Welcome New Faculty
Front Row (l-r) – Amy Greene, Maite Barragán, Belén Pérez Simarro
Back Row – Jose Aviles, Benoît Boutruche, Mike D’Errico, Adam Owenz
Jose Aviles, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Communications
Specializing in public relations and advertising, Jose Aviles holds a doctorate in mass communications from Pennsylvania State University and a master’s degree in communications from The College of Charleston. He received a bachelor of arts degree in psychology from Bard College.
Avile’s recent research focuses on virtual avatars and gaming, with special attention to gender and racial stereotypes and prejudice. He has also examined the effectiveness of advertising through online games and user-designed avatars. A first-generation faculty member, Aviles has worked with the LAGRANT Foundation mentoring Latino students in public relations and advertising.
Maite Barragán, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Art History
Maite Barragán received a doctorate from the Tyler School of Art, Temple University and her undergraduate degree in art history from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Before joining Albright’s faculty, Barragán developed classes on the “Art of Protest” and “The Artist’s City” as a postdoctoral fellow at Lawrence University.
Barragán’s research interests include interweaving distinct art histories from Europe and the Americas. Her exploration of architecture, photography, film and sculpture in conjunction with literary, social and cultural studies links past and present artistic production across disciplines and continents. In addition to a background in European and Latin American art, Barragán is an expert in the development of Surrealism after World War II and the culture of Puerto Rico as it transitioned from a Spanish colony to American territory.
Michael D’Errico, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Music
Specializing in music technology and composition, Michael D’Errico received a doctorate in musicology and a graduate certificate in digital humanities at UCLA. His expertise in sound design and multimedia editing has been applied to large scale collaborations on 3D modeling, web design and mobile app development for music analysis.
In addition, D’Errico investigated the ways in which the composition and production of electronic music are influenced by software and digital instrument design for his dissertation “Interface Aesthetics: Sound, Software, and the Ecology of Digital Audio Production.” The former digital strategist at UCLA has performed and published on a range of topics including hip-hop, sound design, electronic dance music and video games.
Amy Styer Greene
Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry
Amy Greene earned a doctorate from the University of Georgia’s Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and received her Bachelor of Science degree in biochemistry from the University of Delaware. In addition, she is also a violinist having studied music and science as an undergraduate.
Visiting Fulbright Language Instructors for 2018-19:
Benoît Boutruche
Visiting Instructor of French
Benoît Boutruche has taught both French to English-speaking students and English to French-speaking students. He first earned a bachelor’s degree in literature and civilization and language studies of the English-speaking world at the University of Nantes, France, and moved to Manchester, UK, to serve as a middle school French teaching assistant. After completing a master’s degree in teaching and education at the University of Nantes, Boutruche returned to France to teach English classes in two different Paris suburb middle schools.
Belén Pérez Simarro
Visiting Instructor of Spanish
Born in Valencia, Spain, Belén Pérez Simarro received a bachelor’s degree in philology with concentrations in Spanish and English from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and the University of Westminster in London. She holds a master’s degree in English literature from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and a master’s degree in teaching English and Spanish as foreign languages from the Universidad Francisco de Vitoria in Madrid. For the latter, she wrote her thesis on “gamification” in the language classroom. She has worked as a Spanish teacher in Spain and Turkey and as an oral examiner for DELE exams (for students studying Spanish as a foreign language) at the Instituto Cervantes.