Skip to main content

Faculty

Jump to Last Name:

Ken Alder

Ken Alder (Ph.D., History of Science, Harvard) is a Milton H. Wilson Professor in the Humanities. He studies the history of science and technology in the context of social and political change. His first book, Engineering the Revolution: Army and Enlightenment in France (Princeton, 1997; Chicago, 2010), won the 1998 Dexter Prize from the Society of the History of Technology. His second book, The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error that Transformed the World (The Free Press, 2002), examined the origins of the metric system in Revolutionary France. This book has been translated into 12 languages and won the Davis Prize (HSS), the Dingle Prize (BSHS), and the Kagan Prize (The Historical Society). His most recent book, The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession (The Free Press, 2007; Bison Books, 2009) examines the fraught relation between truth and justice in twentieth-century United States. He was awarded a fellowship at the Kaplan Humanities Institute for 2019-2020 for his project on the history of technology.

Sokhieng Au

Sokhieng Au

Visiting Assistant Professor
Global Health Studies

sokhieng.au@northwestern.edu

Sokhieng Au (Ph.D., UC-Berkeley, 2005, MPH Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, 2009), is a medical historian and public health practitioner focused on health and illness in the Global South. Her research examines medicine and disease broadly in both contemporary and historical perspectives, with particular focus on (cultural, scientific, technical) exchanges/interventions and global inequities in health. She is an area specialist in Southeast Asia and Central Africa. She has worked with Doctors Without Borders and has researched and taught at universities in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Her first monograph was a study of French colonial medicine in Cambodia. Her two most recent publications examined Belgian colonial medicine in the Congo, "Belgian Colonial Medicine" (co-authored with Anne Cornet), and present-day antibiotic overuse in Afghanistan in "'They eat it like sweets': a mixed methods study of antibiotic perceptions and their use among patients, prescribers and pharmacists in a district hospital in Kabul, Afghanistan" (co-authored) with Burtscher D, Van den Bergh R, Masood N, et al. 

Moya Z. Bailey

Moya Z. Bailey

Associate Professor
Communication Studies

moya.bailey@northwestern.edu

Moya Bailey is an Associate Professor at Northwestern University and is the founder of the Digital Apothecary and co-founder of the Black Feminist Health Science Studies Collective. Her work focuses on marginalized groups’ use of digital media to promote social justice, and she is interested in how race, gender, and sexuality are represented in media and medicine. She is the digital alchemist for the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network and the Board President of Allied Media Projects, a Detroit-based movement media organization that supports an ever-growing network of activists and organizers. She is a co-author of #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice (MIT Press, 2020) and is the author of Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance (New York University Press, 2021).

Lydia Barnett

Lydia Barnett (Ph.D., Stanford University, 2011) specializes in Early Modern Europe and her work explores the intersections of science, religion, and the environment in transnational contexts. Her current book, After the Flood: Imagining the Global Environment in Early Modern Europe explores the scientific imagination of global natural disasters at the turn of the eighteenth century. This global catastrophic imaginary was enabled by the expansion of long-distance networks (commercial, imperial, religious, and scholarly) and gave rise to new forms of environmental consciousness that were strongly linked to both Christian theology and imperial ideology.

Adia Benton

Adia Benton

Associate Professor
Anthropology and Program of African Studies

adia.benton@northwestern.edu

Adia Benton (Ph.D., Harvard University) is has interests in global health, biomedicine, development and humanitarianism and professional sports. She is also interested in patterns of inequality in the distribution of and the politics of care in settings “socialized” for scarcity. This means understanding the political, economic and historical factors shaping how care is provided in complex humanitarian emergencies and in longer-term development projects – like those for health. These concerns arise from her previous career in the fields of public health and post-conflict development in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. Her book, HIV Exceptionalism: Development through Disease in Sierra Leone (University of Minnesota, 2015), explores the treatment of AIDS as an exceptional disease and the recognition and care that this takes away from other diseases and public health challenges in poor countries. It was awarded the 2017 Rachel Carson Prize from the Society from the Social Studies of Science. She is currently working on the global movement to improve access to quality surgical care in poor countries, using it as a case study for describing and understanding ideological formations in global public health.
Claudio Benzecry

