Faculty Highlights - Academic Year 2022-2023

This summer, Professor of the Practice in Music Kareem Roustom traveled to Quebec to attend rehearsals and perform his String Quartet No. 1 at the Domaine Forget music academy. He also traveled to Oregon where he was the composer-in-residence at the Willamette Valley Chamber Music Festival. In August, he attended the Grand Teton Music Festival in Wyoming to join rehearsals and the world-premiere of a large-scale work for mezzo-soprano and orchestra entitled THE CLUSTERED VINE: SONGS OF LOVE, LOSS, & REMEMBRANCE. It can be streamed here. He also traveled to Tallinn Estonia for the 70th birthday concert of renowned, Grammy award winning Estonian conductor Tõnu Kaljuste. The concert included two of Roustom's works, Dabke for string orchestra and Hurry To The Light for women's voices and string orchestra. 

Professor of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning Justin Hollander, A’96, was invited to share his research in a presentation to the Planning Institute of Australia, the professional association for urban planners in Australia. His talk “The Role and Potential Risk of Bots in Participatory Planning” was based on research he has been working on with colleagues in the UK and Canada, with financial support from the Land Economics Foundation.

Packard Professor of Theology Brian A. Hatcher recently published Against High Caste Polygamy: An Annotated Translation (Oxford University Press, 2023). The book offers a complete, annotated translation of Ishvarchandra Vidyasagar's 1871 tract arguing against the practice of high-caste Kulin marriage in Bengal. An interview with Professor Hatcher about his new book is available here.
 

Professor in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study & Human Development Christine McWayne and her colleagues at UC Irvine received a grant from the Heising-Simons Foundation to evaluate the impact of professional learning for teachers on home to school practices in the Santa Ana Unified School District of Orange County, California.

Professor Emeritus of Philosophy Daniel Dennett received an honorary degree from the University of Beirut and gave their commencement address. He also co-produced a sold-out play at the 59E59 Theater in New York City called The Unbelieving, based on the book he wrote with Qualitative Researcher Linda LaScola entitled Caught in the Pulpit: Leaving Belief Behind.

Alice and Nathan Gantcher University Professor Emeritus Sol Gittleman recently published a book entitled An Accidental Triumph: the Improbable History of American Higher Education (West Virginia University Press). An Accidental Triumph tells the story of how American higher education evolved from a patchwork of seminaries in the early nineteenth century into the envy of the world in research by the middle of the twentieth century.

Associate Professor of Chemistry Yu-Shan Lin is a distinguished speaker in the prestigious Presidential Symposium at the American Chemical Society Meeting, which features leading researchers in the application of machine learning to chemistry. 

Associate Professor of Chemistry Charles Mace is the Elected Chair of a Gordon Research Conference for June 2024, the premier conference series for basic and applied sciences.  

Professor of Urban & Environmental Policy & Planning, and Fletcher Professor of Rhetoric and Debate, Julian Agyeman was awarded an honorary doctorate by KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden.

Professor of Mathematics Kasso Okoudjou was awarded a National Science Foundation grant for a project entitled "Collaborative Research: New perspectives from applied and computational time-frequency analysis."

Professor of Chemistry Charles Sykes and members of his group were recently recognized with the Prestigious Horizon Prize of the Royal Society of Chemistry (UK). The Royal Society of Chemistry recently released a video highlighting the work. 

The American Sociological Association's Environmental Sociology Section recently awarded Assistant Professor of Sociology Caleb Scoville with The Environmental Sociology Allan Schnaiberg Outstanding Publication Award. Scoville co-won this award for his article entitled "Constructing Environmental Compliance: Law, Science, and Endangered Species Conservation in California's Delta."

Assistant Professor in the History of Art and Architecture Department Alice Isabella Sullivan recently published two books: a monograph entitled The Eclectic Visual Culture of Medieval Moldavia (Visualising the Middle Ages 15; Brill, 2023) and an edited volume with Kyle G. Sweeney, Winthrop University, entitled Lateness and Modernity in Medieval Architecture (AVISTA Studies in the History of Medieval Technology, Science, and Art 16; Brill, 2023).

Professor of the Practice in Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies Maurice Emmanuel Parent is the co-founder and co-producing artistic director of The Front Porch Arts Collective, a theater company which recently received 12 Elliot Norton Awards.

Dean of Academic Affairs and Associate Dean for Diversity and Inclusion Heather S. Nathans was recently awarded the Lawrence J. Kanter Award for Travel and Research from the Southern Jewish Historical Society to support her new book project.

Assistant Professor of Sociology Daanika Gordon’s book, Policing the Racial Divide: Urban Growth Politics and the Remaking of Segregation, was just selected as the winner of the SSSP 2023 Law and Society Division’s Edwin H. Sutherland Book Award Competition.
 

Professor of the Practice in Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies Maurice Emmanuel Parent is the co-founder and co-producing artistic director of The Front Porch Arts Collective, a theater company which recently received 30 award nominations from The Boston Theater Critics Association Elliot Norton Awards. Professor Parent received four individual nominations for his performance in Joe Turner's Come and Gone, his choreography of Ain't Misbehavin', and his direction of Ain't Misbehavin' and Seven Guitars.

Dean of Academic Affairs for the College of Arts & Sciences and Professor of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies Heather S. Nathans was inducted into The College of Fellows of the American Theatre as a new member. The primary purpose of the College is to promote and encourage the highest standards of research, writing, and creativity in educational and professional theatre through honoring distinguished service and notable accomplishment by individuals of recognized national stature.

Associate Professor of Physics & Astronomy Timothy Atherton was awarded The Cyril Hilsum Medal from the British Liquid Crystal Society for his notable contributions to liquid crystal science, his work in research and innovation within physics education, and his passion for enhancing equality, diversity, and inclusion in academia.

Professor of Classical Studies Gregory Crane has been awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to complete a project entitled "Perseus on the Web: Preparing for the Next Thirty Years." The Perseus Digital Library is the largest reference collection on Greco-Roman culture that is freely available to anyone on the web. NEH funding will support a major expansion and enhancement of the Perseus Digital Library.

Assistant Professor of Sociology Caleb Scoville was recently honored with an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellowship, which supports exceptional scholarship in the humanities and interpretive social sciences that has the potential to make significant contributions within and beyond the awardees’ fields. Scoville will be completing a project entitled "Stupid Little Fish: Extraction, Conservation, and the Politics of Environmental Decline."

Professor Emeritus of Sociology Paul Joseph's recently published a book entitled Precious Cargo: Following Mark Twain Across the South Pacific. At the end of the 19th century, Mark Twain, his wife, and one of his daughters traveled around the world for a year. One hundred years later, Joseph spent an academic sabbatical in New Zealand while also traveling in Fiji, Australia, and Indonesia with his wife and three children. Drawing upon Twain’s notebooks and letters, his children’s journals, intense experiences, contrasting sets of photographs, cross-cultural encounters, and a quirky sense of humor, Precious Cargo compares the geographic and emotional journeys of the two families as they move through the same places a century apart.

SMFA Professor of the Practice Ethan Murrow was in Paris this February for the inaugural opening of Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire's second exhibition space in the Marais. Ethan and other artists represented by Les Filles du Calvaire are part of the show Persona.

SMFA Professor of the Practice in Sculpture, Megan McMillan, together with her partner and collaborator Murray McMillan, have a new video installation at the Providence Children’s Museum, What Is Possible Is Here Now.
 

Assistant Professor in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study & Human Development Fernando Salinas-Quiroz has recently been elected to serve on the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) Latinx Caucus Steering Committee 2023-2025 as the Technical/Social Media Manager.
 

SMFA Professor of the Practice Jennifer Schmidt was recently awarded artist-in-residence fellowships at TYPA in Tartu, Estonia, Directangle Press in Bethlehem, New Hampshire, and The Morgan Conservatory in Cleveland, Ohio.

Professor Emeritus of Biology Jan Pechenik translated the sixth and final edition of Charles Darwin's revolutionary book, The Origin of Species, into accessible, engaging prose for modern readers. Pechenik's book, entitled The Readable Darwin (Oxford University Press), brings this groundbreaking book to life for readers of all backgrounds while remaining true to the original text.

SMFA Professor of the Practice Ethan Murrow, along with his co-author Vita Murrow, was recognized by legislators at the State House on January 18 as part of the Massachusetts Book Awards. Their mostly wordless book for young readers, Zero Local, with Candlewick Press was chosen as an Honor Book for this award program.

Associate Professor of Political Science Kelly Greenhill has published a new co-authored article entitled "Deal-making, Diplomacy and Transactional Forced Migration." 

Assistant Professor of Mathematics Abiy Tasissa was honored by Mathematically Gifted & Black as a Black History Month 2023 Honoree.

Richard M. Lerner, Bergstrom Chair in Applied Developmental Science, Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study & Human Development, was reappointed by the Pope to serve another five-year term on the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life. He will serve from March 1, 2023 to March 1, 2028.

Robinson Professor of Chemistry Krishna Kumar was named as a Senior Member of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI). The NAI Senior Member Advisory Committee and Board of Directors noted Kumar's status as an academic inventor who is a leader at the intersection of chemistry, biology and medicine.

