Named Professorships

Richard Lerner is the Bergstrom Chair in Applied Developmental Science, Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development, and the director of the Institute for Applied Research in Youth Development. His expertise is in the application of developmental science across the lifespan. Honors include the Society for the Study of Human Development Distinguished Lifetime Career Award, the Association for Psychological Science James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award for lifetime outstanding contributions to applied psychological research, and the International Society for the Study of Behavioral Development Award for Applications of Behavioral Development Theory and Research. Lerner has more than 700 scholarly publications, including more than 80 authored or edited books. He was the founding editor of the Journal of Research on Adolescence and of Applied Developmental Science, which he continues to edit. Lerner was also appointed by the Pope to serve on the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life. He received his PhD in developmental psychology from the City University of New York.

Alexander Vilenkin is the Leonard Jane Holmes Bernstein Professor of Evolutionary Science, Department of Physics and Astronomy. He is also the Director of the Institute of Cosmology at Tufts. His expertise is in theoretical cosmology and his research focuses on cosmic inflation, dark energy, cosmic string and monopoles, quantum cosmology, and the multiverse. He is the author of the book Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes (Hill and Wang, 2007) as well as the co-author of Cosmology for the Curious (Springer, 2017) and the monograph Cosmic Strings and Other Topological Defects (Cambridge University Press, 2000). He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2020 and was featured in the film Before the Big Bang 9: A Multiverse from Nothing, which included Stephen Hawking and other leading cosmologists. He received his PhD from the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Patrick Schena is the B.L.R Professor of the Practice in Finance, Department of Economics, as well as a Senior Fellow at the Center for Emerging Market Enterprises and Co-Head of the Sovereign Wealth Fund Initiative. He is also an Associate-in-Research at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University and served as Chairman of the advisory committee of a World Bank - PIAFF study on the evolution and role of strategic investment funds. Schena came to Tufts in 2002. He brings 30 years of industry experience in finance, investments, operations, and technology management with a disciplinary focus in asset management to the Department of Economics. He has previously taught finance at the Hult International Business School and at Tufts’ Fletcher School. He brings to the department, and to our students at large, a perfect blend of scholarly research and industry practice. Schena holds a PhD and an MA from The Fletcher School at Tufts, and an MA and BA from Boston College.

Previous Holders of the B.L.R Professorship

Christopher Manos, 2018-2022

Michael Levin is the Vannevar Bush Professor, Department of Biology. He also serves as director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts and director of the Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology. Honors include the Scientist of Vision award from the International Functional Electrical Stimulation Society and the Distinguished Scholar award from Tufts University. Levin’s research attempting to crack the bioelectric code that dictates body plan and permits the reprogramming of cells could one day contribute to the regeneration of limbs and organs and repair of birth defects and cancer. He is the co-editor-in-chief of the journal Bioelectricity, the founding associate editor of the journal Collective Intelligence, and on the editorial advisory board of the journal Laterality. Levin received his PhD in genetics from Harvard University and did post-doctoral training in molecular embryology at Harvard Medical School.

Previous Holders of the Vannevar Bush Professorship

Jack Schneps, 1995-2011
Irwin Rosenberg, 1993-1994
William B. Schwartz, 1976-1992

This professorship is not currently awarded.

Previous Holders of the Arthur H. Dadian and Ara Oztemel Professorship of Armenian Art and Architectural History

Christina Maranci, 2008-2022
Lucy Der Manuelian, 1989-2008

Ina Baghdiantz-McCabe is the Darakjian Jafarian Chair of Armenian History, Department of History. She is also part of the core faculty of International Relations and affiliated faculty to the Fares Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies at the Fletcher School. She came to Tufts in 1998 after a decade of teaching. McCabe’s books include A History of Global Consumption: 1500-1800 (Routledge, 2014), Orientalism in Early Modern France Eurasian Trade, Exoticism, and the Ancien Régime (Oxford, 2008), and The Shah’s Silk for Europe’s Silver: The Eurasian Trade of the Julfa Armenians in Safavid Iran and India (1530-1750) (University of Pennsylvania, 1999). Her work has been supported by several fellowships, most recently at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard. She received a PhD in history from Columbia University.

Gina Kuperberg is the Dennett Stibel Professor of Cognitive Science, Department of Psychology. She is also a psychiatrist in the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital. Kuperberg's NeuroCognition Lab is located both at Tufts University and the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Mass. General Hospital and focuses on the cognitive neuroscience of language, thought and meaning. The lab is interested in when, where and how the human brain builds up the meaning of sentences, discourse, and visual images, and addresses these questions using multimodal neuroimaging techniques. In addition to studying normal brain function, the research group is also examining how the build-up of meaning is impaired in patients with schizophrenia and how such impairments are reflected by abnormal patterns of brain activity in such patients. Her accomplishments have been recognized by several awards, including the A.E. Bennett Research Award from the Society for Biological Psychiatry, the Joseph Zubin Award for Significant Contributions to Research in Psychopathology, and an award from Brain Research for their most highly cited article. She earned her M.D. at St. Bartholomew's Medical School, London, and her PhD in Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience at Kings College, University of London.

Moon Duchin is the John DiBiaggio Professor of Citizenship and Public Service, Department of Mathematics. She founded and leads the MGGG Redistricting Lab, a Tisch College research group that studies redistricting and data science interventions to further civil rights. Her interest areas include the social foundations of authority; technology and law; and mathematical interventions for racial justice. She joined Tufts in 2011, and helped found the Tufts interdisciplinary Science, Technology, and Society program. Her pure math research focuses on geometric group theory and geometric topology, with tools from dynamics. Duchin examines the metric geometry of groups and surfaces, often by zooming out to assess the large scale picture. She received her PhD from the University of Chicago.

Previous Holders of the John DiBiaggio Professorship of Citizenship and Public Service

Gilbert Metcalf, 2018-2022
Maryanne Wolf, 2006-2017
Robert Hollister, 2002-2006

James Rice is the Walter S. Dickson Professor of English and American History, Department of History. Before coming to Tufts he taught at a variety of institutions including SUNY Plattsburgh, Washington College, and Tübingen University. Rice’s scholarship interests include early America, Native American, and environmental history. He is the recipient of a number of grants and awards including the OAH Binkley-Stephenson Award for the year’s best article in the Journal of American History. He is the author of the books Tales from a Revolution: Bacon’s Rebellion and the Transformation of Early America (Oxford University Press, 2012) and Nature and History in the Potomac Country: From Hunter-Gatherers to the Age of Jefferson (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). He received a PhD in early American history from the University of Maryland.