Claudio Benzecry

Professor
Communication Studies and Sociology

claudio.benzecry@northwestern.edu

Claudio E. Benzecry is Professor of Communication Studies and Sociology (courtesy) at Northwestern University, and Director of Graduate Studies for the MTS PhD. He holds secondary appointments at LACS and the IPTD Programs. He is a sociologist interested in culture, arts, knowledge and globalization. His book The Opera Fanatic. Ethnography of an Obsession (University of Chicago Press, 2011) received the Mary Douglas Award for best book in the Sociology of Culture (2012), and Honorable mention for the ASA Distinguished Book award (2014). He is the editor of three volumes on theory, culture, and knowledge, including Social Theory Now (with Monika Krause and Isaac Reed, University of Chicago Press, 2017) and has published articles on sociological theory, sociology of culture, and the arts in venues such as Sociological Theory, Theory, Culture & Society, British Journal of Sociology and Theory & Society, among many others. In 2019, he started his tenure as co-Editor in Chief of Qualitative Sociology. His new book, The Perfect Fit. Creative Work in the Global Shoe Industry (University of Chicago Press), is based on five-year ethnographic research on fashion, creativity, and globalization, following how a shoe is imagined, sketched, designed, developed, and produced in between the US, Europe, Brazil and China.

Pablo Boczkowski

Pablo Boczkowski

Professor
Communication Studies

pjb9@northwestern.edu

Pablo J. Boczkowski is the Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. He is Founder and Director of the Center for Latinx Digital Media, and Faculty Director of the Master of Science in Leadership for Creative Enterprises program, both at Northwestern, and Co-Founder and Co- Director of the Center for the Study of Media and Society in Argentina, a joint initiative between Northwestern and Universidad de San Andrés, in Buenos Aires. In 2020 he was named Fellow of the International Communication Association, and in 2022 elected Chair of the Fellows. His research program examines the dynamics of digital culture from a comparative perspective. He is the author of six books, four edited volumes, and more than sixty journal articles. Three of his books were published in 2021: Abundance: On the Experience of Living in a World of Information Plenty (Oxford University Press), The Digital Environment: How We Live, Learn, Work, and Play Now (with Eugenia Mitchelstein, MIT Press) and The Journalism Manifesto (with Barbie Zelizer and Chris Anderson, Polity). His next book, forthcoming with MIT Press in spring 2023, is To Know Is To Compare: Studying Social Media Across Countries, Media and Platforms (with Mora Matassi). He is currently working on The Patina of Distrust: Misinformation in a Context of Generalized Skepticism (with Eugenia Mitchelstein, Facundo Suenzo, and María Celeste Wagner). He writes regularly for Infobae América and Revista Anfibia. 

Lina Britto

Lina Britto

Associate Professor
History

lina.britto@northwestern.edu

Lina Britto (Ph.D. New York University) specializes in Modern Latin America and the Caribbean. Her work situates illegal narcotics networks in Colombia, particularly marijuana, in the context of a growing articulation between the country and the United States during the Cold War. She has published in Revista Contemporánea, the Hispanic American Historical Review (spring 2015), North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) and El Espectador (Colombia). Her courses at Northwestern focus on the hemispheric history of narcotic trafficking, the war on drugs, popular music, and oral history.

Héctor Carrillo

Héctor Carrillo

Professor
Sociology and Gender & Sexuality Studies

hector@northwestern.edu

Héctor Carrillo (Ph.D., Public Health, Berkeley) has been interested in issues of health, biomedicine, and sexuality for Mexican and Latino/a immigrant populations. He is the author of The Night Is Young: Sexuality in Mexico in the Time of AIDS (University of Chicago Press, 2002), which received the Ruth Benedict Prize from the American Anthropological Association. His second book, Pathways of Desire: The Sexual Migration of Mexican Gay Men (University of Chicago Press, 2017), received book awards from three sections of the American Sociological Association (ASA) and the 2020 ASA Distinguished Book Award. With support from a Guggenheim and ACLS fellowships, Prof. Carrillo currently investigates the interactions that amateur genealogists establish with the documents and records that constitute the essential building blocks of any genealogical endeavor. Prof. Carrillo is co-director of the Sexualities Project at Northwestern (SPAN)
Jeannette Colyvas

