Conference Dedication

This conference is dedicated to the memory of Professor Gill’s commitment to the study of race and democracy at the local and national levels through scholarship, active citizenship, teaching, research, mentoring, and service.

Professor Gerald R. Gill (1948-2007) taught African American history at Tufts University from 1980 until his untimely death twenty-seven years later. Over his more that quarter-century of service at Tufts, Professor Gill amassed a brilliantly distinguished record as a teacher, mentor, and scholar whose courses on African American history mesmerized undergraduates. A two time “Massachusetts College Professor of the Year” Professor Gill was the recipient of numerous university wide awards for distinguished teaching, advising, and service, including the Tufts Community Senate’s Professor of the Year Award (1999) and the Distinguished Service Award (2000), which has since been renamed in his honor.

As deputy chairman of the history department and core faculty in American Studies, Peace and Justice Studies, and Africa in the New World, Professor Gill combined a deep knowledge of African American history with an interdisciplinary teaching pedagogy that made him one of the university’s most popular teachers, mentors, and colleagues.

At the time of his death Professor Gill was at work on a definitive history of Boston’s civil rights movement, a labor of love that reflected his deep interest in the intersection of race and democracy in twentieth century American history. A native New Yorker and Yankee fan, Gerald nonetheless remained fascinated by Boston’s combative history of race relations.

 

Founding Conference Organizer

Dr. Peniel E. Joseph is professor of history at Tufts University and author of the award winning Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America and Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama and editor of The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Eras and Neighborhood Rebels: Black Power at the Local Level. Professor Joseph is the founder of the "Black Power Studies" subfield whose reverberations have widely impacted interdisciplinary scholarship within the academy and popular conceptions of civil rights and Black Power outside of it. He is a frequent national commentator on issues of race, democracy, and civil rights who has appeared on CNN, MSNC, and NPR. During the 2008 presidential election he provided historical analysis for the PBS News Hour with Jim Lehrer. Professor Joseph's essays have has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chronicle Review, The Journal of American History, and The American Historical Review. He is currently working on a biography of Black Power icon Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture).

 

Keynote Speakers

Sonia Sanchez: Poet. Mother. Professor. National and International lecturer on Black Culture and Literature, Women’s Liberation, Peace and Racial Justice. Sponsor of Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Board Member of MADRE. Sonia Sanchez is the author of over 20 books including Does Your House Have Lions? and Morning Haiku. She was the first Presidential Fellow at Temple University and she held the Laura Carnell Chair in English at Temple University. She is the Poetry Society of America’s 2001 Robert Frost Medalist, as well as the recipient of the Langston Hughes Poetry Award, the Harper Lee Award, and the Robert Creeley Award. Currently, Sonia Sanchez is one of 20 African American women featured in “Freedom Sisters,” an interactive exhibition created by the Cincinnati Museum Center and the Smithsonian Institution. Sonia Sanchez was appointed as Philadelphia’s Poet Laureate in December 2011.

 

Jeremi Suri holds the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Global Leadership, History, and Public Policy at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of five books on contemporary politics and foreign policy. In September 2011 he published a new book on the past and future of nation-building: Liberty's Surest Guardian: American Nation-Building from the Founders to Obama. Professor Suri's research and teaching have received numerous prizes. In 2007 Smithsonian Magazine named him one of America's "Top Young Innovators" in the Arts and Sciences. His writings appear widely in blogs and print media. Professor Suri is also a frequent public lecturer and guest on radio and television programs. Professor Suri's professional webpage is: http://jeremisuri.net

 

Matthew C. Whitaker is ASU Foundation Professor of History and the Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at Arizona State University.  He is an historian of African American history, civil rights, and social movements, and is the author of Icons of Black America: Crossing Boundaries and Breaking Barriers; co-­editor, with Jeremy I. Levitt, of Hurricane Katrina: America’s Unnatural Disaster; editor of African American Icons of Sport: Triumph, Courage, and Excellence; and author of Race Work: The Rise of Civil Rights in the Urban West.  Whitaker's forthcoming works include Over Jordan: A History of Modern Black America and Black Power Principals.  He is also the co‐editor, with Levitt, of the Justice and Social Inquiry book series at the University of Nebraska Press.   A highly sought after speaker, Whitaker's commentaries on popular culture, race class, gender, presidential politics, have appeared on NPR, PBS, WVON, and other media outlets.