Assistant Professor of Medieval Art and Architecture Alice Isabella Sullivan recently won a RSA-Samuel H. Kress Publication Subvention for Art Historians from the Renaissance Society of America (2023) for her forthcoming monograph The Eclectic Visual Culture of Medieval Moldavia. She also published a new book entitled Natural Light in Medieval Churches (Brill 2023). 

Kerri Greenidge, assistant professor in the Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora Department, is serving on the new Boston Reparations Task Force, created to lead research on the historical impact of slavery in Boston and explore ways the city can provide reparative justice for Black residents. Over the next 18 months, the task force members will convene and work on proposing recommendations to Mayor Michelle Wu for reparative solutions for the descendants of enslaved persons. 
 

Assistant Professor of Sociology Daanika Gordon published an article entitled "Evaluating and Improving Department Racial Climate through Action Research." It was co-authored by four Tufts undergraduate students and describes a learning experience that utilized participatory action research to improve the racial climate of the Tufts Sociology Department.

Professor of Chemistry Joshua Kritzer was awarded a 5-year Maximizing Investigator’s Research Award from the National Institutes of Health. This grant supports multiple basic research projects investigating new classes of drugs and new ways to measure how well different drug classes penetrate cells.

Professor of Biology Catherine Freudenreich wrote an article entitled “What repeat expansion disorders can teach us about the Central Dogma” about trinucleotide repeat diseases for the scientific journal Molecular Cell.

Assistant Professor of Medieval Art and Architecture Alice Isabella Sullivan won the 2023 Digital Humanities and Multimedia Studies Prize from The Medieval Academy of America. She was awarded the prize along with her co-director, Julia Gearhart, Director of Visual Resources in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, and colleagues from the Department of the History of Art at the University of Michigan and the Saint Catherine Monastery at Mount Sinai. They are being recognized for their work on the Sinai Digital Archive, a collaborative digital project supporting inter-institutional sharing of archives into a single, public, scholarly resource that makes the important collections of Saint Catherine Monastery at Mount Sinai available to all. 

Ellen Pinderhughes, professor in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study & Human Development, was awarded the Distinguished Contributions to Understanding International, Cultural, and Contextual Diversity​ in Child Development Award as part of the 2023 Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) Biennial Awards.

Professor of Physics & Astronomy Peter Love was awarded a grant from the Department of Energy to research nuclei and hadrons with quantum computers.

Associate Professor and Chair of the Political Science Department Nimah Mazaheri authored a new book entitled Hydrocarbon Citizens: How Oil Transformed People and Politics in the Middle East (Oxford University Press 2022). 

Professor of the Practice Anthony Romero received two large grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Kresge Foundation to launch the East Boston Spatial Justice Lab. This new research lab will attempt to understand and measure how the arts, advocacy, and cultural organizing for housing justice can strengthen East Boston residents’ social/emotional wellbeing and community’s healing and revitalization.

Associate Professor of History Kendra Field and Professor of the Practice in Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies Khary Jones were among 35 grantees of the 2022 Sundance Institute Documentary Fund for Night Fight, currently in production.

Fahd Humayun, Department of Political Science, was awarded a grant from the Stanton Foundation to support his research on political cleavages and the risk of war in nuclear-armed nations.

Assistant Professor in the Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora Department Kerri Greenidge's new book The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family was selected as one of the "Ten Best History Books of 2022" by Smithsonian Magazine.

Professor of the Practice in Curatorial Studies and History of Art and Architecture Kelli Morgan received a 2022-2023 Emily Hall Tremaine Journalism Fellowship for Curators award from the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation.

Assistant Professor in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development Eileen T. Crehan received funding from the Deborah Noonan Foundation to research educational inequities for autistic students in Massachusetts. Along with collaborators at Boston Children’s Hospital, Dr. Crehan also received an R34 grant through the National Institute of Mental Health to develop an eye tracking and behavioral paradigm to study relationships and sexuality in autistic adults.

History of Art and Architecture Professor Andrew McClellan received the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Fellowship at the National Humanities Center for 2022-2023.

Professor and Chair of the Department of Music Kwasi Ampene has been elected to the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences.

