The College of Humanities is pleased to welcome new faculty for the upcoming academic year.
“These are outstanding scholars who represent the breadth and diversity of Humanities scholarship and teaching,” said Dorrance Dean Alain-Philippe Durand. “Their expertise in languages and cultures around the world will further our mission of graduating students equipped with the skills they need to succeed on the global job market.”
Mary-Evelyn Farrior, Assistant Professor
Department of Religious Studies and Classics
Dr. Farrior joins the Department of Religious Studies & Classics as Assistant Professor of Classics (Roman Archaeology). Her research focuses on the archaeology and social history of marginalized communities in the Roman urban landscape. Dr. Farrior earned her doctorate from Columbia University. Her dissertation, recognized with the Rome Prize in Ancient Studies (2024), explored foreign communities within the Greek epigraphic record of imperial Rome. Her current research builds on this work to investigate the relationship between imperial power and the Greek language within the city of Rome.
She is the Excavation Supervisor for the Pompeii I.14 Project, which examines everyday life at the edges of Roman urban society. She has co-authored reports on the project’s first three seasons, published in the Rivista di Studi Pompeiani and the E-Journal degli Scavi di Pompei. Her fieldwork extends beyond Pompeii, including at sites such as Sant’Omobono, Morgantina and Hadrian’s Villa in Italy, as well as Pañamarca in Peru. Most recently, she held a lectureship in the Department of Classics at Princeton University, where she taught courses on Roman archaeology and history. Before Princeton, she was the Stavros Niarchos Fellow in Classical Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA). She studied Classics at Brown University (BA, 2014) and Classical Studies at Tulane University (MA, 2016).
Genevieve Ferrier-Rainey, Assistant Professor
Department of French and Italian
Dr. Geneviève (Gene, [ʒənə]) Ferrier-Rainey, a native of southwestern France, is a linguist and a language instructor. She earned her Ph.D. in French Linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin in 2026, after completing a portfolio in Language Program Direction (UT Austin, 2023), a Master in French Linguistics (UT Austin, 2022), and a Master Français Langue Étrangère (Université de Pau Pays de l’Adour, 2017). She is joining the Department of French at the University of Arizona in the Fall of 2026 as Assistant Professor and Director of the Basic Language Program. Her research interests focus on Second Language Pragmatics and intercultural communication, with a focus on irony understanding and formulaic language. Dr. Ferrier-Rainey’s teaching philosophy is centered on raising students’ awareness of languacultural norms in their first and second languages, and she endeavors to support student learning through language play and practical communication strategies.
Borbala Gaspar, Assistant Professor of Practice
Department of French and Italian
Dr. Gaspar earned her Ph.D. in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching. She is the co-author of Italian In Wonderland, an OER language-learning platform sponsored by an NEH grant and currently used for Italian language instruction at the University of Arizona.
Dr. Gaspar’s research focuses on literacy-oriented language teaching and learning and students’ perceptions of language learning. She is grateful for the opportunity to continue her professional growth while collaborating with and learning from the diverse community within the College of Humanities.
Bo Liu, Assistant Professor
Department of East Asian Studies
Dr. Liu is an Assistant Professor of Chinese and Director of the Basic Language Program in Chinese in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Arizona. Before joining the University of Arizona, he taught Chinese language, culture, and research courses at Texas A&M University, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Oklahoma. He earned his Ph.D. in Instructional Leadership and Academic Curriculum from the University of Oklahoma, with a concentration in World Languages Education.
His teaching and research focus on Chinese language pedagogy, language learning motivation, teacher education, curriculum design, and language assessment. He has published research in Foreign Language Annals, RELC Journal, and Chinese as a Second Language. He is actively involved in professional service and leadership in world languages education and teacher education. In his free time, he enjoys traveling, walking his dog Lucy, watching movies, and playing pickleball.
Manuela Luengas Solano, Assistant Professor
Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Dr. Luengas Solano joins the Department of Spanish and Portuguese as Assistant Professor of Spanish. She is a cultural studies scholar of modern and contemporary Latin America, working at the intersection of environmental humanities, contemporary art and media, and cultural anthropology. Her research and teaching interests include climate and environmental justice, sound studies, Indigenous literatures, and the history of print and visual cultures in the Americas from the nineteenth century to the present. Her current book project, River Archives: Sedimentation, Fluidity, and Futurity in Latin American Cultures, brings together a wide-ranging corpus of film, travel writing, cartography, literature, and installation art, examining the role of rivers in Latin America’s modern history. Her book argues that, instead of passive ‘natural’ elements, rivers can be conceived as both historical archives and social actors for artists and communities in the region—they are complex entities holding traces of the past, while being active mediators of human and more-than-human relations. Through an interdisciplinary approach, River Archives offers a novel understanding of the region’s hydro-social territories, foregrounding rivers’ centrality in questions regarding political violence, race, migration, and post-colonial extractive cycles. Further, her research demonstrates how rivers’ materialities has affected the aesthetic registers and languages of Latin American cultural production.
Prior to joining the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at University of Arizona, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow in environmental humanities at Harvard University’s Mahindra Humanities Center (2025-2026). She holds a PhD in Latin American and Iberian Cultures from Columbia University (2025), an MA in Literary Studies from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (2018), and a BA in Anthropology from Universidad Nacional de Colombia (2015). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Contracorriente, Crisol, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, and World Literature Today, among others. Her first book, entitled Revista Mito: Libertad, situación y política del intelectual (1955-1962), on twentieth-century print culture in Colombia was published by Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico Press in 2025.
