Race and Ethnic Relations

María Acosta Cruz, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Spanish and Chair, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures
Dr. Acosta-Cruz specializes in contemporary Latino and Latin American literature and culture, particularly the Hispanic Caribbean islands, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic in the 19th and 20th centuries. Her work focuses on issues around gender, identity, and history. Her special areas of research and teaching include Caribbean fiction, Latino literature in the United States and women's writing. With a degree in Comparative Literature, she has a special interest in issues related to ethnic studies and Hispanic women.
Tel: 1-508-793-7677
Email:

Kiran Asher, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, International Development, Community and Environment Department
Dr. Asher attempts to bring about social change by addressing issues of power related to gender, race, and historical location. Her research and teaching interests include: Culture and power, political economy, gender studies, the politics of biodiversity conservation, and Latin American studies. Her scholarly interests also address postcolonial, marxist, and feminist theories of power, and the nexus of nature/culture and politics.
Tel: 1-508-421-3823
Email:

Belen Atienza, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Spanish
Dr. Atienza's research interests include the relationship between social history and literature in the Spain of the Conquistadores. In particular she is interested in the literary representations of marginal groups – the poor, the ill, the outcast – as well as the conditions in which they lived. Other research interests include gender and women’s studies, history of theater, pedagogy, and cinema.
Tel: 508-793-7256
Email: batienza@clarku.edu

Parminder Bhachu, Ph.D.
Professor, Department of Sociology
Dr. Bhachu is interested in emergent cultural forms and cultural identitities in border zones and niche markets innovated from the margins by multiply-moved new global citizens. Her work deals with the production, circulation, and marketing of cultural products and commodities in multiple sites around the globe and their interpretation in local contexts. These research topics build on her long term interests in immigrant enterprises, multiple migrations and diasporas, race and ethnicity, cultural nationalisms, and consumer and popular cultures in global markets.
Tel: 1-508-793-7599
Email:

Ramon Borges-Mendez, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Community Development and Planning
Coordinator of the Graduate Program in Community Development and Planning
Dr. Borges-Mendez has written on various public policy issues: workforce development; labor markets; Latino CBO’s; Latino poverty and community development in the United States; immigration; decentralization and civil society matters in Latin America. His research and teaching interests include, Urban and regional economic development, labor markets and workforce development, political economy, Latin America, Latinos in the U.S. and immigration, governance, non-profits and institutional development, and research methods.
Tel: 508-421-3838
Email: rborgesmendez@clarku.edu

Paul Burke, Ph.D.
Professor of Classics, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures; Adjunct Professor, Department of History
Director of Ancient Civilization Program Dr. Burke teaches a wide variety of courses on the Clark campus, including: Introduction to Classical Greek, Jews and Christians in the Ancient World, Classical Mythology, Roman Art and Architecture, and Religious Experience in the Ancient World. He has taught a course on Roman archaeology in Clark's Luxembourg May Term and has directed numerous study-abroad tours of Southern Italy and Sicily. Dr. Burke is past president of the Vergilian Society which offers, through its Classical Summer School, courses on Greek and Roman history, art, and archaeology in Southern Italy, France, Israel, and elsewhere in the Mediterranean.
Tel: 1-508-793-7365
Email:

Carol D'Lugo, Ph.D.
Professor of Spanish, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures
Dr. D'Lugo's special areas of research and teaching include the Mexican and Argentine novel within her general specialty of Latin-American fiction. She recently published a book on the twentieth-century Mexican novel, The Fragmented Novel in Mexico: The Politics of Form . At this time she is exploring how current novels depict the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico and the conditions leading to it. Her other teaching interests include courses on translation and on shorter fiction.
Tel: 1-508-793-7494
Email:

Mark Davidson, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, School of Geography
Gentrification, urban politics, policymaking, comparative urbanism, critical socio-spatial theory
Tel: 508-793-7291
Email:

Debórah Dwork, Ph.D.
Rose Professor of Holocaust History, Department of History
Director of the Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies Historian Dr. Debórah Dwork, one of the first historians to study the Holocaust and to collect oral histories from Holocaust survivors, uses a variety of sources--including government and philanthropic agency archives, newspapers, letters, memoirs and interviews--to understand the causes and impacts of the Holocaust and other genocides of the twentieth century.
Tel: 1-508-793-7450
Email:

Jody Emel, Ph.D.
Associate Director and Professor, School of Geography
Resource/environmental geography, animal geographies, feminist/social theory
Tel: 508-793-7317
Email:

Odile Ferly, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of French, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures
Dr. Ferly's research interests are Caribbean literatures and cultures from a comparative perspective, including the Anglophone, Francophone, and Hispanic regions. She studies especially contemporary women's writing from the Caribbean and its diaspora. Her work focuses on the issues of race and gender in connection with history, language, and the Caribbean literary tradition. She teaches interdisciplinary courses on literatures and cultures from Francophone countries, on French popular culture, immigration in France and on Caribbean writing from comparative perspective.
Tel: 508-793-7723
Email:

William Fisher, Ph.D.
Professor and Director, International Development, Community, and Environment Department
Dr. Fisher's research centers on the social and environmental impact of large dams, forced displacement, transnational advocacy, competition over natural resources and non-governmental organizations. His research and work for such agencies as CARE, USAID, and the UNDP have taken him to several continents. Other research activities, mostly in South Asia, include ethnic associations, competition for natural resources, non-governmental associations, and the role of participation and community-based institutions in development planning and action.
Tel: 1-508-421-3765
Email:

Everett Fox, Ph.D.
Allen M. Glick Chair in Judaic and Biblical Studies, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures; Director, Jewish Studies Program
Director of Jewish Studies Concentration Dr. Fox's main scholarly focus is the rhetoric and internal coherence of the Hebrew Bible, and how they may be brought out in translation. He is also interested in how the Bible has been transformed at each stage by generations of Israelites, Jews, and Christians. He teaches courses in which texts serve as windows to the attitudes and concerns of Jews through the ages. Dr. Fox's activities in translation have led him to some unexpected places. He was a religious consultant on the animated film Prince of Egypt, and has been collaborating with an American-Israeli artist, Schwebel, who sets the David stories against the backdrop of 1980s Jerusalem.
Tel: 1-508-793-7355
Email:

Janette T. Greenwood, Ph.D.
Professor, Department of History
Dr. Greenwood teaches a variety of courses in American history including American race and ethnicity, history of the South, Reconstruction, and the Gilded Age. She is the author of First Fruits of Freedom: The Migration of Former Slaves and Their Search for Equality in Worcester, Massachusetts, 1862-1900, University of North Carolina Press, 2010, which examines the Civil War-era migration of former slaves to Central Massachusetts. Her first book, Bittersweet Legacy (UNC Press, 2004) explores the emergence and interaction of the black and white middle class in a New South city.
Tel: 1-508-793-7286
Email:

Anita Hausermann Fabos, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Department of International Development, Community, and Environment
Dr. Fábos is an anthropologist who has conducted research on issues of ethnicity and race, gender, refugees in urban settings, immigration and naturalization policy, Arab nationalism, and Islam. Her research interests include, ethnicity and race, gender, urban refugees, Sudanese immigrants and refugees, Middle Eastern immigration and naturalisation policies, transnationalism and citizenship, transnational Islam, narratives of exile, and Hungarian refugees.
Tel: 508-793-7201
Email: afabos@clarku.edu

Betsy P. Huang, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Department of English
Dr. Huang researches and teaches representations of ethnic identities and politics in 20th-century American literature and popular culture. Her scholarship focuses on literary treatments of ethnicity in narratives about immigration, assimilation, and citizenship, and she is particularly interested in the ways in which the "ethnic" and the "American" persist as mutually exclusive terms in the American cultural consciousness. She also investigates the affinities between ethnic literature and science fiction, two bodies of work that, in her view, share similar critical and theoretical aims in their treatments of social, biological, and cultural difference.
Tel: 508-793-7145
Email:

Lene Jensen, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Hiatt School of Psychology
One line of Dr. Jensen’s research is in the area of moral development. This work takes a “cultural-developmental” approach, addressing how moral reasoning is both culturally and developmentally situated. Her work has included members of diverse religious communities in India and the United States. A second line of research addresses cultural identity development in the contexts of migration and global change. A current project with adolescents and their parents who have immigrated to the United States from El Salvador and India, examines their cultural identity development as well as ties between cultural identity and engagement with civil society, school, and family.
Tel: 1-508-793-7271
Email:

Fern Johnson, Ph.D.
Professor, Department of English
Dr. Johnson is a sociolinguist specializing in the study of ethnicity, race, and gender in discourse. Her teaching and research center on the relationship of cultural systems to language-in-use, especially ideological codes in discourse and language policy issues. She has written on topics including cultural models for understanding language diversity, language policy, gender and discourse, and the language of advertising as cultural text.
Tel: 1-508-793-7142
Email:

