New faculty fall 2026

The Division of the Arts & Humanities welcomes nine assistant professors. 

Canaan Breiss joins Linguistics as a Neubauer Family Assistant Professor from the faculty of the University of Southern California, where he was assistant director of the Center for Computational Language Sciences. Previously he was a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, working with the Computational Psycholinguistics Laboratory and MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab. He completed his PhD at UCLA with a dissertation titled “Lexical Conservatism in Phonology: Theory, Experiments, and Computational Modeling,” which was supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. His BA—in linguistics and languages—is from Swarthmore College. His research focuses on how infants and machines learn the sound patterns of language (phonology), how this knowledge is represented in the mind, and how it supports language use.

Breiss uses experimental and computational methods to run experiments on how learners acquire and use language and how phonological knowledge interacts with other types of linguistic and cognitive capacities—a research area he calls “computational psychophonology.” He acquires experimental data through computational modeling, online surveys, and laboratory experiments, including ones in which participants are prompted to learn artificial grammars. This work reveals new details that explain sound structure, language processing, and linguistic development.

Amber Jacob, assistant professor of Egyptology in the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures and Middle Eastern Studies, completed her PhD at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University with the dissertation “Medical Knowledge in Graeco-Roman Egypt: The Demotic Medical Papyri from Tebtunis.” She holds an MA in Egyptology from the University of Copenhagen and a BA in the myth and literature of Greece, Rome, and the Near East from the University of British Columbia. She is a specialist in ancient Egyptian medical texts, which she uses to reconstruct Egyptian medical history and the underexplored connections with Greek medicine in Greco-Roman Egypt.

Jacob is an expert in the Demotic phase of ancient Egyptian language. In addition to her work on Greek medicine in Egypt (in the fourth century BCE to the seventh century CE), she has studied ancient Greek medical texts and is a codirector of the research project Scientific Papyri from Ancient Egypt in Cross-Cultural Perspective (SciPap), which publicizes Demotic medical texts in the Papyrus Carlsberg Collection, organizes conferences and workshops, and publishes conference proceedings. She has also worked with the Saqqara Saite Tombs Project as part of the team publishing Demotic inscriptions found on a cache of embalming vessels discovered at the archaeological site. She coedited “Scientific Papyri from Ancient Egypt: New Medical and Astrological Texts” and Scientific Traditions in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East: Joint Proceedings of the 1st and 2nd Scientific Papyri from Ancient Egypt International Conferences, May 2018, Copenhagen, and September 2019, New York (New York University Press, 2023).

Fiction writer Adam Levin, AM’01, joins English Language and Literature as assistant professor in Creative Writing, following several teaching positions in Chicago (at Kennedy-King College, Columbia College Chicago, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Roosevelt University), as well as at the Disquiet International Literary Program in Lisbon, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Duke University, and elsewhere. In addition to his master’s in social work from UChicago, he holds a BA in psychology from the University of Illinois Chicago and an MFA from Syracuse University. He is the author of the novels Mount Chicago (Doubleday, 2022), Bubblegum (Doubleday, 2020), and The Instructions (McSweeney’s, 2010), which won the Indies Choice Book Award and New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award. His short stories have appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern and The New Yorker, among other venues, and in 2012 he published the collection Hot Pink (McSweeney’s).

Additionally, The Instructions was selected as a finalist for the Virginia Commonwealth University Cabell First Novelist Award and the National Jewish Book Award in Fiction, and Levin was given a Pushcart Prize Special Mention for his short story “Prayer” as well as the Joyce Carol Oates Fiction Prize for his novella “Play Your Straightman.” He also received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Read his writing online, or hear him on The New Yorker’s fiction podcast.

Rachel Morrison, assistant professor in Latin Literature in Classics, is completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Vassar College after receiving her PhD from UCLA; she will arrive on campus in autumn 2027. Her dissertation, “Long-Distance Friendship in Roman Letters,” uses literary analysis and queer theory to explore friendship, proximity, and homosociality in ancient Rome while also engaging with contemporary discussions about telecommunication. Another major research interest is the reception of classical literature among abolitionists in the United States. She holds an MA in classical languages from the University of Kansas and a BA in classics from Denison University.

