Wellesley College
AC-9: Academic Research

Africana Studies - Ophera Davis: Research focuses on the resilience and recovery of Mississippi Black women survivors of Hurricane Katrina; includes psychology, disaster studies, women's studies, and education. - Layli Maparyan: scholar-activist work interweaves threads from the social sciences and the critical disciplines, incorporating basic and applied platforms around a common theme of integrating identities and communities in peaceable, ecologically sound, and self-actualizing ways - Filomina Clarice Steady: global gender systems and hierarchies; Africa and African Diaspora; social and environmental justice; international consulting Anthropology - Justin Armstrong: cultural geography and human ecology, ethnographic perspectives on globalization and neoliberalism, and the anthropology of space and place - Susan Ellison: conflict as a window onto the entanglements between foreign aid agendas, the justice sector, and the lived experience of violence and economic insecurity in urban Latin America; environmental justice and indigenous rights movements, particularly around mining issues, water privatization, and persistent forms of socio-political exclusion affecting indigenous Bolivians - Anastasia Karikasidou: issues of ethnicity. national consciousness and agrarian transformations - Adam van Arsdale: the evolution of biological variation and its connections to culture through the fossil record - Benjamin Vining: the cumulative, continued impacts of pre-hispanic land use patterns on Andean environments, and how ancient societies responded to episodes of climatic stress. Biological Sciences - Andrea Sequeira: genetic impact of introduced species in an ecosystem that is hailed as an example for conservation efforts while under increasing pressure from tourism and development: The Galápagos Archipelago. - Heather Mattila: Studies the organization of animal societies, insect communication, and the evolution of cooperation, using the honey bee as a model. - Jeff Hughes: Ecology, Parasitology, Marine Biology - Marcia Thomas: conservation and sustainable agriculture; environmental science, plant biology, and geospatial analysis - Vanja Klepac-Seraj: understanding how microbial communities are formed, their stability and resilience in relation to particular environmental variables, microbe-microbe interactions, and how these interactions shape evolution in these populations. Chemistry - Rachel Stanley: Research on inorganic environmental chemistry, especially gas tracers and climate change. Teaching includes inorganic, introductory, and aquatic chemistry. Computer Science - Orit Shaer: Explores new human-computer interaction techniques that provide seamless interfaces between people, computers, and the physical world Economics - Pinar Keskin-Bonatti: Applied micro-economist focusing primarily on the environmental challenges facing decision makers in developed and developing countries - Julie Ann Matthaei: Marxist-feminist-anti-racist-ecological economist, specializing in women, gender, feminism, and work, and involved in research about and promotion of the emerging solidarity economy. - Kartini Shastry: Conducts research on economic development, including questions related to education, health, and savings behavior. Environmental Studies - Beth DeSombre: Why people are behaving the way they do environmentally, using social science explanations - Dan Brabander: Sustainable urban agriculture - Jay Turner: Social dimensions of batteries and sustainability - Kristina Jones: Ecological approaches to agriculture and plant/animal interactions, including humans. - Monica Higgins: Risks of contaminant mixtures in the environment. - Marianne Moore: Dimensions of biodiversity and climate change in aquatic systems. - Alden Griffith: invasive plant population dynamics and environmental influences - Katie Goodall: Research focuses on biodiversity conservation, landscape ecology, and farmer livelihoods within agro- ecosystems, mostly in Latin America. Geosciences - James Besancon: Continuing study of physical model and salt content of local community and campus water supply, ICP-OES analysis of water; Ion chromatography. History - Katherine Grandjean: Historian of early American and Native American history, English colonialism and cultural encounters, environmental history, and violence in American history. Studio Art/ Art - Andrew Mowbray: grows gourds and in molds them into modular pieces as they grow. He is using the modules to build different type of structures. - David Kelley is conducting research on the impacts of the Keystone Pipe Project. - Daniela Rivera: the ecological impact and complex economical, cultural, social and political impact of copper mining in Chile, looking specifically at the exploitation of copper in Chuquicamata, the largest open pit mine on earth. - Rebecca Bedell: explores the relations between art and science, and the place of sentimentalism in American art. Education - Soo Hong: community and family engagement with schools and teachers engagement with families and communities - Noah Rubin: youth participatory action research Philosophy - Erich Matthes: environmental preservation, ecological restoration, and ways of valuing nature - Helena de Bres: political and moral philosophy, with a focus on questions of distributive justice in global politics. Other areas include: duties of the affluent toward the global poor, the fairness of the international trading regime, the moral justification for the state system, and the question of whether or not we are morally obliged to purchase local food. Political Science - Craig Murphy: history of voluntary consensus standard setting -- the kind of stakeholder "deliberative technocracy" that has become the major way of reaching international agreements every since the US has backed away from intergovernmental cooperation.  This is work I'm doing with JoAnne Yates at MIT's Sloan School. - Robert Paarlberg: Researcher on food and agricultural policy, with a focus on farming technologies and poverty in the developing world. - Laura Grattan: Researches and teaches political theory, with a focus on grassroots organizing and the politics of race, ethnicity, and culture. - Nadya Hajj: Research driven by this question: What are the origins of institutions among marginalized groups in anarchic systems? Examines the origins of institutions, namely property rights, in Palestinian refugee camps. Specifically, I examine the formation of property rights with respect to private assets (housing and construction industry sectors) and shared resources (water and electricity). - Hahrie Han: politics of social policy, civic engagement, engagement organizing, political activism, health and environmental politics, polarization, and elections. - Lois Wasserspring: Focused on the politics of development, inequality and democracy in Latin America; issues of rural development and the impact of both “development” and inequality on women’s lives. Quantitative Reasoning - Corrine Taylor: QR and climate science; pedagogy that uses QR at different levels to examine climate science, culminating with independent student research, exemplified by student research with SEA Semester Russian - Marshall Goldman: Studies economic and political developments in Russia, especially the energy sector and how it affects Vladimir Putin. - Thomas Hodge: nexus of Russian literature and Russian music in the 1800s, and to the history of nineteenth-century Russian nature-writing and hunting literature. Sociology - Peggy Levitt: studies international migration, transnational studies, development, religion, globalization, global arts and culture. Women and Gender Studies - Charlene Galarneau: Ethics of US health care, health policy, and public health w/emphases on gender, race, and class; bioethics; justice theories; global health.

Going through the faculty biographies in each department