New Arts and Sciences Faculty: Fall 2022

Leah Abrams is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Community Health. She comes to Tufts from the Center for Population and Development Studies at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health where she was a Sloan Postdoctoral Fellow on Aging and Work. Abrams’ research and teaching interests include social epidemiology, health policy, population aging, work/retirement, and mental health. Her research has been published in peer reviewed journals, such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, International Journal of Epidemiology, and The Gerontologist. She holds a PhD and MPH from the University of Michigan School of Public Health.

Talha Ali, PhD, is a social epidemiologist and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Community Health. She joins Tufts from Yale University School of Medicine where she was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Section of Geriatrics. Ali’s research interests include structural racism and health disparities; social support networks; caregiving; and cognitive aging and dementia. Her work has been published in journals such as The Journals of Gerontology, Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, The American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, and the Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities. Ali is a 2022 NIA Butler-Williams Scholar and an NIA IMPACT Collaboratory Faculty Scholar. She received a PhD in Epidemiology from the University of Michigan School of Public Health, and an MS in Epidemiology, and a BS in Psychology from Yale University.

Kwasi Ampene is a Professor in the Department of Music. He comes to Tufts from the University of Michigan where he was a Professor of Ethnomusicology in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies. Previously, he was an Associate Professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder’s College of Music. Ampene specializes in the musical traditions of the Akan people of West Africa and his research interests also include intersections between historical/lived experience, music, and social values; music ethnography; music and social change; and popular music. He is the author of numerous journal articles, book chapters and books including Asante Court Music and Verbal Arts in Ghana: The Porcupine and the Gold Stool (Routledge Press, 2020), Engaging Modernity: Asante in the Twenty-First Century (University of Michigan Publishing, 2016), Discourses in African Musicology: J.H. Kwabena Nketia Festschrift (University of Michigan Publishing, 2015), and Female Song Tradition and the Akan of Ghana: The Creative Process in Nnwonkorɔ. Ampene holds a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh.

Sara Deniz Akant is a Professor of the Practice in the Department of English. She recently completed her PhD at the CUNY Graduate Center with a dissertation titled “Flicker-Feelings: An Evil-Eye Poetics.” She also holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her areas of specialization include twentieth and twenty-first century poetry, autobiography and memoir, affect theory, women-of-color feminisms, postcolonial studies, anti-racist pedagogies, and decolonial thought. She is the author of two poetry books: Hyperphantasia (Rescue Press, 2022) and Babette (Rescue Press, 2015) as well as two chapbooks: Parades (Omnidawn, 2014) and Latronic Strag (Persistent Editions, 2014). Her performances have included a video installation for the Poetry Project, a collaboration at NYU's Kimmel Gallery, and a solo show at the Gunder Exhibitions in Chicago. Akant is the recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets and has been an artist in residence at Yaddo, Art Farm, and MacDowell.

Ravichandra Bachu is a Lecturer in the Department of Chemistry. Bachu earned his BSc in Mathematics, Physics, and Chemistry at the Post Graduate College of Science in Hyderabad, and his MSc in Chemistry from the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi before moving to the US for his graduate studies. After earning his MPhil. and PhD in chemistry from The City University of New York, he worked as a postdoctoral research scientist in the laboratory of Prof. Lawrence Chasin, Biological Sciences Department at Columbia University, NY. His research has been published in journals such as Biotechnology and Bioengineering and RNA. In August 2013, Bachu moved to Carnegie Mellon University Qatar as an Assistant Teaching Professor of Chemistry and worked there until August 2022.

Maritsa Barros is a Lecturer in the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice Leadership Program. She received a Doctorate of Education from Northeastern University with a focus on organizational leadership and her scholarship focused on the lived experiences of Chief Diversity Officers in the Northeast. Before coming to Tufts, she served as the Chief Officer of Talent and Culture for the City of Revere prior to that was the inaugural Chief Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Officer for the City of Framingham. Before that, she worked at Lesley University in various roles including the Associate Diversity Officer and Executive Director of the Urban Scholars Initiative and served as the Interim Chief Diversity Officer at the height of the pandemic. She started her career as an admissions officer at Northeastern University and has also held the roles of Assistant Director of Admission, Diversity Outreach and Recruitment, at Framingham State University and the Assistant Director of Admission, Multicultural Recruitment at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.