Esther Jones, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, E. Franklin Frazier Chair in African American Literature, Theory, and Culture, Department of English
Dr. Jones specializes in the study of black women writers in the Americas, with a focus on the intersections of race, gender, class, and nationality and theorizations of difference. She has a particular interest in speculative literatures and science fiction by feminists and writers of color, and how such texts attempt to theorize and/or critique how difference operates within contemporary culture.
Tel: 1-508-793-7141
Email:

Lisa Kasmer, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Department of English
Dr. Kasmer specializes in gender studies and women's writing in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British literature and culture. She is particularly interested in the way in which the sociopolitical milieu and print culture between 1760-1840 shaped gender politics in Britain. Some of her courses include Making Gender in Eighteenth-Century British Literature, Gender and Genre in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel, Jane Austen in Contemporary Culture, and The Terror of the Gothic.
Tel: 508-793-7136
Email:

Willem Klooster, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Department of History
Dr. Klooster specializes in the history of the Atlantic world (15th-19th centuries). He teaches classes on comparative colonialism (the Americas), the age of Atlantic revolutions (1776-1824), and Caribbean history. His recent research includes, Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative History (New York University Press, 2009) and Migration, Trade, and Slavery in an Expanding World: Essays in Honor of Pieter Emmer (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009).
Tel: 1-508-421-3768
Email:

Sharon Krefetz, Ph.D.
Andrea B. and Peter D. Klein '64 Distinguished Professor; Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Political Science
Dr. Krefetz's most recent research is on low income or affordable housing policies in Massachusetts, in several other states, and in Israel. Her other research interests include U.S. urban politics and policies, suburban politics, and women and politics.
Tel: 1-508-793-7300
Email:

Thomas Kuehne, Ph.D.
Professor, Department of History; Strassler Family Chair in the Study of Holocaust History
Dr. Kuehne teaches Modern European and German History. His academic and research work is concerned with the relation of war, genocide, and society, with long-term traditions of political culture of Central Europe, above all with the problem of locating the Holocaust and Nazi Germany in the social and cultural history of the 20th century.
Tel: 1-508-793-7523
Email:

Stephen M. Levin, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Department of English
Dr. Levin specializes in contemporary British and postcolonial literature, transnational cultural studies, and critical and literary theory. His research focuses on the ways in which twentieth-century global conditions have shaped contemporary culture and produced new discourses of self and identity. Dr. Levin teaches introductory and advanced courses on Anglophone world fiction, contemporary British literature, English poetry, and cultural studies and social theory. His recent courses have included "Fictions of Empire," "Contemporary British Fiction and Culture," and "Webs and Labyrinths: Imagining Globalization in Literature."
Tel: 508-793-7147
Email:

Olga Litvak, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Department of History; Michael and Lisa Leffell Chair in Modern Jewish History
Dr. Litvak specializes in Eastern European and modern Jewish history. She has written and lectured on a wide range of subjects related to the study of Russian Jewry, including urban violence, literary and artistic life, war, revolution and migration. She has also been pursuing the study of Jewish participation in the making of modern Russian visual culture.
Tel: 1-508-793-7254
Email:

Deborah Martin, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, School of Geography
Director of Urban Development and Social Change Concentration
Urban geography, social movements (particularly neighborhood activism), place identity, local politics, legal geography, and qualitative methodologies.
Tel: 508-793-7104
Email:

Constance Montross, Ph.D.
Director, Language Arts Resource Center
Dr. Montross is located on the 4th floor of Goddard Library. She is also a part-time Lecturer of Spanish.
Email:

Ravi K. Perry, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science
Director of Race and Ethnic Relations Concentration
Dr. Perry’s teaching interests include African-American politics, urban and local politics, race and representation, American politics and public policy and contemporary political theory. His current research foci include: the representation of Black interests and public policy service delivery of African American mayors in medium-sized U.S. cities, and the intertwined relationship between scholarship and activism for social science scholars.
Tel: 508-793-7797
Email:

Paul W. Posner, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Department of Political Science
Dr. Posner's current research focuses on democratization and political participation in developing regions, particularly Latin America. He is also interested in the impact of economic globalization and related state reforms on social organization and collective action in both developing and developed countries, and in comparative environmental policy and democratization in developing countries. Dr. Posner is also affiliated with the Latin American and Latino Studies Concentration.
Tel: 1-508-793-7253
Email:

