Two Indigenous educators join the Faculty of Education
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This story is published in YFile’s New Faces Feature Issue 2021, part two. Every September, YFile introduces and welcomes those joining the York University community, and those with new appointments. Part one was published on Sept. 3.
Two Indigenous educators join York University’s Faculty of Education this fall as full-time faculty members. They are Kiera (Kaia’tanó:ron) Brant-Birioukov and Rebecca Beaulne-Stuebing.
“We are delighted to welcome two new colleagues: Kiera (Kaia’tanó:ron) Brant-Birioukov and Rebecca Beaulne-Stuebing. Each are respected scholars and teachers in their particular fields of study,” said Faculty of Education Dean Robert Savage. “They bring a diverse range of expertise to the Faculty of Education in Indigenous understandings and development. We very much look forward to the new ideas, perspectives, and contributions that they will make to our faculty and towards our ongoing mission of reinventing education for a diverse, complex world.”
Kiera (Kaia’tanó:ron) Brant-Birioukov
Kiera (Kaia’tanó:ron) Brant-Birioukov is a Haudenosaunee (Kanyen’keha:ka) educator and educational theorist from Kenhtè:ke, also known as the Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory in Ontario. She joins the Faculty of Education and the Wüléelham community at York as an assistant professor and will support the Indigenous cohorts, courses and programs in the Faculty of Education.
She is a certified teacher in Ontario and British Columbia and is committed to ethical Indigenous education across all K-12 and post-secondary classrooms. Some of her current projects include the repatriation of historical Haudenosaunee stories, artifacts and journal diaries to communities across the Six Nations Confederacy, as well as collaborating in the knowledge mobilization of Indigenous-Settler food sovereignty through the Earth to Tables Legacies project.
Rebecca Beaulne-Stuebing
Rebecca Beaulne-Stuebing joins the Faculty of Education as an assistant professor. She is Métis, adopted into the Anishinaabe bald eagle clan in the Three Fires Midewiwin lodge. Her family has roots in the Sault Ste. Marie Métis community and Manitoba, and they are registered with the Métis Nation of Ontario.
Beaulne-Stuebing is also of French and Austrian settler ancestry. Her PhD thesis, “Grief Medicines,” focused on learning about what helps community members through ongoing experiences of loss. Beaulne-Stuebing facilitates mashkiki gitigaanan, an urban Indigenous medicines sovereignty project in Toronto.
Bolton excels on the world stage. Click here for more York U in the news
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York University student-athlete Charlotte Bolton was profiled in the Hanover Post Sept. 8. Read full story.
Welcome to YFile’s New Faces Feature Issue, part two
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Welcome to YFile’s New Faces Feature Issue 2021, part two. In this special issue, YFile introduces new faculty members joining the York University community and highlights those with new appointments.
The New Faces Feature Issue 2021 was presented in two parts: part one on Friday, Sept. 3 and part two on Friday, Sept. 10.
In this issue, YFile welcomes new faculty members in the Faculty of Education; the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies; the Faculty of Science; Osgoode Hall Law School; and the Schulich School of Business.
New Faces was conceived and edited by Ashley Goodfellow Craig, YFile deputy editor; Jenny Pitt-Clark, YFile editor; and Lindsay MacAdam, communications officer
Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies welcomes 18 new faculty members
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This story is published in YFile’s New Faces Feature Issue 2021, part two. Every September, YFile introduces and welcomes those joining the York University community, and those with new appointments. Part one was published on Sept. 3.
Eighteen new faculty members join the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies (LA&PS) this fall: Damilola Adebayo, Kelly Bergstrom, Duygu Biricik Gulseren, Jessica Braimoh, Asad Haider, Desirée de Jesus, Paul Lawrie, Sunwoo T. Lee, Zhixiang (Steven) Liang, Ann Marie Murnaghan, Katherine Nastovski, Katarina O’Briain, Margaret O’Brien, Jay Ramasubramanyam, Isha Sharma, Rianka Singh, Liz Smeets and Zachary Spicer.
“LA&PS is delighted to welcome a strong cohort of new faculty members to York this fall,” said J.J. McMurtry, dean of LA&PS. “These new faculty, hired in many of our diverse programs across LA&PS, will add to our already impressive research and innovation initiatives and provide first-class teaching practices for our students, whether remote or in-person.”
Damilola Adebayo
Damilola Adebayo
Damilola Adebayo is an assistant professor in the Department of History. He is a historian of anglophone West Africa whose research and teaching interests are at the intersection of social and economic history; science, technology and society; and the role of international organizations in the African past.
Adebayo earned a BA in history from the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, where he was a Grace Leadership Foundation Scholar; an MA from the Graduate Institute, Geneva in Switzerland, as a Hans Wilsdorf Foundation Scholar; and a PhD in history from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Cambridge-Africa Scholar.