Yanyun Chen is a Professor of the Practice in Drawing and Painting at SMFA at Tufts. She received a BFA in digital animation from the School of Art, Design, and Media at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore as well as a MA in communications and a PhD from the European Graduate School in Saas Fee, Switzerland. Chen is a visual artist, and runs a drawing, new media, and installation practice. Her works delve into the aesthetic, cultural, and technological inheritances on one’s body, unravelling fictional and philosophical notions of embodiment, and are grounded in the physicality of human and botanical forms. She builds two trains of thought throughout her works: “on bodies” and “on constructs.” In the former, she researches cultural wounds, dowry traditions, hereditary scars, philosophies of nudities, and etymology, and investigates stories as a skin which we wear. In the latter, she questions memorializing the artifice in art as opposed to being present to the experience of witnessing, withering, and the death of what is outside of oneself. She received the prestigious National Arts Council Young Artist Award (2020), Singapore’s highest award for young arts practitioners aged 35 and below.

Craig Cipolla is a Mellon Bridge Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology. 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. Previously, he was a Lecturer in Archaeology and Marie Curie Research Fellow in the School of Archaeology and Ancient History at the University of Leicester. 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. In the last few years, his work has come to explore the ways in which collaborative Indigenous frameworks transform archaeology as a form of knowledge production about both Indigenous societies and whiteness. His work will deepen and complement existing offerings in archaeology, and it contributes a vital new angle to our department’s offerings on North America, bringing renewed focus on Indigeneity and settler colonialism in the Americas.

Kevin Clark is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry. Clark comes to Tufts from the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he was a Postdoctoral Fellow. His research is focused on the development of new materials and methods for the analysis of RNA modifications in the central nervous system and single cells. Clark’s research has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Analytical Chemistry and ACS Central Science. In 2020, he was awarded the American Society for Mass Spectrometry Career Development Award. Clark holds a PhD from Iowa State University. 

Sarah Corrigan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of International Literary and Cultural Studies. She recently completed her PhD in Comparative Literature at Harvard University with a dissertation titled “The Language of Lament: Modernism, Catastrophe, and Exile.” Her research fields include religion and literature, psychoanalysis, comparative modernisms, trauma studies, translation studies, affect theory, medical humanities, and posthuman and animal studies. She joins a newly redesigned ILCS department, which has integrated its various language programs into a single, forward-looking comparative literature/film program.

Soulé Déesse is a Professor of the Practice in Drawing and Painting at SMFA. She received a BFA in painting and drawing and a BA in psychology from Wayne State University and an MFA in painting and drawing from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University. Her work moves between painting and site-specific installation, incorporating sculpture, collage, video, experimental sound, oral storytelling, digital printmaking, photography, and performance. Déesse is interested in the power of imagery and object-making to represent trauma and death, the state of the world, and the Black utopia of Futurafrique. She draws on the esoteric spirituality and magic of her Afro-Caribbean lineage to address the politics and aesthetics of geographical and social displacement, the complexities of pain, memory and place, and the evolving realities of identity perception. Déesse’s work has been exhibited in the Middle East, Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas, at institutions including the Katonah Museum of Art, Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, and Printed Matter, Inc., New York, NY.

Khaled Fahmy, a leading scholar of modern Egypt and the Middle East, is the Edward Keller Professor of North Africa and the Middle East in the Department of History. He comes to Tufts from Cambridge University, where he was the Sultan Qaboos Professor of Modern Arabic Studies and the Director of the Walid bin Talal Centre of Islamic Studies. Prior to that he was Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History at the American University in Cairo, an Associate Professor at New York University, and an Assistant Professor at Princeton University. He has also held Visiting Professorships at Harvard University and Columbia University. Fahmy is the author of five books. These include In Quest of Justice: Forensic Medicine and Islamic Law in Modern Egypt (University of California Press, 2018), which was awarded the 2020 Social History Society Book Prize and the 2019 Peter Gonville Stein Book Award. He has additionally published his work in numerous book chapters, scholarly articles, newspapers, magazines, and encyclopedias. He was elected to the British Academy in 2020. He holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford.