Jeannette Colyvas

Associate Professor
Kellogg School of Management

j-colyvas@northwestern.edu

Jeannette Colyvas (Ph.D., Education, Stanford) interests are in learning and organizational change. Her current research addresses university-industry relations, scientist collaboration networks, and the development and commercialization of academic research, particularly with respect to the biotech industry. She is interested in organizations and entrepreneurship, comparing public, private, and non-profit forms of organizing, and the study of networks. Professor Colyvas teaches the course Tools for Organizational Analysis at Northwestern and while at Stanford co-taught graduate courses on the nonprofit sector with Professor Walter W. Powell. Her published work has appeared in the journals Management Science and Research in Organizational Behavior.

Scott Curtis

Scott Curtis

Associate Professor
Radio, Television and Film

scurtis@northwestern.edu

Scott Curtis (Ph.D., Film Studies, Iowa) studies scientific and medical filmmaking, specifically how scientists and physicians use moving images in their research, how the image itself is constructed as legitimate evidence, and how the use of it articulates particular conceptions of time, space, and the human body. He is especially interested in the ways that expert vision accommodates itself to moving images, which is the topic of his book, The Shape of Spectatorship: Art, Science, and Early Cinema in Germany (Columbia, 2015). His work on science and cinema has appeared in Science in Context, Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft, and other journals and anthologies, and he has organized symposia on the topic at Northwestern University and Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany. Professor Curtis is currently the Director of the Communication Program at NU's campus in Qatar.
Penelope Deutscher
Penelope Deutscher (Ph.D., Philosophy, New South Wales) specializes in twentieth-century and contemporary French philosophy and philosophy of gender. Other areas of special interest include theories of genealogy and biopolitics (Nietzsche, Foucault, Agamben). Her publications include Yielding Gender: Feminism, Deconstruction and the History of Philosophy (Routledge, 1997); A Politics of Impossible Difference: The Later Work of Luce Irigaray (Cornell, 2002), How to Read Derrida (Granta/Norton, 2006), and The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Ambiguity, Conversion, Resistance (Cambridge, 2008)
Steven Epstein

Steven Epstein (Ph.D., Sociology, Berkeley) is the John C. Shaffer Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Sociology. He studies the “politics of knowledge”—more specifically, the contested production of expert and especially biomedical knowledge, with an emphasis on the interplay of social movements, experts, and health institutions, and with a focus on the politics of sexuality, gender, and race. He is especially known for two books: Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge (California, 1996), and Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in Medical Research (Chicago, 2007), both of which received multiple awards. Epstein’s newest book, The Quest for Sexual Health: How an Elusive Ideal Has Transformed Science, Politics, and Everyday Life, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2022. Epstein serves on the editorial board of the journals Social Studies of Science and Science, Technology, & Human Values. He is a past chair of the Science, Knowledge, and Technology Section of the American Sociological Association, and he has served on the council of the Society for Social Studies of Science.

Wendy Espeland
Wendy Espeland (Ph.D., Sociology, Chicago) works in the areas of organizations, culture, and law. Her book, The Struggle for Water: Politics, Rationality and Identity in the American Southwest (Chicago, 1998) was awarded the Best Book Prize by the Culture Section of the American Sociological Association, the Rachel Carson Award from the Society for the Social Studies of Science, and the Louis Brownlow Book Award from the National Academy of Public Administration. She is currently writing a book about the effects of commensuration, the process of translating qualities into quantities. In it she investigates how media rankings have influenced higher education, how efforts to measure homosexuality have shaped gay and lesbian politics, and the commensurative practices necessary in order to transform air pollution into a commodity that is traded on futures markets.
Gary Fine

Gary A. Fine received his Ph. D. in Social Psychology from Harvard University and is a James E. Johnson Professor of Sociology. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is interested in understanding difficult reputations and problematic collective memories of figures such as Joseph McCarthy, Charles Lindbergh, Warren Harding, and Benedict Arnold. This research was published in Sticky Reputations: The Politics of Collective Memory in Midcentury America (2012). His current research involves shifting reputations and political positions of Southern segregationist politics and the examination of ruptures in political alliances. He was recently awarded a fellowship at the Kaplan Humanities Institute for 2019-2020 for his project on arts training in the American University.

