Dear Faculty, Staff, Students, and Friends of CSSH:
I’m pleased to share this issue of our newsletter alongside a milestone for our college—a new Vision and Strategic Framework that articulates who we are and why we matter at this extraordinary moment for higher education. The framework reflects our values as a human-centered, public-facing, and globally minded college. It affirms our commitment to rigorous empirical and interpretive research, to teaching that cultivates critical thinking and ethical reasoning, and to engagement that extends beyond our campuses.
As the President noted, “In an age of agentic AI, when human centrality can no longer be taken for granted, it must be continuously reaffirmed – and that reaffirmation is what we do in CSSH. Our ambition is to build a model of higher education that foregrounds the irreducible importance of human meaning, judgment, and values, and in so doing, helps to reestablish public trust in research, teaching, and scholarship.”
Summer Highlights
As we begin a new academic year full of momentum, I am proud of everything our faculty, students, staff, and alumni have accomplished over the past few months.
This summer marked the official completion of our merger with Marymount Manhattan College (MMC), and I’m thrilled to welcome our new CSSH colleagues as Northeastern University – New York City opens its doors on the Upper East Side. We are also welcoming the second cohort of New York City Scholars – first-year students who begin their Northeastern journey in NYC before joining us in Boston – a pathway that began with over 300 students last year. The AI + Data Ethics Summer Training Program (AIDE Summer) brought 13 fully funded PhD students to Boston to spend nine weeks working with faculty to develop expertise in the ethics and philosophy of AI. Supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, AIDE Summer seeks to increase the capacity for robust, technically informed research on key philosophical issues related to AI. Participants engaged with faculty and gained expertise through a faculty led seminar, a coding bootcamp, professional development workshops, and a speaker and networking series. Participants covered topics that ranged from algorithmic fairness to the impact of AI on scientific practice. AIDE Summer closed with participants sharing research works-in-progress developed over the course of the summer. AIDE Summer is led by John Basl, Associate Professor of Philosophy, and former Northeastern Professor Katie Creel.
“I consider them [AIDE Summer] the single best training pipeline right now for early career scholars working in AI ethics.” -Meghan Sullivan, AIDE Summer Participant; Director, Notre Dame Institute for Ethics and the Common Good
New Arrivals and Program Expansion
Please join me in welcoming new faculty to our college this year. Among them is Dan Traficonte, who joins us as Associate Professor of Law and Public Policy, with a joint appointment with the School of Law. Professor Traficonte’s research focuses on the political economy of innovation and technology development. Alberto Moran-Vallejo joins CSSH as an Assistant Teaching Professor in our World Languages and Cultures Program with a focus on medical interpreting education.
Our Master of Science in Criminology and Criminal Justice is expanding its reach this fall with its debut at our Arlington campus, joining the program’s existing offerings in Boston and online. This growth reflects the strength and flexibility of the degree and gives students in the Washington, D.C. metro area access to our faculty’s expertise in crime prevention, policy, and justice research. It’s a great example of how our academic programs are growing right alongside Northeastern’s global network.
Faculty and Staff Honors
Congratulations to several CSSH colleagues recently honored for their scholarship.
Korey Tillman, Assistant Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice and of Africana Studies, received the Oliver Cromwell Cox Article Award from the American Sociological Association Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities for “Carceral Liberalism: The Coloniality and Antiblackness of Coercive Benevolence.” In addition, the Association of Black Sociologists named him a recipient of the Jacquelyn Johnson Jackson Early Career Scholar Award. Dan O’Brien, Professor of Public Policy and Urban Affairs and Criminology and Criminal Justice and Director of Boston Area Research Initiative, received the James Short Senior Scholar Award from the American Society of Criminology’s Division on Communities and Place, recognizing his book The Pointillistic City. Tiffany Joseph, Professor of Sociology and International Affairs, was awarded the Ida B. Wells Public Engagement Award from the International Association for Population Health Science (IAPHS) for her extensive public engagement around immigration and health care access, growing out of her 2025 book Not All In: Race, Immigration, and Health Care Exclusion in the Age of Obamacare. Gretchen Heefner, Professor of History and department chair, received the Robert H. Ferrell Book Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations for Sand, Snow, and Stardust: How US Military Engineers Conquered Extreme Environments. Louise Walker, Professor of History, won the Wallace K. Ferguson Prize from the Canadian Historical Association for her book Debts Unpaid: Two Centuries of Trouble and Conflict in Mexico’s Economy. Please join me in celebrating this wonderful recognition of our colleagues’ scholarship and impact.