Riccardo Giacconi is a Professor of the Practice in sound at SMFA. He received a BA in visual and performing arts and an MA in visual arts from the Iuav University of Venice, Italy as well as a PhD from Leiden University, the Netherlands. Giacconi is a visual artist, researcher, and documentarian. His works have been presented in exhibitions, film festivals, radio broadcasts, and performing art contexts. Giacconi's articles are regularly published in magazines, and he has published three books (Options, 2020; The Variational Status, 2017; Spoilsport, 2014). His artistic work has been exhibited in various institutions, including Grazer Kunstverein (Graz), ar/ge kunst (Bolzano), MAC (Belfast), WUK Kunsthalle Exnergasse (Vienna), FRAC Champagne-Ardenne (Reims), tranzitdisplay (Prague), Kunstpavillon (Innsbruck), and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Turin). He has presented his films at several festivals, including the New York Film Festival, Venice International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Visions du Réel and FID Marseille, where he won the Grand Prix of the International Competition in 2015. He also co-founded the collective listening festival “Helicotrema” and the audio storytelling studio “Botafuego”.

Scott Greenspan is a Lecturer in the Department of Education. He is a Licensed Psychologist and a Nationally Certified School Psychologist. Greenspan joined the School Psychology program at Tufts as a Part-Time Lecturer in Fall 2021, and will now be joining the program as a full-time faculty member. Greenspan has provided clinical services within schools, clinics, and community-based contexts. His research focuses on school-based mental health services, physical activity promotion, and affirming psychosocial supports for LGBTQIA+ youth. Greenspan received his PhD in School Psychology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

N. Sean Glover, is a Professor of the Practice in sculpture at SMFA. He is an artist and educator who uses a wide range of materials and processes (both new and old) to investigate the histories of violence, labor, and technology. Sean’s work has been exhibited at the ICA Boston, SFMOMA, Wellesley College, and Space Gallery in Portland, ME. He lives and works in Boston, MA.

Alfredo Hernandez is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology. He comes to Tufts from Harvard Medical School where he was an Instructor in the Department of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology. Prior to that, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Harvard Medical School. He has published his research in scholarly journals such as The Journal of Biological Chemistry, the Journal of Visualized Experiments, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. His 2020 article in the Proceedings was awarded that publication’s Cozzarelli Prize, which is awarded annually to six research teams whose articles have made outstanding contributions to their field. Hernandez is originally from southern Texas and received his PhD from Texas A&M University. He will be teaching Biochemistry and upper-level courses in his area of specialty, which is DNA replication and RNA biology.

Eric High is a Lecturer in the Department of Chemistry. He received his PhD in Chemistry from Tufts in 2020. He is returning to Tufts following a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Rowland Institute at Harvard University. Eric is an experimental and physical chemist with expertise in kinetics and catalysis. He has published research in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters.

AB Huber is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora. Huber comes to Tufts from Colby College where they were a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program. Previously, they also taught as an Assistant Professor in New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study; their teachings were affiliated with the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, the Department of Comparative Literature, and Gender and Sexuality Studies. Huber’s research focuses on critical theory and gender and sexuality studies, and their work can be seen in published articles, as well as other formats including curated video installations and commissioned public conversations. Huber received their PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.  

Fahd Humayun is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science. Humayun recently completed his PhD in Political Science at Yale University, with his dissertation “Democratic Institutions & International Crisis Behaviour.” His research interests include international relations, international crisis behavior, democratic institutions, civil-military relations, political representation, South Asian politics, and foreign policy analysis. Humayun also holds degrees from the University of Cambridge and the London School of Economics. Alongside his academic research, he has written articles for Foreign Policy, Al-Jazeera, The Washington Post, Dawn newspaper, and many other media outlets. 

Jennie Jieun Lee is a  Professor of the Practice in ceramics at SMFA. She received a Studio Diploma from SMFA and her MFA in ceramics from California State University Long Beach. Through her work, Lee challenges conventions of ceramic sculpture, embracing the inherent vulnerability of a medium that has long been tamed by its practitioners. Across busts, vessels, and painting, Lee’s works accumulate indices both deliberate and accidental, grafts that both decorate and distort. Transferring the immediacy and authenticity conferred upon gestural painting to sculpture, Lee disrupts a medium typically associated with the domestic. She has shown in several galleries including Marlborough Chelsea, Cooper Cole, Shulamit Nazarian, and Martos Gallery. Lee has worked on fabric collaborations with the designer Rachel Comey and created a ceramic sculpture piece for the 2022 Alexander McQueen special project.  In 2022, Lee's ceramic work was featured on season two of the Netflix television show, Russian Doll. Lee received a 2015 Artadia Award, was a recipient of the 2016 Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant, and in 2017 received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. 

Stephanie Khoury is a Lecturer in the Department of Music. Khoury has been a part-time Lecturer in Tufts’ Music Department since 2017 and has now been promoted to Full-time Lecturer. She has previously been a Lecturer in the Anthropology Department at the University of Paris Ouest Nanterre and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Sorbonne University in France. She has participated in conferences across the world and published journal articles and book chapters, most recently a chapter titled “(Re)producing the Past Online: Oral History and Social-Media Based Discourses on Cambodian Performing Arts in the Aftermath of Genocide” in Mass Violence and Memory in the Digital Age: Memorialization Unmoored and the forthcoming chapter “Music and Genocide,” in the Edward Elgar’s Handbook of Genocide Studies. She holds a PhD in Ethnomusicology from the University of Paris Ouest Nanterre.

Tonhi Lee comes to Tufts from the University of Michigan as an Assistant Professor specializing in English literature and drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His dissertation, “Migration and Mimesis in the English Renaissance, 1492-1668”, traces a literary history of migration in the early modern world; it explores the relationship between migrancy and fictionality in some of the major genres of the period, such as romance, utopian fiction, tragedy, and pastoral. He is also currently working toward a second book project, Theater of Migration in the Age of Shakespeare, which will examine the history of English popular drama––from its beginning in medieval religious and moral dramas to Elizabethan-Jacobean dramas produced by the professional theaters––from the perspective of human movement. His additional research and teaching interests include post-Reformation public culture; conversion; citizenship; migration and empire; classical reception; world literature; and the phenomenology of theater.

Cathy Lu is a Professor of the Practice in Ceramics at SMFA. She received a BFA in Ceramics and a BA in Chinese language, culture, and history from Tufts University and an MFA in Sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute. Lu’s work manipulates traditional Chinese art objects and symbols in order to deconstruct assumptions about Asian American identity and cultural authenticity. By creating ceramic-based sculptures and large-scale installations, Lu explores what it means to be both Asian and American, while not being able to fully embody either. Unpacking how experiences of immigration, cultural hybridity, and cultural assimilation are part of American identity is central to Lu's work. Lu’s work has been featured in solo, juried, and group exhibitions, including the Chinese Culture Center SF, CA, American Museum of Ceramic Art in Pomona, CA, and Art Salon Chinatown in Los Angeles, CA. She was a 2019 Asian Cultural Council/ Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation Fellow and a 2020 NCECA Emerging Artist. She will be exhibiting work at SFMOMA in Dec 2022.

Diego Javier Luis is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History. Luis comes to Tufts from Davidson College where he was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Humanities Program, History Department, and Latin American Studies. He has a book under contract with Harvard University Press, The First Asians in the Americas: A Transpacific History, and has published peer-reviewed articles in journals including The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Latin American History, Ethnohistory, and the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History. He received his PhD in History from Brown University.

Ian Manly is a Lecturer in the Department of Mathematics. He joins Tufts from the University of Florida where he was a lecturer in their Mathematics department. His publications include work focused on students’ learning, contributing to an article “Transitioning to an Active Learning Environment for Calculus at the University of Florida” in addition to his dissertation at Kansas State University “Data mining and intervention in Calculus I.” He holds a PhD in Mathematics from Kansas State University.

Helen McCreery is a Lecturer in the Department of Biology. She comes to Tufts from UMass Boston where she was a postdoctoral fellow, with previous post-doctoral positions at Harvard University and Michigan State. She received her PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and her BS and MS in Environmental Engineering at MIT. She is an expert in Ecology and Evolution, with a special interest in social insects like ants. She has publications in Ecology and Evolution, Journal of Experimental Biology, and Nature Communications. McCreery will be teaching the introductory course Organisms and Populations (Bio14), Biostatistics, and courses in Ecology.

Mary Amanda McNeil is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora. McNeil recently completed her PhD in American Studies, with a secondary field of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, at Harvard University with her dissertation “’To Make a Political Place for Ourselves’: Black Power and Red Power Claims to Boston.” Her research interests include Black studies, Native American and Indigenous studies, Afro-native studies, urban history, social movements, Black feminisms, Indigenous feminisms, nationalisms, geography, and carceral studies.

Lauren O’Connor-Korb is a Professor of the Practice in Sculpture at SMFA. She received her BFA in spatial art from San Jose State University and her MFA from the University of Georgia. Using language as a guidepost, she looks at the way Western culture assigns narrative significance to experiences and moments in history. By focusing on the objects and narratives that are preserved and perpetuated, she explores the latent error in translation between projected meaning and reality. Her accolades include the juror’s award at the 2020 Wiregrass Biennial, the International Sculpture Center’s 2019 Outstanding Student Achievement Award in Contemporary Sculpture, and the 2020 Excellence in Graduate Research Award from the University of Georgia.

Patricia Palmer is a Lecturer in the Art Education Program in the Department of Education. Palmer comes to Tufts from Montserrat College of Art, where she was an Associate Professor and Director of Art Education. Previously, she was a Research Associate at Harvard Project Zero, as well as a Program Supervisor at SMFA. Her research interests include learning to think in and through the arts. She has created curriculum materials, Artful Thinking and Visible Thinking, participated in group and solo art exhibitions, and presented at conferences including AERA and the National Association of Art Educators. She holds her EdM in Arts in Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Elisa Giardina Papa is a Professor of the Practice in digital media at SMFA. She received a BA from Politecnico di Milano, Facoltà del Design in Milano, Italy, an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design, and a PhD in film and media from the University of California, Berkeley. Giardina Papa is an Italian artist whose work investigates gender, sexuality, and labor in relation to neoliberal capitalism and the borders of the Global South. Her most recent body of work documents how past and present forms of capitalism have progressively extracted all capacities for labor and living —including sleep, affect, and emotions— and instead draws attention to everything in our lives, embodiments, and desires that remains radically unruly, untranslatable, and un-computable. Her work has been exhibited and screened at venues such as the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (The Milk of Dreams), the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA’s Modern Mondays), the Whitney Museum (Sunrise/Sunset Commission), and Seoul Mediacity Biennale 2018.

Sarah Robbins, Assistant Professor of Early American Multi-Ethnic Literature in the Department of English, completed a PhD in English at Yale University in 2021. Her research focus is in nineteenth-century African American literature, and her current book project, based on her dissertation, "Re(-)Markable Texts: Making Meaning of Revision in 19th-Century African American Literature," addresses authors who revised their own work. She considers revision from a material standpoint, adapting theories and methods from textual scholarship, genetic criticism, and editorial theory in order to reconstruct the processes that constitute black revisionary labor. Her work has been enriched through her participation with the Black Bibliography Project and as a junior fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography.

Jeffrey Rosen is a Professor of the Practice in the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning. He joins Tufts from his work as the Chief Financial Officer of Solidago Foundation & Affiliate Foundations. His career focuses on financial management, strategic planning, operational management, financial modeling, audits and compliance, and philanthropic services. He has presented at many financial and philanthropic conferences and participated in curriculum development and publications on community investment. Professor Rosen is a leading practitioner in the emerging Impact Investing field and will help to lead the UEP department’s new graduate certificate in Sustainable Impact Investing.

Patrick Schena is the B.L.R. Professor of the Practice in Finance in the Department of Economics. Schena comes to the Department of Economics with 30 years of industry experience in finance, investments, operations, and technology management with a disciplinary focus in asset management. 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 degree from The Fletcher School at Tufts, and an MA and a BA from Boston College.

Brynn Speroni is a Lecturer in the Department of Occupational Therapy. Speroni has been a part-time Lecturer in the Department of Occupational Therapy and has now been promoted to Full-time Lecturer. Speroni teaches courses in the principles of management within the institutional and community health care system, and the influence of culture, race, and gender on occupations and adaptation. In addition, she is a clinician with almost a decade of experience in rehabilitation. She received her B.S. in Health Science and her Masters in Occupational Health Therapy from Quinnipiac University.

Jaclyn Waguespack is a Lecturer in the Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies. Waguespack has been a part-time Lecturer in Tufts’ Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance and has now been promoted to Full-time Lecturer. Waguespack teaches courses in dance. She also makes her own work and has recently collaborated with Daniel McCusker, Alice Trexler, Meghan McLyman, Kristen Duffy Young, Annie Kloppenberg, Jeremy Nelson, and Colleen Leonardi. She holds an MFA in Dance Performance from the Ohio State University. 

Yu Zhang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry. Prior to joining Tufts, Zhang was a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, studying transition metal catalysis and synthetic modeling of the active sites of the hydrogenase enzymes.  His work has been published in journals such as Nature Chemistry, Journal of American Chemical Society, and Inorganic Chemistry. He holds a patent on “Catalyst, Redox-Switchable Catalyst System, and Related Methods Involving Hydrosilylation." Zhang received his B.S from the Beijing University of Chemical Technology and his PhD from West Virginia University.