Adebayo’s current research investigates the socioeconomic life of Western technologies in Africa since the 1850s. He is keen to understand the varied contexts within which Western energy, communication and transportation technologies were adopted, appropriated, hybridized, reinvented or discarded by the upper class and everyday people; and the ways in which these technologies have been a cause and effect of change in African societies. A product of this theme is his ongoing book project, provisionally entitled Electric Urbanism: Technology and Socioeconomic Life in Nigeria.
Internationally, Adebayo was the 2019 recipient of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Life Members’ Fellowship in the History of Electrical and Computing Technology. In 2017, he won the Melvin Kranzberg Dissertation Fellowship awarded by the Society for the History of Technology. His has also won grants from the Past and Present Society, and the Economic History Society in the U.K.
Kelly Bergstrom
Kelly Bergstrom
Kelly Bergstrom is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at York University. Prior to her return to Canada, she was an assistant professor in the School of Communications at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Previously, she was a postdoctoral Fellow at York University’s Institute for Research on Digital Learning and a MITACS postdoctoral researcher at Big Viking Games.
Bergstrom’s research examines drop out and disengagement from digital cultures, with a focus on digital games and social media. She is co-editor of Internet Spaceships are Serious Business: An EVE Online Reader (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) and her work has been published in journals such as Feminist Media Studies, Critical Studies in Media Communication and Social Media + Society.
In 2023, she will join the Markham Centre Campus to teach in courses in social media and public relations.
Duygu Biricik Gulseren
Duygu Biricik Gulseren
Duygu Biricik Gulseren is an assistant professor in the School of Human Resources Management. Prior to York University, she worked as a senior research associate at the Haskayne School of Business; taught at Haskayne, Saint Mary’s University and the Sobey School of Business; and worked as a human resources consultant. She has a BSc in chemical and biological engineering and an MA in social and organizational psychology from Koc University in Istanbul, Turkey, and she completed her PhD in industrial/organizational psychology at Saint Mary’s University.
Biricik Gulseren’s research focuses on healthy and safe work and leadership, and aims to create meaningful knowledge for theory and practice in collaboration with organizations. She studies these topics at the individual, team and organizational levels using a wide range of methodologies, including experiments, interventions, qualitative and quantitative methods. She has published a number of research articles and book chapters on these topics.
Being guided by the experiential teaching and learning philosophy, Biricik Gulseren has designed and delivered several courses, and she is very much interested in working with graduate and undergraduate students.
Jessica Braimoh
Jessica Braimoh
Jessica Braimoh is an assistant professor in the Criminology program in the Department of Social Science. Her research and teaching interests include the interrelation between social inequality and criminalization; socio-legal processes and organizing institutions; and the experiences of “at-risk” populations.
Prior to coming to York, Braimoh was a postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Criminology at Wilfrid Laurier University. There, she explored the criminalization of homelessness in B.C. and more specifically the socio-legal processes managing encampments and the use of public space by unhoused people. She has published her work in Critical Sociology, The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, The Canadian Journal of Public Health, PLOS One and Social Science & Medicine. Guided by principles of social justice, her work seeks to uncover the ways that inequality is perpetuated and maintained.
Asad Haider
Asad Haider
Asad Haider is an assistant professor in the Department of Politics. He completed his PhD in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2018. He also holds a degree in cultural criticism and theory from Cornell University. After finishing his PhD, Haider was the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at Penn State University, and then a visiting assistant professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research.
His dissertation, “Party and Strategy in Postwar European Marxist Theory,” was a comparative study of social movements in France and Italy in the 1960s and 1970s, focusing on developments in Marxism that arose as Communist parties and extra-parliamentary movements addressed the social and political changes of the period.
His dissertation research paralleled his work as founding editor of Viewpoint Magazine, which combined journalism on contemporary social movements, intellectual histories of past movements and translations of historically significant texts of revolutionary theory. Alongside this research, Haider pursued a project on the theoretical interventions of anti-racist movements in the United States, resulting in the book Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump, which was published by Verso in May 2018.
Haider has published articles in scholarly journals, including History of the Present, Radical Philosophy, and Comparative Literature and Culture. He also frequently publishes in popular publications like The Baffler, n+1, The Point, Slate and Salon. He has been invited to speak in both academic and public contexts at universities and institutions around the world.
Desirée de Jesus
Desirée de Jesus
Desirée de Jesus is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies. She is also a video essayist and moving images curator. Her research and teaching explore the intersections of race, gender, aesthetics, and technology in narrative film and media through traditional, creative/curatorial and maker methodologies.
Paul Lawrie
Paul Lawrie
Paul Lawrie is an associate professor in the Department of History. A historian of Afro-America whose research examines the intersections of race, labour, disability, urbanism and time in modern America, his book Forging a Laboring Race: The African American Worker in the Progressive Imagination (NYU Press, 2016) details how evolutionary science and industrial management crafted taxonomies of racial labour fitness in early 20th-century America.
