Meet the Newest Faculty and Staff Members of the College of Arts & Sciences

Lex Allenbaugh is the live sound technician in the Department of Performing Arts.

Mari Bailey is the program administrator in the Department of Computer Science.

Leah Baetcke joined the Dean’s Office in October 2024 as a shared services administrator. She is from northern Virginia and returned to the DC area after completing her bachelor’s degree in Spanish and mathematics at the University of Virginia in 2023. In her free time, Baetcke enjoys attending concerts and watching DC and UVA sports teams.

Derek Baron has joined the Department of Performing Arts as an assistant teaching professor. He received his Ph.D. in historical musicology from New York University in 2023. He has previously held postdoctoral positions at the Rutgers University’s Center for Cultural Analysis and the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies. Baron’s work focuses on music, sound and law in Native American history.

Candy Bartoldus has joined the Dean’s Office as a senior shared services administrator. She enjoys working in shared services, where she provides administrative support to various programs. She has a Ph.D. in environmental biology and worked for the government. Ask about her weekends, and the conversation quickly turns to family time in Frederick, Maryland.

Alex Brostoff has joined the Department of English as an assistant professor of English and women’s and gender studies. An interdisciplinary scholar and translator, they study how trans and queer cultural production recasts the relationship between self-figuration and decolonial critique.

Victoria Broadus is an assistant teaching professor in the Department of History.

Gregory Bowyer, Jr. has joined the Prison and Justice Initiative as a community resource manager. With over 25 years of experience, Bowyer designs cross-sector, evidence-based strategies that empower justice-impacted individuals and communities, delivers solutions to strengthen service organizations and promotes institutional and systemic change.

Darry Byers-Robinson is the Patuxent site coordinator for the Prison and Justice Initiative.

Danny Cackley has joined the Department of Mathematics as a department administrator. He is excited to join the College of Arts & Sciences full-time after working part-time in the School of Medicine as a physical exam teaching associate and standardized patient. Outside of Georgetown, Cackley is the associate artistic director for Faction of Fools Theater Company, DC’s commedia dell’arte theater. He’s a fan of chess, books and bagels from Call Your Mother Deli.

Louisa Christen is the program manager for the Department of Government.

Jinaeng Choi has joined the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures as an assistant professor. She is a literary scholar whose work examines how border-crossing narratives – tied to migration and translation – challenge monolingual and national confines, fostering a more inclusive and diverse literary landscape. Choi is completing her first monograph on the literature of Korean Latin American communities from the late 19th to the 20th century, tracing linguistic negotiations and the politics of cultural exchange to uncover alternative genealogies of world literature. Choi holds a Ph.D. from UCLA and M.A. and B.A. degrees from Stony Brook University and Korea University.

Valerie Coats is the program manager for the Prison Scholars Program in the Prison and Justice Initiative.

Lydia Davis joined the Department of Government in March 2025 as the new assistant director for the Master of Arts in American Government and Democracy & Governance programs. She came from a career in the arts with experience in museums, galleries and private events.

Venus Davis is the project manager in the Department of Computer Science.

Richard Desinord has joined the Department of Performing Arts as an assistant professor of music. His research focuses on gospel and R&B, pedagogy and the visualization of music theory. Desinord is working on a monograph that examines the rhetorical functions of harmonic progressions in gospel music. He holds a Ph.D. in music theory from the Eastman School of Music.

Guadalupe Delgado is the operations administrator for the Department of Theology and Religious Studies.

Theavy Din is an assistant teaching professor in the Department of French and Francophone Studies.

Francesca Di Silvio joined the Department of Linguistics as a department administrator in March 2025. Previously she served as the director of world languages for the Center for Applied Linguistics and as an independent researcher focused on language assessment development and professional development for educators.

