Talented new faculty are bringing innovative ideas, a spirit of interdisciplinary collaboration and a commitment to the student experience to all parts of the Case Western Reserve University College of Arts and Sciences.
Forty faculty members—all standouts in their fields, from chemistry and dance to philosophy and mathematics—have joined the college since September 2023, with four more to come this summer.
The high-impact group reflects the college’s strategic priorities and is part of a larger Case Western Reserve plan announced in summer 2023 to hire at least 100 net new tenure and tenure-track faculty over several years—a 15% increase. The Faculty 100 initiative aims to boost research and academic collaboration, enhance the vibrancy of the intellectual community, foster inclusive excellence and encourage cross-campus connections to solve the world’s most pressing challenges.
“These outstanding scholars and teachers will further raise our research standing, inspire our students and bring their creative energy to new collaborations around campus,” said Dean David Gerdes, PhD, who joined the college in March. “I’m thrilled that they have joined our community.”
Read on to meet five of the college’s new hires.
Ben Mauk | Photo by Carleen Coulter
Ben Mauk, MFA, has turned the wanderlust he nurtured as a bookish child in Laurel, Maryland, into an award-winning journalism and filmmaking career that’s taken him around the globe.
He has chronicled floating villages in Cambodia, hiking trails in Kurdistan and a reeducation camp in China. His forthcoming book, The Fugitive World, features portraits of nomads and refugees from the equator to the Arctic Circle.
“I was always fascinated by the idea of getting to know different parts of the world and immersing myself in other people’s stories,” said Mauk, the Shirley Wormser Professor of Journalism and Media Writing in the Department of English.
Mauk previously was director of the Berlin Writers’ Workshop, which he co-founded. He also co-created The New Yorker’s 2021 documentary Reeducated. The film took viewers inside a detention camp in Xinjiang, China, and won an Emmy and a Peabody Award. His reporting also has appeared in Harper’s and The New York Times Magazine, which last November published a 10,000-word investigation he co-authored with Nyrola Elimä about Uyghurs—a Turkic Muslim minority group—in exile from China.
The culmination of dozens of interviews and two years’ worth of reporting from Thailand to Turkey, the piece drew attention around the world and serves as an example to Mauk’s students of the tenacity, curiosity and attention to detail necessary to make it in the demanding and increasingly competitive field of journalism.
He treats his classroom “like a bullpen or a laboratory” to spitball ideas, workshop leads, develop sources and pitch students’ work.
“My students are serious and sophisticated—they’re already writers,” said Mauk, who taught his first classes on campus during the spring. “My job is to train them to bring knowledge into the world that didn’t exist before.”
Vaia Sigounas
As a physician scientist, Vaia Sigounas, MD, PhD, is “fascinated by how people use medical technologies,” including prosthetics, neurological devices and implantable technologies, “to reconstruct their identities and social relationships.”
The assistant professor of anthropology studies the development, distribution and use of prosthetic legs by Ugandans—largely women and children—who have lost limbs, often after stepping on a landmine. That research inspired her forthcoming book, which explores the design and circulation of medical devices to low- and middle-income countries—and how individuals use or alter devices to better meet their economic and social needs.
Her interest in medical anthropology was sparked by chance during her senior year at Harvard University, when she took a class on the subject to fulfill a social science requirement. When senior lecturer Jim Yong Kim, MD, PhD, a global health leader and former president of the World Bank, issued a charge to the class—“Figure out what the biggest problem is in the world and spend your life trying to change it”—Sigounas bolted upright in her chair.
Kim’s challenge led Sigounas to the University of North Carolina (UNC) School of Medicine. She trained as a surgeon, but as she saw patients trying to navigate the medical system, she wanted a better understanding of how social, cultural and other factors affect health and well-being. Sigounas then returned to UNC, earning a doctorate in medical anthropology,
Since arriving at the college a year ago, Sigounas has enjoyed encouraging her students—a mix of anthropology, engineering and pre-med majors—to find their purpose. “I want them to be exposed to the possibility that they can do a lot of good with their education and their lives.”