His article “Mortality as the Life Story of a People: Frederick L. Hoffman and Actuarial Narratives of African American Extinction” won the 2014 Ernest Redekop Prize for Best Article in the Canadian Review of American Studies. He was also a contributor (“Race, Work and Disability in Progressive Era America”) to the Oxford Disability Handbook (Oxford University Press, 2018) and winner of the 2021 George Rosen Book Prize from the American Association for the History of Medicine. His current Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council-funded project, ”The Color of Hours: Race, Time and the Making of Urban America,” traces how time – as both lived experience and a category of analysis – mediated racial difference and identity in the American city, from the time-work management of the factory floor to the vagrancy statues of the streets.
Sunwoo T. Lee
Sunwoo T. Lee
Sunwoo T. Lee is an assistant professor in the School of Administrative Studies at York University. She received a BSc in consumer sciences and business administration, and an MSc in consumer sciences from Seoul National University, and a PhD in consumer sciences from Ohio State University. Her research interests include household economics, financial behaviours, financial decision-making processes and the personal characteristics affecting those financial decisions.
Zhixiang (Steven) Liang
Zhixiang (Steven) Liang
Zhixiang (Steven) Liang is an assistant professor of management, teaching strategy management and international business at York University. He received his PhD in business administration from the John Molson School of Business at Concordia University.
Liang’s research interests focus on how institutional environments interact with corporate governance and strategies in different business contexts. His recent works address such issues as comparative corporate governance, business groups, market entry and foreign direct investment. He has publications in a wide range of academic journals, including the Journal of World Business and Industrial and Corporate Change. Before joining academia, Liang held various roles in the finance industry, non-profit organizations and consulting firms in China.
Ann Marie Murnaghan
Ann Marie Murnaghan
Ann Marie Murnaghan is an assistant professor in the Children, Childhood and Youth Program in York’s Department of Humanities. Her research expertise and publications focus on discourses of childhood, children’s worlds and material cultures in cities, both historically and in the present period.
Murnaghan’s previous research analyzed how the material cultures of play and playgrounds influenced discourses of childhood and children’s identities in early 20th-century Toronto. In her current research, she examines how museums act as sites of children’s informal education and how integral these are to the formation of children’s identities, using film studies, critical museology and participatory, playful methodologies. In future research, she will explore children’s play in communities and public spaces, and what this means for children and families in the local community.
As a committed collaborator, she currently participates in three Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council-funded projects and is passionate about community-oriented teaching and research. Authoring over 20 articles and chapters, she co-edited the internationally representative and interdisciplinary Children, Nature, Cities, published by Routledge in 2016. She has held teaching positions at University of Manitoba and Ryerson University, and research fellowships at the Centre for Digital Humanities at Ryerson and the Centre for Research in Young Peoples Texts and Cultures at the University of Winnipeg.
Katherine Nastovski
Katherine Nastovski
Katherine Nastovski is an assistant professor in the Work and Labour Studies Program in the Department of Social Science at York University. Her research explores possibilities for transformative models of transnational trade union action, solidarity and co-ordination. Rooted in her experience as a union activist and educator, her community-engaged research agenda works to advance the field of global labour studies. On a practical level, her scholarship contributes to efforts to explore new strategic directions for building workers’ collective power and solidarity in light of the changing nature of work.
Nastovski is currently completing a book manuscript, titled Transnational Horizons: Workers in Canada Enter the Global Sphere (under contract with the University of Toronto Press). The book provides a dialectical analysis of the way workers and workers’ organizations in Canada have acted globally from the mid-1940s to the present. With attention to the social dimensions of transnational labour practices, the book advances a theoretical framework to understand how ideas of race, gender and citizenship shape transnational resistance strategies, and how racialized and gendered class formation in Canada continues to influence ideas of workers’ justice and responses to imperialism, colonialism, nationalism and the regulation of the border.
Katarina O’Briain
Katarina O’Briain
Katarina O’Briain specializes in transatlantic 18th-century literature and culture. Before joining York, she taught courses in literary history, Black Atlantic literature and research methodologies at St. Mary’s University in Calgary, where she received a Teaching Excellence Award in 2021. Her classes often centre around the development of slow, close readings of texts to offer new perspectives on old works of literature and to think carefully about how some of the most urgent social questions of the 18th century live on in our present moment.
O’Briain is at work on a book manuscript, titled Georgic Possibilities: Craft Labor and the Transatlantic Eighteenth Century, which examines the ways georgic poetry – often defined as the poetry of agricultural labor – imagines alternatives to racial capitalism in the long 18th century, as well as in 20th- and 21st-century activist, anticapitalist and eco-poetry. This project ends by tracing the ways georgic poetry has been used to justify an ongoing history of dispossession and settler colonial violence in what is now called Canada. She has published articles relating to this research on the poetics of craft labour and on the political economy of accident in the development of the novel.