Morrison received the Society for Classical Studies’ Erich S. Gruen Prize for the paper “‘Was Terence a Gentleman?’: Terence the Freedman, An American Comedy,” which explores how the presence of Terence—a freed slave described by Suetonius as having dark skin—in classical literature influenced abolitionists. She is currently exploring this figure’s disappearance from the canon throughout the twentieth century, as a way of scrutinizing the relationship between US racecraft and classical studies. She also won the SCS’s Lambda Classical Caucus Graduate Student Paper Award for “Ubique praesentem mihi: Long-Distance Amicitia and Physical Presence in the Letters of Paulinus of Nola,” an excerpt from her dissertation, in which she shows the varying importance of proximity across different relationships and how this complicates attempts to create an overarching theory of friendship.

Celeste Oram, assistant professor in Music Composition, creates award-winning pieces that transcend genre, drawing on performance, improvisation, and multimedia formats. Her PhD is from the University of California, San Diego, where she wrote the dissertation “The Way We Look to a Song: Five Compositions and the Envoicing of Musical Inheritance,” and she completed a double BA-BM degree with an additional honors degree in music at the University of Auckland in her native New Zealand. She previously taught at Vassar College, as well as UCSD. She has published a number of peer-reviewed articles, most recently “Provincializing Practice: Agency and Positionality in Cross-Cultural Music in Aotearoa New Zealand” in the book Music, Society, Agency (Academic Studies, 2023).

In 2025, Oram won a Fromm Music Foundation Commission and a New Music Creator Fund award, and she has been commissioned to write original works by Theater Basel in Switzerland, the Opéra National de Paris, and the Royal Danish Ballet, among other groups. Her accolades include the APRA (Australasian Performing Right Association) Art Music Award, Switzerland’s Christoph Delz Foundation prize, and the Darmstadt Summer Course’s Kranichstein Prize; she is also a two-time finalist for New Zealand’s SOUNZ Contemporary Award for excellence in composition. Her work often involves electronic elements, particularly radio, and she incorporates improvised radiophonic sounds into live performances that engage with the political and social aspects of broadcast technology. Excerpts from her pieces and videos from her performance collaborations are available on her website.

Ola Sidorkiewicz, assistant professor in Slavic Languages and Literatures, comes to UChicago following a postdoctoral fellowship at Université Libre de Bruxelles. She received her doctorate from the University of Oxford, where she also received a master of studies in comparative literature and critical translation. She holds a BA in English and comparative literary studies from the University of Warwick. She is a scholar of Central and Eastern European literature and culture, which she reads through transnational, translingual, and postcolonial frameworks and studies how these frameworks are in turn shaped by the literary and cultural production in the region. Her dissertation and first book project—“Playing Chopin Backwards: Kuncewicz’s and Themerson’s Transnational Polish Literature”—explores the idea of a transnational paradigm in postwar Polish literature and in particular in the literary projects of two émigré Polish writers, Maria Kuncewicz and Stefan Themerson. Her study includes their translingual texts (pseudotranslations, concealed translations, and self-translations) and the transnational literary communities they established for their writing.

During her doctoral research, Sidorkiewicz was a Leverhulme Trust fellow at the University of Wrocław, Poland. She is now editing a collection of Kuncewicz’s previously unpublished works. Her next book project, tentatively titled “Translingual Writing from Eastern Europe: Reconceptualizing National Literature,” will offer the first study of postwar translingualism in Central and Eastern Europe across national borders. She also has curated the exhibitions Transnational Genealogies of the Avant-Garde: The Gaberbocchus Press Collection in Oxford and Belgian Crossings: The Avant-Garde Adventures of Belgian Books in Central and Eastern Europe in Brussels.

