New Talent Arrives

Erica Chenoweth joins Harvard Kennedy School as a professor of public policy and the Radcliffe Institute as a Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor. An internationally recognized authority on political violence, she was chosen as one of Foreign Policy’s Leading Global Thinkers of 2013. Prior to her current appointment, Chenoweth was associate dean for research at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies. 

Chenoweth earned a BA in political science and German from the University of Dayton and an MA and a PhD in political science from the University of Colorado. She codirects the Crowd Counting Consortium, a project that documents political mobilization in the United States during the Trump administration. 

After 16 years on the faculty of Princeton University, Christina L. Davis ’93, PhD ’01 joins Harvard as a professor in the Department of Government. She is also a Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Radcliffe Institute.

Davis holds an AB in East Asian studies and a PhD in government from Harvard University. Broadly, her research connects the politics and foreign policy of Japan and East Asia and the study of international organizations, with an emphasis on trade policy. Davis’s books have won the International Law Book Award, the Chadwick F. Alger Prize, and the Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Prize. She is currently writing a third book on membership in international organizations.

Jarvis R. Givens is a Suzanne Young Murray Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute and an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He earned his PhD in African diaspora studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to his faculty appointment, he completed a dean’s postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Givens’s research interests are interdisciplinary, falling at the intersection of the history of education, 19th- and 20th-century African American history, and black critical theory. He is currently working on his first book, an exploration of how teachers and black community members utilized the historian Carter G. Woodson’s critiques of the American school during the period of Jim Crow.

A specialist in human-computer interaction, Elena Leah Glassman joins the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences as an assistant professor of computer science. She is also a Stanley A. Marks and William H. Marks Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute. 

Glassman designs, builds, and evaluates systems for comprehending and interacting with population-level structure and trends in large code and data corpora. She holds a BS in electrical science and engineering and an MEng and a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before coming to Harvard, she was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, where she received the Berkeley Institute for Data Science Moore/Sloan Data Science Fellowship. 

Shawon K. Kinew AM ’12, PhD ’16 is an art historian of early modern Southern Europe. She comes to the Harvard community as a Shutzer Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute and an assistant professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture. Prior to those appointments, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship for Scholars in the Humanities at Stanford University.

Kinew received her honors BA from the University of Toronto and her AM and PhD from Harvard University. Her research interests include the history of early modern paintings and sculpture, and her current book project focuses on the 17th-century sculptor Melchiorre Cafà. Kinew is fascinated by Cafà’s ability to sculpt hard stone into—as she calls them—“soft sculptures.”

A 2011 recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, Tiya Miles ’92 is a public historian, an academic historian, and a creative writer. She comes to Harvard as a Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Radcliffe Institute and a professor of history.

Miles earned an AB in Afro American studies from Harvard University, an MA in women’s studies from Emory University, and a PhD in American studies from the University of Minnesota. She is an award-winning author whose most recent book, The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits (The New Press, 2017), received multiple accolades, including a 2018 American Book Award and a 2018 Frederick Douglass Book Prize. 

Christina Warinner AM ’08, PhD ’10 is a Sally Starling Seaver Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute and an assistant professor of anthropology. She specializes in biomolecular archaeology and is known for her pioneering work on ancient DNA and proteins. Through her research, Warinner has made significant contributions to the fields of prehistoric human health and past human migration.

Warinner received her AM and PhD from Harvard University. She was a TED Fellow in 2012, and her TED talks have been viewed more than two million times. She is actively engaged in public outreach. In addition to her research, Warinner created an archaeological science coloring book that has been printed in 18 languages, including many indigenous and underrepresented languages. 

Lauren K. Williams ’00 joins Harvard as a Sally Starling Seaver Professor at the Radcliffe Institute and a professor of mathematics. She is the only woman with a tenured faculty position in Harvard’s mathematics department. Williams’s research focuses on algebraic combinatorics; more specifically, she uses algebraic tools to study discrete structures in mathematics. 

Prior to her current appointment, Williams was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She earned an AB in mathematics from Harvard College and a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and held a number of postdoctoral appointments, including a National Science Foundation fellowship at the University of California and a Benjamin Pierce Fellowship at Harvard. 

With these distinguished additions, the Radcliffe Professorships program has recruited 29 faculty members.