Program Faculty
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:
Michael Addis, Ph.D.
Professor, Hiatt School of Psychology
Men’s mental health, masculinity, help-seeking behavior, lay theories of psychopathology and treatment
Tel: 1-508-793-7266
Email:
Margarete Arndt, D.B.A.
Professor, Graduate School of Management
Specialization: Management
Tel: 1-508-793-7668
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:
Belén Atienza, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Spanish, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures
Tel: (508) 793-7256
Email:
Denise Bebbington, Ph.D.
Assistant Research Professor of International Development and Social Change (IDSC)
Director, Women’s and Gender Studies Program (as of January 1, 2012)
Socio-Environmental Movement Organizations and Networks, Extractive Industries and Indigenous Peoples, Environmental Justice, Development Administration, Non-Governmental Organizations, Institutional Development, Gender and Development, Community-based Management of Natural Resources.
Tel: (508) 421-3731
Email:
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:
Sarah Buie, M.F.A.
Professor, Department of Visual and Performing Arts
Director of the Alice Coonley Higgins School of Humanities; Museum exhibition design; graphic design; sacred space; sacred Asian architecture
Tel: 1-508-793-7560
Email:
Michael Butler, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Department of Political Science
Foreign policy, conflict and cooperation, global governance, political violence and terrorism, international relations theory
Tel: 1-508-793-7186
Email:
Marcia Butzel, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Department of Visual and Performing Arts;
Adjunct Associate Professor; Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures
International cinema, film criticism and theory, relationships between film and the other arts
Tel: 1-508-793-7235
Email:
Ya-chen Chen, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures
Sino-Western comparative literature
Tel: 1-508-793-7239
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:
Carol D'Lugo, Ph.D.
Professor of Spanish, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures
Tel: 1-508-793-7494
Email:
Judith DeCew, Ph.D.
Professor and Chair, Department of Philosophy
Chair of Philosophy; Director, Ethics and Public Policy concentration, Theoretical and applied ethics, philosophy of law, social and political philosophy
Tel: 1-508-793-7326
Email:
Gino DiIorio, M.F.A.
Professor and Chair, Department of Visual and Performing Arts; Adjunct Professor, Department of English;
Director, Theater Arts Program
Program Director for Theater Arts, Acting in film and theater; writing plays and screenplays
Tel: 1-508-793-7456
Email:
Jody Emel, Ph.D.
Professor, School of Geography
Resource/environmental geography, animal geographies, feminist/social theory
Tel: 508-793-7317
Email:
Patricia Ewick, Ph.D.
Professor, Department of Sociology
Research methods, gender, law, deviance
Tel: 1-508-793-7529
Email:
Rachel Falmagne, Ph.D.
Professor, Hiatt School of Psychology
Modes of reasoning, personal epistemology and social location. Thought and societal discourses of knowledge. Feminist perspectives on mind, self, identity and development. Gender, self and thought. Psychology and society.
Tel: 1-508-793-7262
Email:
Odile Ferly, Ph.D.
Associate 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, International Development, Community, and Environment Department; Associate Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies
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:
Ellen Foley, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, International Development, Community and Environment Department
Associate Professor of International Development and Social Change
Neoliberal health reform in West Africa, gender and health disparities, reproductive health, HIV/AIDS, access to health-enabling resources, urban health, youth violence.
Tel: 1-508-421-3815
Email:
Beth Gale, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of French, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures
Tel: 1-508-421-3781
Email:
SunHee Kim Gertz, Ph.D.
Professor, Department of English;
Director, Leir Center in Luxembourg
Director of Graduate Studies; Western European literature of the late Middle Ages; semiotics and rhetorical theory
Tel: 1-508-793-7126
Email:
Abbie Goldberg, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Hiatt School of Psychology
Gender, family, and work; contextual influences on development and mental health (e.g., gender, sexual orientation, social class); gay and lesbian families; risk/resilience in adolescents
Tel: 508-793-7289
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:
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:
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.
Associate 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:
Sharon Krefetz, Ph.D.
