The Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora Welcomes New Chair and New Faculty in 2025
Dr. Dorothy Wang – New Chair of the Department of Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora
Effective July 1, 2025, Dr. Dorothy Wang has begun her term as the new Department Chair for RCD. Dr. Wang is an Associate Professor in RCD and an Affiliate of the Department of English. She joined Tufts this past spring from Williams College where she was a Professor and Chair in the American Studies Program. Before Williams, she was a faculty member at Northwestern University and Wesleyan University. Dr. 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. She received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.
This Fall 2025, she will be teaching RCD-0179-01: Contemporary Asian American and Asian British Poetry.
New Part Time Lecturers
Kouross Esmaeli is a researcher, educator, and media producer whose documentaries and short-form news reports have appeared on Democracy Now!, Al Jazeera English, Press TV, Current TV, and Paper Tiger TV. He received his PhD from NYU’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication in 2018. His dissertation, “Testing Technology: Digital Mediation of Education in New York City,” will soon be published under the title Schools & Screens: American Public Education in the Digital Age. After teaching at the American University of Beirut, he served as a Visiting Professor of Media Studies at Pitzer College and Pomona College, before joining us as a Part-Time Lecturer for RCD at Tufts.
J. Brandon Pelcher’s larger research and teaching interests involve the complex cultural formations of various identities and how those formations have been and can be subverted in order to create a more egalitarian society. In addition to work on the avant-garde and eco-critical thought, this research focus has been directed towards the experiences of Afro-Europeans and the African diaspora beyond the Middle Passage. His course, Black Germany, focuses the peculiarities of those experiences in the part of Europe that is so deeply tied to ideas of whiteness.
Dr. Pelcher will be teaching RCD-0094-08: Black Germany in Fall 2025.
Kali Tambreé is a Part-Time Lecturer in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora. Her research interests traverse Black Studies, Gender and Queer Studies, History, and Critical Theory. Her scholarship and teaching are guided by her study of transAtlantic slavery and its not-so "afterlife." She is from Baltimore, and received her Ph.D. in Gender Studies from UCLA.
Dr. Tambreé will be teaching AFR 92: Introduction to Africana Studies and RCD-0094-12: Introduction to Carceral Studies in Fall 2025.