Welcome New Tenure-Track Faculty 2024-25

CAL is pleased to welcome eight new faculty members this fall, each bringing a wealth of international experience and expertise. Joining us in fields ranging from linguistics and geography to history, economics and political science, these assistant professors are set to enrich our academic community with their innovative research and dynamic teaching methods. 

Meet Our New Faculty

Zamira Abman
European Studies and History

Zamira Abman is an assistant professor in European Studies and history at San Diego State University, specializing in Eurasia, the Soviet Union, and Russia. She earned her Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on state feminism in Soviet Central Asia. Abman also holds an M.A. from the University of Notre Dame and a B.A. from the American University of Central Asia in Kyrgyzstan. She is the author of the book, “Coerced Liberation: Muslim Women in Soviet Tajikistan” published by the University of Toronto Press in 2024. Beyond academia, Abman has held positions as a research specialist and community organizer at the University of Minnesota, worked for Counterpart International in Washington, D.C., and served as an election observer with The Carter Center in Monrovia, Liberia.

Jennifer Burke Reifman
Rhetoric and Writing Studies

Jennifer Burke Reifman is an assistant professor in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing Studies and future director of lower-division writing. She completed her Ph.D. in education with a focus on writing, rhetoric, and composition studies at the University of California, Davis, where her research centered on writing assessment and student agency. Her dissertation, titled "The Lies We Tell: Countering Normative Understandings of Agency in Self-Placement Practices," examines the implications of self-placement practices on student self-efficacy and agency within writing programs. Her work often explores the intersections of writing assessment, raciolinguistic ideologies, and feminist coalition-building in postsecondary writing programs, utilizing participant-centered methodologies to understand the experiences of undergraduate students. 

Kyle Jerro
Linguistics and Asian/Middle Eastern Languages

Kyle Jerro is interested in the interface between syntax and semantics. In particular, their research looks at possible verb meanings across languages, with a particular emphasis on languages in the Bantu family. Currently, Jerro is looking into how information structure interacts with verb meaning, with a broader interest in how pragmatics constrains and interacts with argument structure. Other topics of interest are the semantics of location and directed motion, reference and fictional worlds, and the psycholinguistic categorization of noun classes in Bantu languages. In collaboration with community linguists in the D.R. Congo, Jerro is contributing to a project on the revitalization of the Bantu language, Kihunde.

Jaeyoung Kim
Political Science

Jaeyoung Kim is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at San Diego State University. Kim received his Ph.D. in 2024 from McGill University, Canada. Prior to his studies at McGill, he earned his B.A. (2014) and M.A. (2017) from Seoul National University, South Korea. Kim’s research and teaching interests include international security, state formation, and global/historical international relations, with a regional focus on East Asia. His dissertation, “The Rise and Fall of Status-Seekers: Commitment, Strategy, and International Political Change in East Asia,” proposes a theory of status ascent grounded in East Asian history to explain why some states improve their status while others fail to do so when the established international order undergoes a transition.

Keavy McFadden
Geography

Keavy McFadden is an urban geographer with specializations in urban development, urban infrastructure, education, social movements, and community-based research. While completing her Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota, Keavy studied the intersection of education and urban politics in Chicago. Drawing on case studies of school closures, school choice expansion, and the redevelopment of former schools, her research examines how education landscapes are key terrains upon which racial and economic injustices are reproduced, reconfigured, and challenged. Keavy’s latest research project explores how community-led calls for a care-oriented Green New Deal organized around investments in social housing and public education reveal the entanglements between social reproduction and environmental justice.

Leandra Merz
Geography

Leandra Merz is an assistant professor in geography, and a conservationist focused on promoting human-wildlife coexistence in shared landscapes. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Florida.  Leandra has primarily lived and worked in southern Africa focusing on community based natural resource management programs. She has also worked on human-wolf interactions in the northwestern U.S. Her research interests also include wildlife crime, gender and conservation, sustainable development, and natural resource governance.

Jun Takahashi
Linguistics and Asian/Middle Eastern Languages (Japanese)

Jun Takahashi is an assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics and Asian/Middle Eastern Languages at SDSU. He earned his Ph.D. in language education from Indiana University Bloomington. His research focuses on exploring the intersections between second language (L2) writing and L2 development, particularly learner engagement with written corrective feedback, the development of feedback literacy, and L2 writing processes from a sociocultural perspective. He is currently exploring the roles of AI in L2 writing. Additionally, he is working on curriculum and teaching material development, including the creation of a proficiency-oriented textbook for elementary Japanese.

Julia Li Zhu
Economics

Julia Li Zhu is an assistant professor in the Department of Economics. She received her Ph.D. from Cornell University. Prior to joining SDSU, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Norwegian School of Economics. Her research fields are labor economics, economics of migration, and economics of education. Her current research focuses on the causes and effects of high-skilled immigration, labor market institutions and inequality, local impacts of immigration enforcement policies, climate change and migration, attitude formation towards immigrants and racial minorities, and population estimation using demographic techniques.