Yale-NUS welcomes new faculty members this semester

Left to Right: Associate Professor Lombard, Professor Boykoff and Dr Ngaserin.

The start of the academic year represents new beginnings, rejuvenated minds and… fresh faces! This August, Yale-NUS College welcomes several new faculty members. With the wide range of disciplines they specialise in, ranging from Environmental Studies to Philosophy, students will continue to enjoy a robust educational experience.

To find out more, we speak to three new faculty members in this article. Visiting Associate Professor Louisa Lombard is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Yale University, who has done ethnographic research in Central Africa. Joining us from the Environmental Studies department at University of Colorado (Boulder) is Visiting Professor Maxwell Boykoff, who is also a Fellow in the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) and was an advisor on the ‘Don’t Look Up’ film platform with Netflix. Finally, Lecturer (Philosophy) Sherice Ngaserin is a Yale-NUS alum, who did their PhD in Philosophy at the Rackham Graduate School at the University of Michigan. We are delighted to welcome them back!

We are excited that you will be joining us soon! Tell us more about yourself.

Assoc Prof Lombard: Prior to becoming an associate professor in anthropology at Yale University, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley). A broad curiosity underlies all my research: Mutual obligations are part of what makes law law, but in a lot of contexts people disagree about what they entail. I ask how law works in situations where mutual obligations are contested and fraught. I wrote two books about a region of Central Africa and am finishing a book about how Rwandan soldiers working as peacekeepers confront the moral dilemmas that come from being asked to intervene in ongoing armed conflicts to protect civilians, yet not take sides.

Assoc Prof Lombard is visiting us from Yale University. Image provided by Assoc Prof Lombard.

Prof Boykoff: I earned a PhD in Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, and have ongoing interests in science and environmental communications, science-policy interactions, and political economics and the environment. I lead the Media and Climate Change Observatory (MeCCO) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Colorado Local Science Engagement Network, and co-direct Inside the Greenhouse. I am a Contributing Author to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment ‘Mitigation and Policy’ Report and have been Deputy Editor for the social sciences/history team for the Journal of Climatic Change for over a decade.

Dr Ngaserin: My philosophy journey began in the Yale-NUS module Philosophy and Political Thought 1 (PPT1), which sparked my interest in Buddhist philosophy. Then I took some philosophy and global antiquity courses, learned a couple of languages, wrote my capstone project on Plato and Diṅnāga, and headed to the University of Michigan for my PhD in Philosophy. I taught for several years there, defended my dissertation (“Towards a Buddhist Metaphysics of Gender”) this summer, and am thrilled that I was able to make it back in time to teach at Yale-NUS!

What modules will you be teaching at Yale-NUS?

Assoc Prof Lombard: In the first semester, I will be teaching Law and Politics, and the Anthropology of Militarization; in the second, Anthropology of Freedom, and Anthropology of International Development. Students will delve into experiences from Africa, while connecting those cases to dynamics prevalent elsewhere. I am a proponent of non-obvious anthropology: I believe that the process of doing ethnography should help us learn things we would not otherwise know. I choose readings and topics that will elicit a similar feeling of seeing the world with new eyes.

Prof Boykoff: I am teaching Science and Environmental Communication as well as Climate Politics and Policy. Students may look forward to a productive mix of conceptual and historical dimensions of these topics along with contemporary and applied examples. While portions of the courses will be lecture-based, much of our work together will be discussion-oriented and experimental.

Dr Ngaserin: I’ll be teaching Topics in Buddhist Philosophy in the coming semester. We’ll look at the implications of Buddhist no-self on personal identity and agency, the nature of reality, desire and gender, anger and justice. I’ll be teaching Philosophy of Games in Semester 2, which I’m having a lot of fun planning with local table-top role-playing game (TTRPG) friends.

What are you most looking forward to in your time here?

Assoc Prof Lombard: I have had the good fortune of having several excellent Yale-NUS exchange students in my classes at New Haven, so I am really looking forward to getting to know more of them. This is my first time living in Asia, and I’m excited to find out how doing so will expand my understanding of human experiences and help me ask new and better questions in my research.

Prof Boykoff: Learning from the perspectives of students! I have been fortunate to teach at University of California, University of Colorado, Oxford University and University of Navarra. This time at Yale-NUS College in Singapore will certainly be a new adventure. I am also eager to learn about Singapore’s urban sustainability and decarbonisation efforts, the Singapore Energy Transition plan, and the Green Plan 2030. Last, I look forward to ongoing work in Malaysia while visiting other fascinating places in Southeast Asia.

Professor Boykoff will be offering modules in the Environmental Studies major. Image provided by Prof Boykoff.

Dr Ngaserin: I’m excited to be back at home base, and super curious about how things have changed in the five years I’ve been away. I’m particularly interested in reaching out to the student organisations I was involved in as an undergraduate, and learning more about the thriving student initiatives that did not exist when I was a student here.

We had a few additional questions for Dr Ngaserin as they return to their alma mater.

Welcome back! How do you feel about returning as a faculty member? 

Dr Ngaserin: The dream was always to come back to teach, and it still feels a little unreal at this point! I definitely cried a little when I opened my offer of appointment and saw the blue and orange Yale-NUS logo appear on my screen. I’ll be attending Faculty Orientation soon, and it strikes me that this will be my second Yale-NUS orientation… I’m feeling emotions about that too!

Dr Ngaserin is an alum returning to Yale-NUS College as a faculty member. Image provided by Dr Ngaserin.

Do you have any words of advice for your juniors and students-to-be?

Dr Ngaserin: Gosh, it’s hard to come up with catch-all advice. There are many different things that one could get out of the Yale-NUS experience, so no one truly has the same experience here! I suppose anyone who feels like they might benefit from an old alum’s advice should feel free to drop by my office hours. (I guess that means my advice is “Come for office hours!”)

We wholeheartedly extend a warm welcome to our new members of the Yale-NUS family, and wish them all the best for the semester that lies ahead!