Margaret O’Brien
Margaret O’Brien
Margaret O’Brien is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy. Before starting at York, she taught at the University of Edinburgh in both the law school and the Philosophy Department. She received her PhD in philosophy from McMaster University in 2016 and completed a master’s in studies in law from the University of Toronto in 2017. Her areas of specialization are social and political philosophy, but she also works on a set of related topics in moral and feminist philosophy. She writes on judicial review, public reason, hypocrisy, privacy, candour and standing.
Jay Ramasubramanyam
Jay Ramasubramanyam
Jay Ramasubramanyam is an assistant professor in the Law and Society program at York University. He obtained his BA in criminology from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand in 2009; he received a postgraduate diploma and LLM in international human rights from Birmingham City University in the U.K. in 2011; and he received his PhD from the Department of Law and Legal Studies and the Institute of Political Economy at Carleton University in 2021.
Ramasubramanyam is a global south migration researcher whose expertise includes forced migration, international refugee law, statelessness, third world approaches to international law, human rights, race and racialization, postcolonial theory and South Asian studies. His research explores the asymmetries of power, knowledge production, and the ostensible legitimacy of norms in the field of refugee studies and refugee law. He recently published an article in the Asian Yearbook of International Law on refugee law in the Indian subcontinent, and two book chapters in The Oxford Handbook of International Refugee Law.
Ramasubramanyam has taught at Carleton University in the areas of social justice and human rights, refugee rights, international law, and race and racialization, and won the Contract Instructor Teaching Award in recognition of his teaching excellence.
Isha Sharma
Isha Sharma
Isha Sharma is an assistant professor in the School of Administrative Studies and holds a PhD in management. Her teaching interests include consumer behaviour, digital marketing, advertising and communications, and brand management. Her research focuses on studying consumer behaviour pertaining to emerging technologies, exploring the application of artificial intelligence in marketing, gamification in marketing, brand identity, consumer brand relationships, online consumer culture and services transgression. She has published research articles in reputed peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Business Research, the Journal of Product and Brand Management, the Journal of Consumer Marketing, the Journal of Global Information Management and the Online Information Review. She has also earned a competitive research grant this year from the AIM Sheth Foundation for her research proposal on service inclusivity for differently-abled consumers.
Rianka Singh
Rianka Singh
Rianka Singh is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies. She holds a PhD from the University of Toronto, and was formerly a postdoctoral Fellow in the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information and a researcher at U of T’s McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology.
Singh’s research, which has been published in First Monday, Feminist Media Studies and ADA: A Journal of Gender, New Media and Technology, is primarily concerned with the relationship between platforms and feminist politics.
She is currently working on a monograph titled Platform Feminism and the Politics of Elevation. In it, she puts feminist media studies, geography and critical race studies in conversation with digital platform studies. She is also co-editor of the forthcoming book MsUnderstanding Media: A Feminist Medium is the Message (Duke University Press).
Liz Smeets
Liz Smeets
Liz Smeets is an assistant professor of linguistics in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics. She received her PhD from the Department of Linguistics at McGill University in 2020 and two bachelor’s degrees, in linguistics and Italian language and culture, from Utrecht University in the Netherlands in 2012.
Her research interests include the second language acquisition of the syntax-semantics interface, the syntax-discourse interface and the syntax-prosody interface. Most of her projects focus on conditions for language transfer on interface phenomena in bilingual populations (adult L2 learners and bilingual children).
Smeets is also interested in how knowledge and strategies from linguistics can help students and language instructors in the foreign-language classroom to improve their understanding of how languages are structured, how they function and how they are learned.
Zachary Spicer
Zachary Spicer
Zachary Spicer is an associate professor in York University’s School of Public Policy and Administration. Prior to joining York, he served as the director of research and outreach with the Institute of Public Administration of Canada. He holds a PhD in political science from the University of Western Ontario, and began his career as an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Brock University after completing postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Toronto’s Institute of Municipal Finance and Governance and the Laurier Institute for the Study of Public Opinion and Policy at Wilfrid Laurier University. He has also served as a senior policy advisor with the Ontario Public Service. He is the recipient of both the Susan Clarke Young Scholars’ Award and the Norton Long Young Scholars’ Award from the Urban Politics Section of the American Political Science Association.
Osgoode Hall Law School welcomes four new faculty members
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This story is published in YFile’s New Faces Feature Issue 2021, part two. Every September, YFile introduces and welcomes those joining the York University community, and those with new appointments. Part one was published on Sept. 3.
Osgoode Hall Law School welcomes four new faculty members this fall: Rabiat Akande, Barnali Choudhury, Valerio De Stefano and Ivan Ozai.
