimentalism in Nineteenth-Century US Literary History. Her teaching interests include late-eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century US literature, ethnic US literatures, literature of the Americas and environmental literature and ecocriticism. Her most recent publication was “Sanctify Our Suffering World with Tears: Transamerican Sentimentalism in Joaquin Murieta” (2008).
Jinglin Xiong
Lecturer
Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures
Jinglin Xiong received a B.A. in English and a M.A. in Applied Linguistics from Beijing International Studies University and a M.A. in Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language from the University of Iowa. Two major projects Jinglin has worked on are the Chinese Reading World at the University of Iowa and Using the New Perspective English Network Learning System to aid college English teaching at Chinese Ministry of Education and China Agricultural University.
Ya-Wen Yang
Assistant Professor of Accounting
Schools of Business
Ya-wen Yang earned her B.B.A. in Accounting from Tunghai University (Taiwan), her M.B.A. degree in Corporate Finance from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and her Ph.D. in Accounting at the University of Tennessee. Prior to joining Wake Forest University, she taught Intermediate Accounting I & II in the undergraduate accounting program and Financial Reporting & Analysis in the MBA program at the University of Miami. Ya-wen's research interests include executive compensation, corporate governance, corporate lobbying, and international financial accounting and reporting. She has written and co-written numerous research articles, published in academic journals such as Accounting Horizon, Advances in Accounting, Issues in Accounting Education, Journal of Accounting & Public Policy, etc. Her work has been cited in news outlets, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Business Week, and USA Today.
Julian P. Young
Kenan Professor of Humanities
Julian P. Young received a B.A. and M.A. from Cambridge University. He also earned another M.A. from Wayne State University and a Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh. Julian is fluent in German and has a specialist interest in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European philosophy, the philosophy of art and religion, and the foundations of environmental ethics. His current research projects include a book on Richard Wagner as philosopher. Young’s biography, Friedrich Nietzsche: a Philosophical Biography (Cambridge 2010), is upcoming.