Meet ten new faculty at the Faculty of Arts and Science

Amanda McGowan, Assistant Professor, Psychology

By taking research beyond the laboratory and into peoples' daily lives, Amanda McGowan seeks to uncover relationships between lifestyle behaviours and wellness. She aims to engage people where they spend their time—at home, school, or as they go about their daily routines in their neighbourhoods—in order to design scalable mobile health solutions to support wellbeing.

Prior to joining Concordia, McGowan completed her PhD at Michigan State University with a focus on cognitive motor neuroscience and postdoctoral training in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

Mitchell McLarnon, Assistant Professor, Education

Tenure track in Adult Education - Community Learning and Social Change

Mitchell McLarnon’s research explores the extent to which adult education can achieve aims of social and environmental justice. Broadly, he seeks to understand the impacts of intersecting social, environmental, and educational policy on communities in Montreal and elsewhere.

Starting at sites where adult education and community learning take place such as universities, adult education centres, community organizations, local neighbourhoods, museums, and greenspaces, McLarnon supervises research that relates to environmental education, community-based learning and other overlapping and interconnected themes, pedagogies and methodologies. His research interests extend to institutional ethnography, community-based and participatory research, visual methodologies, land-based/environmental/outdoor education, school and community gardening, gentrification, food insecurity and urban political ecology.

Stella Chia, Professor, Department of Communication Studies

Stella Chia is a researcher in media effects on health behavior. Her aim is to equip students with the skills to critically assess media content and, if they end up becoming media producers, to have the tools to do so ethically and responsibly. Her past journalism experience makes her especially passionate about studying the impact of news coverage on public opinion. Recently, she examined how misinformation about COVID-19 and vaccines influenced people’s perception of the pandemic and their willingness to accept vaccines.

Chia grew up in Taiwan and received her PhD and MA degrees in mass communication at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in the United States. She has taught in the United States, Singapore and Hong Kong and her work has been published in several international communications research journals.

Zhifan Luo, Assistant Professor, Sociology & Anthropology

Tenure track in Media Sociology

Zhifan Luo’s research uses a sociological perspective to understand the effects of social dynamics in digital technology with the hope of avoiding potential perils and harnessing them for common good. Trained as a political and media sociologist, her research focuses on how digital technology transforms or sustains pre-existing relationship of power, domination and inequality.

Luo received her PhD in 2021 at the State University of New York at Albany. Her past works have been published in peer-reviewed journals including New Media & Society, Information, Communication & Society, and Armed Forces & Society.

Jonathan Martineau, Assistant Professor, Liberal Arts College

Tenure track in Liberal Arts, Diversity and the Global Core

After earning his PhD from York University in Toronto, Jonathan Martineau taught and researched in the field of the History of Philosophy and Social Thought for several years. As a multidisciplinary scholar, his published research interrogates the manifold and complex relationships between social time, technology and political economy.

Martineau is the author of Time, Capitalism and Alienation (Brill, 2015), focusing on the relationship between time technologies and modes of social power. His most recent co-authored book, Le capitalisme algorithmique et son monde, which explores political, economic and ethical implications of the rise of algorithmic capitalism, will be published in 2023.

Joyce Lui, Assistant Professor, Psychology

Tenure track in Child Mental Health

Joyce Lui’s research seeks to optimize mental health care and outcomes for youth with behavioural challenges with an eye toward sustained implementation in routine care settings. She is passionate about improving access to mental health care for ethnic-minoritized youth.

Prior to joining Concordia, she was a Research Faculty member at the University of Maryland. She completed her PhD in Clinical Psychology at Washington State University with a specialization in children and youth. Lui currently serves on Society of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology Diversity Committee and the Leadership Education to Advance Diversity Institute Planning Committee. 

Jason Bramburger, Professor, Mathematics and Statistics

Tenure track in Applied Mathematics

Jason Bramburger is primarily focused on why and how patterns and waves arise in nature and is interested in dynamical systems including pattern formation and chaos theory. Most of his work is centered on developing novel methods for analyzing complex systems which can provide scientists with the means to interpret equations and data. In the classroom, he attempts to make real-world connections to his class material. His YouTube channel features full lectures to accompany his courses.

Bramburger received his PhD in applied mathematics from the University of Ottawa in 2017 and has held NSERC and PIMS postdoctoral fellowships to study at Brown University and University of Victoria, respectively. He was recently named a fellow of the Institute of Advanced Study in Guildford, UK.

Carlo Pagano, Assistant Professor, Mathematics

Tenure track in Arithmetic, Geometry and Number Theory

Carlo Pagano is a number theorist who tackles ancient mathematical questions such as Malle’s conjecture and the analytic theory of L-functions with modern techniques. Along with his collaborators, Pagano recently used group theory to answer questions about a decades-old conjecture known as the negative Pell equation. He hopes to bring the excitement of doing mathematics in undergrad and graduate level classes.

Originally from Napoli, Italy, Pagano decided to study number theory in his last year of high school, completed his Bachelor and Master studies in Rome and a PhD in Number Theory in Leiden, the Netherlands. From 2018 to 2022, he then completed postdoctoral studies at the Max Planck Institute and the University of Glasgow.

Keelan Harkin, Assistant Professor, Irish Studies

Tenure track in Irish Literature

Keelan Harkin’s work examines the intersections of literature, narrative theory, the law, citizenship and state politics. He teaches on a wide range of Irish literature topics including nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish writing, the Irish Literary Revival, Irish modernism and Contemporary Irish fiction and non-fiction and seeks to introduce students to historically marginalised writers within the Irish literary canon.

Having published articles on a wide range of Irish writers, his current research examines how Irish writers in the 1930s attempted to imagine political consolidation and the future of Irish statehood through fiction. His work looks at how literature provided writers opportunities to make the dynamics of statehood legible to a reading public and how this made it possible to re-imagine the contours of the state.