Faculty

Sarah Luna

Associate Professor and Director of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality

Sex work, migration, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, borders, Mexico, United States My research focuses upon how the US/Mexico border is both productive of and made legible by socially meaningful forms of difference through categories such as gender, race, and sexuality. My first book, Love in the Drug War: Selling Sex and Finding Jesus on the Mexico-US Border, is based on twelve months of ethnographic research conducted from 2008 to 2009 in the Mexican border city of Reynosa, Tamaulipas during the height of the drug war. My analysis of two groups of migrants – Mexican sex workers and the white American missionaries who seek to love them – reveals how both groups create value through relations of obligation and love. I am in the early stages of two research projects. The first examines gender and sexuality-based activism in Mexico City. The second is about gender and fitness culture in the United States.

Laura Baffoni-Licata

Senior Lecturer

20th-Century Italian Poetry; Italian Women Writers; Italian Literature of the Holocaust; Political Ideology in Italian Literature

Nancy Bauer

Feminism, Existentialism and Phenomenology, Philosophical Method, Philosophy and Film

Hilary Binda

Senior Lecturer

Hilary's current research aims to support the development of educational equity and access as a form of racial and economic justice. In addition to a formative research study on the impact and efficacy of higher education in prison programming, Hilary's recent research includes a longitudinal study of reentry and the impact of specific types of programming offered in MyTERN on a person's health and well-being. Along with her research partner Professor of Sociology Jill Weinberg, she has facilitated several student publications of their own work based on their involvement with TUPIT.

Freeden Blume Oeur

Associate Professor

My research engages feminist and humanist insights to enrich a Sociology in the tradition of W. E. B. Du Bois, one committed to understanding the persistence of anti-Black racism today.

Jennifer Burton

Professor of the Practice

Julie Dobrow

Distinguished Senior Lecturer

Children and media; ethnicity/gender and media; adolescents and media use; women's history and biography I am currently working on a three-tiered interdisciplinary research project along with Chip Gidney, Mary Casey, and Cynthia Smith at Eliot-Pearson, as well as faculty in several other departments at Tufts. The first piece of this project is a long-running content analysis of children's animated programming. We are updating prior work we've done that investigates images of race, ethnicity and gender in children's animated programming using both content and sociolinguistic analysis. The second part of this research is an exploration of why stereotyping persists in children's media. We are examining this through intensive interviews with content creators, writers, directors, vocal casting directors, and actors. The third part of the project is empirical research we're conducting with children, to see how children make sense of gender, race, and ethnicity in the animated programs they see. My applied work includes doing many media literacy workshops for parents and for children and for children in a variety of settings, and consulting work with colleagues at GBH, one of the leading creators of children's educational media. I have written about children and media issues in a variety of academic and popular venues. My other research is historical in nature. I serve as co-PI, along with Jennifer Burton, of the Half the History Project at Tufts, which utilizes short-form biography, film, and podcast to tell the untold and under-told stories of women's lives. I've written one biography of the relatively unknown mother/daughter team who made Emily Dickinson into one of the most-known women anywhere in the world. After Emily: Two Remarkable Women and the Legacy of America's Greatest Poet was published by WW Norton in 2018. My next dual biography, Crossing Indian Country: From the Wounded Knee Massacre to the Unlikely Marriage of Ohíye'Sa, Charles Alexander Eastman, will be published by NYU Press in Fall 2025.

Virginia Drachman

Arthur Stern, Jr. Professor of American History

Women in the Professions in America; GIrlhood in Post World War II America; Love and War in World War II; Medicine and Society in Amrica

Lee Edelman

Fletcher Professor of English Literature

Literary Theory (especially Queer Theory, Psychoanalysis, and Post-structuralism) Film Studies

Jennifer Eyl

Associate Professor

Pauline Studies, New Testament, Christian Origins Divinatory Practices and so-called "Magic" Gender & Sexuality in Antiquity Hellenistic Philosophy and Moral Psychology Apocryphal Acts and the Greek Novels Saint and Relic Veneration Constructions of the Afterlife Translation Theory and New Testament Studies Theory of Religion Digital Humanities

Kerri Greenidge

Mellon Associate Professor

African American History and African Diasporic History; African American Intellectual and Political Thought; African American and African Diasporic Literatures; African American and African Diasporic Histories / Literatures of New England

Barbara Wallace Grossman

American popular entertainment, musical theatre, women in theatre, the Holocaust/Genocide on stage and screen, voice and speech, stage directing, theatre and social change

Judith Haber

Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drama Renaissance poetry Gender and sexuality studies

Brenna Heitzman

Senior Lecturer

French language, teaching writing, instructional uses of technology, the 17th-, 18th-, and early 19th-century French literature, motherhood and female mentoring, Rousseau and the Enlightenment, women's writing, defining genre, publishing history

Sonia Hofkosh

Associate Professor

British Romantic poetry and prose Feminist/Gender Theory Visual and Material Culture

Margaret Hutaff

Senior Lecturer

Christian Studies

Ronna Johnson

American literature; postwar movements in U.S.; arts and culture; the Beat generation; feminist theory; studies of 20th century women; intersectionality

Kareem Khubchandani

Associate Professor and Interim Department Chair of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies

Performance Studies; queer studies; South Asian studies

Melinda Latour

Associate Professor

Expertise: Musicology; Research interests: 16th and 17th c. Music; the Cultural History of Philosophy; Stoicism and Neostoicism; Tone and Timbre; Mexican Music.

Joseph Litvak

Harriet H. Fay Professor of Literature

Victorian Literature Criticism and Theory Comedy Film and Cultural Studies

Zarin Machanda

Usen Family Career Development Assistant Professor

wild chimpanzee health and behavior, primate conservation, evolution of leadership

Lily Mengesha

Fletcher Foundation Assistant Professor of Dramatic Literature

Critical Indigenous Studies, Performance Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies

Heather S. Nathans

Nathan and Alice Gantcher Professor of Judaic Studies

Race, Gender, and Ethnicity on the US Stage; Theatre and Social Justice; Prison Education

Stephan Pennington

Associate Professor

Popular Music and Jazz of the United States/Europe, African American Music, Transgender Vocality, Issues of Appropriation, and the Performance of Musical Identity with special attention to race, class, gender, and sexuality.

Ellen Pinderhughes

Families and children in challenging circumstances; parenting and family functioning among diverse families; ethnic-racial socialization processes; cultural and contextual influences; child and youth outcomes; adoption and foster care

Sarah Pinto

Professor and Department Chair of Anthropology

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.

Shameka Powell

Associate Professor

Educational Equity, Teacher Education, Critical Race Theory, Social Context of Schooling, Urban Schooling, Multicultural Education

Alisha Rankin

Professor and Department Chair of History

Early Modern Europe, the History of Science and Medicine, Women's History, the History of the Body and Sexuality

Jessica Remedios

Associate Professor

Social Cognition

Elizabeth Remick

Comparative Politics, East Asia, family policy

Claire Schub

Distinguished Senior Lecturer

20th and 21st Century French and Francophone literature, Women's Studies, Film Studies

Alexandra Shraytekh

Mellon Bridge Assistant Professor

Sarah Sobieraj

Media, Political Culture, Extreme Incivility, Digital Abuse and Harassment, Public Discourse, Social Movements

Jill Weinberg

Associate Professor

Crime, Law, Deviance; Sports; the Body; Research Methods

Man Xu

Associate Professor

Middle Period China, Late Imperial China, Women's History, the History of Material Culture

Adriana Zavala

Modern and Contemporary U.S. Latinx and Mexican art; Latin American art; Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora