LEWISTON — Six new tenure-track members of the faculty began teaching at Bates College this fall, representing the fields of dance, economics, German, neuroscience and psychology, religious studies, and classical and medieval studies.

Beginning their Bates careers as assistant professors are: Ali Humayun Akhtar, religious studies and classical and medieval studies; Rachel Boggia, dance; Jason Castro, psychology and neuroscience; Raluca Cernahoschi, German; Jakub Kazecki, German; and Paul Shea, economics.

Bates has also engaged biologist Larissa Williams, who starts teaching at the college during winter 2013; and historian Lydia Barnett, who begins in autumn 2013.

Appointed assistant professor of religious studies and of classical and medieval studies at Bates, Akhtar studies the complex interactions among political, religious and intellectual establishments in Europe and the Islamic world in medieval and early modern times. He is a native of New Jersey. Prior to Bates, he taught at Bard College and at New York University.

Appointed assistant professor of dance at Bates in 2012 after two years at the college as a visiting faculty member, Boggia employs sophisticated technology in her art and teaching. A videographer with ample documentary experience, she often blends video, both prerecorded and live, into performances, for example. She served as acting director of the Bates dance program in 2010-11 after teaching at Wesleyan University and at Connecticut and Dickinson colleges.

Analyzing neural electrical patterns and chemical imaging that reveals cellular activity, Castro investigates the relationships between the properties of neurons and sensory capabilities, such as the ability to distinguish between odors. He also works from the perceptual perspective, bringing statistical techniques to bear on such questions as how many basic odor categories there are. He came to Bates from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, where he had been a postdoctoral fellow since 2008, the year he received his doctorate in neuroscience at Pittsburgh.

Cernahoschi and Kazecki were hired in a joint appointment as assistant professors of German. Cernahoschi, who has been a visiting professor at Bates the past two years, is a native of Romania. She taught previously at Central Connecticut State University, McMaster University and UBC.

Kazecki has done considerable research on the connection between war and humor, as evidenced by his book “Laughter in the Trenches: Humour and Front Experience in German First World War Narratives,” released in July 2012 (Cambridge Scholars Publishing). A native of Poland, Kazecki taught at Central Connecticut State University for four years prior to Bates, and previously taught at McMaster University in Ontario and the University of British Columbia.

People’s expectations influence the economy, which makes the accurate prediction of expectations important to economists. That’s an aspect of the field that interests Shea, a macroeconomist and econometrician who develops mathematical models for such predictions. He earned a bachelor’s degree in economics at Cornell, and a doctorate at the University of Oregon, where he also worked as an instructor and teaching assistant from 2002 to 2007. From 2007 until he came to Bates, he was a member of the economics faculty at the University of Kentucky.

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