Please welcome the Tenenbaum faculty tutors! Our faculty of world-class researchers are interested in guiding sophomores in independent research as part of the Tenenbaum Tutorials in the Liberal Arts program. Students have weekly meetings with their tutors and a budget to spend as they dive into literatures, observe new fields, and generate new analyses. These experiences are what make the School of Liberal Arts a crossroads for personalized learning and dedicated research exploration.
Students will choose among these faculty to find an interlocutor and tutor for their research interests. The faculty meet with students weekly to listen, guide, and suggest new paths based on their own areas of expertise and training. These tutorials will be registered as independent studies in the faculty's home department under a title that fits their shared pursuit of new knowledge and lifelong learning as befits the liberal arts. Students interested in participating in Tenenbaum Tutorials should see our Tenenbaum Tutorials overview page.
Michele Adams
Michele Adams’ primary areas of interest include gender, family, sport, and social policy, with a methodological focus on critical discourse analysis.
Laura Rosanne Adderley
Laura Adderley is an expert on African diaspora social and cultural history, African-American history, Caribbean history, slavery and emancipation, especially in the 19th-century Americas, Atlantic slave trade, legacies/public memory/public history of Black enslavement.
Adrian Anagnost
Adrian Anagnost is an expert in socially engaged art, art and urban placemaking, and race and strategic essentialism in contemporary art, with a focus on modern Brazil and the post-1960s U.S. in a comparative framework.
Moisés Arce
Moisés Arce is an expert in Environmental politics, conflict processes, democratic governance, and comparative political economy.
Caroline T. Arruda
Caroline T. Arruda is an expert in ethics (especially metaethics), philosophy of action, and social and political philosophy.
Areas of Tutorial Interest - topics in metaethics; theories of agency; theories of reasons, and rationality
Rebecca Atencio
Rebecca Atencio is an expert on feminisms as well as on memory and human rights in literature and film.
Topics of tutorial interest - Anything related to feminism, gender, and/or sexuality; literary, cinematic and/or other cultural interventions in contentious political issues and debates; any other topics that fall within my general expertise, especially Latin America.
Kate Baldwin
Kate Baldwin is an expert in 20th century U.S. literature and culture, Cold War culture and literatures, girlhood and motherhood studies, African American literature, feminist theory and media, Russian literature, fiction and creative non-fiction writing. Some of my popular course titles include “The Cultural Politics of the Cold War,” “Feminisms for the 21st century,” “Bad Moms,” and “Literature and Revolution”.
Casey Beck
Casey Beck is an expert on documentary film production and cinematic techniques, with a focus on the ethics of film production, the representation of historically marginalized groups of people, and environmentalism.
Areas of Tutorial Interest – representation and environmentalism
Ryan Boehm
Ryan Boehm is an expert on ancient Mediterranean urbanism, ancient empires, and interaction between Greece and the Near East. His training is in archaeology, epigraphy, and Greek language and literature.
Brian Brox
Brian Brox is an expert on American Government, Political Parties, Campaigns & Elections, and Political Behavior.
Michael Brumbaugh
Michael Brumbaugh is an expert in Greek and Roman literature and its legacies from antiquity to the present, ancient political thought, literary criticism, papyrology, canon formation, history of writing and of the book.
Dan Burnston
Dan Burnston is an expert in the philosophy and sciences of the mind. He focuses on how advances in neuroscience inform our evolving understandings of mental life. Areas of tutorial interest: Decision-making, mental health and disease, perceptual experience, motivation and attention.
Amy Chafee
Amy Chafee is an expert on voice, text, and dialect design for screen and stage.
Areas of Tutorial Interest - performance studies; storytelling; narrative; ontology of “authentic voice”
Krystal Cleary
Krystal Cleary is an expert in critical disability studies, intersectional feminist and queer theory, and media studies with a particular focus on disability in media and reality television.
Areas of Tutorial Interest - Disability studies, rights/justice, and culture; feminist theory and praxis; queer studies; media studies; reality television; feminist and disability politics of self/community care; New Age cultures and practices.
Alexis Culotta
Alexis Culotta is an expert in the role of collaboration and exchange among artistic and architectural networks across the Italian Renaissance era; she is equally engaged in digital humanities investigations of how to visualize the data related to these networks of makers.
Areas of Tutorial Interest - Any themes related to the Renaissance era (with a particular focus on the Italian peninsula), working relationships between artists/architects, workshop collaborations, or art-oriented digital humanities interventions
Clare Daniel
Clare Daniel is an expert in reproductive politics and the movements for reproductive justice and rights. Her research focuses on reproductive issues in the media (abortion, sex education, adolescent pregnancy, contraception, etc), reproductive health outcomes, and histories of structural racism, welfare, and disaster in the United States.
Areas of Tutorial Interest - defining reproductive justice; children and media; pregnant citizens
Martin Dimitrov
Martin Dimitrov is an expert on autocracies, with a focus on former and current communist regimes. He has conducted research on China, Cuba, Russia, and Eastern Europe.
Areas of Tutorial Interest - modern dictatorships; persistence of authoritarianism in the 21st century
M. Kathryn Edwards
Kathryn Edwards is an expert in modern France, colonialism and decolonization, the histories of immigration and identity-formation, commemoration and historical remembrance. She has training in cultural and social history, experience with film studies, as well as expertise on the historical analysis of literature/film, and race/gender/sexuality.
