Bryn Mawr Welcomes New Faculty for 2026-27 Academic Year

This fall, seven Bryn Mawr faculty members begin tenure-track appointments, one head coach joins Athletics, and 37 other faculty members join the community.

Since its founding in 1885, Bryn Mawr has maintained its character as a small residential community, which fosters close working relationships between faculty and students. The Faculty of teacher-scholars emphasizes learning through conversation and collaboration, primary reading, original research, and experimentation.

Tenure Track Appointments:

Michelle Brann

Assistant Professor of Chemistry

As an experimental physical chemist, Michelle Brann leads a research program that addresses fundamental questions in astrochemistry. Her group uses low-temperature experiments to study how chemical complexity develops in star-forming regions and how organic molecules reach young planets. This work will be complemented by observational astronomy, where the group will analyze ALMA observations to connect laboratory results to astrophysical environments.

Brann looks forward to teaching at all levels of the chemistry curriculum, ranging from introductory chemistry to analytical and physical chemistry. Her goal is to foster an inclusive environment where all students thrive.

Brann completed postdoctoral work at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. She earned her Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Chicago and her B.A. in Chemistry with honors from Wellesley College. She spent one year at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory before beginning graduate school.

Visit the Chemistry Department website

Marissa Fenley

Assistant Professor of Theater

Marissa Fenley is an artist, scholar, and dramaturg. Across her work she asks questions about what exactly makes a person a "person" — and how theater can help us see those questions in new ways. Her research examines everything from puppets to prosthetics to plastics.

Her current book project, Puppet Theory: Dramaturgies of Personhood argues that dramaturgies of the puppet theater — which encompass material designs, techniques for animation, and theatrical narratives — constitute personhood not only as embedded within a given context but as specifically minimal. For example, a popsicle stick can be transformed into a person through the addition of googly eyes, while a sock can take on personhood through the addition of a flapping mouth. Personhood, in these examples, emerges from a single attribute, be it sight or speech. Puppet Theory traces the materialist backstories of five puppetry practices as they originate within or adapt to American cultural and political life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

This Fall, Fenley is teaching Intro to Theater and an original course titled Fabulation, Erasure and Distortion: Feminism on Stage, which will look at canonical feminist theory and philosophy alongside works of feminist theater, performance art, and dance. As a dramaturg, Fenley also frequently brings students into her work in the professional theater.

Visit the Theater Department website

Şehrazat G. Mart

Assistant Professor of Sociology

Şehrazat G. Mart's research examines why social movements fracture under repression, focusing on how activists perceive and navigate political risks. She is currently working on a book manuscript, titled At What Cost? The Strategic and Moral Dilemmas of Anti-Authoritarian Struggle.

Her work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals and public-facing outlets, including the Journal of Peace Research, Time & Society, Humboldt Journal of Social Relations, and Foreign Policy.

Şehrazat's teaching is closely informed by her research. At Bryn Mawr, she will teach courses on social movements, dilemmas of nonviolence, and youth agency alongside core sociology courses, including social theory. She designs her courses to equip students with a global perspective and tools to tackle social problems.

Şehrazat received a Ph.D. in peace studies and sociology from the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame in 2024.

Visit the Sociology website

Lauren Pryce McCarthy

Assistant Professor of Social Work

Lauren Pryce McCarthy’s research focuses on the intersection of the youth mental health care system and the child welfare system, with a focus on reducing the reliance on residential treatment for youth.

McCarthy’s work includes understanding the best policies and practices to support families as they navigate these complex systems by centering lived experience. This work includes the evaluation of best implementation practices for family-centered mental health and child welfare programming, as well as best standards for ethical social work practice.

McCarthy draws on almost a decade of practice experience working with youth and families in Philadelphia to inform her pedagogy. Her teaching interests include fostering excitement and critical thinking about social work research, foundational practice courses with a focus on families, and child welfare policy. McCarthy has also taught classes on trauma-informed care and community practice.

She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Maryland School of Social Work and her master's in social work from the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy and Practice.

Visit the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research website

Scott D. Odell

Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies

Odell's research explores the environmental and social impacts of critical mineral mining. Specifically, he studies how mining companies and communities address water-related conflict, and how these local-scale issues relate to natural resource governance at national and global scales. As a political ecologist, he combines on-the-ground qualitative fieldwork in communities with broader spatial and archival analysis. Geographically, he focuses on the Andean countries, and is also expanding work in the continental U.S. and the Arctic.

Odell teaches introductory and upper-level courses on environmental change, energy transitions, and community relations. He prioritizes inclusive teaching practices to support different learning needs and employs experiential learning techniques, such as community service projects and climate policy simulations.