Richard Elliott has joined the Department of Government as an assistant teaching professor. He grew up in the beautiful Cotswold town of Chipping Norton. After studying history at Cambridge and political theory at Oxford, he completed a postdoc at ETH Zurich before moving to DC in 2020. His work focuses on the intersection of political theory and mass political culture post-1600.

Perry Flores is the Ph.D. program officer for the Department of Government.

Daniel Gostin-Yong has joined the Dean’s Office as the associate director for finance and operations. Originally from New England and steeped in the Jesuit tradition (a soon-to-be triple Boston College Eagle), Gostin-Yong lives with his husband and dog in Capitol Hill and manages to keep up his origins as a classical musician aside from managing finances at the College of Arts & Sciences.

James Gustafson has joined the Department of History as a Royden B. Davis, S.J. visiting professor of Persian/Iranian history for fall 2025. He has been a professor of Middle East history at Indiana State University since 2012. 

Jamon Halvaksz is a visiting associate professor in the Department of Anthropology. 

Robert Hand is the director of production in the Department of Performing Arts.

Laurel Iber has joined the Department of French and Francophone Studies as an assistant teaching professor. Prior to joining the Georgetown faculty, Iber was a visiting assistant professor at UC Irvine and Oberlin College and received her Ph.D. from Duke University. Besides French language acquisition, Iber specializes in 19th- and 20th-century French literature and culture, art history, cinema, gender and sexuality studies, medical humanities and critical theory.

Ayşe Candan Kirişci first joined the Turkish Program in 2019; since January 2025, she has been teaching in a full-time position as an assistant teaching professor, conducting classes at all levels, developing new courses, and organizing speakers’ events for the Turkish Program. Kirişci holds a Ph.D. degree in literature from Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. 

Ariel Kline has joined the Department of Art and Art History as an assistant professor. She specializes in modern art in Britain and the United States. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2024. Her book manuscript is titled Of Monsters and Mirrors: Art and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Britain.

Yoshi Kohno is the McDevitt Chair in Computer Science, Ethics, and Society and professor in the Department of Computer Science and the Center for Digital Ethics. His research focuses on helping protect the security, privacy and safety of users of current and future technologies.

Marisa Koulen has joined the Department of English as an assistant teaching professor. She earned her Ph.D. in rhetoric, composition and pedagogy from the University of Houston in 2025. Her research examines antiracist writing ecologies, multimodal composing and social media and web writing for social justice.

LaiYee Leong has joined the Department of Government as an assistant teaching professor and associate director of undergraduate studies. She earned her B.A. in English and Ph.D. in political science at Yale. Leong’s teaching focuses on democracy and movements in Southeast Asia and the politics of the Asian diaspora. She is the lead scholar of oral history projects centered on aspects of U.S. foreign policy during the George W. Bush presidency.

Glory Liu has joined the Department of Government as an assistant professor. She is a political theorist whose research and teaching focuses on the history of political and economic thought and American intellectual history. Prior to joining Georgetown, she was the assistant director for the Center for Economy and Society at Johns Hopkins.

Assaf Moghadam is the Aaron and Cecile Goldman visiting Israeli professor in the Department of Government. He is a professor at the Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy at Reichman University, where he served as dean from 2019 to 2024. He previously taught at the United States Military Academy at West Point and Columbia University. His research interests are terrorism, insurgency and proxy wars.

Enzo Morello is a visiting professor and Jesuit chair in the Department of Sociology.

Spencer Alexandria Nabors is an assistant professor of philosophy and Provost’s Distinguished Faculty Fellow. Her research interests include philosophy of race, critical phenomenology and social epistemology.

Tiffany Nguyen is the administrator for the Department of Psychology. Prior to joining Georgetown, she studied molecular, cell and developmental biology at UCLA.

Liza Offreda has joined the disability studies program as an assistant teaching professor. She teaches Introduction to Disability Studies, Deaf Culture and Literature and Disability and Sports, focusing on how disability and Deaf experiences are represented in literature, culture and sport. She is also a decorated Deaf athlete and sports advocate.