“I am thrilled to have these very accomplished and internationally renowned scholars and teachers joining us at Osgoode,” said Osgoode Dean Mary Condon. “As we work towards implementing our new strategic plan, they will help us enhance our reputation for research excellence and high-quality, innovative legal education.”
Rabiat Akande
Rabiat Akande
Rabiat Akande works in the fields of legal history, law and religion, constitutional and comparative constitutional law, Islamic law, international law, and (post)colonial African law and society. Her current research explores struggles over religion-state relations in comparative contexts and illuminates law’s centrality to one of modernity’s most contested issues – the relationship between religion, the state and society – while also interrogating law’s complex relationship with power, political theology, identity and sociopolitical change. These issues are at the forefront of her book project, Constitutional Entanglements: Empire, Law and Religion in Colonial Northern Nigeria (under contract with Cambridge University Press).
Akande is a lifelong Academy Scholar at the Harvard University Academy for International and Area Studies, where she was in residence from 2019 to 2021. She graduated from Harvard Law School in 2019 with her dissertation “Navigating Entanglements: Contestations over Religion-State Relations in British Northern Nigeria, c. 1890-1978,” receiving the Law and Society in the Muslim World Prize. At Harvard, Akande held the Clark Byse fellowship and was a dissertation Fellow and graduate student associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. She also served as an editor of the Harvard International Law Journal. Akande taught several courses at Harvard, both at the law school and in the Department for African and African American Studies. She also served as adjunct faculty at Northeastern University School of Law. Prior to her graduate work, Akande was an associate at G. Elias Solicitors and Advocates, Lagos. She obtained her bachelor of laws from the University of Ibadan and she later studied at the Nigerian Law School.
Akande’s work has been supported by fellowships and grants, including the Cravath International research fellowships, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs fellowship, Harvard Academy grants, and the Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World research grant, among others.
Barnali Choudhury
Barnali Choudhur
Barnali Choudhury is a professor of law and the director of the Jack and Mae Nathanson Centre on Transnational Human Rights, Crime and Security. Prior to joining Osgoode, she was a professor at University College London (UCL) and academic director of UCL’s Global Governance Institute.
Choudhury is an internationally recognized expert on business and international economic issues, particularly as they relate to issues of human rights. She has published numerous books, including Corporate Duties to the Public (Cambridge University Press, 2019); Understanding the Company: Corporate Governance and Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2017); and Public Services and International Trade Liberalization: Human Rights and Gender Implications (Cambridge University Press, 2012), as well as a forthcoming commentary on the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. Her work has appeared in the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, the Berkeley Business Law Journal, the International & Comparative Law Quarterly, and the Journal of Corporate Law Studies, as well as in numerous other journals and book chapters. It has also been featured in the Oxford Business Law Blog, the Columbia Law School Blue Sky Blog and the American Society of International Law Insights, among others. She has written op-eds for the Globe and Mail, the Neue Zurcher Zeitung and iPolitics, and her work has been featured in Bloomberg Businessweek. She has held numerous research grants, including a grant from the Leverhulme Trust, one of the U.K.’s most prestigious research bodies.
Regularly invited to give talks, Choudhury has presented her work throughout Asia, Europe, the Middle East and North America, and at the United Nations. She has visited New York University, the University of Cambridge, the University of St. Gallen, the University of Otago, and the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and Private Law. In addition to numerous academic citations, her work has been cited by the United Nations, the U.K.’s House of Commons, the House of Lords EU Select Committee and international arbitral tribunals, and has been relied on by governments and international non-governmental organizations.
Valerio De Stefano
Valerio De Stefano
Valerio De Stefano will join Osgoode in January 2022. Since October 2017, he has been the BOF-ZAP Research Professor of Labour Law at the Institute for Labour Law and the Faculty of Law of the University of Leuven (KU Leuven) in Belgium.
De Stefano read law at Bocconi University in Milan, where he obtained both a master’s and a doctoral degree. He also served as a postdoctoral researcher there, while working part-time as an associate at an international law firm. From 2014 to 2017, he worked as an officer of the International Labour Office in Geneva. During the course of his career, he was a visiting academic at UCL, a postdoctoral member of Clare Hall College at the University of Cambridge, a distinguished speaker at the William C. Wefel Center for Employment Law at Saint Louis University Law School and a senior Fellow at the University of Melbourne.
In 2018, De Stefano was awarded an Odysseus Grant from the Research Foundations – Flanders (FWO), amounting to 880,000 euros, for an interdisciplinary research project on the working conditions and labour protection of platform workers. Since 2020 he has been the principal investigator at the KU Leuven of a Horizon 2020 Grant about in-work poverty.
De Stefano regularly publishes articles in major specialized academic journals. He is the co-editor of the Dispatches Session of the Comparative Labour Law and Policy Journal and an editorial adviser of the International Labour Review. He is currently co-authoring a monograph about algorithmic management, platform work and artificial intelligence to be published by Hart in 2022.