Ousmane Power-Greene, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Department of History
Dr. Power-Greene teaches courses on African American history, especially those that deal with African American social and political movements. His dissertation examined debates over emigration and colonization within the Abolition Movement. Currently, he is researching twentieth century African American internationalism in the thought and activism of Hubert H. Harrison.
Tel: 1-508-421-3725
Email:

Amy Richter, Ph.D.
Associate Professor and Chair, Department of History
Dr. Richter specializes in 19th and 20th century American and cultural history, with an emphasis on women's and urban history. Her teaching repertoire includes the United States survey course, history of American women, and U.S. urban history from the colonial era to the 21st century. She recently started work on a volume of essays exploring the cultural connections between women, consumerism and U.S. overseas expansion in the 1890s.
Tel: 1-508-793-7216
Email:

Dianne Rocheleau, Ph.D.
Professor, School of Geography
Environment and development, political ecology, forestry, agriculture and landscape change, with an emphasis on the role of gender, class and "popular" vs. "formal" science in resource allocation and land use.
Tel: 508-793-7176
Email:

Robert Ross, Ph.D.
Professor, Department of Sociology Director, International Studies Stream
Director of the International Studies Stream Dr. Ross has worked on the political economy of urban development and the analysis of global capitalism. He still does occasional work on the social movements of the 1960s, and is frequently interviewed about his role in those movements. Dr. Ross has worked as a speechwriter and policy advisor, and he writes occasional commentary for magazines. Dr. Ross is among the founders of the program in Urban Development and Social Change, and is also an affiliate of the Community Development and Planning program.
Tel: 1-508-793-7376
Email:

Marianne Sarkis, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of International Development and Social Change
Dr. Sarkis is an applied medical anthropologist who is currently conducting research on the contentious relationship between African women refugees, health care professionals and biomedicine. Her research examines the link between acculturation, reproductive experiences, and strategies and fertility rates among African immigrants in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Tel: 508-421-3898
Email: msarkis@clarku.edu

Valerie Sperling, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Department of Political Science
Dr. Sperling teaches a variety of courses in comparative politics, including Russian politics; revolution and political violence; mass murder and genocide under communism; transitions to democracy; globalization and democracy; and introduction to women’s studies. Her research interests include globalization and accountability, social movements, gender politics, patriotism and militarism, and state-building in the post-communist region.
Tel: 1-508-793-7679
Email:

Ora Szekely, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science
Dr. Szekely's research and teaching interests include Non-state military actors, the politics of the Middle East, mass violence and civilian protection, new media, propaganda, and political mobilization.
Tel: 508-793-7360
Email:

Shelly Tenenbaum, Ph.D.
Professor and Chair, Department of Sociology Adjunct Professor, Jewish Studies
Chair of Sociology Department ; Coordinator of Undergraduate Activities, Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies
Dr. Tenenbaum's research on ethnic enterprise, mutual aid, gender, education, and identity intersects the broad areas of sociology of American Jews and historical sociology. Her book, A Credit to their Community: Jewish Loan Societies in the United States, 1880-1945, explores the relationship between immigrant Jewish credit networks and ethnic enterprise. Dr. Tenenbaum conducts research on such wide ranging topics as Jewish self-help societies and attitudes toward a controversial student assessment exam.
Tel: 1-508-793-7241
Email:

Jaan Valsiner, Ph.D.
Professor, Hiatt School of Psychology
Dr. Valsiner is a developmental scientist who is one of the core members of the Socio-Evolutionary-Cultural Psychology Graduate Program (SEC) within the department. He takes interest in the cultural organization of mental and affective processes in human development across the whole life span. Another domain of his research involves psychology's history as a resource of ideas for contemporary advancement of the discipline and in theoretical models of how human beings are carriers of culture.
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Johanna Ray Vollhardt, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Hiatt School of Psychology
Group-based victimization; inclusive and exclusive victim consciousness; acknowledgment; prosocial behavior between groups (especially between minority and victim groups); psychology of genocide
Tel: 1-508-793-7278
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Kristen Williams, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Department of Political Science; Chair of the Faculty
Chair of Women's Studies; International relations theory, arms control and international security, nationalism and ethnic politics, U.S. foreign policy
Tel: 1-508-793-7446
Email:

Nicola Curtin , Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Hiatt School of Psychology
The role of social identity and individual differences in commitments to creating social change, with a particular interest in ally and coalitional activism.
Tel: 1-508-793-7261
Email: