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CSSH welcomes new faculty members for 2014-15

CSSH Welcomes New Faculty

Dean Uta Poiger welcomes several scholars to CSSH for the 2014-15 academic year. Among the new scholars joining the CSSH full-time faculty are seven tenured or tenure-track faculty, a distinguished professor, a professor of the practice, three full-time lecturers, and the first-ever Dean’s Postdoctoral Fellow. These hires bring the college’s number of full-time faculty to over 200.

Moya Bailey

Dean’s Postdoctoral Fellow
PhD Emory University

Moya Bailey earned her PhD in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies from Emory University and is a scholar of critical race, feminist, and disability studies. Her current work focuses on constructs of health and normativity within a U.S. context. She is interested in how race, gender, and sexuality are represented in media and medicine. She co-curates the #transformdh initiative in Digital Humanities. Courses taught at Northeastern include WMNS 1103: Introduction to Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

Martin Blatt

Professor of the Practice in History
PhD Boston University

Martin Blatt holds a PhD in history from Boston University. He has been Chief of Cultural Resources and Historian at the National Park Service in Boston and Lowell for twenty-four years. In 2013, he conceived and coordinated the historical pageant in Boston, “Roots of Liberty: The Haitian Revolution and the American Civil War.” Dr. Blatt has served as President of the National Council on Public History and on the Executive Board of the Organization of American Historians. Blatt’s museum credits include exhibits on the Old South Meeting House, the Battle of Bunker of Hill, and the Gulag. Blatt is currently Board President of Central Square Theater in Cambridge.

Mai’a Davis Cross

Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs
PhD Princeton University

Mai’a Davis Cross received her PhD in politics from Princeton University in 2005. She studies European integration, security, foreign policy, diplomacy, and public diplomacy. Her most recent book is Security Integration in Europe: How Knowledge-based Networks are Transforming the European Union (University of Michigan Press, 2011), 2012 winner of the Best Book Prize from the University Association for Contemporary European Studies. She is also the author of The European Diplomatic Corps: Diplomats and International Cooperation from Westphalia to Maastricht (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). A forthcoming edited book is entitled, European Public Diplomacy: Soft Power at Work. From 2013-2014 she was a Senior Researcher at the ARENA Center for European Studies, Oslo, Norway.

Bilge Erten

Assistant Professor of Economics and International Affairs
PhD University of Massachusetts Amherst

Bilge Erten earned her PhD in economics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2010, and was a postdoctoral research scholar of the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University from 2012 to 2014. Her research fields are development macroeconomics and gender inequality. In a new project, she explores the determinants of the declining female labor force participation rate in Turkey using a unique survey dataset to understand the relative contributions of rising neoconservative values, stagnant job creation, and internal migration. Her work has examined the macroeconomic effectiveness of macroprudential policies in developing economies, the dynamics of long-term cycles in commodity prices, and the use of innovative finance for gender equality interventions.

Christopher Featherman

Lecturer in English
PhD University of Washington, Seattle

Christopher Featherman received his PhD in English language and rhetoric in 2013 from the University of Washington, Seattle. He is an applied linguist whose teaching and research interests include global Englishes, second language writing, multimodality, and media discourse. He is the author of the book Discourses of Ideology and Identity: Social Media and the Iranian Election Protests (Routledge, 2015).

Catalina Herrera Almanza

Assistant Professor of Economics and International Affairs
PhD Cornell University

Catalina Herrera Almanza received her PhD in applied economics in 2014 from Cornell University. Her main field of research is development economics, with a primary focus on the microeconometric analysis of population, health, and education issues in Sub Saharan Africa and Latin America. As a Hewlett Foundation/IIE PhD Dissertation Fellow, she studied the causal impact of teenage pregnancy on young women’s schooling and cognitive skills in Madagascar as well as the role of  reproductive health policies in increasing female human capital, the role of maternal cognitive ability in improving children’s health in Madagascar, and the determinants of internal migration among youth in Senegal. She has worked for the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington D.C., and the Public Policy Evaluation Directorate in Colombia’s Ministry of National Planning.

Roderick L. Ireland

Distinguished Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice
PhD Northeastern University

Roderick Ireland, a jurist for 37 years, was the first African-​​American on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and is the former State Chief Justice. He is widely recognized for his work on matters of social justice and court reform. He received his doctorate in law, policy, and society from Northeastern in 1998, and has served as a part-​​time instructor at Northeastern since 1978. Ireland has received numerous awards, recognitions, and honorary degrees throughout his career, including most recently the Boston Bar Association’s 2014 Citation of Judicial Excellence. He authored the Juvenile Law volume of Thomson/​West Publishing’s Massachusetts Practice Series as well as several law review articles and articles, and has been on the faculty of the Appellate Judges Seminar at New York University Law School since 2001.