Previous Holders of the Walter S. Dickson Professorship of English and American History

Howard Malchow, 2007-2015
Martin Sherwin, 1982-2007
Russell Miller, 1975-1981
Robert J. Taylor, 1970-1975
Albert Henry Imlah, 1958-1969
Ruhl Jacob Bartlett, 1946-1956
Halford Lancaster Hoskins, 1925-1944
Edwin Cortlandt Bolles, 1913-1920

Doug Gollin is the Jason P. and Chloe Epstein Professor in the Department of Economics. Before coming to Tufts in fall 2023, Gollin was a Professor of Economics and Professor of Development Economics at the University of Oxford. Previously, he was a Professor at Williams College and a Visiting Professor at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Gollin’s primary work is in agricultural and development economics and economic growth spanning across environmental economics, climate change, rural-urban migration, energy economics, structural transformation and technological change. He received his PhD from the University of Minnesota.

Jeffrey Rosen is the Jason and Chloe Epstein Professor of the Practice in the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning. Rosen is focused on ways that impact investing can finance social innovation, an equitable and sustainable future and revitalize community. He spent many years growing and selling food service businesses and serving in senior financial roles for national chains striving to go public. In addition to working in the hospitality sector, he spent time in the non-profit sector, including a stint at New Alchemy Institute. From 2003 to 2022 he served as the Chief Financial Officer for a social justice grant maker, Solidago Foundation, and provided board service to many philanthropic affinity groups, including Confluence Philanthropy and Sustainable Food and Ag System Funders. He has worked with a number of national philanthropies, state, and federal agencies to guide impact investing initiatives. He has an MS in Resource Utilization and Economics from the University of Maine and a Graduate Certificate in Community Organization and Management from Tufts. 

Leila Fawaz is the Issam M. Fares Chair in Lebanese and Eastern Mediterranean Studies at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. She joined the Tufts faculty in 1979 and holds a dual appointment as Professor of History at the School of Arts and Sciences and a Professor of Diplomacy at The Fletcher School. Fawaz is a social historian who specializes in the Eastern Mediterranean region, with specific emphasis on the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her books include A Land of Aching Hearts: The Middle East in the Great War (Harvard University Press, 2014), An Occasion for War: Mount Lebanon and Damascus in 1860 (I.B. Tauris, 1994) and Merchants and Migrants in Nineteenth Century Beirut (Harvard University Press, 1983). Fawaz has been awarded fellowships from the Social Science Research Council and has received the Lillian Leibner Award for Distinguished Teaching and Advising at Tufts University. In 2020, Harvard University awarded Fawaz with the Harvard Medal. In 2014 she received the Harvard Alumni Association's Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2012, Fawaz was named a Chevalier in the French National Order of the Legion of Honor, France’s highest award, given by decree of the president of France. She received a PhD in history from Harvard University.

Joseph Litvak is the Harriet H. Fay Professor of Literature in the Department of English. His research areas of interest include Victorian literature, criticism and theory, comedy, film and cultural studies. He is the author of The Un-Americans: Jews, the Blacklist, and Stoolpigeon Culture (Duke University Press, 2009), Strange Gourmets: Sophistication, Theory and the Novel (Duke University Press, 1997), and Caught in the Act: Theatricality in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel (University of California Press, 1992). He received his PhD from Yale University. 

Previous Holders of the Harriet H. Fay Professorship of Literature

Liz Ammons, 1995-2022
Martin B. Green, 1987-1994
G. Robert Strange, 1967-1985
Kenneth O. Myrick, 1940-1967
Harold Hooker Blanchard, 1932-1938

Lee Edelman is the Fletcher Professor of English Literature, Department of English. He began his academic career as a scholar of twentieth-century American poetry and has since become a central figure in the development, dissemination, and rethinking of queer theory. His current work explores the intersections of sexuality, rhetorical theory, cultural politics, and film. He is the author of Bad Education, or Queer Theory Teaches us Nothing (Duke University Press, 2022), Sex, or the Unbearable, co-authored with Lauren Berlant, (Duke University Press 2014), No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Duke University Press, 2004), Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (Routledge, 1993), and Transmemberment of Song: Hart Crane’s Anatomies of Rhetoric and Desire (Stanford, 1987). Edelman has received the Discovery Prize for Poetry from The Nation and the Poetry Center of New York and the Compton-Noll Award of the MLA. He earned his PhD from Yale University.

Previous Holders of the Fletcher Professorship of English Literature

Jesper Rosenmeier, 1984-2004
Sylvan Barnet, 1963-1984
Harold Hooper Blanchard, 1940-1961
Charles Gott, 1926-1939

Pedro Ángel Palou is the Fletcher Professor of Oratory, Department of Romance Studies. Palou’s work focuses on Mexican literature, Latin American Studies, and film studies. He is the author of many scholarly volumes including El clacisismo mexicano, una indagación (2010) and La culpa de México, la invención de un país entre dos guerras (2009); novels including La ciudad América Latina en su crítica, e historiografía (2019) and La quinta estación (2019); and a book of poetry titled Catálogo de las aves (2010). He was a Fellow at the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation from 2011-2012. He has been Secretary of Culture of his native state of Puebla, rector of the University of the Americas, and director of the magazine Revuelta. In 2020, he was inducted into the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte (SNCA) in Mexico. Palou received his PhD from El Colegio de Michoacán.

Previous Holders of the Fletcher Professorship of Oratory

Laurence Senelick, 1987-2019
Kalmin A. Burnim, 1971-1987
Marston S. Balch, 1946-1970
Newell Carroll Maynard, 1926-1939

Erin Kelly is the Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, Department of Philosophy. Kelly was awarded the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Biography jointly with the late Winfred Rembert for his biography, Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021). Her research interests are in moral and political philosophy and the philosophy of law, with a focus on questions about justice, the nature of moral reasons, moral responsibility and desert, and theories of punishment. Kelly is the author of many scholarly articles and the book The Limits of Blame: Rethinking Punishment and Responsibility (Harvard University Press, 2018). She earned her PhD at Harvard University.