De Stefano has acted as a consultant for the International Labour Office, Eurofound, the Joint Research Center of the EU Commission and national governments. Besides numerous academic conferences, lectures and seminars, he has been invited to speak an as expert on the labour protection of new forms of work at the European Parliament, the European Social and Economic Committee, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and the Canada-EU dialogue on employment, social affairs and decent work. He is a member of the OECD’s Network of Experts on AI (One AI).
Ivan Ozai
Ivan Ozai
Ivan Ozai researches and teaches national and international tax law and policy, with a particular focus on the intersection of tax law with legal theory and political philosophy. His academic writing has appeared in various law reviews and peer-reviewed journals such as the Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence, the Columbia Journal of Tax Law, the Fordham International Law Journal, the Dalhousie Law Journal, the World Tax Journal, the Journal of Constitutional and International Law, and the Journal of Tax Studies. He has authored chapters in several edited volumes, including, more recently, Tax Justice and Tax Law: Understanding Unfairness in Tax Systems (Hart Publishing, 2020). He is also the author of Expenditures in the Value-Added Tax (2019), published in Portuguese by Editora Lumen Juris.
Ozai has been the recipient of multiple awards for his scholarly work, including the 2018 IFA USA Writing Award by the International Fiscal Association and the 2019 Paul-Gérin-Lajoie Rising Star Award by the Fonds de Recherche du Québec, Société et Culture. He currently sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Contemporary Public Law and serves as a reviewer for several journals in the fields of law and philosophy.
Before joining Osgoode in July, Ozai practised tax for more than 10 years as a litigator, a legal adviser and a chartered professional accountant. He was appointed to several senior government positions in Brazil, including as a tax court judge and the head of the Advance Tax Rulings Directorate of the Department of Finance of the State of Sao Paulo. He was also the founding director of the Centre for Research in Taxation in Sao Paulo.
During his doctoral studies at McGill University’s Faculty of Law, where he was a Richard H. Tomlinson Fellow, Ozai was a visiting scholar at the International Bureau of Fiscal Documentation in Amsterdam, at the Centre d’études et de recherches internationales de Montréal and at the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Waterloo, Ont.
Two new professors join Schulich School of Business this fall
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This story is published in YFile’s New Faces Feature Issue 2020, part two. Every September, YFile introduces and welcomes those joining the York University community, and those with new appointments. Part one was published on Sept. 3.
Two new professors will join the Schulich School of Business this fall: Vibhuti Dhingra and Majid Majzoubi.
“The Schulich School of Business is very pleased to welcome Vibhuti Dhingra and Majid Majzoubi to our Faculty,” said Schulich Interim Dean Detlev Zwick. “They are first-rate scholars, and their expertise in the fields of operations management and strategic management will bolster the research and teaching capacity at our school.”
Vibhuti Dhingra
Vibhuti Dhingra
Vibhuti Dhingra is an assistant professor of supply chain analytics at the Schulich School of Business. She received her PhD in management science from the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia (UBC). Her research interests are in data-driven analytics and incentive problems, with applications to supply chains and public sector operations. Her work has been published in top-tier journals, including Management Science and European Journal of Operations Research. While at UBC, she won the Killam Graduate Teaching Assistant Award for teaching excellence.
Majid Majzoubi
Majid Majzoubi
Majid Majzoubi is an assistant professor of strategic management at the Schulich School of Business. He received his PhD in strategic management from the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business, his MBA from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and his bachelor’s degree in computer science from Tehran Polytechnic. His research focuses on how firms can position themselves strategically within various market spaces to gain higher ratings and rankings. In Majzoubi’s research, he demonstrates how machine learning algorithms could be used to facilitate empirical studies and enable a dynamic and customized view of firms’ optimal positioning strategies.
The Faculty of Science brings seven new professors into its ranks
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This story is published in YFile’s New Faces Feature Issue 2021, part two. Every September, YFile introduces and welcomes those joining the York University community, and those with new appointments. Part one was published on Sept. 3.
The Faculty of Science is welcoming seven new faculty members this fall. Joining the ranks are Jade Atallah, Jingyi Cao, Elizabeth Clare, Jairo Diaz-Rodriguez, Lisa Robertson, Woldegebriel Assefa Woldegerima and Jihyeon “Jessie” Yang.
“The Faculty of Science is known for leading-edge research, commitment to our students’ success through teaching excellence and pedagogical innovation, and community impact,” said Rui Wang, dean of the Faculty of Science. “These talented new faculty members represent our core strengths in these areas, and we are excited to welcome them.”
