Wesleyan welcomes 14 new ongoing faculty to campus this fall, including five professors of the practice. They include:

Charles Barber, associate professor of the practice in the College of Letters, is a nonfiction author who writes about mental health and criminal justice issues, for both popular and scholarly audiences. He has previously taught at Wesleyan for eight years as a visitor, primarily as Writer in Residence in the College of Letters, and also in the Psychology and English departments, and Allbritton Center. He has written three books: Songs from the Black Chair: A Memoir of Mental Interiors, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry is Medicating a Nation, and Citizen Outlaw: One Man’s Journey from Gang Leader to Peacekeeper. Barber has been published in The New York Times, Washington Post, Salon, The Nation, and Scientific American MIND. Before becoming a full-time academic, he worked with homeless and incarcerated people for two decades, and conducted federally-funded studies on how to best engage such individuals into treatment and services. He also is a lecturer in psychiatry at Yale University.

Garry Bertholf, assistant professor of African American studies, holds a doctorate in Africana studies from the University of Pennsylvania, as well as a master’s degree in jazz and popular music studies from the University of Pennsylvania. He is working on two book projects. The first, titled The Black Charismatic: Demagoguery and the Politics of Affect, examines the performance, practice, and rhetoric of demagoguery in post-Civil Rights Black political leadership, showing in what ways this form of what he calls “the Black charismatic” threatens to make illusory what should be a vibrant Black public sphere based on substance rather than affect. The second, Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism in Africana Literature, theorizes a distinctively literary genealogy of that antinomy (Afro-pessimism/Black optimism) by exploring earlier Africana texts that potentially give a new shape to the debates that currently circulate around that antinomy. Bertholf has published articles in south: a scholarly journal, Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, and in the edited volume Reconstruction at 150: Reassessing the Revolutionary “New Birth of Freedom.”

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This fall, Wesleyan welcomes 17 visiting faculty members to campus. They are:

Christopher Bell, David Scott Williams Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology, received his BA in English literatures and cultures from Brown University and his MA and PhD in psychology from the University of West Georgia. His research explores the processes and outcomes of psychotherapy; his dissertation, Psychotherapeutic Subjectivities, examined the subjective experiences of individuals in psychotherapy, analyzing these experiences in terms of different psychotherapeutic techniques. He has published on projection and memories of projection as well as Lacanian psychoanalysis, and his projects advocate a contextual approach to psychotherapy research. This fall, Bell is teaching a first-year seminar on Psychoanalysis Then and Now, and Cultural Psychology.

Alessandra Buccella, visiting assistant professor of philosophy, received her PhD in philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh. Her work focuses on the philosophy of mind and perception, at the intersection with psychology and cognitive science. She did her undergraduate studies in Milan, Italy, and has a Master’s degree in analytic philosophy from the University of Barcelona, Spain. Buccella’s broader philosophical interests encompass 20th-century phenomenology, philosophy of science, and feminist philosophy. Recently, she has been working on ways to combine philosophical theories of perception and objectivity with insights coming from the feminist tradition, in particular regarding the role of the body in shaping our experience of the world. This fall semester, she’s teaching Philosophy of Psychology and a first-year seminar titled Bodies and Experiences.

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This fall, Wesleyan welcomes nine postdoctoral fellows to campus. They include:

Sierra Eisen, postdoctoral fellow in psychology, joins the Psychology Department for two years. She received her PhD from the Department of Psychology at the University of Virginia, where she was a researcher in the Early Development Lab. Eisen studies how children interact with and learn from different forms of media. Her research mainly focuses on how children think about and learn from touchscreen devices and educational apps. At Wesleyan, she will conduct collaborative research with students and faculty in the Cognitive Development Laboratories, directed by Anna Shusterman and Hilary Barth, as well as teaching a seminar course in her area of specialization.

Javier Fernández Galeano, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for the Humanities, is a historian of 20th-century Argentina and Spain. His research and teaching interests include gender and sexuality in Latin America and Iberia, queer history, diasporas and migrations, state violence, prison management, and global activist politics. His first book project traces the erotic lives and legal battles of Argentine and Spanish gender-nonconforming people. He shifts the focus to non-elite actors––rural populations, recruits and prisoners, fans of flamenco music, and defendants’ mothers––and to queer transnationalism in spirituality, folk music, fashion and performance, and visual and material culture. Galeano has a PhD in history from Brown University, where he graduated as a Mellon/ACLS fellow; a MA in historical studies from the New School for Social Research, where he was a Fulbright scholar; and two BAs in history and anthropology from the Universidad Complutense of Madrid. He has published in the Journal of the History of Sexuality, the Latin American Research Review, and Encrucijadas, among others.

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