Previous Holders of the Fletcher Professorship of Philosophy

Daniel Dennett, 2000-2022
Hugo A. Bedau, 1968-1998
George B. Burch, 1946-1967
Bruce Wallace Brotherston, 1932-1945
Robert Cheneault Givler, 1926-1931

Julian Agyeman is the Fletcher Professor of Rhetoric and Debate, Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning. He has extensive experience in local government, environmental and sustainability consulting and in the voluntary sector in the UK. Agyeman is the originator of the increasingly influential concept of just sustainabilities, which explores the intersecting goals of social justice and environmental sustainability defined as: the need to ensure a better quality of life for all, now, and into the future, in a just and equitable manner, whilst living within the limits of supporting ecosystems. He centers his research on critical explorations of the complex and embodied relations between humans and the urban environment, whether mediated by governments or social movement organizations, and their effects on public policy and planning processes and outcomes, particularly in relation to notions of justice and equity. He is the author or editor of 12 books, including Introducing Just Sustainabilities: Policy, Planning and Practice (Zed Books, 2013), Incomplete Streets: Processes, Practices, and Possibilities (Routledge, 2014) and Sharing Cities: A Case for Truly Smart and Sustainable Cities (MIT Press, 2015), one of Nature's Top 20 Books of 2015 and Food Trucks, Cultural Identity, and Social Justice: From Loncheras to Lobsta Love (MIT Press, 2017). His latest book is The Immigrant-Food Nexus: Borders, Labor, and Identity in North America (MIT Press, 2020). Agyeman has held many visiting professorships and fellowships in the US and internationally. In 1996, he was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society of the Arts (FRSA) in the UK and in 2016 he became a Fellow of the UK Royal Geographical Society (FRGS). He was awarded the Athena City Accolade by KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden in 2018. In 2023, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. Agyeman holds a PhD in Urban Studies from the University of London. 

Previous Holders of the Fletcher Professorship of Rhetoric and Debate

Jonathan Wilson, 2000-2021
Clyde Taylor, 1995-1997
Michael Fixler, 1968-1994
Newman Peter Birk, 1959-1967
John Rowland Wodruff, 1949-1957
Marston Stevens Balch, 1938-1945
William Nothrup Morse, 1930-1934

Heather Nathans is the Nathan and Alice Gantcher Professor of Judaic Studies, Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies. Nathans’s primary areas of scholarly interest include American theatre and drama, African American theatre, Jewish American theatre, musical theatre, 17th and 18th century French theatre, theatre historiography, English Restoration drama, and directing. In 2017, she published Hideous Characters and Beautiful Pagans: Performing Jewish Identity on the Antebellum American Stage (University of Michigan Press, 2017). The American Theatre and Drama Society awarded Nathans the 2018 John W. Frick Book Award for the book as well as the 2018 Betty Jean Jones Award for her exceptional work as a teacher and a mentor. She is a member of The College of Fellows of the American Theatre and was awarded the Lawrence J. Kanter Award for Travel and Research from the Southern Jewish Historical Society. A former Jumbo, she earned her PhD in theatre and performance studies from Tufts University.

Previous Holders of the Nathan and Alice Gantcher Professorship in Judaic Studies

Sol Gittleman, 1992-2016

Malcolm Turvey is the Sol Gittleman Professor, Department of the History of Art and Architecture. Turvey works primarily in the areas of film theory, the philosophy of film, avant-garde film, and film and modernism. He is the author of Play Time: Jacques Tati and Comedic Modernism (Columbia University Press 2019), The Filming of Modern Life: European Avant-Garde Film of the 1920s (MIT Press 2011), Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2008), and The Filming of Modern Life: European Avant-Garde Film of the 1920s (MIT Press, 2011). He is also the co-editor of Wittgenstein, Theory, and the Arts (Routledge, 2001) and Camera Obscura/Camera Lucida: Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson (University of Amsterdam Press, 2003). He received his PhD in cinema studies from New York University.

Susan Napier is the Goldthwaite Professor of Rhetoric, Department of International Literary and Cultural Studies. Her research interests include Japanese animation (anime) and comics (manga); modern Japanese literature, popular culture, science fiction and fantasy; contemporary constructions of gender and body; and technology and culture. Napier is the author of Miyazakiworld: A Life in Art (Yale University Press, 2018), From Impressionism to Anime: Japan as Fantasy and Fan Cult in the Western Imagination (Palgrave, 2007), Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle: Experiencing Japanese Animation (Palgrave, 2005), The Subversion of Modernity: the Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature (Routledge, 2006), and Escape from the Wasteland: Romanticism and Realism in the Works of Mishima Yukio and Oe Kenzaburo (Harvard University East Asia Series, 1991). She received her PhD in East Asian languages and civilizations from Harvard University.

Previous Holders of the Goldthwaite Professorship of Rhetoric

Christiane Romero, 2005-2017
Norman Daniels, 1990-2002
John O. Perry, 1968-1988
Wisner Payne Kinne, 1958-1967
Myrron Jennison Files, 1946-1956
William Rollin Shipman, 1907-1908

Holly Taylor is the Moses Hunt Professor of Psychology, Department of Psychology. She has a secondary appointment as a Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Tufts School of Engineering. Taylor is an expert in spatial language, navigation, science education, and spatial thinking and her research examines the mental representation of information, sometimes referred to as mental models or situation models. She is the Co-Director of the Center for Applied Brain & Cognitive Sciences at Tufts. She earned her PhD from Stanford University. 

Previous Holders of the Moses Hunt Professorship of Psychology

Klaus Miczek, 1992-2024
Philip Sampson, 1983-1992
Bernard W. Harleston, 1980-1981
Leonard C. Mead, 1971-1979
Dorothea J. Crook, 1955-1969
Robert Chenault Givier, 1931-1951

Vickie Sullivan is the Cornelia M. Jackson Professor of Political Science, Department of Political Science. Before coming to Tufts in 1996, she was an assistant professor in the Department of Government at Skidmore College. She studies and teaches political thought and philosophy as well as politics and literature. She is the author of Montesquieu and the Despotic Ideas of Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Machiavelli, Hobbes, and the Formation of a Liberal Republicanism in England (Cambridge University Press, 2004), and Machiavelli’s Three Romes: Religion, Human Liberty, and Politics Reformed (Northern Illinois University Press, 1996). Her articles have appeared in The American Political Science Review, History of European Ideas, History of Political Thought, Political Theory, Polity, and Review of Politics. Sullivan received her PhD in political science from the University of Chicago.

