This fall, the School of Social Sciences is pleased to welcome ten new tenure-track faculty members to its roster of exceptional scholars. The cohort of new hires will cover multiple departments and contribute to a wide range of research specialties.
“We are delighted to welcome our largest-ever cohort of new faculty to the School of Social Sciences,” said Rachel Kimbro, dean of the School of Social Sciences. “We look forward to their many contributions to the Rice community.”
Anthropology
Khadene Harris, assistant professor, is a historical archaeologist whose research sits at the intersection of slavery, capitalism, and race in the Caribbean. Harris’ current project focuses on the transition from slavery to freedom on the island of Dominica, where she examines the social and economic networks of the laboring class in the wake of such a momentous shift. In her research, Harris uses discarded everyday objects like ceramics and tobacco pipes to narrate community histories under colonial rule.
Linguistics
John Baugh is the Barbara Jordan Distinguished Professor of Linguistics and past president of the Linguistic Society of America and the American Dialect Society. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Baugh created the first experimental studies of linguistic profiling that exposed racial bias in housing discrimination. An American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellow, Baugh taught previously at Washington University in St. Louis and Stanford University, having received his Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania.
Political Science
Rithika Kumar is an assistant professor of political science whose research lies at the intersection of gender, urbanization, and politics with a regional specialization in South Asia, specifically India. Her research examines how development processes, from economic migration to political decentralization, transform patterns of local political engagement by mediating the relationship between the private and the public. Before coming to Rice, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Kellogg Institute at the University of Notre Dame. She received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2023.
Tanika Raychaudhuri, assistant professor of political science, specializes in American politics, immigration, race, and political behavior. Raychaudhuri completed her Ph.D. in politics at Princeton University, a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, and was an assistant professor at the University of Houston before joining Rice. Her current book project explores how Asian Americans – the fastest-growing racial group in the U.S. – learn about American politics and develop partisan preferences. Raychaudhuri’s other research considers questions about immigrant political behavior, representation, and public policy.
Psychological Sciences
Rebecca Brossoit, assistant professor of psychological sciences, earned a Ph.D. in industrial-organizational psychology from Colorado State University with specialized training in Occupational Health Psychology, which focuses on protecting and promoting the health, safety, and well-being of working populations. After graduate school, Brossoit worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Oregon Institute for Occupational Health Sciences at Oregon Health & Science University and as an assistant professor at Louisiana State University. Brossoit’s applied research focuses on employee sleep, workplace interventions, and the influence of the built and natural environment on employees.
Tianjun Sun, assistant professor of industrial-organizational psychology and quantitative methods, brings expertise from her previous role at Kansas State University and her Ph.D. from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on personnel selection, individual differences, and psychometrics, with an emphasis on leveraging advanced technology and methodology to enhance staffing decisions and improve organizational outcomes. Sun’s innovative work has garnered support from prestigious institutions like the NSF and NIH, and she has been recognized as a Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science.
Sociology
Corey Abramson (Ph.D., sociology, UC Berkeley, 2012), associate professor of sociology, researches the connections between inequality, health, and culture using diverse empirical methods such as embedded fieldwork in memory care facilities, neighborhoods, and cancer clinics, national health surveys with older adults, and AI-assisted analyses of health narratives. Abramson authored the award-winning monograph The End Game: How Inequality Shapes Our Final Years (Harvard University Press), numerous scholarly papers for social science, medical, and policy audiences, and co-edited the methodological volume Beyond the Case: The Logics and Practices of Comparative Ethnography (Oxford University Press). His recent works, supported by the National Institutes of Health and other agencies, integrate computational social science, AI, and traditional qualitative methods in innovative ways to address core social science questions and contribute to equitable, evidence-based policies.
Joseph Ewoodzie, an associate professor of sociology who was born and raised in Ghana, West Africa, completed high school, college, and graduate school in the U.S. Ewoodzie’s experiences as a migrant foster a unique perspective into race and ethnicity in the U.S. Ewoodzie’s research seeks to understand boundary-making around Blackness in the U.S., with a recent focus on how African migrants are shaping race and Blackness. Other related research areas of focus include the history of hip hop in the South Bronx and foodways in Jackson, Mississippi.
Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman (B.A., Cornell; M.A./Ph.D., Duke) is an associate professor of sociology and the Center for African and African American Studies. Her research explores the emotional mechanisms of oppression in the context of family and work in African Diasporic communities. Her award-winning first monograph, The Color of Love, examines racial stigma in Black Brazilian families and is the subject of her 2015 TEDx talk. She has published extensively in leading journals, co-edited two books, and recently released Second-Class Daughters, on informal adoption and modern slavery in Brazil, which has received several prestigious book awards. Hordge-Freeman is eager to develop community-engaged courses that build on her summer Brazil program and immersive Journey Towards Justice course.
Jaleh Jalili, assistant professor, received her Ph.D. in sociology from Brandeis University. Her research interests include urban sociology, social movements, space and place, cultural sociology, gender, and inequality. She is currently working on two projects, a qualitative study of Black Lives Matter protests in Portland, Oregon, and a collaborative project on redlining and the built environment in the U.S. Jalili is the author of Tehran’s Borderlines: Urban Development and Public Life in Contemporary Iran (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press), and her published articles appear in Social Problems, Sociological Perspectives, Sociology Compass, The Middle East Journal, Frontiers, and as book chapters in edited volumes.
“Our new faculty members conduct cutting-edge research that addresses pressing societal issues,” said Pat DeLucia, associate dean for research for the School of Social Sciences. “We look forward to featuring some of them at our School of Social Sciences Research Relay in September.”
Rice University's School of Social Sciences is a vibrant, inclusive community of scholars, students, and educators committed to connecting our teaching and research with policy for the betterment of society. We are seven departments with one mission: to tackle society's greatest challenges with an unconventional vision toward shaping a future that we can all thrive in, both individually and collectively.