Nicholas Drashner
When Nicholas Drashner, MFA, was in Cleveland a few years ago to create the sound design for two showcase productions of the CWRU/Cleveland Play House MFA Acting Program, he had no idea he was auditioning for his next role.
Drashner’s ability to craft an immersive sound experience that delighted audiences made a bold impression as he worked on the shows alongside faculty from the college’s Department of Theater.
“I’m excited to leave my fingerprint on all the exciting work that’s happening here,” said Drashner, the department’s first resident sound and projection designer.
Drashner discovered he had an ear—and a passion—for music and audio production as a teenager. After earning a bachelor’s in interdisciplinary computing in the arts at the University of California, San Diego, he found theater was the perfect outlet for his technical skills and creative vision.
As a sound designer, Drashner said, he “blends the artificial world with the action on the stage,” enhancing an outdoor scene, for example, with singing birds, croaking frogs and chirping crickets—either from a sound library or recorded by Drashner himself.
Previously on the faculty at Kent State University, Drashner creates designs for several productions throughout the year, including the MFA showcase, and advises a student designer on another show. Drashner co-taught lighting design during the spring semester.
“The theater department’s standards of quality and scholarship are very high, which is an exciting challenge,” he said. “I’m enjoying working with students, who are incredibly engaged and very smart, and faculty and staff, who are committed to creating the best possible experience for them.”
Andrew Dacks
Entomologist Andrew Dacks, PhD, derives big insights about the brain from some of the tiniest research subjects.
The associate professor of biology works primarily with the vinegar fly, studying the cellular and network mechanism by which the nervous system can flexibly encode sensory information. His research offers a window into how nervous systems allow even the smallest animals to adapt to a wide range of constantly evolving environments.
The Edmonton, Alberta, native—who spent much of his childhood exploring the woods near his home—was bitten by the entomology bug during his sophomore year at the University of Alberta.
“The very first class, the professor told us to pack up our books and we just walked into the river valley and started to flip over rocks,” Dacks said. “My eyes were suddenly opened to this amazing minute world that was just exploding everywhere around me.”
Since coming to the college last summer, Dacks has already forged collaborations involving data collection with researchers across the department.
“[Partnering] with people from different fields of interest allows you to move forward in leaps and bounds, rather than the small incremental advances in knowledge that you make when you’re working in isolation,” he said.
Dacks also enjoys working with students, who, he said, bring a “deep curiosity” to their studies. Last fall, Dacks tasked them with designing an experiment and accompanying funding proposal that built on the research they read during the semester. There were no limits, and students “went in all sorts of exciting directions,” Dacks said. “I thought, ‘Boy, would I love to see some of these studies come to life.’”
Benjamin Murphy
Benjamin Murphy, PhD, delights in making the short weekly walk with undergraduates in his “Introduction to Contemporary Art” class to the Cleveland Museum of Art—their classroom for the day.
“One of the thrills of being [at the college] is our institutional relationship with the museum,” said the assistant professor in the Department of Art History and Art and its interim director of graduate studies. “The scale and richness of its collection are on par with [The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City] or the National Gallery [in Washington, D.C.].”
The college’s nearly 60-year partnership with one of the country’s most preeminent museums is part of what drew Murphy—a scholar of modern and contemporary art with a focus on Latin America—to CWRU last summer.
During the fall semester, graduate students in his “Methodologies of Art History” course wrote their final papers about pieces from the museum. In 2026, he will co-teach a graduate seminar with one of the institution’s contemporary art curators.
“With modern and contemporary art, especially, there’s never a right answer,” Murphy said. “Modern life is confusing—and modern art reflects that.”
Murphy came to the college from the National Gallery of Art, where he was the A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts.
He is working on a book project about Latin American artists who began experimenting with video technology in the 1970s as an act of resistance amid the rise of authoritarian military regimes. Murphy is also researching a second book project about how 20th- and 21st-century artists have incorporated money—from coins to cryptocurrency—in their work and “how that helps us think in new ways about capitalism and the conditions of modern life.”