Faculty Affiliates

Sadegh Ansari is assistant professor of History of the pre-modern Islamic world at SUNY Geneseo. His research interests include the history of science, history of music, and the intellectual history of the pre-modern Islamic and Persianate worlds. His works have recently appeared in the Journal of Abbasid Studies and the Journal Philological Encounters.

Scott Giorgis is professor of geological sciences. He joined the faculty at SUNY Geneseo in 2004. His geological research focuses on the movement of magma in the crust and quantifying how rocks bend or break. As a teacher-scholar, his work has centered on using Google Earth and the Augmented Reality sandbox to quantitatively assess pedagogical approaches for improving students’ three dimensional visualization abilities.

Claire Gravelin PhD joined the SUNY Geneseo faculty as an assistant professor in psychology in 2019. She received her PhD in social psychology, with a minor in quantitative psychology, from The University of Kansas. While pursuing her degree, Gravelin served as a graduate teaching fellow for the University of Kansas Center for Teaching Excellence, where she assisted faculty in their pursuits of transforming their courses based on the principles of active learning. Gravelin has two broad avenues of research. The first concerns exploring the causes and consequences of the marginalization of women, particularly in the domains of sexual assault and women in leadership and STEM fields. The second avenue explores best practices in teaching and learning. In combining her two interests, Gravelin continually challenges herself to find new ways to incorporate digital literacy into her courses; from website design, to podcasting, to wiki-pages, Gravelin hopes to give students practice with transferable skills they can utilize regardless of academic pursuits.

Aaron Heap is a Spencer J. Roemer Supported Professor and has been a member of the SUNY Geneseo faculty since 2007, teaching within the Department of Mathematics. In 2011, he was honored with the SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching. In his time at the College, he has been a proponent for the use of online educational resources. He is the creator of ProofSpace, an online repository of innovative digital course materials intended to be used for a mathematical proof-writing course. He is a problem author for WeBWorK, an open source online homework system. He is also a WeBWorK consultant for the Mathematical Association of America. His mathematical research interests are in knot theory, and he is currently working on creating an interactive website and digital archive for knot mosaics.

Alla Myzelev received her PhD in visual and material culture from Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada. She is an assistant professor of art history and museum studies at SUNY Geneseo, and teaches courses in modern and contemporary visual culture. She is also a coordinator of Museum Studies minor. In her capacity as a faculty member of the museum studies and art history department, she had developed several courses that encompass gender and digital humanities. She is currently exploring opportunities that digital humanities and virtual reality provide for teaching museum studies and art history. She has published extensively on feminism, activism, and material culture and is the author of Architecture, Design and Craft in Toronto 1900-1940: Creating Modern Living (Ashgate 2016) and was editor of the essay collection Exhibiting Craft and Design: Transgressing the White Cube Paradigm (Routledge (2017).

Olaocha Nwadiuto Nwabara received her PhD from Michigan State University in African American and African Studies and became a member of SUNY Geneseo faculty in 2019. Her research examines global African cultural productions and cultural thought as African-centered artifacts and methods to correctively represent cultural identities as they engage the realities of race, ethnicity, and gender amongst transnational Africans. She teaches courses in global African literatures, most specifically West African, women’s, and migratory literature. Her courses focus on examining identity formation amongst diverse African (continental and diaspora) subjects and self-representation within literature and film.

Yvonne Seale has been a member of the SUNY Geneseo faculty since 2016. She is a historian of women and the social history of religion, with a particular focus on the history of the Premonstratensian monastic order in twelfth- and thirteenth-century France. At SUNY Geneseo, she teaches classes on medieval history and digital humanities. Her writing has appeared in publications such as the Journal of Medieval Monastic History, History Today, and The Public Domain Review. She is the recipient of the Teaching Association for Medieval Studies Teaching Award for College Educators, 2019-2020. You can follow her latest research on Twitter @yvonneseale.

Brad Taber-Thomas is an assistant professor of psychology at SUNY Geneseo. His research is at the intersection of cognitive, affective, and developmental neuroscience, focusing on the role that emotion and attention-related brain systems play in social-emotional functioning, development, and risk for psychopathology. His current research studies include: studying patterns of attention and brain function in children at risk for anxiety, developing novel methods for capturing behavioral and brain markers of psychological risk, and examining daily fluctuations in attention biases.

Suann Yang is an associate professor of biology, and teaches introductory biology, ecology, and biostatistics at SUNY Geneseo. As a community ecologist, she uses quantitative and empirical approaches to study how altered landscapes shape the interactions between species. This perspective of response to change also informs her biology education research, where she focuses on how student and faculty populations react to curricular transformation. Her interests in digital learning include collaborating to develop open educational resources, such as Digital Open Modules on Environmental Sustainability (DOMES; with CDL affiliate Karleen West), a curriculum to teach sustainability through student digital products that are shared across courses; Integrating Biology and Inquiry Skills (IBIS), a freely-available active learning introductory biology curriculum; and Cats Teach Stats, a statistics curriculum that is designed to address statistics anxiety through the power of cute cat internet media. She also mentors faculty from multiple institutions in learning how to teach programming and data analysis in biology classes with an interactive tool, through the Quantitative Undergraduate Biology Education and Synthesis (QUBES) Make Teaching R in Undergraduate Biology (Make TRUBLE) Faculty Mentoring Network.