Faculty and Staff

Elizabeth Barrios

Chair of Ethnic Studies

Associate Professor of Modern Languages & Cultures

B.A., Knox College, 2009
Ph.D., University of Michigan, 2016
Appointed 2016

Elizabeth received her B.A. from Knox College, and her Ph,D. from the University of Michigan. That same year she began teaching at Albion.

Her research straddles several fields: Latin American literary and cultural studies, film studies, and the environmental humanities, particularly in the burgeoning field of energy humanities. She is currently working on a book that examines 70-years of Venezuelan oil narratives, environmental art, and oil industry propaganda in Venezuela. Entitled Failures of the Imagination: Reckoning with The Times of Oil in Venezuelan Cultural Production, the project argues that the creation of societies that do not run on oil will not simply involve economic and technological change–it will require cultural work: the retelling of established histories/stories, the disruption of habits, and the reshaping of the imagination itself.

Within the Modern Languages and Cultures Department, Elizabeth teaches various levels of language instruction, including Spanish for Heritage Speakers. Her literature and cultural studies courses have explored the intersection between new-media remixes and established forms of Latin American artistic production, the legacies of diasporas in and from Latin America, as well as Afro-Latinx literatures. She also teaches interdisciplinary courses about environmental art and the political history of climate change.

Office: Vulgamore Hall 106
Email: [email protected]
Phone: (517) 629-0333

Lucia Soriano

Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

B.A. California Polytechnic University, 2012
M.A. Claremont Graduate University, 2014
Ph.D. Washington State University, 2019
Appointed 2021

Office: Robinson Hall 202
Email: [email protected]
Phone: (517) 629-0420

Brad Chase

Professor and Chair of Anthropology and Sociology

Brad received his B.A. in anthropology from Northwestern University, his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2007, and has been at Albion since 2008. He is an anthropological archaeologist who has participated in fieldwork in the American Midwest and Southwest, Turkey, Pakistan, and currently India, where he has been conducting research for over a decade. His teaching and research interests include the organizational dynamics of early urban societies in comparative perspective, the relationship between humans and their environments during periods of social change, and the role of material culture in the creation and maintenance of identities in the past and present. His ongoing research explores these issues in the context of the Indus Civilization in Gujarat, India, specifically focusing on changes in land-use practices and social organization with the emergence and decline of South Asia’s first urban civilization.

Email: [email protected]

Nels Christensen

Associate Professor of English

B.A., California State University
M.A. & Ph.D. Michigan State University

Research and Writing: Ecocriticism, Ecopedagogy, and Environmental Creative Non-Fiction.

Publications: Learning Where the Weather Is Real: Why Teaching in Bad Weather Is Good. Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, Facing the Weather in James Galvin’s The Meadow and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE) 21:1 (Winter 2014), Leaving a Trace Wake: Great Lakes Thought and Culture, The Art of Stillness Gray’s Sporting Journal, The Way You Do It Sports Afield.

Courses: Composition, The Idea of Nature and the Nature of Ideas, Writing in Place, Terrorists and Treehuggers, Black Environmentalism.

Email: [email protected]
Phone: (517) 629-0349

Jess Roberts

Professor of English

B.A., Dartmouth College
M.A., Ph.D., University of Michigan

Jess believes in the community-making power of imaginative literature. She is the founding director of Albion’s Big Read, a program that aims to eradicate injustice inside and outside of the classroom by changing young people’s relationship to reading. She founded that program in 2015 with a group of outstanding people in Albion and runs it with the help of Nels Christensen. For more information about that program, please visit our website at albionbigread.org and follow us on Instagram @albionbigread.

Jess’s most recent writing includes an essay called “Earned Trust and Albion’s Big Read,” which appears in the MLAs 2024 collection Social Justice in Action, and an article entitled ““The Poetess Laureate of Yoknapatawpha County: Rosa Coldfield and the Power of Convention” which appears in the Fall 2020 issue of The Faulkner Journal, published in 2024.

In addition, Jess’s has published essays on Sarah Piatt in ESQ (2018), A History of Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Poetry (2017), and The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Poetry (2011). You can find her pedagogical essays in south: a scholarly journal 48.2 (2016) and the MLAs Options for Teaching the Literatures of the American Civil War (2016). Her writing has also appeared in Callaloo and Oxford Bibliographies in American Literature.

Courses: Writing Essentials; College Writing; Professional Writing; Anti-racism and Young People Literature; Dealing with !@#$; Writing Women in the Nineteenth Century; Black Resistance in the Nineteenth Century; Love in the Nineteenth Century; the American Novel; Literature of the American Civil War; and Whitman and Dickinson in Context

Email: [email protected]
Phone: (517) 629-0463

Kalli Onai

Social Media and Content Strategist

Office: Ferguson 116
Email: [email protected]
Phone: 517-629-0798