Previous Holders of the Cornelia M. Jackson Professorship of Political Science

Charles A. Smith, 1989-2016
James V. Elliott, 1975-1989
Robert R. Robbins, 1959-1970
Gregory Stewart Miller, 1946-1956
Harvey Alden Wooster, 1922-1923
Henry Clayton Metcalf, 1913-1918

Khaled Fahmy is the Edward Keller Professor of North Africa and the Middle East, Department of History. His research focuses on the social and cultural history of the modern Middle East with an emphasis on the history of law, medicine, the army, and the police in nineteenth-century Egypt. He is the author of several books, including In Quest of Justice: Islamic Law and Forensic Medicine in Modern Egypt(University of California Press 2018). In addition to his academic publications, he also writes for the press in both Arabic and English. He has taught at Princeton University, New York University, American University, Columbia University, Harvard University, and the University of Cambridge. Fahmy received a BA and MA from American University in Cairo and a PhD from the University of Oxford.

Previous Holders of the Edward Keller Professorship of North Africa and the Middle East

Hugh Roberts, 2012-2022

This professorship is not currently awarded.

Previous Holders of the King Felipe VI of Spain Professorship of Spanish Culture and Civilization

José Antonio Mazzotti, 2016-2024
Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, 2011-2015
Felipe Fernández-Armesto, 2005-2008
José Álvarez Junco, 1992-2001

Mat Rappaport is the Donald W. Klein Professor in Media Studies. Rappaport’s work explores the intersections of film, emerging technologies, and digital media. He employs AI, mobile video, immersive media, and interactive technologies to investigate themes of isolation, perception, and power within urban and built environments. Formerly an Associate Professor in the Cinema and Television Arts Department at Columbia College, Rappaport’s work has been featured in a wide range of venues, including film festivals, public screenings, museums, and digital platforms. His latest film, the feature documentary Touristic Intent, navigates the intersection of architecture, political ideology, and memory while examining the Nazi-designed resort in Prora, Germany. The film was selected for festivals in the United States, the Netherlands, and Israel; it won Best Feature Documentary at the Massachusetts Independent Film Festival and has been screened at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago. Mat is the co-founder of V1B3, a collective focused on critical approaches to emerging technologies including drones, rapid prototyping, augmented reality and the use of technology to transform urban experiences. 

Joel Rosenberg is the Lee S. McCollester Associate Professor of Biblical Literature, Department of International Literary and Cultural Studies. He is also the director of the Judaic Studies program. His research interests include Judaic studies, film and media studies, ILVS, Middle Eastern studies, central European writers, South African writers, and world literature. He is the author of King and Kin: Political Allegory in the Hebrew Bible (Indiana University Press, 1986). His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in Response, Moment, Midstream, and the anthology Voices Within the Ark: The Modern Jewish Poets (Avon Books, 1980). He received his PhD from the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Previous Holders of the Lee S. McCollester Professorship of Biblical Literature

Sol Gittleman, 1973-1992
Eugene S. Ashton, 1949-1973
Rolland Emerson Wolfe, 1946-1947

Jeremy Eichler is the John McCann Assistant Professor of Music. Before joining Tufts, Eichler served for 18 years as Chief Classical Music Critic of The Boston Globe, where his work was recognized with an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award as well as multiple nominations for the Pulitzer Prize. Eichler is the author of Time’s Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance (Alfred A. Knopf and Faber, 2023). It was named “History Book of the Year” by The Sunday Times of London and “Book of the Year” by the National Jewish Book Awards, in addition to being chosen as a notable book of 2023 by The New Yorker, The New York Times, and NPR. His work has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. He holds a PhD from Columbia University.  

Milo Koretsky is the inaugural McDonnell Family Endowed Bridge Professor, Department of Education and Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering. Koretsky joined Tufts in April 2021 from nearly 30 years teaching in the Department of Chemical, Biological, and Environmental Engineering at Oregon State University (OSU). There he led the Engineering Education Research Group, where he conducted research on innovative curricular design.  He is a Fellow of the Center for Lifelong STEM Education Research at OSU and a Fellow of the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE). Koretsky studies and develops technological innovations that promote knowledge integration and higher order cognition. He has a particular interest in helping faculty effectively use research-based instructional practices to enable more equitable learning, and in understanding what prevents students from connecting the knowledge learned in class to the demands of professional practice. He is author of the popular textbook, Engineering and Chemical Thermodynamics. He received his PhD from UC Berkeley.

Kerri Greenidge is the Mellon Associate Professor, Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora. Greenidge joined Tufts in 2018. Her research explores the role of African American literature in the creation of radical Black political consciousness, particularly as it relates to local elections and Democratic populism during the Progressive Era. She is the author of the book The Grimkes: Family, Race, and African-American Trans-National Politics 1865 - 1935 (Norton, 2020), which was selected as one of the "Ten Best History Books of 2022" by Smithsonian Magazine, and  Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter (Liveright, 2019), which was named by the New York Times as one of its critics’ top books of 2019. Black Radical also won the Mark Lynton J. Anthony Lukas Prize in History from the Nieman Foundation. She is the co-director of the African American Trail Project through Tufts’ Center for the Study of Race and Democracy. For nine years she worked as a historian for Boston African American National Historical Site in Boston, through which she published her first book, Boston Abolitionists (2006). Greenidge is also serving on the 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. She earned her PhD at Boston University. 

Enrico Spolaore is the Seth Merrin Professor, Department of Economics. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where he is a member of the Political Economy Program. He is also a member of the CESifo Research Network. Spolaore’s main research interests are in political economy, economic growth and development, and international economics. His publications include articles in academic journals including American Economic Review and Quarterly Journal of Economics, numerous chapters in edited volumes, and the book The Size of Nations, co-authored with Alberto Alesina. Before joining the Tufts faculty in 2004, he held faculty positions at Brown, Boston College, and the Ohio State University. He was awarded the Primio Due Torri d’Oro prize from his hometown of Rovigo, Italy. He has a PhD in political economy from the University of Siena and a PhD in economics from Harvard University.

Previous Holders of the Seth Merrin Professorship

Ray Jackendoff, 2005-2017

Margaret McMillan is the Neary Family Professor of International Relations, Department of Economics. She has published widely in the areas of international trade, investment, structural change and economic growth focusing primarily on developing countries. Understanding the distributional consequences of international economic integration is a key focus of her work. She is a Faculty Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Senior Research Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute and a recipient of numerous research grants. In 2005, she was named the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Professor McMillan's research has been featured in the New York Times and the NBER Digest and has been published in leading economics journals such as the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Economic Growth, the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, the Journal of Development Economics, and the Journal of International Economics. McMillan has worked in several African countries including Ethiopia, Gabon, Kenya, Mali, Tanzania, Uganda and South Africa. Before coming to academia, she worked for a variety of organizations including the Peace Corps, Lehman Brothers, USAID, UNDP and the World Bank. She holds a PhD in economics from Columbia University.

