A Taste of Tufts: A Sampling of Faculty Research
Fridays from Noon to 1:00pm
Light lunch will be provided
All presentations will be held in Pearson 106

February 1, 2013 Sam Sommers Psychology Few contemporary social issues are as challenging (and potentially controversial) as those surrounding diversity. Discourse on the topic often touches on a wide range of perspectives, including the historical, personal, ethical, and Constitutional. Too infrequently, however, do we also consider the actual effects of diverse settings on social, behavioral, and cognitive outcomes. This talk will present just such an empirical analysis by reviewing a series of research experiments designed to examine the factors that predict group- and individual-level outcomes in racially diverse settings.

February 15, 2013 Nina Gerassi-Navarro Romance Languages Nina Gerassi-Navarro works on nation building, outlaws, travel narratives, and visual culture in Latin America. Her current research focuses on how knowledge circulated between the United States, Brazil and Mexico regarding science, politics and aesthetics. Working with photography, museum collections, travel narratives and personal letters her talk explores the debates that took place between Brazil and the United States regarding science and race in the mid-nineteenth century.

February 22, 2013 Anthony Monaco President Dr. Monaco will present about the genetics of neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism, language impairment and dyslexia.

March 1, 2013 Mary Davis Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning Economics as a social science is a flexible discipline that explores aspects of human behavior beyond the business and financial realm. In particular, economics has proven especially insightful in understanding behavior as it relates to human health and the environment. This talk will explore research where economics has contributed to various human health and environment interactions, including a discussion of air pollution, occupational health, and children's health.

March 29, 2013 Ayanna Thomas Psychology We frequently learn more about memory from its failures rather than its successes. As such, my research has delved into the various contexts that result in episodic memory failures. I take the theoretical perspective that memory decisions are inferential in nature. An episodic event is not represented as a single unit, but rather a distribution of elements that can be differentially accessed at retrieval. Accessibility to those elements influences both memory and metamemorial decisions. By influencing the accessibility of specific elements, or attributes, I am able to bias retrieval. The result is memory and metamemorial failures. My research focuses on three specific situations related to retrieval bias: bias resulting from accessible encoded attributes; bias resulting from automatic processing at encoding and/or retrieval; controlling bias by improving retrieval monitoring.

April 5, 2013 Ken Garden Religion How can the thought of a Medieval Muslim thinker be relevant still today? The Persian Muslim Scholar Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 1111) is a giant of the Islamic tradition of stature of an Aquinas or an Augustine. Some critics, East and West, have accused him in the past century of killing scientific inquiry in the Islamic world through his campaign against philosophy in his book The Incoherence of the Philosophers. Had it not been for al-Ghazali, they suggest, Modernity would have emerged in the Islamic world rather than the Christian. But is this so? A closer look at his writings shows that his treatment of philosophy was much more complex, that the very significance of philosophy in Medieval Islam was very different than what we imagine it to be, and that the reason for Modernity's emergence in the West and not the East lies elsewhere.

April 12, 2013 Noe Montez Drama and Dance Noe Montez works on the intersections of performance, memory and trauma in the contemporary Argentine theatre. His current research investigates the generation of theatre-makers born after the Argentine dictatorship of 1976-1973 in order to examine how these artists are re-contextualizing and challenging some of the "official" narratives of this period in Argentina's history. Working with play scripts and archival footage, his talk will explore ways in which several of the nation's best writers and directors are contesting the very nature of archival material and calling attention to historical subjectivity and curatorial manipulation.

April 19, 2013 David Harris Provost and Senior Vice President Dr. Harris has broad research interests in social stratification, race and ethnicity, social identity, and other areas of public policy. His work has applied theories from sociology, economics, and psychology to empirical studies of racial and ethnic disparities in socioeconomic status, the fluidity of race, and racial and nonracial determinants of residential mobility. In addition to publications in academic journals, public policy outlets, and major national newspapers, he is editor of The Colors of Poverty: Why Racial and Ethnic Disparities Persist (Russell Sage Foundation 2008), and the lead author of Eliminating Racial Disparities in College Completion and Achievement: Current Initiatives, New Ideas, and Assessment (Teagle Foundation 2006). Dr. Harris holds a B.S. in Human Development and Social Policy, and a Ph.D. in Sociology, from Northwestern University.