New Arts and Sciences Faculty: Fall 2019

Mary Casey, Lecturer, Department of Child Study and Human Development, has been a part-time lecturer at Tufts since 2011. She has also taught at the Boston Teacher Residency Program, Harvard Extension School, Harvard Graduate School of Education, and Dartmouth College. She received her Ed.M. and Ed.D. in human development and psychology from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Casey has published in the Journal of Moral Education, the Journal of Adolescence, and Race and Ethnicity.

Lauren Crowe, Lecturer, Department of Biology, has been a postdoctoral scholar with the Department of Neuroscience at Tufts since 2016. She received her B.S. in chemistry from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and her Ph.D. in cell biology from Duke University. She has also taught at Bunker Hill and North Carolina Central University. Crowe's work has been published in Current Biology, ACS Chemical Biology, the Journal of Neuroscience, and The Journal of Medicinal Chemistry.

Noel Heim, Lecturer, Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences, comes to Tufts from Stanford University where he has taught and been the director of the Stanford Earth Young Investigators: Biodiversity Program since 2012. He received his M.S. in geological sciences from the University of California, Riverside and his Ph.D. in geology from the University of Georgia. He has reviewed manuscripts for a number of journals and his work has been published in Paleobiology and Science, among others. His research interests include extinction in modern and ancient oceans, paleontology, conservation, and evolutionary trends.

Catherine Martin, Lecturer, Film and Media Studies Program, received her M.F.A. and Ph.D. from Boston University. Her dissertation was titled “You Don’t Have to Be a Bad Girl to Love Crime: Femininity and Women’s Labor in US Broadcast Crime Programming, 1945-1975.” She has published in Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media and New Review of Film and Television Studies. Martin currently works with the Radio Preservation Task Force, part of the Library of Congress, to preserve and identify its collection. Her research interests include early network radio and television, detective fiction, popular culture, sound studies, and gender roles.

Eoin McGuirk, Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, joins Tufts from Trinity College, Dublin where he has been a visiting fellow in the Department of Economics. Eoin received his Ph.D. in economics from Trinity in 2013. He has also since worked as a consultant for the World Bank and completed post-doctoral work at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, Brown University, and Yale University. He was a visiting scholar at the Center for Global Action at U.C. Berkeley, where he was also a Fulbright Scholar. His research area is in development economics, political economics, and applied microeconomics.

Maurice Parent, Professor of the Practice, Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies, received his M.A. in vocal performance (music theatre) from New York University in 2005 and also trained at the Atlantic Theatre Company and the Dance Theatre of Harlem. Parent has been an adjunct professor at Boston University for 4 years, was the 2018-2019 Monan Professor of Theatre Arts at Boston College, and has had the privilege of teaching theatre to students as young as 3 in Boston Public Schools. A professional actor for over 18 years, he has worked with such nationally and internationally recognized artists as actors Jonathan Groff, Leslie Uggams, and Eden Espinosa and directors David H. Bell, Liesl Tommy, and Maria Friedman. Most of his professional work in the last 8 years has been in the Greater Boston area where he’s worked for nearly every professional theatre company, won 2 Elliot Norton Awards, 3 Independent Reviewers of New England (IRNE) Awards, and an ArtsImpulse Award. In addition to his work as an actor and educator, Parent is the co-founder and Executive Director of The Front Porch Arts Collective, a new Black theatre company committed to advancing racial equity in Boston through theatre.

Meghan Pearson, Lecturer, Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies, joins Tufts from Syracuse Stage where she has been a draper for the last year. She received her M.F.A. in costume design and production from the University of Alabama 2017. She was also a costume shop manager and draper at Millikin University, the Utah Shakespeare Festival, and the Weathervane Theater, where she worked on such productions as 9 to 5: The Musical, Phantom of the Opera, Romeo and Juliet, and Legally Blonde. She has taught courses on the Principles of Design and Costume Construction at the University of Alabama, and has also worked as a wardrobe supervisor, stitcher, costume designer, stage manager, and lighting designer.

Rebecca Shakespeare, Lecturer, Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning, received her Ph.D. in Geography this August from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she also taught several online courses. She has been a co-PI on a research project investigating housing costs and residential mobility of middle-income renters in New York City. Shakespeare has won several awards for her teaching and research, including a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant. She is a Community Geography Workshop Fellow and, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the recipient of a Teaching Excellence award and the Dr. Sandra J. Finley Teacher Scholar Certificate for pedagogy and service.

Jill VanTongeren, Associate Professor, Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences, comes to Tufts from Rutgers University where she was an associate professor. She will start at Tufts in January 2020. VanTongeren received her Ph.D. in earth and environmental sciences from Columbia University and spent two years as a Bateman Posdoctoral Fellow at Yale University. Her research examines magmatic processes in the oceans and continents, and her work has been published in the Journal of Petrology, the American Journal of Science, and Geology.