Nancy Kimelman

Lecturer in Economics
PhD Brown University

Nancy Kimelman received her PhD from Brown University and has been a practicing economist for over 30 years. She has worked at the Federal Reserve Bank as a monetary economist, as a financial economist on Wall Street, in banking and investment, and as a lecturer at Tufts University where she taught macroeconomics. Dr. Kimelman is the author of Common Cents: How the Economy Really Works. From the Global Market to the Supermarket (2010). As a columnist she has written for the Financial World and Bloomberg magazines and has appeared regularly as a commentator on National Public Radio, CNBC, CNN/FN, Reuters and NECN.

Benjamin Koskinen

Visiting Lecturer in Economics
PhD Suffolk University

Benjamin Koskinen is a visiting lecturer in the Department of Economics at Northeastern University. He received his doctoral degree from Suffolk University in 2012, after receiving his MA in economics from Boston University and his BS from the University of Tampa. His research interests are applied microeconomics, specifically industrial organization and political economics.

Dubi Lenz

Schusterman Visiting Israeli Artist

Dubi Lenz will be in residence as a Schusterman Visiting Israeli Artist, hosted by the Jewish Studies program and the Department of Music. He has a distinguished career as a radio broadcaster and music festival producer, and is co-artistic director of Israel’s largest music festival, the Red Sea Jazz Festival summer edition. His two-hour program on world music has been broadcast for the past 30 years on Israeli public radio, and has made him a well-known and popular figure throughout the country.

Alicia Sasser Modestino

Associate Professor of Public Policy and Urban Affairs and Economics
PhD Harvard University

Alicia Sasser Modestino received her PhD in 2001 from Harvard University where she also served as a doctoral fellow in the Inequality and Social Policy Program at the Kennedy School of Government. She comes to Northeastern from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston where she was a senior economist studying regional economic and policy issues for the New England Public Policy Center. Her research focuses on regional labor markets, health care reform, and housing affordability, which has appeared in journals such as the Journal of Human Resources, Health Affairs, and Regional Science and Urban Economics. Her most recent working paper examines whether employers raised education and experience requirements for job vacancies as the supply of skilled workers increased during the Great Recession.

Daniel T. O’Brien

Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Urban Affairs and Criminology and Criminal Justice
PhD Binghamton University

Daniel T. O’Brien received his PhD from Binghamton University in 2010. He comes to Northeastern from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. As research director of the Boston Area Research Initiative he leads and coordinates a range of interdisciplinary projects that bring together local researchers, policymakers, and practitioners in the study of Boston. His research uses large, administrative data sets (i.e., “Big Data”) in conjunction with traditional methodologies to explore the behavioral and social dynamics of urban neighborhoods, particularly surrounding “broken windows theory.” Much of his current work builds on a recent paper, “Ecometrics in the Age of Big Data” (co-authored with Robert J. Sampson and Christopher Winship) that presents a methodology for measuring neighborhood characteristics in the digital age.

Imke Reimers

Assistant Professor of Economics
PhD University of Minnesota

Imke Reimers received her PhD from University of Minnesota in 2013. She joins Northeastern after serving a year as a postdoctoral fellow at the National Bureau for Economic Research (NBER) digitization and copyright initiative. Her research interests are in industrial organization with a focus on the interaction of new technologies and intellectual property in new and existing markets. Recent papers analyze the role of Internet platforms such as Amazon and Groupon in pricing, availability and consumption decisions, and the effectiveness of Internet piracy protection in media markets.

Michael P. Stone

Visiting Lecturer in Economics
PhD University of Connecticut

Michael Stone received his PhD in economics in 2010 from the University of Connecticut. He also has a JD from the University of Connecticut School of Law and a BA in political science from Binghamton University. His areas of specialization are law and economics, public economics, and applied microeconomics. Prior to coming to Northeastern, he spent four years as an assistant professor of economics at Quinnipiac University.  His research has appeared in International Review of Law and Economics and Contemporary Economic Policy, among other journals.

Belinda Walzer

Lecturer in English
PhD University of North Carolina, Greensboro

Belinda Walzer received her PhD in 2012 from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro with a dissertation titled “Rhetorical Approaches to Gender and Human Rights in Contemporary Transnational Literature and Cultural Studies.” She has been an assistant teaching professor at Wake Forest University and has taught writing, literature, and gender studies at UNCG as a lecturer and graduate instructor. She also has been a research associate at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. Her research focuses on the intersections between rhetoric, human rights discourse, and transnational gender studies. Her articles have appeared in College Literature and are forthcoming in MLA and Routledge collections.

Dov Waxman

Professor of Political Science, International Affairs, and Israel Studies
PhD John Hopkins University

Dov Waxman received his PhD in international relations in 2002 from Johns Hopkins University. He is the co-director of the Middle East Center at Northeastern University and specializes in international relations and Middle East politics. He previously taught at City University of New York and Bowdoin College. He is the author of The Pursuit of Peace and the Crisis of Israeli Identity: Defending / Defining the Nation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), and the co-author (with Ilan Peleg) of Israel’s Palestinians: The Conflict Within (Cambridge University Press, 2011). He is a frequent media commentator on U.S. foreign policy, Israeli-Palestinian relations, and Middle East affairs.

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