Rayvon Fouché

Rayvon Fouché

Professor
Communication Studies and Medill School of Journalism

fouche@northwestern.edu

Rayvon Fouché holds a joint appointment as Professor of Communication Studies and Professor in the Medill School of Journalism, Media, and Integrative Marketing Communications. He authored or edited Black Inventors in the Age of Segregation (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), Appropriating Technology: Vernacular Science and Social Power (University of Minnesota Press, 2004), Technology Studies (Sage Publications, 2008), the 4th Edition of the Handbook of Science & Technology Studies (MIT Press, 2016), and Game Changer: The Technoscientific Revolution in Sports (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017).   
Sanford Goldberg
Sandy Goldberg (PhD Columbia University, 1995) interests are in the theory of knowledge, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind, with a special interest in the social aspects of knowledge. He is the author of numerous articles as well as three books: Anti-Individualism (Cambridge University Press, 2007), Relying on Others: An Essay in Epistemology (Oxford University Press, 2010), and Assertion: On the Philosophical Significance of Assertoric Speech (Oxford University Press, 2015). His research focuses on various aspects of knowledge communities: the use of language to spread knowledge; the division of intellectual labor; the way in which norms structure knowledge communities; disagreement; and other issues in social epistemology.
Tara Gonsalves

Tara Gonsalves

Assistant Professor
Sociology

tgonsalves@northwestern.edu

Tara Gonsalves (Ph.D., UC Berkeley) examines how social categories are created and contested. More specifically, her research examines the contested processes through which gender and sexuality categories emerge and transform as well as the social consequences of classification processes. Her research fall into three main streams: (1) An investigation of how the category “transgender” is coming to articulate global gender variance; (2) An exploration of how medical experts produce new gendered and racialized understandings that are inscribed in the body; and (3) An analysis of an original data set of LGBT organizations worldwide, examining regional influences on their emergence and integration into advocacy networks. 
Philip Hockberger
Philip Hockberger (Ph.D., Neuroscience, University of Illinois) is at the Feinberg School of Medicine and Associate VP for Research at Northwestern University. He has given more than 150 presentations to the public over the past 20 years aimed at fostering communication between scientists and society. He and Dr. Richard Miller co-teach an annual graduate course, Science & Society, that explores the intersection of these topics. They also lead an annual bioethics seminar for the Chicago Graduate Student Association, and serve as faculty mentors for the NU Science Policy Initiative (SPiN). As Associate VP for Research, he oversees core facilities administration and research planning and facilities.
Michelle N. Huang

Michelle N. Huang

Assistant Professor
English, Asian American Studies

michelle.n.huang@northwestern.edu

Michelle N. Huang (Ph.D. English, Women’s Studies, Pennsylvania State University), jointly appointed in the English Department and in the Asian American Studies Program, has research and teaching interests in contemporary Asian American literature, posthumanism, and feminist science studies. Her current project, “Molecular Race,” examines posthumanist aesthetics in post-1965 Asian American literature to trace racial representation and epistemology at nonhuman, minute scales. “Molecular Race” argues that a rapprochement with scientific discourse is necessary to fully grasp how the formal and aesthetic qualities of Asian American literature unsettle sedimented structures of racial formation. Michelle’s work appears in Twentieth-Century LiteratureJournal of Asian American StudiesAmerasia, and Post 45: Contemporaries, among other venues.

Daniel Immerwahr

Daniel Immerwahr (Ph.D., History, UC Berkeley) specializes in the history of the United States within a global context and teaches U.S. intellectual history, U.S. foreign relations, and global history. His first book, Thinking Small (Harvard, 2015), offered a critical account of U.S. grassroots development projects, at home and abroad. He is particularly interested in the role that technology and infrastructure play in global power. His most recent book, How to Hide an Empire was published in 2019 and is about territories of the United States overseas.

Peter Locke

Peter Locke

Assistant Professor of Instruction
Anthropology

peter.locke@northwestern.edu

Peter Locke (Ph.D., Princeton) is a cultural and medical anthropologist focused on bringing ethnographic evidence to the comparative study of global health and humanitarian intervention in post-conflict societies. His field research, writing, and teaching all explore and critique the intersection of humanitarian work and reigning modes of evidence production in contexts of contentious local politics and lingering histories of conflict and mass violence. Locke’s doctoral research in Bosnia-Herzegovina examined how the urban poor cope with traumatic histories and rebuild their lives in a new post-war state and economy; more specifically, he charted the impact and sustainability of humanitarian psychiatry and psychosocial support services for war survivors in Sarajevo. Prior to joining Northwestern’s faculty, Locke served as a postdoctoral research associate and then as a lecturer for Princeton University’s Program in Global Health and Health Policy.

