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:
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.
Assistant 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:
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:
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, 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 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:
Ellen Foley, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, International Development, Community and Environment Department
Assistant Professor of International Development and Social Change
Anthropology of development, gender, Islam, knowledge systems, medical anthropology and West Africa
Tel: 1-508-793-3815
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:
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 socio-political 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
Dr. Krefetz's most recent research is on low income or affordable housing policies in Massachusetts. Her other research interests include, U.S. urban politics and policies, urban and suburban housing policies, 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 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:
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:
Heather L. Roberts, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Practice, Department of Philosophy
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:
Paul Ropp, Ph.D.
Research Professor, Department of History
Chinese social and intellectual history
Tel: 1-508-793-7213
Email:
Laurie Ross, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, International Development, Community, and Environment Department
Assistant Professor of Community Development and Planning
Coordinator of the Graduate Program in Community Development and Planning
Social justice youth development, community based participatory research
Tel: 1-508-793-7642
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:
Srinivasan Sitaraman, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Department of Political Science
Program Faculty for Holocaust and Genocide Studies
On sabbatical, 2011
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:
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:
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.
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, 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:
Kristina Wilson, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Department of Visual and Performing Arts
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.
IDCE Research Professor
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
Susan Hanson, Ph.D.
Urban/social/economic geography, feminist geography
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.