Yannis M. Ioannides is the Max and Herta Neubauer Endowed Chair in Economics, Department of Economics. Before joining the Tufts faculty in 1995, Ioannides taught and served as department head at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. His research interests are macroeconomics, economic growth and inequality, social interactions and networks, and housing markets. Ioannides served as a member of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Social Interactions and Economic Inequality, and as a consultant to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the European Investment Bank (Luxembourg), among other EU, U.S., and Greek institutions. He has published in many leading journals including American Economic Review and Journal of Economic Literature. He received his PhD in engineering-economic systems and economics from Stanford University.

Brian Schaffner is the Newhouse Professor of Civic Studies, Department of Political Science. Before coming to Tufts, he was a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Schaffner’s research is focused on civic engagement, political participation, and citizenship. He has received multiple awards and honors over the course of his academic career, such as the Best Paper Award from the American Political Science Association’s Section on Class and Inequality in 2016, and the 2016 Virginia Gray Best Book Award for the best political science book published on the subject of U.S. state politics or policy in the preceding three calendar years. Schaffner has written and co-written many books, including Campaign Finance and Political Polarization: When Purists Prevail (University of Michigan Press, 2015) and Hometown Inequality: Race, Class, and Representation in American Local Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2020), which was was named one of Choice Review's Outstanding Titles of 2021. He earned his PhD in political science from Indiana University.

Brian Hatcher is the Packard Professor of Theology, Department of Religion. His research focuses on religious and intellectual transformations in colonial and contemporary South Asia, with a special interest in early colonial Bengal. His publications explore issues of vernacular modernity, translation, the life histories of Sanskrit scholars under colonialism, and the modalities of religious eclecticism and spiritual reform among a wide range of Calcutta-based intellectuals. He is the author of Against High Caste Polygamy: An Annotated Translation (Oxford University Press, 2023), Hinduism Before Reform (Harvard University Press, 2020), Vidyasagar: The Life and After-life of an Eminent Indian (Routledge, 2014), Bourgeois Hinduism, or Faith of the Modern Vendantists: Rare Discourses from Early Colonial Bengal (Oxford University Press, 2008), Eclecticism and Modern Hindu Discourse (Oxford University Press, 1999), and Idioms of Improvement: Vidyasagar and Cultural Encounter in Bengal (Oxford University Press, 1996). He received his PhD in religion from Harvard University.

Previous Holders of the Packard Professorship of Theology

John M. Ratcliff, 1941-1954
Lee Sullivan McCollester, 1912-1940
George Thompson Knight, 1900-1910
Thomas J. Sawyer, 1869-1900

This professorship is not currently awarded.

Barry Trimmer is the Henry Bromfield Pearson Professor of Natural Science, Department of Biology. He is the director of the Neuromechanics and Biomimetic Devices Laboratory and director of the IGERT: Soft Materials Robotics PhD program and has secondary appointments in the School of Engineering, Department of Biomedical Engineering, and the School of Medicine, Department of Neuroscience and Department of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics. Trimmer is interested in the control of locomotion and the neural processes that organize sensory and motor information. He has published articles in journals such as Science Robotics and Journal of Experimental Biology. He received his PhD in neurobiology from the University of Cambridge in England.

Previous Holders of the Henry Bromfield Pearson Professorship of Natural Science

June R. Aprille, 1987-2001
Charles E. Stearns, 1973-1987
Robert L. Nichols, 1949-1972
Crosby Fred Baker, 1933-1948
Alfred Church Lane, 1910-1933
John P. Marshall, 1900-1901

Ayesha Jalal is the Mary Richardson Professor, Department of History. She joined the Tufts faculty in the fall of 1999 and since 2003 has held a joint appointment with the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Jalal’s research interests include South Asia and the Muslim world. She has authored and co-authored a number of books, including Modern South Asia: History, culture, political economy (Routledge, 2017), The Struggle for Pakistan: A Muslim Homeland and Global Politics (Harvard University Press, 2014) and Partisans of Allah: Jihad in South Asia (Harvard University Press, 2008). Jalal has been a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge (1980-1984); Leverhulme Fellow at the Centre of South Asian Studies, Cambridge (1985-1986); and Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies (1988-1990). Between 1998-2003 Jalal was a MacArthur Foundation Fellow. She received a PhD in history from the University of Cambridge.

Previous Holders of the Mary Richardson Professorship

Madeline Caviness, 1986-2007

Krishna Kumar is the Robinson Professor of Chemistry, Department of Chemistry. He is a member of the Cancer Center at Tufts Medical Center and an adjunct professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the School of Engineering. His research is at the interface of chemistry, biology, and medicine. The main goal of his research is to use chemical and biological methods to create novel and functional molecules that allow understanding the mechanism of, and/or control of biological processes. He is a Senior Member of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) and is an Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. Kumar earned his PhD in chemistry from Brown University.

Deborah Schildkraut is the John Richard Skuse, Class of 1941, Professor of Political Science. She is the author of States of Belonging: Immigration Policies, Attitudes, and Inclusion (Russell Sage Foundation, 2021, with Tomás Jiménez, Yuen Huo, and John Dovidio), Americanism in the Twenty-First Century: Public Opinion in the Age of Immigration (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Press 'One' for English: Language Policy, Public Opinion, and American Identity (Princeton University Press, 2005), and The Challenge of Democracy: American Government in Global Politics (Cengage Learning, 2022, with Ken Janda, Jeff Berry, Jerry Goldman, and Paul Manna). Much of her research examines the implications of the changing ethnic composition of the United States on public opinion in a variety of domains. Schildkraut also studies how liberals and conservatives in the United States feel about factors related to democratic governance, like compromise and engaging in political discussions across the aisle. She received her PhD from Princeton University and her BA from Tufts.

Previous Holders of the John Richard Skuse, Class of 1941, Professorship of Political Science

Jeffrey M. Berry, 2001-2023

Virginia Drachman is the Arthur Stern, Jr. Professor of American History, Department of History. She came to Tufts in 1977. Her research focuses on women in modern American society. Specifically, she is interested in the theme of women in male-dominated professions, particularly medicine, law, and business. Her current research project takes her in a new direction and focuses on girlhood in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Drachman’s books include Enterprising Women: 250 Years of American Business (University of North Carolina Press, 2002), Sisters in Law: Women Lawyers in Modern American History (Harvard University Press, 1998), Women Lawyers and the Origins of Professional Identity in America: The Letters of the Equity Club, 1887 to 1890 (University of Michigan Press, 1993) and Hospital with a Heart: Women Doctors and the Paradox of Separatism at the New England Hospital, 1862-1969 (Cornell University Press, 1984). She received her PhD in history from the State University of New York at Buffalo. 