Anto Mohsin

Anto Mohsin

Assistant Professor
NU Qatar Liberal Arts

anto.mohsin@northwestern.edu

Anto Mohsin is an assistant professor in residence in the Liberal Arts Program at Northwestern University in Qatar. He is an interdisciplinary scholar of infrastructure, energy, and  the environment specializing in Indonesia in the twentieth century with a broader interest in Southeast Asia. At Northwestern Qatar, he teaches undergraduate courses examining science, technology, environment, and disasters in society, as well as on a history of knowledge production of and in Asia. He has researched and published different science and technology studies (STS) topics. His peer-reviewed articles have appeared in several journals, including Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia; East Asian Science; Technology and Society: An International Journal; and Arcadia, an open-access, peer-reviewed journal for short, engaging environmental histories. He has also published a chapter on community resilience in the wake of a long-running energy-related disaster in the edited volume The Sociotechnical Constitution of Resilience (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and on electric infrastructure development in Indonesia’s borderlands in the anthology Infrastructure and the Remaking of Asia (University of Hawaii, 2022). His first book, Electrifying Indonesia: Technology and Social Justice in National Development, published by the University of Wisconsin Press, was published in December 2023.
Joel Mokyr

Joel Mokyr

Professor
Economics and History

j-mokyr@northwestern.edu

Joel Mokyr is the Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences and Sackler Professor (by special appointment) at the Eitan Berglas School of Economics at the University of Tel Aviv. He specializes in economic history and the economics of technological change and population change. He is the author of Why Ireland Starved: An Analytical and Quantitative Study of the Irish Economy, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress, The British Industrial Revolution: An Economic Perspective,  The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy and The Enlightened Economy. He has been a visiting Professor at Harvard, the University of Chicago, Stanford, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the University of Tel Aviv, University College of Dublin, and the University of Manchester. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a foreign fellow of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences and the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei.

Santiago J. Molina

Santiago J. Molina

Assistant Professor
Sociology

Santiago J. Molina (Ph.D., Sociology, Berkeley) works on the deeply entangled relationship between the production of knowledge and the production of radicalized social orders. Their research focuses on the politics of emerging biotechnologies and the use of ethnic, national, and racial categories in biomedicine. Molina is working on a book project, The Biopolitics of Genome Editing, that draws off ethnographic data to analyze the institutionalization of CRISPR-Cas technology. Molina's research has been published in Annual Review of Sociology, Frontiers in Genetics, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine,  Perspectives on Science, Review of Policy Research and Science. Molina’s teaching has aimed to cultivate practical tools for thinking critically about the relationship between science and society. They have taught courses on sociology of technology, genetics and society, sociology of medicine and illness, and sociological methods.

Laura Pedraza Fariña

Laura Pedraza Fariña

Assistant Professor
School of Law

laura.pedraza-farina@law.northwestern.edu

Laura Pedraza Fariña (Ph.D., Genetics, Yale; J.D., Harvard) Before joining academia, Professor Pedraza Fariña practiced law in the Washington, D.C. offices of Covington & Burling, where she focused on patent litigation and litigation under the Alien Tort Statute, and served as a consultant for the Open Society Foundations, where she researched the national implementation of global commitments to fight HIV/AIDS. Professor Pedraza Fariña’s scholarship focuses on patent law, international law, and human rights law. She has written on the role of non-state actors in global governance, and on sociological approaches to patent law. Her published articles include,Conceptions of Civil Society in International Law-Making and Implementation: A Theoretical Framework, 34 Michigan Journal of International Law 102 (2013), and Patent Law and the Sociology of Innovation, 2013 Wisconsin Law Review 815 (2013). Her scholarship on intellectual property law seeks to complement traditional law and economic analyses of patent law by developing a sociological and historical approach that focuses on the ways in which scientific knowledge, and thus innovation, is made, maintained, and modified. Her current projects include an analysis of the implications of sociological studies on tacit scientific knowledge for the disclosure theory of patent law, and a study of how the specialized court structure of patent law influences the content of patent decisions.

