Muhlenberg Announces Faculty Promotions
Six members of the faculty were recently awarded tenure and promoted to associate professor by the Board of Trustees.Wednesday, February 7, 2024 04:21 PM
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Jacqueline (Jacki) Antonovich, History
Antonovich is a historian of health and medicine in the United States, with particular interests in how race, gender and politics shape the medical field and access to health care. Her teaching interests include histories of public health, alternative medicine, disability, reproduction and childbirth and epidemics. She also focuses on the history of the American West, nineteenth-century America and the Gilded and Progressive Eras.
She recently published an article on the public health politics of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, and her current writing project is a book manuscript on women physicians and medical imperialism in the turn-of-the-century American West. She is also the co-founder and executive editor of Nursing Clio, a peer-reviewed blog project that ties historical scholarship to present-day issues related to gender, health and medicine.
Antonovich won a Faculty Rising Scholar Award in 2022 and serves as director of the Shankweiler Scholars Medical Humanities Honors Program.
She earned a B.A. from Colorado Mesa University, an M.A. from the University of Wyoming and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.
Ross Dardani, Political Science
Dardani teaches public law and legal studies courses that focus on the relationship between law and society. His classes examine how the Supreme Court influences American politics, the complex ways law matters to people and the political, cultural and economic forces that shape the U.S legal system. His courses have a particular focus on how the Supreme Court’s decisions involving race relations are influenced by the larger structural forces of U.S. society.
His research interests include law and society, constitutional law, critical legal studies, critical race theory, legal mobilization, legal history, U.S. citizenship and U.S. immigration policies. His current research analyzes the legal histories of U.S. citizenship legislation for the Pacific unincorporated territories (Guam, American Samoa and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands). His most recent research project focuses on the influence that equal protection jurisprudence and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights had on debates about the extension of citizenship to American Samoa in the immediate aftermath of World War II.
He earned a B.A. from SUNY New Paltz and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut.
Emanuela Kucik, English and Africana Studies
Kucik, who directs the Africana Studies Program, studies 20th century and contemporary African American and American literatures, global Black literature, Holocaust literature, genocide literature, human rights literature and comparative race and ethnicity studies to produce work that intertwines scholarship and activism and highlights how literature can combat genocide. Her forthcoming book, The Black Blood of Genocide: Tracing Genocide in Post-Holocaust African Diasporic Literature (Columbia University Press, 2025), is a literary history of how Black authors across the globe have used literature to raise awareness about anti-Black genocide in the post-World War II era.
She teaches interdisciplinary courses that examine the intersections of race, genocide and human rights violations through the study of 20th century and contemporary literature(s). She serves as faculty advisor to the Black Students Association and as the inaugural Faculty Fellow for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Initiatives. She founded the Africana Studies Book Club and co-founded the Graduate School Preparatory Program for Students from Underrepresented Backgrounds with Associate Professor of Biology Giancarlo Cuadra.
Kucik has been honored with numerous College awards, including the Bridge Builder award (2018), the Ruth and Joel Spira Prize for Distinguished Teaching (2021), the Faculty Rising Scholars Award (2022) and the Robert C. Williams Award for Distinguished Scholarship and Research (2023).
She earned a B.A. in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an M.A. and Ph.D. in English and a doctoral graduate certificate in African American studies from Princeton University.
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Casey James Miller, Anthropology
Miller offers a range of introductory and advanced cultural anthropology courses on topics including gender and sexuality, queer anthropology, medicine and health, and Chinese culture and society.
His research has examined the intersections of gender, sexuality, health and civil society in postsocialist urban China. His book, Inside the Circle: Queer Culture and Activism in Northwest China, is the first book to explore queer culture and activism in northwest China. Drawing on ethnographic data collected over a decade of fieldwork in urban northwest China from 2007–2019 involving more than 70 people from local queer communities, civil society organizations and government agencies, the book offers a novel, compelling and intimately personal perspective on Chinese queer culture and activism.
Miller won Muhlenberg’s Award for the Outstanding Advisor to First-Year Students in 2020.
He earned a B.A. from Magdalen College, University of Oxford; an M.A. from Harvard University; and a Ph.D. from Brandeis University.
Ellen Rackas, Accounting
Rackas, who is a Certified Public Accountant licensed in Pennsylvania and Maryland, enjoys imparting her passion for accounting to her students. Accounting is the language of business and is, therefore, integral to communicating business information. She strongly believes that accounting can unlock many doors for students, regardless of career choice.
Rackas’ research interests include exploring taxation and public policy. She won a Faculty Rising Scholar Award in 2022 and proudly serves on several college committees including the Faculty Development and Scholarship Committee, the Academic Judicial Board and the Muhlenberg Center for Teaching and Learning.
She earned a B.A. from American University and an M.B.A. from the University of Maryland and is a parent of a student in the Class of 2026.
Leticia Robles-Moreno, Theatre
Robles-Moreno teaches classes on race, gender, performance and politics in the Americas. She uses multiple forms of contemporary performance to think about alternative forms of world-making. She invites her students to reflect upon political conflicts rooted in racial and cultural clashes and on how the liberal arts have the ability to address, analyze and work towards the transformation of these conflicts.
She studies different forms of artistic collaborations, specifically “creación colectiva,” the Latin American counterpart of devised theatre. She is interested in how collective efforts can serve as strategies for survival in times of turbulent politics. Her book project Living After Death: Performance, Decay and Collective Survival in the Americas analyzes the political aesthetics of theatre, art and activism as modes of anti-neoliberal and intersectional bodily coexistence. She won a Faculty Rising Scholar Award in 2022.
Robles-Moreno earned a B.A. from Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, an M.A. from the University of Colorado at Boulder and an M.A. and a Ph.D. from New York University.