He has a Ph.D. and M.A. in geography from Clark University and a B.S. in Foreign Service from Georgetown University.

Lab website

Visit the Environmental Studies program website

Danya Pilgrim

Assistant Professor of History

Danya Pilgrim is a specialist in African American history during the long nineteenth century. Her research and teaching interests focus on the social and cultural history of the United States, including food, gender, and the everyday, as well as public history and digital humanities.

Pilgrim’s current book project explores the ways in which Black food workers utilized different forms of capital in shaping the evolution and development of Philadelphia’s catering trade from the early national period to the early 20th century.

In addition to an article on public waiters in the antebellum period published in the Pennsylvania Magazine for History and Biography and a new introduction for a reprint of E. A. Maccannon’s Commanders of the Dining Room, Pilgrim has contributed her expertise to documentaries such as Reconstruction and the Legacy of Henry M. Minton and podcasts such as "Hagley’s History Hangout," "Elfreth Alley’s Alley Cast," and "Resurrecting Voices: the Philadelphia Black Experience," for the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Pilgrim has served as a member of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania’s Library Committee since 2024, and she is especially excited to share her knowledge of the Greater Philadelphia area, its history and archives, with Bryn Mawr students.

Pilgrim earned her Ph.D. in African American and in American Studies and a certificate in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies from Yale University.

Visit the History Department website

Clara Stuligross

Assistant Professor of Biology

Clara Stuligross is an ecologist interested in understanding how environmental stressors affect bee health and persistence in natural and managed ecosystems. Bees provide an opportunity to explore broader ecological questions because of their sensitivity to environmental change, reliance on resources from multiple habitats (e.g., nesting in woodlands, foraging in meadows), and diversity in ecological and life-history traits.

Stuligross is particularly interested in exploring how pesticide exposure, nutrition, and climate change interact to shape bee responses across multiple biological scales. Through this work, she aims both to address fundamental ecological questions while informing conservation and management strategies to mitigate environmental stressors.

Stuligross’ teaching focuses on helping students critically engage with the biological world and their place within it. She teaches across the biology curriculum, from introductory biology to upper-level courses in ecology, entomology, and climate biology, with an emphasis on connecting foundational concepts to real-world environmental challenges.

Stuligross earned her Ph.D. in ecology from the University of California, Davis and a B.A. in environmental studies from Earlham College.

Visit the Biology Department website

Additional faculty appointments

A-H

Danielle Wilman Abraham, Visiting Associate Professor of MECANA

Dahlia Al-Habieli, Visiting Assistant Professor of Theater

Manali Allen, Visiting Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies

Tasnim Aziz, Visiting Assistant Professor of Education

Ksusha Cascio, Visiting Instructor in Social Work

Stanley Collins, Visiting Assistant Professor of Growth and Structure of Cities

Tim Cook, Lecturer in Chemistry

Christine Egizi, Visiting Instructor in Social Work

Radwa El Barouni, Drill Instructor in Arabic

Alexis Ferguson, Visiting Assistant Professor of Literatures in English

Stephanie Franklin, Visiting Instructor in Social Work

Katherine Fritz, Visiting Instructor of Theater

Jeremy Felix Gallion, Visiting Assistant Professor in the Emily Balch Seminar

Meg Hankel, Visiting Assistant Professor of History of Art

David Harvey, Visiting Instructor in Social Work

I-O

Ismael Jimenez, Visiting Lecturer in Education

Delbar Khakzad, Visiting Assistant Professor of MECANA

Tiffany King, Visiting Associate Professor on the Presidential Professorship in Black Studies

Raina León, Visiting Professor of Creative Writing

Max Malossini, Visiting Lecturer in the Quantitative Program

Martin Michalek, Visiting Assistant Professor of Greek, Latin, and Classical Studies

P-Z

Raquel Parrine, Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish

John Paulus, Visiting Assistant Professor of Neuroscience

Michael Priest, Visiting Assistant Professor of Biology

Brie Radis, Visiting Assistant Professor of Social Work

Sam Ridge, Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy

Michele Rossi, Visiting Assistant Professor of Transnational Italian Studies

Photis Rotsides, Frank and Sally Mallory Postdoctoral Fellow in Chemistry

Kelly Shiptoski, Visiting Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Ben Van Zee, Visiting Assistant Professor of History

Emily Vance, Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology

Keelan Whitmore, Dance Instructor

Margaret Wilmanm, Instructor and Head Swim Coach and Aquatics Director

Joachim Wintzer, Visiting Assistant Professor of German Studies

Stephen Wisser, Visiting Instructor in Psychology

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