Andrea B. and Peter D. Klein '64 Distinguished Professor; Associate Professor, Department of Political Science; Director, Steinbrecher Fellowship Program
Dr. Krefetz's most recent research is on 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:
Nina Kushner, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Department of History
Early modern European social and cultural history, the history of women and gender, and the history of sexuality
Email:
Deborah Martin, Ph.D.
Associate Director, School of Geography; 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:
Deborah Merrill, Ph.D.
Professor, Department of Sociology
Research methods, family, aging, medical sociology, social demography
Tel: 1-508-793-7284
Email:
Meredith Neuman, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Department of English; Adjunct Associate Professor, Department of History
American literature from the colonial period through the nineteenth century
Tel: 508-793-7298
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 history of American women, U.S. urban history from the colonial era to the 21st century, Gender and the American City, and American Consumer Culture. Her book, Home on the Rails: Women, the Railroad, and the Rise of Public Domesticity, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2005. Her current research looks at marriage and the consumer marketplace at the turn of the twentieth century, and she is working on a primary source reader on 19th-century interpretations of home.
Tel: 1-508-793-7216
Email:
Juan Pablo Rivera, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures
Tel: 1-508-793-7236
Email:
Heather L. Roberts, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Practice, Department of Education
Writing and literature, literacy, school-university partnerships, collaborative currculum development, school reform
Tel: 1-508-793-7146
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:
Laurie Ross, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, International Development, Community, and Environment Department
Associate Professor of Community Development and Planning
Associate Director for IDCE
Social justice youth development, community based participatory research
Tel: 1-508-793-7642
Email:
Srinivasan Sitaraman, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Department of Political Science
Program Faculty for Holocaust and Genocide Studies
United Nations and international law, international political economy, and international relations
Tel: 1-508-793-7684
Email:
Valerie Sperling, Ph.D.
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
Coordinator of Undergraduate Activities, Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies
American Jewish Studies, race and ethnicity, social stratification, comparative genocide, gender
Tel: 1-508-793-7241
Email:
Robert D. Tobin, Ph.D.
Professor, Department of Foreign Languages; Henry J. Leir Chair in Foreign Languages and Cultures
Department Chair: Comparative Literature;
Professor of German
Henry J. Leir Chair in Foreign Languages and Cultures
Tel: 1-508-793-7353
Email:
Alice Valentine, M.A.
Lecturer, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures
Instructor in Japanese
Virginia Mason Vaughan, Ph.D.
Professor, Department of English
Early modern English literature, especially Shakespeare and his contemporaries
Tel: 1-508-793-7144
Email:
Kristen Williams, Ph.D.
Professor and Chair, Department of Political Science
International relations theory, arms control and international security, nationalism and ethnic politics, U.S. foreign policy, women, gender and conflict.
Tel: 1-508-793-7446
Email:
Kristina Wilson, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Department of Visual and Performing Arts;
Adjunct Associate Professor, Department of History
Program Director for Art History; Nineteenth and twentieth century painting, modern design and architecture, and the history of photography
Tel: 508-793-7639
Email:
Research Faculty
Cynthia Enloe, Ph.D.
the interactions of feminism, women, militarized culture, war, politics and globalized economics in countries such as Japan, Iraq, the US, Britain, the Philippines, Canada, Chile and Turkey
Email:
Susan Hanson, Ph.D.
Urban/social/economic geography, feminist geography
Email:
Paul Ropp, Ph.D.
Research Professor, Department of History
Chinese social and intellectual history
Tel: 1-508-793-7213
Email:
Robert Ross, Ph.D.
Professor, Department of Sociology;
Director, International Studies Stream
Labor and labor rights in global context; urban structures; social policy
Tel: 1-508-793-7376
Email:
Barbara Thomas-Slayter, Ph.D.
IDCE Research Professor
Local institutions, women and public policy, peasant-state relations, gender issues, non-governmental organizations
Tel: 1-508-793-7454
Email:
Emeriti Faculty
Serena S. Hilsinger, Ph.D.