A cross-departmental group of Tufts faculty members, including Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering Babak Moaveni, Professor of Mathematics Bruce Boghosian, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Usman Khan, Senior Data Scientist Anna Haensch, Professor of the Practice in Civil and Environmental Engineering Eric Hines, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering Dan Kuchma, Associate Professor of Public Health and Community Medicine Beth Rosenberg, Professor of the Practice at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy Bobbi Kates-Garnick, Assistant Professor at the University of Nevada Reno Hamed Ebrahimian, and Associate Professor at the Oregon State University Bryony DuPont secured a grant from the National Science Foundation to undertake a project entitled "Multi-Domain, Multi-Scale, Policy-Aware Digital Twin for Offshore Wind Energy Infrastructure.” The goal of this project is to develop a framework for decision making regarding offshore wind turbines, which will help policymakers to enact informed decisions that meet the needs of underserved and disadvantaged communities that haven’t been part of previous conversations around environmental justice and sustainability, especially around energy insecurity. (A&S Professor of Mathematics Bruce Boghosian is pictured.)

Associate Professor in the Department of Occupational Therapy Keren Ladin is featured in a video commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Greenwall Faculty Scholars program, the career development award for bioethics scholars focused on bioethics research with policy impact. Ladin’s research funded by the Greenwall Foundation examines how subjective criteria used in medical decision-making translate into decisions about prioritizing and allocating scarce health resources (ex. organ transplantation, ICU beds during COVID, clinical trials).

Sarah Sobieraj, professor and chairperson in the Department of Sociology, has been awarded this year’s NCA Political Communication Division Hart Outstanding Book Award for her book Credible Threat: Attacks Against Women Online and the Future of Democracy (Oxford University Press 2020).

Professor and Chair of the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora Lorgia García Peña was awarded the Angela Y. Davis Prize for Outstanding Public Scholarship from the American Studies Association.

Professor of Political Science Fahd Humayun's paper, “The Punisher’s Dilemma: Domestic Opposition & Foreign Policy Crises," has been selected as the recipient of the Stephen P. Cohen Best Paper Award from South Asia in World Politics (SAWP).

Professor of Political Science Jeffrey Taliaferro received a renewal of his publishing contract for the Chinese translation of his book Neoclassical Realist Theory of International Politics (Oxford University Press 2016). Since 2017, the book has sold many thousands of copies and will continue to be offered by the publisher, Shanghai People’s Publishing House, for another five years.

Robinson Professor of Mathematics Eric Todd Quinto is the subject of an article entitled “Research biography of a distinguished expert in the field of inverse problems: Professor Eric Todd Quinto.” It appears in the Journal of Inverse and Ill-posed Problems (Vol 30, No. 4, 2022) and was written by Mark Agranovsky, Jan Boman, Alemdar Hasanov, Raluca Felea, Jürgen Frikel, Venky Krishnan, Roman Novikov, Ronny Ramlau, and Cristiana Sebu. It followed a session held in his honor at the Inverse Problems Modeling and Simulation (IPMS) Conference in May 2022 in Malta. In the fall, Quinto is co-organizing a semester Tomography Across the Scales at the Jonathan Radon Institute for Computational and Applied Mathematics in Linz, Austria.

Assistant Professor in the History of Art and Architecture Department Alice Isabella Sullivan has co-edited a book with Maria Alessia Rossi entitled Eclecticism in Late Medieval Visual Culture at the Crossroads of the Latin, Greek, and Slavic Traditions (De Gruyter 2022).

Professor of the Practice in the Music Department Kareem Roustom was featured in an op-ed in The Guardian. The article highlights his dance/opera project entitled Clorinda Agonistes (Clorinda the Warrior) based in London, England.

Serving as chair of the International Migration Section of the American Sociological Association, Associate Professor of Sociology Helen Marrow helped to host the "Emerging Voices in Migration Scholarship Mini-Conference” at the University of Southern California. 

Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology Amahl Bishara published a book entitled Crossing a Line: Laws, Violence, and Roadblocks to Palestinian Political Expression (Stanford University Press 2022) about Palestinian political expression in Israel and the West Bank.

Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Lincoln Filene Professor of Citizenship & Public Affairs Peter Levine received the Established Leader Award from the American Political Science Association for his outstanding achievements and sustained commitment to civic engagement.⁦

Professor of Political Science Deborah Schildkraut's recent book, States of Belonging: Immigration Policies, Attitudes, and Inclusion (Russell Sage Foundation 2021) received an Honorable Mention Award from the American Political Science Association’s Latino Caucus Best Book Award Committee.

Professor of the Practice Patte Loper has a solo show on view at Bellevue Arts Museum entitled Patte Loper: Laboratory for Other Worlds, a multimedia landscape that uses animation, sound, and everyday objects to create a hand-woven, immersive environment.

Professor and Chair of the Department of Music Kwasi Ampene was awarded the J.H. Kwabena Nketia Book Prize for Asante Court Music and Verbal Arts in Ghana (Routledge 2022) for the best monograph on African music published in the past two years, by the Society for Ethnomusicology’s African Music Section.