Welcome New Tenure-Track Faculty 2026-27
The College of Arts and Letters is pleased to welcome four new faculty this academic year, where departments across the college are expanding research in the social sciences and humanities. These new scholars are leaders in their fields of Brazilian history, demography/immigration and border politics, and more.
Meet Our New Faculty
Elaine Andres, Asian American Studies
Elaine Kathryn Andres studies political economies of music and performance within the U.S. transpacific empire. Her current project examines touring performances of Filipinx American musicians to theorize geographic, stylistic, and racial im/mobilities as intertwined conditions of musical labor. Constellating musical transits, the work unfolds how histories of empire and militarization structure movement between racial, geographic, and musical worlds and shape Filipinx American relationalities with Black and Latine communities and sound cultures. Her writing appears in Sexe, Race, et Colonies, the Journal of Asian American Studies, PBS American Experience, and the SAGE Encyclopedia for Filipina/x/o American Studies.
Alongside her scholarship, Andres has organized public initiatives with organizations including the Music of Asian America Research Center and Asian Americans Advancing Justice – Atlanta.
Previously, Andres was a postdoctoral fellow in Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and an ACLS Leading Edge Fellow. She earned her Ph.D. in culture and theory at UC Irvine with emphases in Asian American studies, gender and sexuality, and visual culture, and her B.A. in rhetoric with honors from UC Berkeley.
Born and raised in the Inland Empire by Filipinx immigrants, Andres is excited to work with students who bring their own experiences of Southern California to the classroom.
Fernando Riosmena, Geography
Fernando Riosmena is professor in the Department of Geography. He has two main areas of research, both on migration and borders. First, Riosmena’s work aims at improving understanding of the theories, drivers, empirical measurement, and analytical strategies to analyze migration. His empirical work focuses on the social, economic, policy, and environmental factors likely influencing international movement, with emphasis on Mexico-U.S. migration. Second, Riosmena’s research examines race-ethnic disparities in health, aging, and wellbeing. In particular, his work assesses the way in which disadvantage gets under the skin, as well as understanding the direct and indirect impacts of migration on aging and health, comparing the experience of immigrants to key "counterfactual" populations in sending areas. (Starts @SDSU in spring 2027)
Arthur Schott Lopes, History
Arthur Schott Lopes is an incoming assistant professor of Brazilian history, a joint appointment in the Department of History and the Behner Stiefel Center for Brazilian Studies. Schott Lopes earned an M.A. in the social sciences and a Ph.D. in history at the University of Chicago, and a B.A. in history at Harvard College. He is a political historian of Brazil interested in the nexus between institutional conflict and the violence of everyday life; in histories of politics that go beyond national and state capitals; in borderlands and frontiers; and in the intersection between political, economic, and environmental history. His first book project is a history of military intervention into land conflict at Brazil’s Triple Border with Argentina and Paraguay during the 20th century. The project reassesses civilian-military relations away from barracks and government palaces, demonstrating how military actors became political players on the ground before Brazil’s military coup of 1964, and how they helped build a rural political economy grounded on environmental and human exploitation well before the military dictatorship’s 1970s Amazonian colonization policies.
Maile Young, Asian American Studies
Maile Aihua Young is an interdisciplinary scholar who works at the intersection of ethnic studies and public health. Their main research project explores Asian American racialization through the culture of disease. Bringing Asian American cultural production – such as films, novels, and visual art – into dialogue with scientific discourses and media, their ongoing work tracks how notions of “contagion” are incorporated into Asian diasporic life. Other research interests include Asian American experimental video, health activism, and Asian American literary history. Young received a Ph.D. in English with an emphasis in Asian American studies from UC Santa Barbara and a B.S. in public health and literature from American University. Before coming to SDSU, they were a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Bioethics and Health Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch. Their writing can be found in Amerasia and Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. (Starts @SDSU in spring 2027)