 

Dr. Yohuru Williams is the author of Black Politics/White Power: Civil Rights Black Power and Black Panthers in New Haven (Blackwell, 2006) and Teaching U.S. History Beyond the Textbook (Corwin, 2008). He is the editor of A Constant Struggle: African-American History from 1865 to the Present, Documents and Essays (Kendall Hunt, 2002), and the co-editor of In Search of the Black Panther Party: New Perspectives on a Revolutionary Movement(Duke University, 2006), and Liberated Territory: Toward a Local History of the Black Panther Party (Duke University, 2009). He also served as general editor for the Association for the Study of African American Life and History's 2002 and 2003 Black History Month publications, The Color Line Revisited (Tapestry Press, 2002) and The Souls of Black Folks: Centennial Reflections (Africa World Press, 2003). Dr. Williams also served as an adviser on the popular civil rights reader Putting the Movement Back into Teaching Civil Rights.

 

Panelists

Angela Ards is an assistant professor of English at Southern Methodist University, where she specializes in African American literature and culture, 20th-century American literature, critical gender studies, and autobiography.Ards has a Ph.D. in English from Princeton University. Her journalism, es says, and reviews, widely anthologized, have appeared in The Nation, The Village Voice, Essence, Ms., the Crisis, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Ards has also held residence at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton University’s Center for the Study of Religion, Columbia University as a Charles H. Revson Fellow, and the Nation Institute as the inaugural Haywood Burns Fellow.

 

 

 

Mark Barnes is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Geography Department at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.  He studies the human element of transportation adaptation to climate change in U.S. cities and regions.  Theoretical and empirical frameworks in human dimensions of global change, natural hazards, transport and urban geography sub-fields inform his work.  Mark teaches courses in Urban Studies, Population Geography, World Regional Geography, Natural Hazards and Human Dimensions of Global Change.  He has helped to advance the research and service missions of the City of Philadelphia, The University of Pennsylvania, and National Urban League.  Mark is a recipient of the 2012 Jeanne X. Kasperson Student Paper Award presented by the American Association of Geographers? Natural Hazards Specialty Group.  

 

Dr. Ezra J. Barzilay hails from Greece and is a pediatrician by training. Dr. Barzilay is currently the lead epidemiologist for the Health System Reconstruction Office, in the Center for Global Health, after serving as the Deputy Incident Manager for the 2010-2011 Haiti Cholera Response of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Emergency Operations. Prior to that, Dr Barzilay led the National Surveillance Team for Enteric Diseases in the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases.

Dr. Barzilay received his Bachelor’s and Medical degrees from Tufts University, in Boston, MA. He completed a residency in pediatrics at Emory University School of Medicine Affiliated Hospitals and then joined the Epidemic Intelligence Service corps at CDC to train in infectious disease epidemiology and is board-certified in pediatrics. Fluent in seven languages, Dr Barzilay’s field experience includes surveillance, international public health interventions, disaster response, outbreak investigations, and serving as a trainer and expert consultant for the World Health Organization.

 

Dale Bryan is Assistant Director of the Peace and Justice Studies (PJS) Program, serving as lecturer and administrator since 1984.  His teaching, public speaking, and publications address social movements, nonviolent social change, experiential learning, and civic engagement.  In 1987 he helped co-found The Peace Studies Association, a professional organization for faculty and academic programs in the United States and Canada. In 2003 he was the recipient of the Experiential Education Higher Education Leader of the Year offered by the National Society for Experiential Education for his direction of the Institute in Social Movements and Strategic Nonviolence: An Experiential Inquiry into Social Change, which spanned the years 1991-2003 and variously addressed peace, environmental justice, and watershed restoration movements.  He was a member of the 2004-2005 Ella Baker Fellowship Program sponsored by Antioch New England Graduate School.  

 

Dr. Sharon Harley, Associate Professor and former chair of the African American Studies Department at the University of Maryland, College Park.  A leading scholar in the field of black women’s history her Timetables of African American History (Simon & Schuster) was selected as a Book of the Month as well as History Book of the Month. She has been a fellow at the National Humanities Center at the Research Triangle, North Carolina, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University.  In 2010, she was awarded the Carter G. Woodson Medallion for Outstanding Scholarship given by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History.

 

Dr. James Jennings is Professor of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University.  He teaches graduate courses in the area of community development and social policy and has published widely on race, politics, and urban issues.  Some of his books include Puerto Rican Politics in Urban America (Greenwood Press); The Politics of Black Empowerment (Wayne State University Press); Understanding Poverty in Urban America (Praeger Publishers); Race, Politics, and Economic Development: Community Perspectives (Verso Press); A New Introduction to Poverty (New York University Press); Welfare Reform and the Revitalization of Inner City Neighborhoods (Michigan State University Press); Race, Neighborhoods, and the Misuse of Social Capital (Palgrave MacMillan); and more recently, Urban Spaces: Planning and Struggles for Land and Community (Rowman and Littlefield).

 

Raised by his grandmother in Atlanta's Carver Homes housing project, Ricky L. Jones not only became the first member of his immediate family to graduate high school, but by age 29 he had also earned a Ph.D. Currently, he is full professor and past chair of the University of Louisville's Department of Pan-African Studies.  He is alsodirector of the University's Center on Race and Inequality  (CRI). Jones is an honors graduate in Political Science from Morehouse College. He was only the second African American to receive a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Kentucky where he specialized in Political Philosophy and Comparative Politics. His books include: Black Haze: Violence, Sacrifice, and Manhood in Black Greek-Letter Fraternities and What’s Wrong with Obamamania?: Black America, Black Leadership, and the Death of Political Imagination. He has also written scores of scholarly and magazine articles, book chapters, and opinion columns.  He is also a columnist for Louisville’s most popular alternative weekly, the Louisville Eccentric Observer.

 

Dino Kritsiotis is Professor of Public International Law in the University of Nottingham, where he has taught since October 1994. Professor Kritsiotis is a regular member of the visiting faculty at the University of Michigan Law School, where he has held the L. Bates Lea Visiting Professorship in Law (2005-2008), and he has taught at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and at the University of Cape Town. He sits on the editorial boards for the Journal of Conflict and Security Law (Oxford University Press), the Human Rights Law Review (Oxford University Press), Human Rights & Human Welfare (and the African Yearbook of International Humanitarian Law (Juta Publishing).

 

 

 

 

Peter Levine is Director of CIRCLE, The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement,  and Research Director of Tufts University’s Jonathan Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service. Levine studied philosophy at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, receiving his doctorate in 1992. He is the author of Reforming the Humanities: Literature and Ethics from Dante through Modern Times (2009), The Future of Democracy: Developing the Next Generation of American Citizens (2007), three other scholarly books on philosophy and politics. He has served on the boards or steering committees of AmericaSpeaks, Street Law, the Newspaper Association of America Foundation, the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools, the Kettering Foundation, the American Bar Association Committee’s for Public Education, the Paul J. Aicher Foundation, and the Deliberative Democracy Consortium.

 

Dean Jeremy Levitt of the Florida A&M University of College of Law is a political scientist and a public international lawyer with expertise in African politics, democratization, and state dynamics. Levitt has authored and edited four books including Hurricane Katrina: America’s Unnatural Disaster (2009, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln and Africa: Mapping boundaries in International Law (2008, Hart Publishers, Oxford, UK). HE has also written and edited many law review articles. Currently he is the senior member of the International Technical Assistance Committee of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee (ITAC) of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Liberia. He holds a Ph. D in International Relations from the University of Cambridge-St. Johns College, a J.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a B.A. in Political Science in Arizona State University.

 

Kris Manjapra: My work focuses on transnational approaches to South Asian and Central European History in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  In 2010, I published the biography of a world-traveling founder of Indian Marxism, M.N. Roy (M.N. Roy: Marxism and Colonial Cosmopolitanism, Routledge), and I am the co-editor of a volume on new approaches to global intellectual history (Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas, Palgrave).  My interests are in how thought travels across boundaries, and in the theme of cosmopolitanism "from below".