Jade Atallah
Jade Atallah
Jade Atallah joins the Department of Biology as an assistant professor. Atallah received her undergraduate degree from the University of Toronto Mississauga. She completed her doctoral and postdoctoral studies at the Levine Laboratory in the Department of Cell and Systems Biology at the University of Toronto. Her research focused on behavioural genetics, where she investigated the cell and molecular mechanisms underlying social interactions in the model organism Drosophila melanogaster. Throughout her research journey, Atallah was also heavily invested in biology higher education, where she pursued education training through Woodsworth College and the Association of College and University Educators. She served as an assistant professor (teaching stream) at the University of Toronto Mississauga for three years and has also taught at McMaster University. Atallah’s teaching practice places strong emphasis on higher order skills such as critical thinking and integrative problem solving. She continues to contribute to curriculum design, course development, creation of teaching tools and science education research.
Jingyi Cao
Jingyi Cao
Jingyi Cao joins the Department of Mathematics and Statistics as an assistant professor, following a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Mathematics at Michigan University. She completed her PhD in actuarial science at the University of Waterloo, where her research focused on stochastic optimal control problems in insurance, including optimal reinsurance with contagious claims, model risks, and the demand for life insurance and annuities. During her PhD, she was recognized as a James C. Hickman Scholar by the Society of Actuaries. Cao’s postdoctoral research studied the problem of approximating the classical Cramér-Lundberg risk processes with heavy-tailed claims by a sequence of stable Lévy processes, which facilitates the computation for various problems such as the Gerber-Shiu distribution of exponential Parisian ruin and the optimal dividend problem. Her current research program focuses on the rate of convergence for such approximation, as well as optimal insurance with belief heterogeneity. Cao is also an associate of the Society of Actuaries.
Elizabeth Clare
Elizabeth Clare
Elizabeth Clare joins the Department of Biology as an assistant professor. She received her PhD from the University of Guelph in 2010, studying neotropical bat diversity and phylogeography. She completed a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) postdoctoral fellowship at Bristol University (2010-12), where she developed some of the first protocols for the use of metabarcoding for dietary ecology. Clare spent eight years as a faculty member at Queen Mary University of London, where her research group developed new techniques in molecular ecology. Most recently, they established a method to vacuum environmental DNA from the air to aid in global terrestrial biodiversity science. Clare is keenly interested in the biology of bats and their responses to habitat change in neotropical forests, particularly their role in seed dispersal and pollination. She supervises students working on aquatic ecology, parasitology and microbial ecology, and in field locations around the world. Her work is currently funded by NSERC and Genome Canada and she is an associate editor of the journal Biological Invasions.
Jairo Diaz-Rodriguez
Jairo Diaz-Rodriguez
Jairo Diaz-Rodriguez joins the Department of Mathematics and Statistics as an assistant professor. His research interests centre around data science, machine learning, high-dimensional statistics, optimization and big data. He received his PhD in mathematics (statistics-oriented) at University of Geneva in Switzerland under the supervision of Professor Sylvain Sardy in 2018. Subsequently, he was appointed assistant professor at Universidad del Norte in Colombia. Most of his research contains both theoretical development and practical applications, with strong interdisciplinary components, and cloud and parallel computing implementations. Diaz-Rodriguez has also worked as a data science consultant and machine learning engineer in a wide variety of fields, including information technology, public health, education, economics and marketing. He has worked on real-world data science problems and is experienced in the entirety of the data science pipeline, from data acquisition and transformation to visualization, model selection (statistics and machine-learning based), and deployment into fully functional production systems.
Lisa Robertson
Lisa Robertson
Lisa Robertson is a new assistant professor in the Department of Biology, where she completed a postdoctoral fellowship with York Professor Andrew Donini, examining ion transport in anal papillae of chironomids and mosquitoes. Robertson received her PhD and MSc from the University of Toronto, working in the lab of Professor Angela Lange, investigating the involvement of neuropeptides in the physiological functioning of peripheral tissues in the African migratory locust. Previously, she was an instructor and course co-ordinator in the University of Guelph’s Department of Integrative Biology (2017-21) and an assistant professor (contract-limited) in the Department of Biomedical Science (2013-17). She is an award-winning instructor, passionate about teaching and learning, and committed to creating engaging learning experiences for students. Her current research interests centre around student success strategies. Robertson has been an active member of the teaching and learning community for many years. She has been a member of the Open Consortium of Undergraduate Biology Educators since graduating.
Woldegebriel Assefa Woldegerima
Woldegebriel Assefa Woldegerima
Woldegebriel Assefa Woldegerima joins the Department of Mathematics and Statistics as an assistant professor. Before York University, he was a postdoctoral research Fellow at the DST/NRF SARChI Chair in Mathematical Models and Methods in Biosciences and Bioengineering at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Woldegerima obtained his PhD in mathematical biology (“Modelling and Analysing of In-host Immunopathogenesis Dynamics of Parasites”) from the University of Buea in Cameroon, in a collaboration with Lehigh University in the U.S. He also earned two master’s degrees: one from the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS), with a master’s thesis on partial differential equations; and a second master of science degree from Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia, in functional analysis. Woldegerima worked as an assistant professor at Mekelle University in Ethiopia for one year; as a predoctoral research associate at Lehigh University; as an assistant lecturer at the University of Pretoria in South Africa; and as a teaching assistant at AIMS. His research interests lie broadly in mathematical biology, applied differential equations and data analysis in Python.
