The School of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine has hired four new faculty members. Three of the new hires are women.
Margaux Fitoussi was named an assistant professor in the departments of comparative literature and history. Dr. Fitoussi served as the Paloheimo Fellow at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and studied experimental film in Madrid. Her research focuses on understandings of Jewishness in the contemporary Muslim world, specifically in Tunisia.
Dr. Fitoussi is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, where she majored in history. She holds a master’s degree in religious studies from Harvard Divinity School, a master’s degree in contemporary audiovisual creation and practice from the Laboratorio Audiovisual in Lisbon, and a Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University in New York City.
Nicole T. Hughes is an assistant professor in the department of Spanish and Portuguese. She served as an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center before becoming an assistant professor in the department of Iberian and Latin American cultures at Stanford. Her research on the early modern world focuses specifically on Mexico and Brazil in the sixteenth century.
Dr. Hughes holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in comparative literature from New York University. She earned a Ph.D. in Latin American and Iberian cultures and comparative literature and society from Columbia University.
Taija Mars McDougall was named an assistant professor of African American studies. She recently completed a President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on Black critical theory, slavery and financialization, psychoanalysis and continental philosophy.
Dr. McDougall earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature with a minor in philosophy from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, and a master’s degree in British, American and postcolonial studies from Universität Münster in Germany. She holds a second master’s degree and a Ph.D. in culture and theory from the University of California, Irvine.