Previous Holders of the Arthur Stern, Jr. Professorship of American History

John L. Brooke, 1998-2000

Natasha Warikoo is the Lenore Stern Professor in Social Sciences, Department of Sociology. A former Guggenheim Fellow, she came to Tufts in 2020 and is an expert on racial and ethnic inequality in education. Her latest book, Race at the Top: Asian Americans and Whites in Pursuit of the American Dream in Suburban Schools (University of Chicago Press, May 2022) illuminates tensions related to achievement in a suburban, high-income town with a large and growing Asian American population. Warikoo was previously an Associate Professor of Education at Harvard University. Prior to her academic career, she was a teacher in New York City’s public schools, and also spent time working at the US Department of Education. She was awarded Best Article by both the American Sociological Association's Sociology of Education Section and the Sociology of Emotions. She has been featured on various news networks including NPR, ABC News, CNN, and The Washington Post, commenting on the impact of the Supreme Court’s decision to set limits on affirmative action. Warikoo completed her PhD in sociology from Harvard University, and BSc and BA in mathematics and philosophy at Brown University.

Previous Holders of the Lenore Stern Professorship in the Humanities and Social Sciences

Sheldon Krimsky, 2012-2022
Mark Richard, 2007-2009

This professorship is not currently awarded. 

Previous Holders of the Stern Family Professorship

Abani Patra, 2019-2024

Charles Sykes is the John Wade Professor, Department of Chemistry. His research involves the imaging of atoms and molecules. He uses highly sophisticated equipment to view and characterize electrons and their flow. The work, which has received extensive external funding from the National Science Foundation as well as the American Chemical Society and the Beckman Foundation, has yielded a significant body of published work, which has appeared in top physical and general chemistry journals. Among his many awards, he has received the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, an NSF CAREER Award, an Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation Young Investigator Award, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. He and fellow Tufts faculty member from the School of Engineering Maria Flytzani-Stephanopoulos received the American Chemical Society Catalysis Leadership for their groundbreaking research. In 2022, Sykes and his team at Tufts were awarded the 2022 Faraday Division Horizon Prize from the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) for their groundbreaking work on single-atom catalysts. In 2023, he was recognized with the Henry Albert Award of the International Precious Metals Institute. He received his PhD in chemistry from Cambridge University.

Previous Holders of the John Wade Professorship

Robin Kanarek, 2000-2019
Richard H. Milburn, 1989-1998
Seymour O. Simches, 1962-1989
George H. Gifford, 1934-1961
Charles Ernest Fay, 1883-1931

Misha Kilmer is the William Walker Professor of Mathematics, Department of Mathematics. She is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Computer Science in the School of Engineering. Her expertise is in iterative methods, numerical linear algebra, numerical analysis, scientific computing, and image and signal processing. Kilmer is the author of numerous scholarly articles and papers appearing in a wide range of computational math and engineering publications. Her work has been funded or is being funded by the NSF, NIH, IARPA, and DARPA. She has served as referee for numerous highly rated scientific journals as proposal reviewer and cite team member for the National Science Foundation, as an international PhD thesis examiner, on program committees for several international research conferences, and on award committees for international awards. She was named one of the 2019 Fellows of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). She received her PhD in applied mathematics from the University of Maryland, College Park.

Previous Holders of the William Walker Professorship of Mathematics

Richard M. Weiss, 2001-2016
William F. Reynolds, 1970-1998
William Richard Ransom, 1944-1954
Frank George Wren, 1908-1941
Benjamin G. Brown, 1880-1903

Sergei Mirkin is the White Family Chair in Biology, Department of Biology. He came to Tufts in 2007 from the University of Illinois at Chicago where he was a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics. Mirkin’s research interests are in the field of DNA structure and functioning. He has published articles in journals such as Nature Structural & Molecular Biology and Cell Reports. He has received awards from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. He earned his PhD in molecular biology from the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Gregory Crane is the Winnick Family Chair in Technology and Entrepreneurship, Department of Classical Studies, and the editor-in-chief of the Perseus Project, a digital library project. His research interests include Greek drama, Hellenistic poetry, and the relationship between the humanities and rapidly developing digital technology. He is the author of The Blinded Eye: Thucydides and the New Written Word (Rowman and Littlefield, 1996) and The Ancient Simplicity: Thucydides and the Limits of Political Realism (University of California Press, 1998). He has been awarded major grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support the Perseus Project. Before coming to Tufts in 1998, he was an associate professor of classics at Harvard University, where he also received his PhD in classical philology.

Heather Curtis is the Warren S. Woodbridge Professor in Comparative Religions, Department of Religion. She is the author of Faith in the Great Physician: Suffering and Divine Healing in American Culture, 1860-1900 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), which was awarded the Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer prize from the American Society of Church History for the best first book in the History of Christianity. Her book, Holy Humanitarians: American Evangelicals and Global Aid (Harvard University Press, 2018) examines the crucial role popular religious media played in the extension of US aid at home and abroad from the late-nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Curtis has also published articles on the global expansion of American evangelicalism, pentecostalism, religion and science, and Christian spirituality in a variety of academic journals, books, and online venues. She served as a senior editor for the Oxford Encyclopedia of Religion in America. Curtis received her PhD in the History of Christianity and American Religion from Harvard University. 

Previous Holders of the Warren S. Woodbridge Professorship in the Department of Comparative Religions

Mohamed A. Mahmoud, 2000-2007
Robert L. H. Miller, 1970-1988
Benjamin Butler Hersey, 1959-1969
Alfred Storer Cole, 1947-1955
Clarence Russell Skinner, 1915-1949
Adolph Augustus Berle, 1913-1914
Lucius Moody Briston, 1912-1913
Warren Samuel Woodbridge, 1890-1909

Shan Jiang is the Eileen Fox Aptman, J90, and Lowell Aptman Assistant Professor, Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning. Her research interests lie in the fields of Big Data Analytics, Spatial Data Science, Geographic Information Science, Computational Social Science, and the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in Land Use, Transportation, and Urban Planning. Her work investigates the interactions of human activities and the built environment in global urbanization processes to design responsive policies for smart, sustainable, resilient and healthy cities. She has worked on projects funded by the National Academies of Sciences, the Singapore National Research Foundation, the Portugal Foundation for Science and Technology, the Chicago Transit Authority, and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, among others. She has published in journals such as PNAS, Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, IEEE Transactions of Big Data, Transportation Research Part C, Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, etc. Prior to joining Tufts in 2018, Jiang was a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT. She holds a PhD in Urban and Regional Planning from MIT.