 

Phillip W.D. Martin, Sr Reporter for WGBH Radio News in Boston. He is also Executive Producer for Lifted Veils Productions a non-profit journalism organization dedicated to exploring issues that divide (and unite) society. Currently he is heading up The Color Initiative, a BBC/WGBH radio-journalism project broadcast on PRI's "The WORLD." Phillip was a Supervising Senior Editor for National Public Radio and former NPR Race Relations Correspondent. He was among a group of senior producers responsible for creating PRI's The World radio program in 1995 (BBC, WGBH, PRI). He has written for several publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post Outlook Section, Nieman Reports, Japan Times Weekly and theBoston Globe. He studied international relations and international law at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and human rights law at Harvard University Law School and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard in 1998.

 

Sam Sommers is an award winning psychology professor at Tufts University and the author of Situations Matters: Understanding How Context Transforms Your World (New York: 2011). He is interested in how race impacts the way people see and interact with the world in a wide range of social settings. In recognition of this work, in 2008 he received the Saleem Shah Award for Early Career Excellence from the American Psychology-Law Society. His research has been covered by Good Morning America, Harper’s, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and NPR. Sommer lives near Boston with his wife and two daughters.

 

 

Kim McLarin is the author of the critically-acclaimed novels Taming It Down, Meeting of the Waters, and Jump At The Sun, all published by William Morrow, and co-author of the memoir Growing Up X by Ilyasah Shabazz with Kim McLarin. Her nonfiction has appeared in the The New York Times, Glamour, The Root, Slate, The Washington Post and other publications. She is a former staff writer for The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Associated Press, and serves as a regular commentator on Basic Black, produced and aired by WGBH  in Boston. McLarin is an assistant professor of writing, literature and publishing at Emerson College. Her memoir, Divorce Dog, will be published in 2013. 

Kim McLarin is assistant professor of writing and literature at Emerson College and the author of the critically-acclaimed novels Taming It Down (1999), Meeting of the Waters (2001), and Jump at the Sun (2006), all published by William Morrow Inc. McLarin is also co-author of the memoir Growing Up X with Ilyasah Shabazz. Jump at the Sun was chosen as a 2007 Fiction Honor Book by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. The novel was also nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award and selected by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association as a 2007 Fiction Honor Book.

 

 

Vali Nasr is Professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University, Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy at Brookings Institution and a columnist with Bloomberg View. He was Senior Advisor to U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke between 2009-11. Vali Nasr is the author of The Rise of Islamic Capitalism: Why the New Middle Class is Key to Defeating Extremism; New York Times best-seller The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam will Shape the Future; and Democracy in Iran: History and the Quest for Liberty. He has written for The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, and is frequent commentator in public media. He received his BA from Tufts University in International Relations summa cum laude and was initiated into Phi Beta Kappa in 1983. He earned his masters from the Fletcher School of Law in and Diplomacy in international economics and Middle East studies in 1984, and his PhD from MIT in political science in 1991. He was Carnegie Scholar for 2006.

 

Jeanne Marie Penvenne is Associate Professor of History and Core Faculty in International Relations, Women’s Studies and Africa in the New World Interdisciplinary Programs at Tufts University. Her scholarly interests include Mozambican urban and labor history in the colonial era, southern African intellectual history, oral history and history through photography. She is the author of two books and many articles and chapters on the history of African workers in Lourenço Marques, today Maputo, Mozambique.  Her book African Workers and Colonial Racism was a finalist for the African Studies Association’s 1996 Herskovits Award.  She has served as Review Editor and Guest Editor for the International Journal of African Historical Studies, as an inaugural Research Editorial Board member of Lusotopie, and the Editorial Advisory Board of the Journal of African History.  She has held Fulbright’s Regional Research Award, Fulbright Research / Lecturer Awards, U.S. Speaker and Specialist Awards, Social Science Research Council, Mellon and Gulbenkian Foundation Research Awards.

