Faculty Advisory Committee - Goldfarb Center

Meet Our Faculty Advisors

The Goldfarb Faculty Advisory Committee is charged with advising the Executive Director on ways to integrate Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs programming with the current curriculum, particularly in public policy. The group helps shape policy themes and priorities, as well as helps identify speakers and students for events. In addition, the committee helps the Center support and fund faculty-led work on issues of public policy research and development, including awarding public policy grants to faculty.

Nadia El-Shaarawi

Goldfarb Faculty Associate Director

Assistant Professor of Global Studies

Nadia El-Shaarawi is an Assistant Professor and Associate Chair of Global Studies at Colby College. She is a cultural and medical anthropologist who specializes in transnational forced migration, humanitarian intervention, and mental health. She has done fieldwork in the Middle East and North Africa, Europe, and the United States. Her current book project, Collateral Damages, focuses on the experiences of Iraqi refugees in Cairo in the aftermath of the US-led invasion and occupation and the civil war that followed. In collaboration with Maple Razsa, Nadia is also working on Insurgent Mobilities, a collaborative ethnography of the Balkan Route that refugees travel to reach Europe. In 2019-2020, Nadia was an ACLS Fellow and Visiting Scholar at the Global Mental Health Program in the Department of Psychiatry at McGill University. Prior to joining Colby, Nadia was the Global Migration Postdoctoral Fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University, where her work included research and teaching on the health and social effects of displacement and resettlement.

Christel Kesler

Associate Professor of Sociology

Professor Christel Kesler is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology. Her research focuses on cross-national comparisons of social inequality. She is particularly interested in how political-economic institutions and social policies shape the experiences of immigrants and their host societies in North America and Western Europe. She has worked on several projects that consider immigrant socioeconomic incorporation in various countries. Other recent projects examine immigration-driven diversity’s effects on social solidarity and the welfare state and patterns of racial, ethnic, and national belonging among immigrants’ descendants. Professor Kesler’s work has appeared in journals such as the International Migration Review, Social Science Research, and Social Forces. In addition, professor Kesler teaches numerous courses on social inequality, social policy, international migration, methods for social research, and data analysis.

Nicholas Jacobs

Assistant Professor of Government

Nicholas Jacobs is a political scientist whose research focuses on multi-level governance and the politicization of administrative power. He has published over two dozen peer-reviewed articles and book-chapters on topics ranging from school segregation, tax reform, and America’s urban-rural divide. His first book, What Happened to the Vital Center?, with Oxford University Press, explores how institutional developments throughout the 20^th century created incentives to craft public policies away from median voter and use administrative tools as a mobilizing strategy for party activists. He received the American Political Science Association’s John Kincaid award for his research on federalism and intergovernmental relations and he regularly comments on American politics for local and national media outlets. At Colby, he teaches courses on American political development, public policy, political science research methods, and institutional reform. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia and a B.A. from the University of Mary Washington.

Jerzy A. Wieczorek

Assistant Professor of Statistics

Jerzy Wieczorek teaches courses on statistical modeling, data visualization, and survey design and data collection. Professor Wieczorek’s research focuses on visualization of statistical
uncertainty and on model selection and assessment, particularly when fitting modern statistical or machine learning models to data from complex sample survey designs. He holds a BS in Engineering from Olin College, a MS in Statistics from Portland State University, and a PhD in Statistics from Carnegie Mellon University. Professor Wieczorek also spent several years as a mathematical statistician at the U.S. Census Bureau. As a volunteer, he has provided data analysis and visualization assistance for organizations such as StatAid, Statistics Without Borders, and DataKind.

Jennifer A. Yoder

Robert E. Diamond Professor of Government and Global Studies

Professor Yoder holds a joint appointment with the Department of Government and the Global Studies Program and teaches courses on European politics and societies. Her special interests are German politics, remembrance and reckoning after communism, and borderlands in Europe. Her latest project examines the construction of European memory and the role the European Union plays in facilitating discussions of the past, particularly across the old West-East divide. Yoder is the author of two books: From East Germans to Germans? The New Post-Communist Elite (1999) and Crafting Democracy: Regional Politics in Post-Communist Europe (2013). Her articles have appeared in Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, German Politics and Society, German Politics, German Studies Review, East European Politics and Societies, Europe-Asia Studies and Regional and Federal Studies.

Inga K. Diederich

Assistant Professor of East Asian History

Professor Inga Kim Diederich is a historian whose research focuses on the development of Korean ethnic nationalism and its medico-scientific dimensions. Working at the intersection of Asian Studies, Science Studies, and Ethnic Studies, she concentrates on how the symbol and substance of blood worked to congeal a new form of modern Korean identity across a divided peninsula and diverse diasporas. She has published, presented, and organized work that explores the connections between Korean nationalism and the biological sciences in the context of gender, race, and class formations in modern East Asia and the trans-Pacific sphere. She received her PhD from the University of California San Diego, an MA from Harvard University, and a BA from the University of Chicago. At Colby, Professor Diederich teaches courses in the Departments of History, East Asian Studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies that survey East Asian history from antiquity through the present, explore the contours of Korean modernity, and consider how Asian bodies have been shaped by sexualized and radicalized discourses and practices.

Aaron R. Hanlon

Associate Professor of English

Chair of the Science, Technology, and Society (STS) Department

Professor Hanlon’s research takes British literature of the Enlightenment as a basis for understanding how we frame and organize knowledge and how fact, fiction, and inference work together in the various types of writing we have called “literature”: not only fiction and poetry, but also scientific atlases, political pamphlets, correspondences, and travelogues. His work brings literature (broadly defined) into conversation with history and philosophy, particularly the history and philosophy of science. His first book, A World of Disorderly Notions: Quixote and the Logic of Exceptionalism (University of Virginia Press, 2019), explains the concept of “exceptionalism,” a belief that one’s special mission or outlook on the world justifies not having to follow the same rules as everyone else. The character of Don Quixote, rewritten for differing eras and international audiences since 1605, helps us understand how exceptionalist thinking and behavior can lead to the conflation of fact and fiction. More than 65 of Hanlon’s essays for a broader audience have appeared in venues including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Vox, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and others. He holds a B.A. in Political Science and an M.A. in English from Bucknell University, an M.A. in Cultural Studies from Dartmouth College, and a D.Phil. in English Language and Literature from the University of Oxford.

Ana S. Almeyda-Cohen

Assistant Professor of Spanish

Ana Almeyda-Cohen is originally from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. She recently earned her Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Since 2016, she has taught Spanish from Elementary to advanced levels at different institutions of higher education, including Latin American literature and film. At Colby College, she teaches courses on Latin American cinema and culture. Her research analyzes representations of popular cultural figures within Mexican culture and media and the Caribbean. Her work takes an interdisciplinary approach that draws from critical theories of race and gender, eco-criticism, Mexican visual studies, anthropology, border studies, and Latino/a studies.

MISSION OF THE GOLDFARB CENTER

• Be a vibrant information hub on the most pressing current events in the world
• Increase awareness of the role of public policy to address these complex challenges
• Inspire active citizenship among the Colby Community
• Empower and build the leadership skills of Colby students
• Create networking opportunities to connect students to alumni and world leaders who have established careers in public affairs
• Spark thought-provoking public policy conversations
• Provide forum for open, healthy discourse for all (all majors, all opinions, all people)

JOIN OUR MAILING LIST

The best way to stay informed and engaged is to join our mailing list. You will know about upcoming events, major announcements, and funding opportunities. Put in your name and email below and become a part of the Goldfarb Center!