Congratulations also to Kate Duggan, CSSH’s Director of Research Development, who was recently selected for the Massachusetts Education Policy Fellowship, a ten-month program bringing together education leaders from across the state to examine policy, equity, and leadership. It’s a well-deserved honor for a colleague whose behind-the-scenes work helps so many of our faculty bring their research to life.
New Grants and CSSH in the News
Our faculty continue to secure external support for their exciting research. A few recent highlights:
- Etai Mizrav, Assistant Teaching Professor and Arlington MPA/MPP Coordinator, funded by the Spencer Foundation, is examining how school segregation persists as a policy problem among administrators in metropolitan Boston, probing questions of authority, responsibility, and accountability.
- Nick Beauchamp, Associate Professor of Political Science, funded by the Air Force Research Laboratory via the University of Michigan, is building a framework using large language models to understand how narratives form, evolve, and shape group engagement.
- Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, Associate Professor of History, funded by Koç University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilization in Istanbul, is examining botanical experimentation and global seed and sapling exchange across Ottoman Lebanon and Syria between 1870 and 1914.
- Lori Whynot, Director of the American Sign Language & Interpreting Education Program, funded by the US Department of Education, is working to address the national shortage of American Sign Language interpreters with specialized legal knowledge by training interpreters in legal-adjacent (non-courtroom) contexts, such as benefits determinations, disability rights, healthcare, and care and protection matters, all areas where deaf, hard of hearing, and DeafBlind individuals frequently lack adequate communication access.
It’s always wonderful to see our community’s expertise reach wider audiences, and this summer was no exception:
- Liz Bucar, Professor of Religion and Dean’s Leadership Fellow, published an op-ed in TIME examining how tech leaders’ visions of the future–what she calls their “eschatology”–are shaping the development of artificial intelligence.
- Professor of English Chris Gallagher co-authored a piece in Inside Higher Ed pushing back on critics who question the values instilled by a college education, arguing that values formation happens through diverse experiences, mentorship, and reflection.
- Sarah Lageson, Associate Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice & Law, and her student researchers were featured in Northeastern Global News for their work in an Oakland-based co-op analyzing race and gender disparities in California’s criminal record relief system.
- Dean’s Professor of Economics and Public Policy Nishith Prakash’s novel police training program, which uses theater and role-play techniques to reduce gender bias among officers in India, was profiled for its early, promising results.
- Rowan Frew ’26 (BS, Economics and Business Administration), an economics and business administration student’s co-op at Piraeus Bank in Greece made headlines after he flagged risk on a major corporate loan and turned a profit on a currency trade.
- Peter Fraunholtz, Assistant Teaching Professor in History and International Affairs, was quoted in a feature on a Northeastern alumnus and ROTC graduate who is sharing his personal collection of documents and photographs as one of the last living witnesses to the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Kennedy era.
Congratulations to all of our colleagues and students for sharing CSSH’s work with the world.A
Notable Fall Events
Mark your calendars: our Global Asian Studies program will host bestselling author R.F. Kuang on Thursday, October 29, at Blackman Auditorium, where she’ll discuss her new novel, Taipei Story, and more. It promises to be a wonderful evening of conversation about writing, identity, and culture.
On Wednesday, October 7, we host our annual CSSH Co-op Poster Expo, this time as a mixer with representatives from hiring organizations for past and future co-ops. Curious about what a co-op in the social sciences and humanities actually looks like? The poster expo gives students who’ve recently returned from co-op a chance to showcase their learning through posters that reflect on their work experiences—from local nonprofits to global organizations—and be on hand to talk through what they learned.
Closing
As I look back on the summer and all the fall semester programming, I’m struck by how much energy and ambition continues to define this colleges—in our classrooms, our research centers, our newest campus in New York City, and everywhere our faculty and students are making an impact. Thank you, as always, for everything you bring to CSSH. I look forward to seeing you around campus and hearing about your activities and accomplishments.
Warmly,
Kellee Tsai
Dean, College of Social Sciences and Humanities
Northeastern University