Previous Holders of the Eileen Fox Aptman, J90, and Lowell Aptman Professorship

Benjamin Wolfe, 2018-2020

Jonah Bloch-Johnson is the Chang Family Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth and Climate Sciences. Before joining Tufts in fall 2024, he held a Postdoctoral Researcher position at the United Kingdom’s National Centre for Atmospheric Science at the University of Reading. Bloch-Johnson studies nonlinear climate dynamics, which explores the ways in which the climate’s response to disturbances such as humanity’s CO₂ emissions can become stronger or weaker over time. His work has received funding from the National Science Foundation and has been published in Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems and Climate Dynamics, among others. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago. 

Xandra Kredlow is the Dean of Arts and Sciences Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology. Kredlow joined Tufts in January 2022 and has a background in clinical psychology. Her program of research examines methods to harness memory processes with the goal of developing novel interventions for emotional disorders (e.g., anxiety, trauma and stressor-related, and mood disorders). She has published her work in journals such as Research & Therapy, International Journal of Psychophysiology, and American Psychologist. She earned her PhD at Boston University, and came to Tufts from Harvard University, where she was a Postdoctoral Fellow.

Marcus Weera is the Evans Family Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology. Weera join Tufts in January 2024 after being a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center. His research is on the neurobiology of alcohol use, stress, and co-morbid disorders. Weera has published his work in peer-reviewed publications such as eLife, Journal of Neuroscience, and Neuropharmacology, and has received awards from the International Drug Abuse Research Society. He received his PhD in Integrative Neuroscience from Purdue University.

Previous Holders of the Evans Family Assistant Professorship

Sara K. Johnson, 2020-2023

Sasha Fleary, 2018-2020

Lilian Mengesha is the Fletcher Foundation Assistant Professor, Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies. She received her MA and PhD in theatre arts and performance studies from Brown University. Mengesha works in critical Indigenous studies, affect theory, and feminist theory, especially with respect to performance art, dramatic literature, and dance. In addition to her scholarly work, she also writes performance pieces and is a director, performer, and dramaturge. She was a visiting scholar in MIT’s literature section during the 2016-2017 academic year and is the 2016 winner of The Drama Review’s best graduate student essay award and her research has also appeared in The Canadian Theatre Review. Mengesha is the recipient of the 2021 Career Enhancement Fellowship through the Institute for Citizens and Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson Foundation). She has presented papers and organized panels in the U.S., Canada, Puerto Rico, and the U.K..

Previous Holders of the Fletcher Foundation Professorship

Albert Hatton Gilmer, 1926-1928

Xinqiang Ding is the Dr. Charles W. Fotis A37, AG39 Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry. Ding joined Tufts in Fall 2023 from a Postdoctoral Researcher position at MIT. Prior to that, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Neurobiology at the University of Chicago. His research has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Nature Communications, Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation, and The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters. In 2021 he was awarded the PHYS Young Investigator Award from the American Chemical Society. He received his PhD from the University of Michigan.

Previous Holders of the Dr. Charles W. Fotis A37, AG39 Assistant Professorship

Philip Shushkov, 2019-2022

This professorship is not currently awarded.

Previous Holders of the Gerald R. Gill Professorship

Adolfo Cuevas, 2021-2022
Madina Agenor, 2018-2020

Amaris Brown is the John Holmes Assistant Professor in the Department of English. She joined Tufts in 2023 after receiving her PhD from Cornell University in the Department of Africana Studies, with a Graduate Certificate in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her dissertation was titled “Desirous Disposability: Circuits of Race, Sex, and Refusal”, and her research includes 20th and 21st century African diasporic literature and visual culture, gender and sexuality studies, and critical disability studies. She was a Critical Writing Fellow in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program and holds a BA from Brandeis University in African and Afro-American Studies and Sociology.

Previous Holders of the John Holmes Assistant Professorship in the Humanities

Kimberly Bain, 2020-2022

This professorship is not currently awarded.

Courtney Sato is a Mellon Assistant Professor, Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora. Sato joined Tufts in Fall 2021 from Harvard University where she was a Global American Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History. Her research and teaching fields include Asian American history; U.S. intellectual & cultural history (late 19th-20th Century); women, gender, and sexuality studies; U.S. empire; transpacific studies; and digital and public humanities. Her article, “‘A Picture of Peace’: Friendship in Interwar Pacific Women’s Internationalism,” was published in Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences. Sato serves as Co-Principal Investigator and Project Director for the Out of the Desert initiative at Yale University. Supported by a US National Park Service Japanese American Confinement Sites (JACS) grant, the Out of the Desert digital project interprets World War II Japanese American incarceration history for a broad public audience. Sato earned her PhD at Yale University.

Mary Amanda McNeil is a Mellon Assistant Professor, Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora. McNeil joined Tufts in Fall 2022 after completing her PhD in American studies with a secondary field in studies of women, gender, and sexuality at Harvard University. Her research and teaching sit at the intersections of Black studies; Native American and Indigenous studies; Afro-Native studies; women, gender, and sexuality studies; social history; and geography. Keenly invested in public humanities, McNeil has previously worked as a research assistant for the African American Trail Project at Tufts University and as a scholar-in-residence at the Framingham History Center. Currently, she sits on the board of the Royall House and Slave Quarters and as an advisory council member to the Mellon “Just Futures”-funded public history initiative, “Reimagining New England Histories: Historical Injustice, Sovereignty, and Freedom.” Her writing can be found in NAIS: Journal of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association; Panorama: Journal of Association of Historians of American Art; and Boston Art Review.

Alexandra Chreiteh (Shraytekh) is a Mellon Bridge Assistant Professor, Department of International Literary and Cultural Studies. Her work is at the intersection of transnational literature, literary history and theory, visual studies, race and ethnicity studies, women and gender studies, environmental studies, queer studies, and disability studies. Her work has appeared in the Journal of North African Studies, and in a volume on magical realism edited by Chris Warnes and Kim Sasser, forthcoming from Cambridge UP.  She is also the author of two novels, Ali and his Russian Mother and Always Coca-Cola. Chreiteh has organized and spoken on a large number of national and international conference panels and symposia. She received her PhD in comparative literature from Yale University.