 

Pearl T. Robinson is associate professor of political science at Tufts University. She is co-author of Stabilizing Nigeria: Sanctions, Incentives, and Support for Civil Society (The Century Foundation Press) and co-editor and co-author of Transformation and Resiliency in Africa (Howard University Press). A member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a past President of the African Studies Association, she has served on the boards of Oxfam-America and TransAfrica. Her current projects include an intellectual biography of 1950 Nobel Peace laureate Ralph Bunche, and a documentary film about Islam and female empowerment among the Tidjaniyya in Niger.

 

 

 

Joyce A. Sackey, M.D. is Dean for Multicultural Affairs and Global Health and Associate Professor of Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine. As Dean for Multicultural Affairs and Global Health at TUSM, she oversees the school’s key diversity initiatives. Dr. Sackey has dedicated her time, skills and talent to addressing health care disparities, both locally as well as globally.  A leader in global health education, Dr. Sackey has led a number of faculty development and training workshops for physicians and other health professionals. She has additionally mentored numerous students, residents and junior faculty on global health services delivery research and quality improvement projects. She is co-founder of the Foundation for African Relief (FAR), a Massachusetts-based non-profit organization. The program has made significant contributions to the fight against HIV/AIDS through the education and training African physicians in the forefront of providing clinical care to people living with HIV/AIDS.

 

Dr. Selker is Dean of the Tufts University-wide Clinical and Translational Science Institute (Tufts CTSI) and Principal Investigator the NIH Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) that supports it (www.CTSAweb.org). He is Professor of Medicine at the Tufts University School of Medicine and Executive Director for the Institute for Clinical Research and Health Policy Studies at Tufts Medical Center, where he is also Chief of the Division of Clinical Care Research in the Department of Medicine and Director of the Center for Cardiovascular Health Services Research. He has served on boards and as an officer for a variety of professional and educational organizations, including in 2011-2012 as President of the Society of General Internal Medicine, 2010-2011 as President of the Society for Clinical and Translational Science and 2003-2004 as President of the Association for Clinical Research Training. He has been an active advisor in the design of Clinical Research graduate and training programs in the United States and internationally, and he is an active advocate and advisor in Washington in support of clinical research, research training, and for improvements in the healthcare delivery system. He maintains his medical practice at the Pratt Diagnostic Clinic at Tufts Medical Center.

 

Brooks D. Simpson is ASU Foundation Professor of History at Arizona State University and Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy.  He is the author of several books, including The Civil War in the East (2011); Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph over Adversity, 1822-1865 (2000); The Reconstruction Presidents (1998); America’s Civil War (1996); and Let Us Have Peace:  Ulysses S. Grant and the Politics of War and Reconstruction, 1861-1868 (1991).  A historian of nineteenth-century United States history and the American presidency, he has written numerous articles and appeared on C-SPAN, NPR, and PBS’s The American Experience.

 

Morissa Sobelson is a senior analyst with Manatt Health Solutions, an interdisciplinary healthcare consulting firm. Her project work focuses on diverse topics within the healthcare sector, including public health insurance programs, health information technology, and federal and state health policy trends. Prior to joining MHS, Morissa worked as an advisor to the Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services in the New York City Mayor's Office. In this role, she helped to develop a citywide plan for expanding New Yorkers’ access to healthy and affordable food, as well as provided research and policy analysis to senior health officials in preparation for the impact of federal health reform implementation. Immediately after completing her BA in Community Health and American Studies at Tufts, Morissa served as a research assistant to Dr. H. Jack Geiger, helping with the development of a forthcoming book on the U.S. Community Health Center movement.

 

John Stauffer is a leading authority on antislavery, social protest movements and interracial friendship. He is a Harvard University professor of English and American Literature and African American Studies, and Chair of the History of American Civilization program at Harvard. His eight books include The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (2002) and Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (2008), which both won numerous awards. He is the author of more than 50 articles, on topics ranging from the Civil War era to visual culture, and is working on new books about interracial friendship and about Frederick Douglass and visual culture. His essays have appeared in Time, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New Republic, Raritan, and the New York Sun. He has appeared on national radio and television shows and has lectured widely throughout the United States and Europe.

