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New Faculty Members

Three of ILR's five newly-named professors began teaching this semester.

They are Assistant Professor Rachel Aleks, Associate Professor Adam Seth Litwin and Associate Professor Shannon Gleeson.

Assistant Professor Vanessa Bohns starts teaching next semester and Associate Professor Virginia Doellgast will join the faculty in July.

Aleks, the lead organizer of the Service Employees International Union and chief steward of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, was a course instructor at the University of Toronto, where she also received her doctorate.

A 2012 recipient of the Susan C. Eaton Scholar-Practitioner Memorial Fund Award, Aleks is teaching a collective bargaining course this fall and is an assistant professor in the Department of Labor Relations, Law, and History.

Bohns, in her primary research area, combines the topics of social influence and egocentrism to examine the extent to which people recognize the influence they have over others across a variety of situations. Some of her additional research interests include prosocial and antisocial behavior, moral emotions such as guilt and shame, and interpersonal relations.

Joining the Department of Organizational Behavior, Bohns serves as an editorial board member of Social Cognition and is a reviewer for multiple journals in the social science and psychology fields. She was an assistant professor of management sciences at the University of Waterloo in Canada and received her doctorate from Columbia University.

Doellgast, currently at the London School of Economics, is joining the ILR International and Comparative Labor Department as an associate professor. Her research focuses on comparative employment relations and human resource management in Europe and the U.S.

Recent projects include a study of the restructuring of frontline service jobs in the U.S. and German telecommunications industries and an international study of human resource management in the global call center industry.

Gleeson, chair of the American Sociological Association Labor and Labor Movements Section and a representative to the UC Global Health Institute COE for Migration and Health, focuses primarily on the experiences of low-wage workers, immigrant engagement and legal mobilization.

One of her books, "Conflicting Commitments: The Politics of Enforcing Immigrant Worker Rights in San Jose and Houston," was published in 2012. She is working on a book about U.S. labor and employment law and its impact on low-wage workers. She was an associate professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and received her doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley. Gleeson is a member of the Department of Labor Relations, Law, and History.

Litwin is an associate professor in the Department of Labor Relations, Law, and History. His area of expertise lies in the relationship between technological change and employment, with a focus on the health care sector. He is a research affiliate of the Employment Policy Research Network and a founding member of the Industry Studies Association.

Litwin has published seven papers on topics ranging from entrepreneurship to health information technology to parental leave. Previously, he was an assistant professor at the Carey Business School at Johns Hopkins University. He received his doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At ILR, he teaches collective bargaining.

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