New Arts and Sciences Faculty: Fall 2024

Amarildo “Lilu” Barbosa is a Senior Lecturer and Program Director in the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice Leadership program. He comes to Tufts from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health where he was the Chief Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging Officer. Prior to that, Barbosa was the Chief Diversity Officer at Lesley University and the Director of the Office of Multicultural Affairs and Student Inclusion. As a DEIJ practitioner in the community and higher education, his scholarly and research interests focus on strategic diversity leadership, organizational learning & development, and behaviors and practices that harness cultural assets and funds of knowledge of Black & African communities for the purpose of societal impact. He received his PhD in Human Development & Learning from Lesley University.

Jonah Bloch-Johnson is the Chang Family Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth and Climate Sciences. He comes to Tufts from 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. 

Alexandra Collins is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Community Health. She comes to Tufts from Brown University School of Public Health where she was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology. Her community-based research examines social, structural, and environmental drives of health outcomes among people who use drugs, and evaluates substance use-related interventions. She previously worked at the British Columbia Centre on Substance Use and the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS. Her work has been published in journals such as International Journal of Drug Policy, Journal of Urban Health, and Social Science & Medicine and has informed drug policy related to decriminalization and the establishment of overdose prevention centers. She received her PhD from Simon Fraser University in Canada. 

Simone Dufresne is a Lecturer in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development. She recently completed her PhD at Tufts with a dissertation titled “Navigating Tufts for Neurodivergent Students: Developing, Implementing, and Evaluating a Workshop Series at a U.S. University.” Her research focuses on how autistic individuals understand themselves and their place in society, and how interventions can support this development. She has been working in the autism field supporting youth and families for over 10 years. 

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.  

Anne Fast is a Lecturer in the Department of Psychology. She joins Tufts after faculty positions at Western Washington University and Clark University. She has extensive teaching and advising experience, and has also served as a departmental coordinator for graduate teaching assistants. At Tufts, she will be teaching courses in statistics for the behavioral sciences, developmental psychology, and gender development, among others, as well as advising students in all 5 of our undergraduate majors. Her research interests include prosocial behavior, morality, social cognitive development, and gender development. She received her PhD from the University of Washington.

Isabela Fraga is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Romance Studies. She comes to Tufts from Stanford University where she was a Postdoctoral Mellon Fellow at Stanford Humanities Center and a Lecturer of Iberian and Latin American Cultures. Her research explores issues of personhood, subjectivity, and language in the context of chattel slavery in Latin America and the Spanish CaribbeanSpecifically, her book project traces a century-long genealogy of writings concerned with the affective lives of enslaved and free people of African descent in Brazil and Cuba, the two most lucrative coffee- and sugar-producing regions of the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. Fraga received her PhD in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Studies from the University of Chicago.

Fatima Aysha Hussain is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology. Before coming to Tufts, she was a Postdoctoral Research Scientist at the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard. In 2021 she was awarded the Schmidt Science Fellowship. Her lab at Tufts will study the ecology and evolution of microbes living in the human vagina with the aim of using this research to design ecologically-informed microbial therapies for women’s health. She received her PhD from MIT, where she studied virus-bacteria interactions in the ocean. At Tufts she will be designing a new Virology course and co-teaching the Microbiology Lab. Her research has been published in journals such as Nature, Science, and Nature Microbiology.

Jordan Jurinsky is an Assistant Professor in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development. He recently received his PhD from Vanderbilt University with a dissertation titled “Dynamic ecology of adolescent recovery: A mixed methods exploration of the individual, family, and school contexts of adolescent alcohol use recovery.” His interdisciplinary research examines how social contexts, such as peers, families, schools, and communities, impact the addiction recovery process of adolescents and young adults, with an emphasis on health equity and action research. He is also the Director of the Systematic Evaluation of the Association of Recovery Schools, which is developing and iterating a nation-wide data infrastructure for recovery high schools. He has published his work in peer reviewed journals such as Alcohol: Clinical & Experimental Research, Addiction Research & Theory, and The Journal of American College Health.

Jing Li is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics. She comes to Tufts from the MIT Sloan School of Management where she held the William Barton Rogers Career Development Chair of Energy Economics. From 2017-2018, Li was a Postdoctoral Associate of the MIT Energy Initiative. Her research interests lie in energy economics and industrial organization, focusing on development and adoption of new technologies. In recent work, Li has studied standardization and location choices in the U.S. electric vehicle charging industry, automaker diesel vehicle emissions control technology, and cost pass-through in E85 retail markets. Li received her PhD from Harvard

Brandon McDonald is the Rumsey Family Assistant Professor in the Department of Classical Studies. He joins Tufts 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. 

Emily Meehan is a Lecturer in the Department of Mathematics. She comes to Tufts from Wheaton College where she was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics. Previously, she was an Assistant Professor at Gallaudet University. Meehan has published research in Advances in Applied Mathematics. She completed her PhD at North Carolina State University.

Takeshia Pierre is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Education. She recently completed her PhD at the University of Florida, Gainesville’s School of Teaching and Learning with a dissertation titled “Re-Authoring the Stories of Success of STEM/Health Professional Men Holding Black Diasporic Identities: A Disaggregated Approach.” Pierre’s research focuses on exploring equity in STEM and STEM-related fields. She has been published in the refereed journals Professional Development in Education and Cultural Studies of Science Education. In 2023 she was awarded a fellowship with the Community for Advancing Discovery Research in Education (CADRE). 

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. 

Daniele Santucci is a Lecturer and the Italian Language Coordinator in the Department of Romance Studies. He earned his PhD in Italian from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and holds both an MA and a BA from the Università per Stranieri di Siena, specializing in Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition. He has experience designing and teaching Italian language and culture courses in various international settings, including Italy, Australia, Belgium, and Indonesia.  His research interests include  contemporary Italian Literature, gender and sexuality studies, queer studies, border studies, environmental humanities, and second language acquisition.

Sonal Sharma is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology. He recently completed his PhD at Johns Hopkins University with a dissertation titled “Class-compromise and informal sector workers in the Global South: the case of domestic workers’ legal rights in India and South Africa, 1990 to Present.” His research interests include sociology of race/caste, gender and labor, labor movements, civil society, capitalism, comparative-historical sociology, and ethnography. Sharma has published his work in peer-reviewed journals such as Critical Sociology, South Asian History and Culture, and South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal.

Emily Strasser is a Professor of the Practice of Creative Nonfiction and Journalism in the Department of English. Her first book, Half-Life of a Secret (University of Kentucky Press, 2023), was awarded the 2024 Reed Prize in Environmental Writing from the Southern Environmental Law Center and the 2024 Minnesota Book Award. Her writing situates the personal within the global and explores themes and questions of home, secrecy, mental illness, environment, grief, guilt, and interconnectedness. Her work has appeared in publications such as Catapult, Ploughshares, Guernica, Colorado Review, The Bitter Southerner, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and Gulf Coast, among others. Strasser has received awards and fellowships including the Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s Contest, an AWP Intro Award, the W.K. Rose Fellowship, the Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship in Creative Writing, and grants from the Minnesota Arts Board, the Jerome Foundation, and the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council. She was a 2019 McKnight Writing Fellow. Strasser has previously taught at Hamline University, Colgate University, Century College, and the University of Minnesota. She received her MFA from the University of Minnesota.

Dorothy Wang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora starting January 1, 2025. She comes to Tufts from Williams College where she was a Professor in the American Studies Program. Previously, she was a faculty member at Northwestern University and Wesleyan University. Wang is the author of Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry (Stanford University Press, 2013), which won the Association for Asian American Studies’ 2016 award for best book of literary criticism. In 2017-2018 she was the ACLS Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellow in the English Department at the CUNY Graduate Center. She has also been a Visiting Professor at Chinese University of Hong Kong, Doshisha University (Kyoto, Japan), Lingnan University (Hong Kong), and Columbia University. She received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.