Nearly 20 new faculty have joined the College of LAS this fall, with their research and teaching interests ranging from African American religious diversity to the human brain and the role of law during periods of crisis. Read below for a feature on one of SLCL's new professors, Alexia Williams. Other new SLCL faculty this fall include:

• Naoko Gunji, East Asian languages and cultures
• Anna Hunt, Germanic languages and literatures
• Peter Wright, Slavic languages and literatures

Alexia Williams, Department of Religion

After living on the east coast for the last seven years, Alexia Williams is excited to be closer to home. Originally from Louisville, Kentucky, she also has ties in St. Louis where she completed her postdoctoral research.

Her research focuses on African American Catholics and African American religious diversity, but it didn’t start there. At one point she was more interested in music.

“I initially was interested in 20th century jazz musicians, and their relationships with artists in South America,” Williams said, “But I started to come across the fact that so many jazz musicians were actually Roman Catholics, and their conversion to Catholicism, often marked a change in the way that they were represented in the jazz community.”

This semester Williams is teaching a class on African American religious history in addition to writing her first book, “Black Revolutionary Saints.” The book delves into the lives of six African American candidates for sainthood, one of whom, Augustus Tolton, is from Illinois.

“When Pierre Toussaint passed away in New York, people said, ‘That man was a saint,’ and it's written in some of his obituaries,” Williams said, of the former slave whose charitable work in New York City in the 1800’s led him to be declared Venerable by Pope John Paul II in 1996. “So, the fact that people recognize him as a saint, but didn't see that as a category fit for African Americans at the time, is part of what I'm studying and researching.”

So far Williams has only been in the area for a few months, but she has already experienced some classic Midwest traditions such as apple and pumpkin picking.

“It seems that U of I has done something really special with the community here. It's not often that I hear of new faculty being welcomed, the way that I've been welcomed,” Williams said, “And on top of doing innovative research, the fact that people really work hard to be supportive of each other and to instill camaraderie is something that was really inspiring to me.”

Read the full feature from LAS here.