Faculty

Research/Areas of Interest: I am interested in histories and cultures of medicine, especially as they pertain to gender, kinship, caste, law, and everyday intimacies, with a regional focus on South Asia. I am also interested in the ways knowledge about bodies and minds moves across time and place, and how, in such movements, colonial, anti-colonial, and postcolonial scientific imaginations seed critical genealogies, often counterintuitively. In the diverse ways people make use of medicine and science, I am drawn to the forms of creativity, imagination, and ethical world-making that emerge in the interstices of authority and power. My research has considered childbirth, infant mortality, and birth-work in Uttar Pradesh, India, noting the way reproductive health interventions reiterate caste and the marginalization of Dalit women; women's movement through psychiatric care settings in urban north India and the intersections of kinship dissolutions with crisis and care; and histories of psychiatry and psychoanalysis in South Asia as they pertain to women's lives and gendered diagnoses, notably "hysteria" and its avatars.

Research/Areas of Interest: Computational complexity, logical foundations of computer science, tropical geometry

Research/Areas of Interest: African Music and Dance Ensemble

Research/Areas of Interest: 20th Century Spanish Peninsular Literature: Generation of 98, post-Civil War, historical memory, women authors

Research/Areas of Interest: Medieval and Renaissance French and Italian Literature

Research/Areas of Interest: Personal and social development; biological & evolutionary roots of human development Biological and evolutionary substrates of human development; the role of eye-contact in social development.

Research/Areas of Interest: Educational Equity, Teacher Education, Critical Race Theory, Social Context of Schooling, Urban Schooling, Multicultural Education

Research/Areas of Interest: African Arts, Art history and Anthropology, Museum and Heritage Studies, History of Fields and Ideas

Research/Areas of Interest: Late Antique & Medieval Western Europe, Byzantium, Southeastern Europe, Papal-Imperial relations

Research/Areas of Interest: Systems biology of aging in genetically variable populations

Research/Areas of Interest: Clinical Psychology, Anxiety and Depressive Disorders

Research/Areas of Interest: Tomography is an inverse problem, and the goal of tomography is to map the interior structure of objects using indirect data such as from X-rays. Integral geometry is the mathematics of averaging over curves and surfaces, and it is the pure math behind many problems in tomography. Integral geometry combines geometric intuition, harmonic analysis, and microlocal analysis (the analysis of singularities and what Fourier integral operators do to them). I have proven support theorems and properties of transforms integrating over hyperplanes, circles and spheres in Euclidean space and manifolds. Because of the mentorship of Tufts physics professor and tomography pioneer, Allan Cormack (Tufts' only Nobel Laureate) I developed X-ray tomography algorithms for the nondestructive evaluation of large objects such as rocket bodies, and this motivated my research in limited data tomography In limited data tomography problems, some tomographic data are missing. I developed a paradigm to describe which features of the object will be visible from limited tomographic data and which will be invisible (or difficult to reconstruct). I proved the paradigm using microlocal analysis. Often artifacts are added to tomographic reconstructions from limited data, and colleagues and I recently used microlocal analysis to prove the cause of these added artifacts and to predict where they will occur. Collaborators and I have developed local algorithms for electron microscopy, emission tomography, Radar, Sonar, and ultrasound. In each case we use microlocal analysis to determine the strengths and weaknesses of the problem and to refine and improve the algorithms.

Research/Areas of Interest: Cognitive Neuroscience

Research/Areas of Interest: Early Modern Europe, the History of Science and Medicine, Women's History, the History of the Body and Sexuality

Research/Areas of Interest: Environmental management and policy

Research/Areas of Interest: emerging media, AI, mass tourism, the built environment, digital futures, immersive video

Research/Areas of Interest: Comparative literature, film studies, modern Arabic literature, modern Persian literature, memory studies, postcolonial studies I study Persian and Arabic literary history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My first book Literary Modernity between Europe and the Middle East (Routledge, 2009) explored the origins of the conception of literary modernity in Arabic and Persian literatures, a topic that I have further addressed in articles and as editor of a special issue of the journal Middle Eastern Literatures and in articles and chapters for edited volumes. Second, I research the role of cinema and visual culture in the formation of cultural memory in conflict and post-conflict social settings, with specific interests in the histories of Iran, Lebanon, Palestine and Algeria. This research is reflected in my second book, Surviving Images: Cinema, War and Cultural Memory in the Middle East (Oxford UP, 2015). I am currently completing a critical study of the cinema of the Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman, under contract with Wallflower/Columbia University Press.

Research/Areas of Interest: Avian ecology and conservation biology

Research/Areas of Interest: Social Cognition

Research/Areas of Interest: Comparative Politics, East Asia, family policy

Research/Areas of Interest: French cinema, second language pedagogy, French history

Research/Areas of Interest: Early American, Native American, and Environmental History

Research/Areas of Interest: Industrial organization, merger analysis

Research/Areas of Interest: Glacial and Quaternary Geology, Geomorphology, Field Geology, Paleomagnetism

Research/Areas of Interest: Spanish Language and Literature Foreign Language Pedagogy

Research/Areas of Interest: Conquest narrative, eco-criticism and climate justice, intercultural dialogue and global citizenship education, Spanish language instruction, Spain's early modern period,

Research/Areas of Interest: Analytical Chemistry Professor Robbat's area of expertise is in separation science and mass spectrometry. His group develops data analysis software that automatically identifies and quantifies target compounds by mathematically deconvolving mass spectra for up to 20 coeluting compounds. Once identified the spectra of target compounds are subtracted from the total ion current chromatogram resulting in mass spectra of unknowns. Once these compounds are identified, they are added to the retention time and mass spectrum library to analyze a wide variety of samples. They routinely track plant-climate interactions for tea, coffee, citrus fruit, and berries of between 500 and 1500 volatile metabolites. The objective is to learn how changes in climate will affect the sensory and nutritional compounds in foods we consume. Toward this end, they employ GC/MS, GC-GC/MS, and GCxGC/MS all with olfactory detection to learn first-hand how changes in metabolite distribution and concentration are affected. Professor Robbat's research interests include the development of innovative analytical instruments, methods, and data analysis software used to solve a wide range of environmental problems, including: a subsurface sampling and analysis probe that detects pollutants without bringing soil or groundwater to the surface for analysis. This technology is used to rapidly characterize hazardous waste sites and to provide monitoring data during cleanup.

Research/Areas of Interest: Nineteenth-century African American literature; nineteenth-century American literature; critical bibliography; book history; print culture

Research/Areas of Interest: Comparative Politics, Africa, African-American Politics

Research/Areas of Interest: Comparative constitutional law European studies International relations