Moisés Arce
Scott and Marjorie Cowen Chair in Latin American Social Sciences and Professor,
Department of Political Science
Moisés Arce specializes in conflict processes, state-society relations, and the politics of social and economic development. He has joined Tulane as the Scott and Marjorie Cowen Chair in Latin American Social Sciences and Professor in the Department of Political Science, and is also affiliated with the Stone Center of Latin American Studies. Arce is the author of Market Reform in Society (Penn State, 2005), Resource Extraction and Protest in Peru (Pittsburgh, 2014), Social Protest and Democracy (Calgary, 2019), and numerous book chapters and journal articles. He has served as a Visiting Fulbright Lecturer at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (2003), and as a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo (2014). Arce received his Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico.
Ruth D. Carlitz
Assistant Professor,
Department of Political Science
Ruth Carlitz's research looks at government responsiveness from the ‘top down’ (how governments distribute public goods) and the ‘bottom up’ (what citizens and non-governmental organizations can do to promote transparency and accountability). She focuses primarily on East Africa, inspired by her experience living and working in Tanzania from 2006-2008. In addition to her academic research, Carlitz has worked on evaluations commissioned by organizations including the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Twaweza, the International Budget Partnership, the Institute of Development Studies, and the UK’s Department for International Development. Carlitz received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Hongwei Chen
Assistant Professor,
Department of Communication
Hongwei Thorn Chen is a scholar of Chinese and east Asian film and media cultures. Chen received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota and his research addresses how institutions attempt to govern with technological media, and how media, in turn, trigger crises of governmental reason. He is working on a book that examines how "education" and "tutelage" served as organizing rationalities of institutional film use in China during the early-twentieth century, a period when elites sought to shape new political subjects within the uneven landscape of global inter-imperial competition. This book unfolds Chen's broader interests in colonial modernities and their legacies in east Asia and modern China, and transnational histories of film and visual culture.
Augustine Denteh
Assistant Professor,
Department of Economics
Augustine Denteh's broad research interests are in applied econometrics and health economics, where he is interested in employing innovative econometric tools to study how public policies affect people’s health and wellbeing. In particular, he works on impact evaluation, measurement error models, the economics of obesity, and food and nutrition programs. Denteh received his Ph.D. from Georgia State University and also studies techniques for generalizability in health policy using statistical machine learning approaches for causal inference.
Erin J. Kappeler
Assistant Professor,
Department of English
Erin Kappeler's current book project, The Secret History of Free Verse: American Prosody and Poetics 1880–1933, is the first historical account of free verse poetry as a race-based construction. Through readings of journals, literary magazines, and poetry anthologies from the modernist era, The Secret History of Free Verse identifies the fundamental but, until now, neglected connections between prosodic theories of free verse and constructions of American whiteness, and shows how these discourses shaped popular and academic understandings of African American and Native American poetry. Kappeler received her Ph.D. from Tufts University and her research has been supported by the ACLS, the Mellon Foundation, and the NEH.
Andrew McDowell
Assistant Professor,
Department of Anthropology
Andrew McDowell's research interests include cultural anthropology, medical anthropology, tuberculosis (TB), global health, and the anthropology of science with a focus on South and Central Asia. In work with TB-afflicted communities in rural Rajasthan, India, he traces the changes in TB care and its memory as well as its dialectical effects on rural forms of life. Focusing on global health, kinship, and aspiration his work toggles between haunted pasts, futures, bacilli, and families. McDowell received his Ph.D. from Harvard University.
Jonathan Morton
Assistant Professor,
Department of French & Italian
Jonathan Morton specializes in medieval literature with a particular interest in the interrelation between philosophy and art, and in literature’s mediation between knowledge, experience, and desire. Morton received his D. Phil. from the University of Oxford and comes to Tulane from the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, where he was the recipient of an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellowship.
David O’Brien
Assistant Professor,
Department of Philosophy
David O'Brien's academic interests include ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of education, and metaethics. His recent publications include an article on the unit and currency of egalitarian concern in the Journal of Moral Philosophy, and “Inequality of opportunity: Some lessons from the case of highly selective universities” in Theory and Research in Education. O’Brien received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Lee Skinner
Dean of Newcomb-Tulane College and Professor,
Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Lee Skinner, dean of Newcomb-Tulane College, is a leading scholar of Latin American literature. Skinner earned her bachelor’s degree in comparative literature from Brown University and her Ph.D. in Spanish from Emory University. Skinner’s research and teaching focuses on the study of national identity in 19th-century Spanish America. She has authored two monographs, History Lessons: Refiguring the Nineteenth-Century Historical Novel in Spanish America (Newark, 2006) and Gender and the Rhetoric of Modernity in Spanish America, 1850-1910 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2016).
Patrick A. Testa
Assistant Professor,
Department of Economics
Patrick Testa's current research focuses on the political economy of development, and he employs a combination of microeconomic theory and empirical methods, as well as both contemporary and historical data, in his research. Testa’s recent work seeks to understand the urban and regional effects of forced migration, as well as how institutions and culture interact with economic geography. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine.