Congratulations to Vassar’s Newly Tenured Faculty Members

Those granted tenure are: Associate Professor of Italian Sole Anatrone, Associate Professor of Economics Esteban Patricio Argudo Valverde, Associate Professor of Cognitive Science Stephen Flusberg, Associate Professor of Drama Peter Gil-Sheridan, Associate Professor of Film Denise Iris, Associate Professor of Computer Science Rui Manuel Pacheco Meireles, and Associate Professor of Philosophy Sofia Ortiz-Hinojosa.

Dean Eudell lauded all seven faculty members for their scholarly and artistic achievements. “The recently tenured faculty embody Vassar’s commitment to rigorous research and creative practices, inspirational and socially relevant teaching, and dedicated service to the College and beyond campus,” he said.

Sole Anatrone

Associate Professor of Italian

Education: BA, Smith College; MA, PhD, University of California-Berkeley

At Vassar since 2019

Teaching and Research: Associate Professor Anatrone’s research focuses on questions of gender and sexuality, race, migration, (post)colonialism, and activism in cinema, literature, and cultural studies. She is the author of Queering Italian Media (Lexington Books, 2020) and the chapter “Why LGBTQIA+ Inclusivity Matters for Italian Studies” in the forthcoming book Diversity in Italian Studies, ed. A. Tamburri, (New York: John D. Calandra Italian American Institute). Her work has also been published in Gender/Sexuality/Italy journal, California Italian Studies, and beyond. She is a cofounder of Asterisk, a task force that offers workshops to university faculty, students, and staff geared toward fostering LGBTQAI+ inclusivity inside and outside the classroom. Professor Anatrone is also on the steering committee of Vassar’s Women, Feminist, and Queer Studies Program and the Consortium on Forced Migration, and a member of the advisory board to the Queer Studies Caucus of the American Association of Italian Studies.

Esteban Patricio Argudo Valverde

Associate Professor of Economics

Education: BS, MA, University of Pennsylvania; PhD, Indiana University Bloomington

At Vassar since 2017

Teaching and Research: Associate Professor Argudo is a macroeconomist who is a native of Quito, Ecuador. He moved to the U.S. in 2004 to pursue a degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on investigating the implications of different fiscal and monetary policies for economic stabilization and growth in the context of diversity and inequality. His most recent research explores the transmission channels of monetary policy, and particularly its effect on the credit conditions faced by different people in the economy.

Stephen Flusberg

Associate Professor of Cognitive Science

Education: BA, Northwestern University; MA, PhD, Stanford University

At Vassar since 2023

Teaching and Research: Associate Professor Flusberg’s research focuses on the ways everyday language and public discourse both reflect and shape beliefs, attitudes, and decision-making surrounding complex topics such as time, politics, and the environment. In the Framing, Reasoning, and Metaphor (FRAME) Lab at Vassar, he and his students investigate these topics using empirical and analytic methods from across the cognitive and social sciences.

Recent projects have examined how metaphorical explanations impact science and health communication and how victim framing influences moral and social judgment. His work treats framing as an unavoidable feature of human communication that guides how audiences understand and react to a message.

At Vassar, he teaches across the cognitive science curriculum, including Introduction to Cognitive Science, intermediate courses on the cognitive science of language, and senior seminars on language and thought and the cognitive science of religion. His courses invite students to think critically about the mind from multiple perspectives and to practice cognitive science by applying its theories and methods to real-world questions.

Peter Gil-Sheridan

Associate Professor of Drama

Education: BA, Fordham University; MFA, University of Iowa

At Vassar since 2020

Teaching and Artistic Background: Associate Professor Gil-Sheridan is a Cuban-American playwright whose play This Space Between Us has been developed by both the New Harmony Project and Page 73 Productions as part of the Page 73 Residency. It was performed off-Broadway with Keen Company in 2022. Other plays include Cockfight, written at Soho Rep’s Writer/Director Lab and further developed by PlayPenn and produced as a podcast by the Parsnip Ship; Useful People, developed by the Powerhouse Theater; and Maybe When You’re Older, developed at PlayLabs.

At Vassar, he was awarded a Ford Fellowship to develop his adaptation, Medea and Her Sons, in collaboration with Sydney Duncan ’24. He founded and annually produces the Steerman Festival of New Work that features fully produced plays by Vassar writers. Alongside students and colleagues, he’s produced 11 new plays. He serves as the Arts Working Group Cochair of the Engaged Pluralism Committee; has mentored students who have participated in ModFest, the Creative Arts Across Disciplines Program (CAAD,) and Community-Engaged Learning (OCEL); and advised theses for the Women, Feminist, and Queer Studies Program.

Denise Iris

Associate Professor of Film

Education: BA, Brown University; MFA, Columbia University

At Vassar since 2018

Teaching and Artistic Background: Associate Professor Iris’s films have been presented at the Museum of Modern Art, broadcast on PBS, and screened in festivals around the world. Booyaka, a portrait of Jamaican American singer Maxine Foster, won the Silver Spire at the San Francisco International Film Festival and a Director’s Choice Award at the Black Maria Film and Video Festival. Minor Visions, a journey through post-communist Romania, won the Critics’ Prize at the Dakino International Film Festival. Her most recent project, Supersymmetry, charts the wanderings of a lost Polar explorer.

Professor Iris’s films are in the collections of Harvard, Colgate, the New School, and Texas State. Her one-minute videos, Minimentals, are discussed in the textbook The Film Experience, by Timothy Corrigan and Patricia White (Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, third edition).

She has been awarded fellowships and grants from the MacDowell Colony, NY Foundation for the Arts, NY State Council on the Arts, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Jerome Foundation, Bogliasco Foundation, Wexner Center, Djerassi, and Blue Mountain Center. Born in Romania, she escaped the Ceausescu regime at the age of fourteen.

Rui Manuel Pacheco Meireles

Associate Professor of Computer Science

Education: MS, PhD, Carnegie Mellon University; PhD, Universidade do Porto

At Vassar since 2017

Teaching and Research: Associate Professor Meireles teaches in the Computer Science Department. His interests lie in the general areas of networking and distributed systems, and his research is applied and experimental in nature: designing protocols, creating prototypes, and evaluating them in realistic environments. His main focus is Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks, which wirelessly connect vehicles to each other and to roadside infrastructure, with the goal of improving traffic safety and efficiency, as well as providing entertainment to passengers.

Sofia Ortiz-Hinojosa

Associate Professor of Philosophy

Education: BA, Brown University; PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

At Vassar since 2016

Teaching and Research: Associate Professor Ortiz-Hinojosa teaches courses in the Latin American and Latinx Studies and Science and Technology Programs and Philosophy Department. She received a New Directions Fellowship from the Mellon Foundation in support of her project “Mesoamerican Worldviews: How Indigenous Philosophies Influence Latin America.”

Professor Ortiz-Hinojosa grew up in Monterrey, Mexico. She joined Vassar as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow before being hired as a full-time faculty member in 2018. Ortiz-Hinojosa has developed research in contemporary philosophy of mind and the history of thought in the Americas, especially the colonial period in Latin America.

Her work has highlighted the thought of a polymathic nun named Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, sometimes called the “first feminist of the New World.” Professor Ortiz-Hinojosa is the editor and translator of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Selected Philosophical Writings (Hackett Press, 2027). Her work has been published in the Journal of the APA, Philosophical Studies, and Crítica, as well as in collections including Project Vox, Latin American and Latinx Philosophy: A Collaborative Introduction, and Philosopher Queens.