Nicholas Ott, Assistant Professor
Department of German Studies
Dr. Ott, (University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2024), is an incoming Assistant Professor of German Studies who will serve as the Director of the Basic Language Program at the University of Arizona. Prior to this role, he was a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at the University of Utah and was affiliated with the Second Language Teaching and Research Center (L2TReC). Dr. Ott’s research is situated within the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and focuses on speech accommodation, the multilingual identity, and social justice-oriented pedagogy. His work has appeared in Unterrichtspraxis/Teaching German, Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, and other venues.
As a teacher, Dr. Ott actively integrates innovative approaches to teaching German, including AI- and virtual reality-enhanced instruction, multiliteracies pedagogy, and arts-based methods.
At various points in his career, he has taught German, Spanish, and English as a second or foreign language at the secondary and/or postsecondary levels in the United States, Germany, and Costa Rica. Drawing on his experience as a Fulbright grantee and as a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer, Dr. Ott is particularly interested in supporting L2 learners’ transition from the classroom into real-world immersion environments.
Cassidy Reis, Assistant Professor of Practice
Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Dr. Reis earned her M.A. and Ph.D. (2021) in Spanish Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2021, she joined the teaching faculty of the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at the University of Arizona, where she has served as Lecturer, Coordinator and Interim Director of the Spanish Language Program. Her research interests include early modern Spanish literature and visual art, the visual rhetoric of Spanish picaresque fiction, ekphrasis in early modern literature, language program direction and leadership, and teaching Spanish as an additional language. She received her M.Ed. in Curriculum & Instruction from UNLV as a Teach for America Corps Member in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Her teaching experience includes beginning, intermediate, and advanced Spanish language and literature courses. Her dissertation is titled, Themes of Visuality, Visual Language, and Ekphrasis in the Early Modern Spanish Picaresque Novel (2021), and other publications include "Painted Dreams and Cervantes’s Critique of Representation in the Persiles", eHumanista Cervantes 5 (2017).
Martin Sheehan, Department Head and Associate Professor
Department of German Studies
Dr. Sheehan is incoming Department Head and Associate Professor of German Studies at the University of Arizona. His research examines how literature and other media shape perceptions of bodies, identities, and social difference in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German culture. His scholarship has appeared in leading journals of German literary and cultural studies, including Seminar, Colloquia Germanica, and in such collections as The Routledge Companion to Literary Media. With Carrie Collenberg-Gonzalez, he co-edited Moving Frames: Photographs in German Cinema, a volume that investigates the aesthetic, narrative, and theoretical significance of photography in German film.
His current projects investigate how disability intersects with gender in German drama. A related strand of his research explores how visual and administrative technologies organize bodies and social relations during Germany’s Weimar era. He also creates scholarly video games that use interactive systems to explore a range of historical experiences. Paper Empire uses the mechanics and aesthetics of incremental games to explore everyday life during Weimar hyperinflation, while Kafka Teaches Typing, a modification of the border control game Papers, Please, translates the reality of Franz Kafka’s bureaucratic position at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute in Prague into procedural gameplay. Across these projects, Dr. Sheehan considers how media forms structure perception and assign cultural meaning to embodied difference.
A former co-director of the German Studies Association’s Digital Humanities Network, Dr. Sheehan has organized seminars and workshops on social network analysis, computational creativity, and other digital approaches to scholarship and teaching. He has also helped develop interdisciplinary academic programs that connect the humanities with computing and engineering.
His teaching and research have received support from the Max Kade Foundation and the German Academic Exchange Service. He has also presented his work at Harvard University, Georgetown University, and the University of Oxford. Before joining the University of Arizona, he held positions at the University of Virginia and TU Dortmund University. At Tennessee Tech University, he chaired the Department of Foreign Languages for nearly a decade. A native of South Carolina, he now calls the Southwest home, where he continues to collect, restore, and write with mechanical typewriters.
Chelsea Ward, Assistant Professor
Department of East Asian Studies
Dr. Ward is an Assistant Professor of Japanese at the University of Arizona whose research spans modern and contemporary Japanese literature, film, and media. She examines how literature and media shape sensory experience—and how ideas about perception become entangled with translation, technology, empire, and globalization. Her work moves from interwar silent cinema, modernist fiction, and colonial poetry to karaoke background videos, graphic design, avant-garde fashion, and food culture.
She is currently writing a book, Making Sense in Japanese Modernism: The Politics and Affects of Perception, that asks how competing scientific and cultural understandings of the senses shaped the aesthetics and politics of interwar Japan. Reading across literature, cinema, and translation, it shows how sensory experience became a crucial site for negotiating modernity, cultural difference, and empire. Her interest in the sensory also extends to more contemporary intersections of perception and global media. In a recent article published in the Journal of Visual Culture, she traces how karaoke background videos transformed changes in media technology, copyright, urban leisure, and nostalgia into an embodied form of ambient entertainment. Her next book project, Packaging the Spirit, examines how postwar Japanese film, fashion, food, and design were marketed abroad through a minimalist sensory aesthetic that continues to shape Japan’s global image.
Dr. Ward teaches courses on modern and contemporary Japanese literature and media, East Asian popular culture, translation, and media theory. Before joining Arizona, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Colgate University and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Wellesley College. She received her Ph.D. in Japanese literature, with a designated emphasis in Film & Media, from the University of California, Berkeley.