Paul Ramírez

Paul Ramírez

Associate Professor
History

pramirez@northwestern.edu

Paul Ramírez (Ph.D., History, Berkeley) reasearch interests lie in the ways often implicit cultural understandings facilitated the introduction of new kinds of medical knowledge in Mexico’s early modern period. In 2018 he published Enlightened Immunity: Mexico's Experiments with Disease Prevention in the Age of Reason which explores the ways theology, Catholic liturgy, priests, pastoral letters, rituals of statecraft, and village politics informed the use of techniques such as inoculation and vaccination for smallpox. He has published articles on the promotion of enlightened medicine in colonial Mexico’s periodical press, on a shrine devotion’s resurgence in Mexico City’s 1776 earthquake, and on a quarantine implemented during a 1797 smallpox epidemic from the perspective of peasants, artisans, and merchants subjected to it.
Jim Schwoch

Jim Schwoch

Professor
Communication Studies and Media, Technology and Society

j-schwoch@northwestern.edu

James Schwoch (Ph.D. Northwestern University) teaching and research areas are global media, media history, international studies, global security, and media and the environment. He has published six books and a wide range of articles, and his research has been funded by many organizations, including NSF, NEH, the Fulbright Commission (Finland, Germany), the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Ford Foundation. His book Wired for Nature is about the telegraph and Western North America in the 19th century, a study that explores themes such as telegraph companies and national security, military uses of the telegraph in Native American conflict and counterinsurgency, the challenges for telegraph development presented by landscapes and ecosystems, and the uses of the telegraph in geodesy, natural history specimen collection, and the gathering of weather data.
Rebecca Seligman

Rebecca Seligman

Associate Professor
Anthropology

r-seligman@northwestern.edu

Rebecca Seligman (Ph.D., Emory) works in the areas of medical anthropology, psychological anthropology, and transcultural psychiatry. She is interested in the relationships of individual experience, social and political contexts, and cultural models of selfhood to outcomes such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), dissociation, somatization, diabetes, and depression. She is also engaged with current neuroscience research concerning these phenomena, and has published several articles critically engaging with the field of cultural neuroscience. She has written Possessing Spirits and Healing Selves: Embodiment and Transformation in an Afro-Brazilian Religion, as well as articles that have been published in Transcultural Psychiatry, Culture Medicine and Psychiatry, Medical Anthropology, Social Cognitive Affective Neuroscience, Progress in Brain Research and Ethos. She is co-editor and contributor to the Oxford Handbook of Cultural Neuroscience.

Noelle Sullivan

Noelle Sullivan

Associate Professor of Instruction
Anthropology

noelle.sullivan@northwestern.edu

Noelle Sullivan (Ph.D., Anthropology, University of Florida) is a cultural and medical anthropologist focusing on the politics of global health in practice. Sullivan is concerned about what becomes ‘in vogue’ in global health. Which issues or needs tend to be included/excluded or celebrated/marginalized? How global health concerns are taken up, and by whom? She conducts ethnographic fieldwork in northern Tanzania. During 2016-2017, Sullivan was also a Public Voices Fellow of The Op-Ed Project. Her op-eds and a comprehensive list of media publications and appearances can be found on her website. She was awarded a fellowship for 2019-2020 at the Kaplan Humanities Institute for her project on "volunteer tourism" in the Global South.

Helen Tilley

Helen Tilley

Associate Professor
History

helen.tilley@northwestern.edu

Helen Tilley (PhD, History, Oxford) has affiliations with the African Studies, Global Health, and Environmental Policy and Culture programs. Her work examines medical, environmental, racial, and anthropological research in colonial and post-colonial contexts, emphasizing intersections with environmental history and development studies. Her book, Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago, 2011) explores the dynamic interplay between scientific research and imperialism in British Africa between 1870 and 1950. She has also written articles and book chapters on the history of ecology, eugenics, agriculture, and epidemiology in tropical Africa, and is co-editor with Robert Gordon of Ordering Africa: Anthropology, European Imperialism and the Politics of Knowledge (Manchester, 2007) and with Michael Gordin and Gyan Prakash of Utopia-Dystopia: Historical Conditions of Possibility (Princeton, 2010). Her current project seeks to explain the different scientific studies and legal interventions in the twentieth century that originally helped to construct “traditional medicine” as a viable category of research and policy-making, especially in the contexts of decolonization and the Cold War. She has received grants for her research from the Wellcome Trust and the National Science Foundation.