 

Patrick Sylvain teaches at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Brown University. His scholarship is informed by history and is structured by phenomenology and discourse analysis. “My aim is to have an in-depth understanding of certain foundational historical events to better inform my theoretical constructions within the humanities, while positioned to structurally process power relations, whether inter-group, intra-group, or trans-continental. Hence, the foci of my deconstructive analyses lie in the fields of politics, religion and performative culture, which includes the creative arts.”

 

Sherman Teichman is the founding Executive Director of the Institute for Global Leadership at Tufts University, Institute programs include: Education for Public Inquiry and International Citizenship (EPIIC), a rigorous interdisciplinary program for analysis of global issues and active citizenship, now celebrating its 25th Anniversary; the interdisciplinary Synaptics Scholars research and leadership program; ALLIES - Alliance Linking Leaders in Education and the Services, a national civil - military program with the military academies of the United States, and Empower, an international poverty alleviation and social entrepreneurship program linked to the Clinton Global Initiative, and [EXPOSURE], a photojournalism, documentary studies and human rights initiative.

 

Olufemi Vaughan of Bowdoin University is currently a professor of Africana Studies and History as well as the director of their Africana Studies program. In past years, he has served as associate dean of the Graduate School at SUNY, Stony Brook where he also tenured as a professor of Africana Studies and History. He received his D.Phil. (PhD) in Politics at University of Oxford, England in 1989. Vaughan has published a plethora of books, essays and articles including Chiefs, Power, and Social Change: Chiefship and Modern Politics in Botswan, 1890s-1900s, published by the Africa World Press of Trenton, NJ, in 2003, Globalization and Marginalization: Essays on the Paradoxes of Global and Local Forces (co-editor with M. Wright and C. Small) Ibadan, Nigeria: Sefer Academic Press, 2005, and  ‘Religion, Religiosity, and Governance in West Africa’, Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa’ in 2008.

 

Rhonda Y. Williams is an Associate Professor of History and the founder and director of the postdoctoral fellowship in African American Studies at Case Western Reserve University. She focuses on the Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies Programs at the institution. The award-winning author of The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles Against Urban Inequality, the History Network has declared Williams a Top Historian. Her research focuses include the history of low-income people’s lives and activism as well as the implications of race and gender inequality on urban space and policy. Williams received her PhD in history from the University of Pennsylvania in 1998 and her undergraduate degree in journalism from the University of Maryland College Park in 1989, where she became that university's first black salutatorian in its then 187-year history.

 

Senior University Leadership

Anthony P. Monaco became the thirteenth President of Tufts University on August 1, 2011. A distinguished geneticist, he had served as the Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Planning and Resources at the University of Oxford since 2007. President Monaco is an accomplished leader, scientist and teacher. He brings to the Tufts Presidency deep-rooted commitments to academic excellence, diversity and inclusion, a global perspective and the consequential role that universities have in society.

 

 

Joanne Berger-Sweeney is an alumna of Wellesley, UC Berkeley, and Johns Hopkins. She was appointed Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences in August 2010, where she oversees all operations of the School.  Prior to her appointment at Tufts, she was Associate Dean and Allene Lummis Russell Professor in Neuroscience at Wellesley College.  She also directed the Neuroscience Program, which she helped found at Wellesley.  Her work has been recognized by a National Science Foundation Young Investigator award, among other honors.  She has also been recognized with lifetime mentoring awards by the Society for Neuroscience and Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience.  She is a fellow of the International Behavioral Neuroscience Society.

 

 

 

 

 

Peggy Newell was named Provost and Senior Vice President ad interim for Tufts University in July 2011 and continues to serve as Vice Provost. As Interim Provost, Peggy is committed to the advancement and support of teaching, research, and scholarship, while she leads the schools in academic planning and priority setting across the University. She has been at Tufts since 1982, serving as Associate Dean of the Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences and Associate Dean for Special Programs at the School of Medicine prior to joining the Provost's Office as Associate Provost for Research in 1998. In her role as Associate Provost for Research, Peggy created the first office of proposal development and the first office of technology licensing and industry collaboration at Tufts. She has been a member of the Board of Directors of the Massachusetts Society for Medical Research and a member of the Board of Governors of the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative's John Adams Innovation Institute. She is also on the Board of Directors of the Tufts Veterinary Emergency Treatment Services, Inc.