51��������

Joseph Holt, Associate Professor of English

Joseph Holt teaches courses in creative writing and technical writing, and he is faculty advisor for the campus undergraduate journal Ice Box. His fiction has appeared in Gulf Coast, New Ohio Review, and Beloit Fiction Journal. His nonfiction and critical writing has appeared in The Sun, Colorado Review, and Prairie Schooner. Holt studied in the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi, where he received an AWP Intro Journals Award in fiction. His debut story collection, Golden Heart Parade, was published in Fall 2021 by Santa Fe Writers Project. His personal website is holt.ink.

Chisato Murakami, Term Associate Professor of Japanese

Chisato Murakami, has an M.A. in Applied Linguistics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Prior to working at 51��������, she taught all levels of Japanese, Business Japanese, and Specific Purpose Japanese at universities in the U.S. and many intensive summer courses at universities in Japan over 25 years. Her research interest and publications are on second language acquisition, reading process in Japanese as a foreign language, and proficiency assessment. Ms. Murakami has been a certified Oral Proficiency tester of Japanese administered by the American Councils on the Teaching of Foreign Languages.

Phil Wight, Associate Professor of History
Assistant Director, Arctic and Northern Studies

Phil Wight teaches courses on the history and contemporary issues of the North, including The Circumpolar North: An Introductory Overview; Environmental History; Fire, Ice & the Fate of Humanity: A History of Energy & Climate Change; History of Alaska; and 20th Century History of the Circumpolar North. He advises the B.A. and Graduate Certificate programs in Arctic and Northern Studies. His research focuses on Alaskan and modern circumpolar history, with particular attention to energy systems, political economy, mobility and infrastructure, and the impacts of climate change.

Sveta Yamin-Pasternak, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Affiliated with Arctic and Northern Studies, and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

As a cultural anthropologist interested in how human food practices in high latitude regions interact with the local climate, built environment, ecology, and aesthetics, Sveta Yamin-Pasternak works in communities around Alaska and Russian Far East, and with scholars in the fields of humanities, natural sciences, and engineering. After completing her PhD dissertation in 2007, with a focus on ethnomycology in the Bering Strait, she continued to study anthropology of food in the course of two postdoctoral appointments, first as a National Science Foundation Polar Research Fellow at Johns Hopkins University and later at the 51�������� Institute of Northern Engineering. She currently leads several interdisciplinary research projects at the Institute of Northern Engineering and teaches a broad range of courses at the 51�������� Department of Anthropology. The graduate and undergraduate students she mentors at 51�������� conduct research on questions related to foraging, post-Soviet transitions, foodways, expressive culture, and contemporary art.