Jihyeon “Jessie” Yang
Jihyeon “Jessie” Yang
Jihyeon “Jessie” Yang joins the Department of Mathematics and Statistics as an assistant professor. Yang received her PhD in mathematics from the University of Toronto in 2012. She completed a three-year postdoctoral fellowship at McMaster University, a four-year assistant professorship at Marian University in Indianapolis, and sessional lectureships at the University of Toronto in 2015 and 2020. During her PhD and postdoctoral fellowship, Yang studied two fundamental geometric objects: curves and flat spaces such as lines and planes. The former has a connection with String Theory and the latter is an important object in Representation Theory, which has rich applications in chemistry and physics. Yang learned about new branches in mathematics to solve her problems: Tropical Geometry and Newton-Okounkov Body Theory. These new fields (about 20 years old) are actively developing in diverse areas, including computer science and biology (phylogenetics). Yang is enthusiastic about exploring these topics, especially with undergraduate students. Currently, she is working on educational development programs focusing on instructional designs that promote active learning in individuals and are supported by the pedagogy of care.
York University student-athlete sets North American record at Tokyo Paralympics
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Charlotte Bolton
Incoming York University student-athlete Charlotte Bolton is joining the Lions this fall after an impressive Paralympic debut in Tokyo.
As the youngest member of Team Canada’s Paralympic track and field team, the 18-year-old from Tillsonburg, Ont., finished sixth overall in both of her events – F41 shot put, with a best distance of 8.73 metres; and F41 discus throw, with a North American record-setting distance of 27.72 metres.
Bolton’s original goal was to qualify for the Paris 2024 Paralympic Games, but the one-year postponement of the Tokyo games worked in her favour, allowing extra time to hone her skills before the revised qualification deadline. Let’s see what another three years can do for this rising athletic star.
Schulich contributes to research advancing theory of institutional drift
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Even the smallest variations in the way people interact with one another and perform their jobs inside an organization can lead to significant institutional change over time, according to new research published in the Journal of Management Studies.
Maxim Voronov
Maxim Voronov, a professor of organization studies at York University’s Schulich School of Business, co-authored the research paper together with Mary Ann Glynn, an associate of the Department of Sociology at Harvard University, and Klaus Weber, a professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School of Management.
The research paper puts forward what it terms the “theory of institutional drift” to explain how minor, under-the-radar changes to standard practices can lead over time to significant and unexpected changes in organizations. A classic example of institutional drift, says Voronov, is what happened at NASA regarding the Challenger disaster in 1986, when the NASA space shuttle suddenly exploded one minute after takeoff, killing all seven crew members aboard.
“When ongoing deviations from routine interactions between people within an organization are ignored or normalized, the result is institutional drift.”
— Professor Maxim Voronov
A number of studies have shown that one of the contributing factors in the accident was the slow but steady tolerance from NASA engineers for accepting greater levels of risk, which in turn led to an erosion of safety standards within the organization – what the researchers describe as the “normalization of ever-greater deviations from routine practices.”
“Institutional drift leads to institutional change by altering the repertoire of practices associated with certain roles, thus redefining the shared understandings of acceptable and normal practice,” says Voronov. “When ongoing deviations from routine interactions between people within an organization are ignored or normalized, the result is institutional drift.”
The key lesson here for organizations, adds Voronov, is that small practice deviations on the part of a large number of employees should not be seen as trivial – particularly when they build up over time.
Former York University professor Ruth Schattner died on Aug. 10. She was a longtime faculty member in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies’ Department of French and Department of Humanities.
Ruth Schattner
Schattner, born in Vienna, Austria in 1930, emigrated to New York City with her family in 1948. She attended Hunter College, and earned a bachelor’s degree in French in 1951. She moved to Canada shortly thereafter to study French at the PhD level at the University of Toronto, where she earned a scholarship. She was awarded her PhD in 1963 and accepted a role at York University in 1964 – first at Glendon Campus and then at the Keele Campus.
She was hired on to teach French language and literature, but was later cross-appointed to the Humanities Division. She was known for making her classes exciting by including music, art and theatre.
With a strong belief in the value of liberal education for all, Schattner accepted a part-time position at York University’s Atkinson College where she taught evening classes in addition to her regular faculty appointment. She continued in this role at Atkinson even after her retirement from full-time teaching.
Off campus, Schattner spent her time supporting and enjoying the arts – plays, concert and performances, as well as art and live music. For several years she served as docent at the Art Gallery of Ontario.
She is survived by daughters Evelyn Straka (Blake Landor), and Michèle Straka (Christopher Klugman), and son Alexander Schattner.
