Faculty

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Kathleen Camara

Arts, music and drama education and its impact on youth development in formal and informal settings; the development of arts programming to support positive development, cultural identity and resilience among youths in underserved communities; arts and social justice; family influences on children's learning and social development; quantitative and qualitative methods of research and mixed methods designs; program evaluation
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Alessandra Campana

Opera: staging, visuality, theatricality, performance and spectatorship. Film and Media Studies: sound and music editing; aesthetics and politics of synchronization; aurality of silent film; suture; Foley; Renoir, Ophuls, Visconti and Fellini; music video and animation
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Gregory Carleton

Twentieth-Century/Contemporary Russian Literature and Culture; Narratives of War, Russian and Comparative; Reception studies; Sexuality
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Ira Caspari-Gnann

Chemistry and STEM Education. In order to understand how and why successful teaching and learning of chemistry at the university level works, the Caspari research group focuses on analyzing students', teaching assistants' (TA), learning assistants' (LA), and instructors' reasoning, interactions, and culture. The group collects video data of classroom practices and conducts qualitative research interviews with instructors, TAs, LAs, and students to better understand how certain interactions and ways of reasoning lead to student sense making and learning. While zooming in and investigating how students connect aspects of chemistry, the group also zooms out and investigates classroom culture and how individual interactions and personal experiences integrate into larger systems of teaching and learning. The group uses this fundamental research as a theoretical basis for implementing teaching innovations and designing training opportunities in order to promote supportive learning environments for students that value and encourage their unique ways of being, knowing and doing.
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Maria Isabel Castro

Journalism and Literature; Journalistic crónicas (chronicles); Modernismo and Vanguardia; 20th Century Fantastic Literature; Boom and Post-Boon; Teaching Spanish as a Foreign Language.
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Virginia Chomitz

My work is centered on solutions-oriented research that leverages community goals and assets to respond to priority public health issues .I have 20-plus years of experience in community-engaged and school-based research in obesity prevention, healthy eating and physical activity promotion in the cities of Boston, Cambridge, Somerville and other cities and neighborhoods in Massachusetts. Examples of my active living research include assessing the impact of school physical education and physical activity programming on PA and obesity. Examples of healthy eating research include assessing the impact of school-based food service, gardening, farm-to-school, and curricular interventions on healthy eating and obesity. My dissemination activities have focused on bringing study results to the community through reports and presentations for use in rapid quality improvement cycles. My peer-reviewed publications reflect the pragmatic research and evaluation approach I have taken to contributing to community health improvement. My current research focuses on incorporating social determinants into promoting healthy eating and phys activity and ensuring the equitable reach and relevance of interventions for vulnerable populations. I am an active member of the Addressing Disparities in Asian Populations through Translational Research (ADAPT), a coalition of researchers and community agency leads dedicated to health equity and community health improvement in Boston Chinatown. Through this community-engagement, I am conducting research on Chinese children's healthy eating and physical activity in child-care and dental-clinic settings, as well as a study assessing relationships of health and housing conditions with residents who have recently moved to affordable housing units in Boston Chinatown. I am currently engaged with Shape Up Somerville to conduct a food system assessment designed to inform policies and programs to support healthy eating in that city. These studies set the stage for externally funded longitudinal research trials and for informing local programming and policies to address health disparities.
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Tatiana Chudakova

Medical anthropology, science and technology, environment, ethnicity and indigeneity, nationalism, post-socialism. Geographic focus: Russia; North Asia My first book, Mixing Medicines: the Politics of Health in Postsocialist Siberia (Fordham 2021), follows Russia's official medical sector's attempts to reinvent itself through state-led initiatives of "medical integration" that aim to recuperate indigenous therapeutic traditions associated with the state's ethnic and religious minorities. Based in Buryatia, a traditionally Buddhist region on the border of Russia and Mongolia known for its post-Soviet revival of "Tibetan medicine" and shamanism, the book traces the uneven terrains of encounter between indigenous healing, the state, and transnational medical flows. My current research project explores how the use of "smart drugs" reconfigures discourses and experiences of clinical, social, and work-related efficacy, as they circulate across borders and enter divergent pharmaceutical, medical, and ethical regimes between Russia and the United States. Focused on a contentious category of pharmaceuticals labeled "nootropics" – a chemically fluid taxonomic classification that encompasses a variety of synthetic and naturally-derived substances designed to enhance cognitive functions – the project interrogates what types of selves, regimes of labor, therapeutic ideologies, and temporalities of embodiment these substances help mediate and enact.
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Craig Cipolla

North American archaeology; historical archaeology; collaborative Indigenous archaeology; Indigenous-colonial history; archaeological method & theory; colonialism; museums; material culture; archaeological theory; the history of archaeology; New England; Great Lakes My research focuses on the archaeology of Indigenous-colonial interactions in North America, particularly in New England and the Great Lakes. I combine archaeological patterns with written and oral records to learn about colonial-indigenous histories, placing them into critical dialogue with the long term Indigenous and European histories that shaped them. My research on colonialism addresses issues of ecology, identity, resistance, cultural continuity and change, and more. Much of my research is designed and carried out in collaboration with Indigenous nations. My current collaboration is with the Mohegan Tribe of Connecticut; we design and run an archaeological field school each summer on the Mohegan Reservation. There, we identify and study archaeological sites from a range of time periods, with special emphasis on Mohegan-colonial interactions in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and we train the next generations of archaeology students in collaborative archaeological method and theory.
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Kevin Clark

Analytical Chemistry, Separations, Mass Spectrometry, RNA Modifications, Neuro-analytical Chemistry. Our group is interested in the characterization of RNA modifications in the central nervous system and single cells. These naturally occurring modifications to RNA biopolymers play important roles in regulating protein translation, but little is known about their functions in the brain. We are focused on developing new approaches for chromatographic separations and mass spectrometry measurements of in small-volume samples such that they can be applied for the simultaneous profiling of multiple RNA modifications in single neurons. The Clark Lab is particularly interested in ionic liquid solvents and ion-tagged oligonucleotides as customizable materials for nucleic acid sample preparation that can be leveraged to improve the performance of downstream analysis methods. We combine our analytical methodologies with a powerful neurobiological model, the marine mollusk Aplysia californica, to investigate relationships between the dynamic landscape of RNA modifications and animal behavior, learning and memory, and function of the central nervous system in health and disease.