Danielle Purifoy (they/she) is a Royden B. Davis, S.J. visiting professor in the Department of Black Studies. Purifoy is a professor and scholar whose interests intersect geography, law, environmental studies and Black studies to learn about Black placemaking practices from town formation to ecological stewardship. Beyond Purifoy’s visiting position at Georgetown, they are an assistant professor of geography and environment at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where they also serve as a faculty project lead for the Environmental Justice Action Research Clinic.

Atif Qarni has joined the Program on Education, Inquiry, and Justice as an assistant professor. He is an educator and U.S. Marine Corps veteran who served as Virginia’s Secretary of Education from 2018 to 2021. He led efforts on tuition-free community college, expanded early childhood programs, workforce training and advanced inclusive history and culturally relevant pedagogy.

Daniel Rappoport has joined the Department of Economics as an assistant professor. He is a microeconomic theorist studying information economics, specifically how to design institutions for agents who are primarily motivated by reputation concerns. Rappoport is originally from New Jersey but did his undergraduate degree in DC. He likes to play racquet sports, most recently, pickleball.

Mary Roberts is a Royden B. Davis, S.J. visiting professor for the Georgetown Humanities Initiative and the Department of Art and Art History. She specializes in modern Ottoman art and European Orientalism. At Georgetown, she is teaching Ottomans and Orientalists: 1798-1910 and commencing her next book on Constantin Guys’ Crimean War drawings for the Illustrated London News, which considers the ways in which these drawings mediated the representation of conflict, diplomacy and Istanbul’s urban modernity.

Marjorie Sheiman has joined the Department of English as a business administrator. She grew up in Oregon but moved to the east coast for graduate school in 2022. Before coming to Georgetown, she was the business manager and marketing coordinator of the Benjamin T. Rome School of Performing Arts at the Catholic University of America. In addition to her administrative duties, Sheiman is also a classical singer and recently graduated from the Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University with a Master of Music in voice performance. She works with organizations around the DMV region and beyond, including the National Symphony Orchestra, the Washington National Cathedral and Opera Baltimore.

Samantha Simonsen is the administrative coordinator for the Prison and Justice Initiative’s prison education programs.

Kelyn Soong joined the Dean’s Office in April 2025 as the content specialist on the communications team, where he is responsible for writing stories on the College’s faculty, staff, students and alumni. Soong is a passionate storyteller, writer, editor and communications expert who previously worked as a journalist for more than a decade at The Washington Post and Washington City Paper.

Jessica Tamayo has joined the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor as a training specialist in occupational health and safety. She is a prominent activist and defender of labor rights for immigrants and minorities in the DC area. Originally from El Salvador, since her arrival to the region, Tamayo has demonstrated a commitment unwavering with the Latin community. She currently serves as acting chapter president for the Labor Council for Latin America Advancement (LCLAA-Chapter DC). She plays a crucial role as an organizer at 32 BJ SEIU, where she is dedicated to educating workers about their labor rights and the regulations that guarantee their safety in the workplace. Her influence extends to the board of the Metropolitan Washington Council AFL-CIO, where she contributes as an active member. Tamayo was also a student at North Virginia Community College.

Martina Thorne is an assistant teaching professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.

Allan Tulchin has joined the Department of History as a teaching professor. He is from New York City and is married to Judith Miller, a Georgetown professor of math. They have two teenage kids. Tulchin was educated at Yale, Cambridge and Chicago, and taught for 19 years at Shippensburg University. His field is French history between the Renaissance and the French Revolution.

Luis Miguel Toquero-Pérez is an assistant professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. 

Danielle Wiggins has joined the Department of History as an assistant professor. She received her Ph.D. in history from Emory University in 2018. Her first book, Black Excellence: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Black Liberalism, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in September 2025.

王悠 Wáng Yōu is an assistant professor in the Department of History.

Linxi Zhang is an assistant teaching professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.