Stephanie Soileau, AB’98, moves into a new role as assistant professor of Creative Writing in English, where she has served for many years as assistant professor of practice in the arts. After receiving her undergraduate degree in English from the College, she earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Before returning to UChicago, she taught at Stanford, as well as throughout Chicago (at the University of Illinois Chicago, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, City Colleges Harry S Truman and Malcom X, and StoryStudio Chicago) and at the University of Southern Maine. She is the author of the novel Should the Waters Take Us (Doubleday, 2026), which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and the collection Last One Out Shut Off the Lights (Little, Brown, 2020), which includes “Haguillory,” selected for The Best American Short Stories 2021.

Both of Soileau’s books are set in coastal Louisiana, where she grew up, with Last One Out offering snapshots of contemporary domestic life and Should the Waters exploring the region’s long history of environmental devastation, culminating in the aftermath of a catastrophic oil spill. She also wrote about her hometown of Lake Charles in the wake of Hurricane Laura in “I Take Back Everything I Said About Southwest Louisiana” for The New York Times (2020). Her work has been recognized by a number of major honors, including an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, a Camargo Foundation Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Creative Writing, and an Emerging Artist Award in Literature from the St. Botolph Foundation in Boston.

Composer and performer Corie Rose Soumah joins Music as assistant professor in Composition and Sound Practices after completing a doctor of musical arts at Columbia University and a Formation Supérieure I in composition from the Conservatoire de Musique de Montréal. Her dissertation project explored the link between eschatology and humans’ understanding of time, especially in an era of environmental crisis, and how music can offer an alternative perspective that privileges freedom and care. Her compositions, which draw on Afro-diasporic perspectives and ecology, vary in scale—from chamber music to large ensembles—and often feature various electronics, such as real-time sound editing, fixed media, and built-in instruments. Among many other honors, she received Canada’s Prix d’Europe en Composition (Prix Fernand Lindsay) in 2025.

Soumah is the recipient of several grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec to create original commissioned pieces, stage performances, or attend prestigious music residencies. Her work has been featured in many renowned festivals, such the Darmstadt Summer Course, TIME:SPANS, Gaudeamus, Wigmore Hall, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, contrapunkt, and MaerzMusik. Her pieces have also received prizes from the SOCAN (Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada) Foundation Young Composers Awards, and she received an Honorable Mention from the Cortona Prize in 2024 for her piece “Limpidités IV” before receiving the prize in 2025 for “States of Intermeshing: xi. Épilogue.” Her music and performances are available on her website.

Ashlyn Sparrow joins the faculty of Cinema and Media Studies, where she was previously a senior research associate, as assistant professor in Media Arts and Design. She came to the University more than a decade ago to help develop the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab before spending several years as assistant director of UChicago’s Weston Game Lab. She is also a founding member of Fourcast Lab, which designs alternate reality games, and is the lead engineer at Waking Oni, a game studio that designs interactive experiences for underrepresented voices. She holds a master’s in entertainment technology from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Madeira in Portugal and a BS in information sciences and technology with a focus on design and development from Pennsylvania State University.

Sparrow’s portfolio includes a host of University-affiliated projects, including Haven, a text-based role-playing game for first-years in the College; ECHO, designed to help students learn health safety protocols around COVID-19; and Terrarium, an alternate reality game for incoming UChicago undergrads, which won an IndieCade Award for innovation in games and play. She has written more than a dozen articles on the pedagogical and social value of games, most recently publishing “Play and Being: The Interplay of Existence in Death Stranding and Huizinga’s Homo ludens” in Playthrough Poetics: Gameplay as Research Method (Amherst College Press, 2024). She received a grant from the National Institutes of Health for her game Caduceus Quest: A Serious STEM Game to Promote Reproductive Health and STEM and Health Career Interest, and she helped secure funding from the University of Chicago Women’s Board to create and promote the Year of Games initiative to advance games scholarship and foster collaboration across the University.