Craig Cipolla is the Mellon Bridge Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology. His work explores the ways in which collaborative Indigenous frameworks transform archaeology as a form of knowledge production about both Indigenous societies and whiteness. Before joining Tufts, Cipolla was the Vettoretto Curator of North American Archaeology at the Royal Ontario Museum and Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. He is the author of the book Becoming Brothertown (University of Arizona Press, 2013) and co-author of the books Archaeological Theory in Dialogue: Situating Relationality, Ontology, Posthumanism, and Indigenous Paradigms (Routledge, 2021) and Archaeological Theory in the New Millennium (Routledge, 2017). His work on North American archaeology, collaborative archaeology, and archaeological theory has also been published in a number of peer-reviewed journals, articles, and book chapters. Cipolla received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.

Previous Holders of the Mellon Bridge Assistant Professorship

Kareem Khubchandani
Riccardo Strobino
Elana Jefferson-Tatum

Elizabeth Setren is the Gunnar Myrdal Assistant Professor, Department of Economics. She comes to Tufts from a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She was also a research associate at the MIT School of Effectiveness and Inequality Imitative and an assistant economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Setren is a labor economist with special expertise in education and public finance. Her research has been published in Education Finance and Policy, Education Next, Journal of Human Resources, the Journal of Labor Economics and Economic Policy Review. She received her PhD in economics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Dingru Huang is the Rumsey Family Assistant Professor in the Humanities and the Arts in the Department of International Literary and Cultural Studies. Before joining Tufts in fall 2023, she was at the University of California, Berkeley, as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Chinese Studies. With a PhD in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University, her research explores the entanglement of cultural production, technological development, and ecological imaginations in China and East Asia, particularly the roles played by nonhuman animals. Her research has been published in peer-reviewed journals, such as Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Ex-Position, Wenxue, and the Chung-wai Literary Quarterly. Aside from academic research, Huang enjoys creative writing. Her short story “Peacock Trappers” was published by Shanghai Literature.

Previous Holders of the Rumsey Family Assistant Professorship in the Arts and Humanities

Melinda Latour, 2016-2023

Brandon McDonald is the Rumsey Family Assistant Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies in the Department of Classical Studies. He joined Tufts in Fall 2024 from the University of Basel in Switzerland where he was a Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in the Department of Ancient History. McDonald’s research interests include ancient environmental history; Roman and late ancient history/archaeology; ancient disease and health; palaeoclimatology; Graeco-Roman Egypt; and Roman and late antique western Asia. He has published his work in journals such as The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology and is working on converting his dissertation into a monograph titled Roman Ecology: The Interplay of An Empire, Its Natural Environment and Pathogens. He received his DPhil from the University of Oxford.

Zora J Murff is an Endowed Professor of the Practice in Photography at SMFA at Tufts. He received a BS in Psychology from Iowa State University and an MFA in Studio Art, Photography from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Murff is an artist and educator interested in liberation from anti-Blackness. He uses his creative practice to explore the politics of stereotypes using provocative imagery. He practices photography expansively, stretching it across disciplines to create associative or implied images. Like bell hooks, he strives to speak plainly about visual culture and its entanglement with racial capitalism and other forms of hierarchical oppression. He has created multiple books of his work including his latest monograph, True Colors (or, Affirmations in a Crisis) published by Aperture Foundation. His work has been exhibited and collected widely by institutions like the Museum of Modern Art, LACMA, Studio Museum in Harlem, and the V&A Museum. In 2023, Murff was named an International Center for Photography Infinity Award Winner.

The second SMFA Endowed Professor of the Practice is not currently awarded.

Stephanie Badde is the Stibel Family Assistant Professor of Brain and Cognitive Science, Department of Psychology. Her research has focused on priors in tactile and proprioceptive localization, optimal integration of multisensory information, cross-modal recalibration, and Bayesian models of perception. She has received several awards for her research achievements including the biannual Best Dissertation Award by the German Psychological Society and the Lucien Levy Best Research Article Award by the American Journal of Neuroradiology. She is an active scholar and has published her research in journals such as European Journal of Radiology, Journal of Vision, Scientific Reports, Current Biology, Neuropsychologia, eLife, and Nature Communications. Badde came to Tufts in Fall 2020 from New York University, where she was a Postdoctoral Associate. She earned her PhD at the University of Hamburg in Germany.

Zarin Machanda is the Usen Family Career Development Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology. Machanda’s research revolves around understanding the factors that shape the quality and development of social relationships among wild chimpanzees. Her work so far has focused mostly on the evolution of male-female relationships, male-male cooperation (especially cooperative hunting), and how chimpanzees use communication to mediate social relationships. She has started a long-term project to study infant and juvenile chimpanzees and how they develop sex-typed adult behaviors. Zarin is the Director of Long-term Research at the Kibale Chimpanzee Project, an organization that for the last 30 years has conserved and protected the Kanyawara community of chimpanzees living in Kibale National Park, Uganda. She is also on the Board of the Kasiisi Project, a community development organization in Uganda that works with over 9000 school children living around Kibale National Park. Her work has been featured in many scholarly articles, including in publications such as Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, American Journal of Primatology, Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, and Journal of Animal Ecology. Zarin holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Biology. She received her PhD from Harvard University.

Previous A&S Holders of the Usen Family Career Development Assistant Professorship

E. Charles Sykes, 2008-2010
Shruti Kapila, 2005-2007

Lawrence Uricchio is the inaugural Youniss Family Assistant Professorship of Innovation, Department of Biology. He joined Tufts in Fall 2021 from the University of California, Berkeley where he was a postdoctoral fellow. Uricchio is a population geneticist whose research concerns the rate at which species adapt in response to environmental changes. His interests include host-pathogen evolution, inference of adaptation rates from genomic data, eco-evolutionary modeling, and constraints on adaptation. He is also deeply interested in how students learn evolutionary concepts and the creation of inclusive classrooms. He has published his research in journals such as Ecology, Evolution, Trends in Parasitology, Human Genetics and Nature Ecology & Evolution. Previously, he was an NIH Institutional Research and Academic Career Development Awards postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University. He earned his PhD at the University of California, San Francisco and instructed ecology courses at San Jose State University.