Faculty members who are new to the college join a small cohort under the leadership of a pair of faculty mentors. These mentors coordinate group and individual meetings, class observations, and programming for faculty members who are new to our community.
Jason Bishop joins the Music Department as a Visiting Assistant Professor and Choral Director. Dr. Bishop is a Rhodes College alumnus (Class of 1998) and received his DMA in Choral Conducting from the University of Oklahoma. He comes to Rhodes after serving as Director of Choral Activities at St. Lawrence University. Dr. Bishop’s research interests include 19th-century Lieder and part song, conducting pedagogy, music literacy in the choral rehearsal, and the liturgy and music of Compline. Dr. Bishop has taught courses in Music History, Music Theory & Aural Skills, Choral Methods, and Conducting.
Robert Chang joins the Department of Mathematics and Statistics as a Visiting Assistant Professor. He received his Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 2019. He studies mathematical problems arising from quantum mechanics using tools from microlocal analysis, complex analysis, and probability.
Charity Clay joins the History department as a visiting professor of African American History. She comes to Rhodes after being a 2023-24 research fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. Before that she was a professor of Sociology at Xavier University of Louisiana. Dr. Clay is an integrated methods sociologist of the African Diaspora who has taught courses in Sociology, Women's and Gender Studies and African American and Diaspora Studies. Her work centers around place based understandings of Black liberation and resistance movements. These movements date back to the 1600s with Marronage from enslavement in the New World; include decolonization movements on the African continent during the 1900s', and provide frameworks for understanding the Social Media era of Black Freedom struggle in the United States .
Kelly Jo Fulkerson Dikuua joins the Health Equity Program in the Urban Studies Department as a Visiting Assistant Professor. Kelly Jo holds a PhD in African American and African Studies from the Ohio State University and a Master's in Theological Studies from Harvard University. She comes to Rhodes from the University of Tennessee Health Science Center. She has also taught for Denison University and the Namibian University of Science and Technology. Kelly Jo's research interests center on understanding health equity in post-apartheid spaces. She has taught courses titled Introduction to Health Equity; Race, Gender & Medicine; and Intersections: Approaches to Race, Class, and Sexuality.
Kevin Galambos joins the department of International Studies as Assistant Professor after graduating from the University of Texas at Austin. Dr Galambos researches international conflict and cooperation, with a focus on multinational war games. His teaching covers topics such as international relations, security, and foreign policy.
Connor K. Kianpour joins the Philosophy Department as a Postdoctoral Fellow. Dr. Kianpour received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2024. His specialties lie in applied ethics and social/political philosophy. Dr. Kianpour's research interests span topics as diverse as the moral duties of the oppressed, the rights and entitlements of children and animals, sexual ethics, and the philosophy of humor, among other things. His professional website can be accessed at www.connorkianpour.com, where you can find links to his published work.
Evan Kingsley is starting as an assistant professor in the Biology Department. Since finishing his PhD at Harvard University, he has been a postdoc at Harvard Medical School and a visiting postdoc at St Jude. He studies evolutionary and developmental biology, currently focusing on the evolution of bird vocalization.
Dr. Kugele's research focuses on artificial intelligence, cognitive modeling, and neuro-symbolic systems. The goal of his research is to understand how natural minds (such as human minds) work and to implement biologically inspired software systems based on the same principles. Dr. Kugele has worked for over a decade as a software engineer and software architect. He has undergraduate degrees in computer science, mathematics, and anthropology, and a PhD in computer science from the University of Memphis.
Jenn Lupu joins the Anthropology and Sociology department as an Assistant Professor. She received her PhD in Anthropology at Northwestern University in 2023. She comes to Rhodes after serving as a visiting professor at Northwestern University and completing a fellowship at the Science History Institute. Dr. Lupu is a historical archaeologist researching medicine access, inequality, and queer history using artifacts excavated from 19th and 20th century household trash in Washington, DC. She teaches courses on medicine and society, critical geography, and queer anthropology.
Alex McDiarmid researches psychological topics related to metascience such as the extent to which science consumers are persuaded by scientific evidence and situational factors that influence the persuasiveness of evidence. His second line of research focuses on intergroup stereotypes and prejudice between religious believers and religious non-believers.
McKinley E. Melton joins Rhodes College as Associate Professor and Chair of Africana Studies. He comes to Rhodes after 12 years on the faculty of Gettysburg College, where he most recently served as the Inaugural Paxton Endowed Teaching Chair and Associate Professor of English. He earned his Ph.D. from the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and his undergraduate degrees in English and African & African-American Studies from Duke University. Dr. Melton’s research and teaching focus primarily on 20th and 21st Century Africana literatures, with a particular emphasis on contemporary Black poetics. He teaches a range of courses that are designed to engage the intersections of social, political, and cultural movements as part of a critical approach to Africana literature and culture.
Cameron Ogg joins the Biology Department as a Visiting Assistant Professor. Dr. Ogg received her PhD in Neurobiology from the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in 2017. She comes to Rhodes after her postdoctoral training at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Dr. Ogg’s research interests center on the neuromodulation of behavioral flexibility. In both graduate school and in her postdoc work, she has used in vivo calcium imaging to explore how neural activity in certain brain areas is organized, how that organization is affected by certain neurotransmitters, and what effect those changes have on behavior.
Casey Shin joins the Politics and Law Department as an Assistant Professor. Dr. Shin received his Ph.D. in Political Science from West Virginia University in 2022. He has previously served as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Rhodes College from 2021-2024. His research interests center on policy, political behavior, and populism. Within the Politics and Law Department at Rhodes, he has taught courses such as PLAW 151: United States Politics, PLAW 205: Introduction to Public Policy, and PLAW 270: Methods of Political Inquiry.
Jasper St. Bernard joins as the Visiting Assistant Professor of History. He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Memphis in 2024. His research interests center on African American philosophy of the late 19th - early 20th century, more broadly. He focuses more specifically on Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s campaign against racialized violence, and the cross-section between philosophy, history, and literature where Wells’s writings dwell. While at Memphis he taught classes centered on ethics, and at Rhodes taught classes on the gothic and monsters as a part of the SEARCH program.
James Tumulty joins the Biology Department as an Assistant Professor. Dr. Tumulty received his Ph.D. in Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior from University of Minnesota in 2018. Before joining Rhodes, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University and Visiting Assistant Professor at William & Mary. Dr. Tumulty studies animal behavior, focusing on how animals communicate with each other and how behavior evolves.