Sepehr Vakil

Sepehr Vakil

Assistant Professor
School of Education and Social Policy

sepehr.vakil@northwestern.edu

Sepehr Vakil (Ph.D., University of California-Berkeley) teaches learning sciences. Previously he was Assistant Professor of STEM Education and the Associate Director of Equity & Inclusion in the Center for STEM Education at the University of Texas at Austin. Vakil's current research projects span three broad thematic areas of focus: (a) ethics, learning, and technology, (b) participatory design and community-engaged research methodologies, and (c) historical and sociopolitical analyses of engineering education across global contexts. Dr. Vakil recently received the National Science Foundation’s early CAREER award, as well as the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral fellowship. He received his PhD in the Education in Mathematics, Science, and Technology program at UC Berkeley, and his B.S and M.S in Electrical Engineering from UCLA.
Sharra Vostral

Sharra Vostral

Assistant Dean of Research, Communication Studies
Communication Studies, Professor of Instruction

svostral@northwestern.edu

Sharra Vostral’s research explores gender, technology, and medicine and the cross-section of their histories. The histories communicate stories about not only about the past, but the way the future is imagined. She is the author of Under Wraps: A History of Menstrual Hygiene Technology (Lexington, 2008) and Toxic Shock: A Social History (NYU Press, 2018). She co-edited Feminist Technology (University of Illinois Press, 2010) and The Politics and History of Menstruation: Contextualising the Scottish Campaign to End Period Poverty (Open Library of Humanities, 2022). As Assistant Dean of Research in the School of Communication, her role is to support faculty and students in the arts, humanities, and social sciences, to match their research goals with funding and award opportunities.
Nick Winters

Nick Winters

Assistant Professor
Classics

nick.winters@northwestern.edu

Nick Winters is a classicist and former physicist specializing in ancient mathematics and science. His dissertation proposed a major revision to the history of Greek mathematics, organizing ancient mathematical texts into networks of information transmission and methodology. Outside of mathematics, Dr. Winters' work has included projects in ancient medicine, music, engineering, and practical sciences such as surveying and accounting, weaving and textile arts, timekeeping, and navigation.
Kelly Wisecup
Kelly Wisecup (Ph.D. University of Maryland, College Park) specializes in Native American literature, early American literature, and medicine and literature. Her research studies the ways in which Native American and African-descended people responded to and critiqued Euro-American science in North America and the Caribbean before 1900. She has published essays in Early American Literature, Early American Studies, Atlantic Studies, and Studies in Travel Writing. Her book, Medical Encounters: Knowledge and Identity in Early American Literatures (2013) explores how medical knowledge served as a form of communication among colonists, Native Americans, and African Americans, and one in which people defined and defended their bodies, their relationship to the environment, and to other than human beings. Her current book project, Assembled Relations: Compilation, Collection, and Native American Writing, investigates how Native American writers, diplomats, ministers, and tribal leaders adapted forms of compilation and collection—herbals, vocabulary lists, museum inventories, catalogs, and commonplace books—to restore and remake environmental, epistemological, and interpersonal relations disrupted by colonialism.
Sandy Zabell

Sandy Zabell

Professor
Statistics and Mathematics

s-zabell@northwestern.edu

Sandy Zabell (Ph.D., 1974, Harvard) focus revolves around mathematical probability and Bayesian statistics (in particular, the study of exchangeability). He is also interested in the history, philosophical foundations, and legal applications of probability and statistics. One of his major historical interests at present is the use of cryptology during WWII (in particular the contributions of Alan Turing).  His primary applied interests are in the areas of law and forensic science. He is currently a member of the NIST OSAC (Organization of Scientific Area Committees) Biological Data Interpretation and Reporting Subcommittee, and charged with developing standards and guidelines related to scientifically valid methods of interpretation, statistical analysis and reporting of biological results.