Allison Emmerson
Allison Emmerson is an expert in Roman archaeology and the ancient Mediterranean. She is particularly interested in the “marginal” aspects of ancient cites, not only literal city edges and the activities they attracted, such as waste management and the treatment of the dead, but also the people who have been marginalized both in ancient life and in modern reconstructions of it, including women, the enslaved, and the subelite. Her research focuses on the Roman city of Pompeii, Italy, but stretches to sites across Africa, Asia, and Europe.
Edmond (Edo) Ernest dit Alban
Edo's research examines the role of fan’s quotidian pedestrian mobility in the construction of transmedia environments, industries, and products. They are interested in the reconstruction of inclusive transmedia histories, looking at city space as point of convergence between diverse perspectives on animated media, storytelling, media production, and even activism.
Areas of Tutorial Interest - Japan, Popular Cultures, Transmedia Industries, Gender and Sexuality
Fayçal Falaky
Fayçal Falaky is an expert on The impact of the Enlightenment on modern political thought, including cultural and political intersections between the Arab world and Europe in the 18th century, the philosophical and societal shifts from stillness to motion and exploring how these dynamics shaped perceptions of progress and influenced the broader societal structure, themes of liberty and authority in philosophical and literary texts, and the role of automatons in Enlightenment thought, examining concepts of alienation and agency within the context of emerging modernity.
Holly Flora
Holly Flora is an expert on the history of art, cultural heritage law, museum studies, European medieval art, Renaissance art, Italian language and culture, religious studies, Byzantine art and culture, Early Christian/late Antique art and culture, women and gender, medieval manuscripts.
Areas of Tutorial Interest - Art History, Museum Studies,Curatorial Studies, Cultural Heritage Studies,Gender Studies,Italian Studies
Bouchaib Gadir
Bouchaib Gadir is an expert in Middle East and North Africa popular culture and politics, Arabic language and literature, Identity and Exile in the Arab Diaspora and multiculturalism.
Leslie Geddes
Leslie Geddes is an expert in early modern art and architecture with a focus on Renaissance and Baroque Italy.
Areas of Tutorial Interest - individual artists; artistic rivalries; the city of Rome; ideal cities; landscapes; Renaissance ecologies; antiquity reception, history of science and scientific illustration; prints and book
Amy George
Amy George is an expert in translation studies with a specialization in Mesoamerican Linguistics, particularly the analysis of the transfer of 16th century European astronomical and astrological concepts in 18th century Mayan manuscripts. Her research interests include manuscript studies and primary source analysis, second language acquisition scholarship and interactions between visual representations and textual adaptations in early modern books. Professor George is an interdisciplinary scholar with a particular passion for cross-disciplinary projects.
Areas of Tutorial Interest: Translation Studies; Second Language Acquisition; Mesoamerican Linguistics; Manuscript studies primary source analysis and rare books, Early modern astrology, astronomy; Transcontinental texts and decolonization of knowledge.
Antonio Gómez
Antonio Gómez is an expert in Latin American culture, literature and film, documentary film, New Argentine Cinema, and the relationship between politics and culture, with a focus on the Southern Cone in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Areas of Tutorial Interest: Cinema, documentary film, Latin American cultural studies, Latin American literature, memory studies, exile studies
Katharine Lee
Katharine Lee is an expert in biocultural approaches to human biology; human variation; menstruation; bone health; physical activity; gender/sex in health research.
Jana Lipman
Jana Lipman is an expert in refugees, migration, labor, transnational movements, 20th century US history, and US foreign relations, particularly in Southeast Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean.
Areas of Tutorial Interest - Immigration: Past/Present; Black Workers Matter; Who is a Refugee?; US War and Society; US Foreign Relations; Public History and Memory
F. Thomas Luongo
F. Thomas Luongo is an expert on History of Christianity, Jews and Christians in the Middle Ages, Dante, Italian Renaissance, Christian Mystics and Saints, History of the Book.
Laura Helen Marks
Laura Marks is an expert in Pornography Studies, Sex Work, Film Genre, Sexuality Studies, Masculinity Studies, Gothic/Horror Fiction, True Crime Media.
Adam McKeown
Adam McKeown is an expert in literature, writing, Early Modern Studies, visual culture, military history, with training and research interests in art & architectural history, and the history of the built environment.
Isa Murdock-Hinrichs
Isa Murdock-Hinrichs is an expert in literary, visual, and film theory; early 20th century film and postwar national cinemas; and early 20th century modernism Theories of genre and adaptation.
Roberto Nicosia
Roberto Nicosia is an expert in European immigration, immigration in Italy, and Italians in New Orleans. His research interests include Classical reception in Italian Renaissance, the Aldine press in Venice, and the Greek emigres in Italy between 15th and 16th century.
Areas of Tutorial Interest – immigration; cultural studies; history of the press; cultures of New Orleans
Scott Nolan
Scott Nolan is an expert in American Politics with specific emphasis on courts, law, identity politics, and especially LGBTQ people and issues.
Topics of interest - LGBTQ Sociopolitical Change, Fighting Discrimination, Law in America, Equality and Equity in America.
Thomas Oatley
Thomas Oatley is an expert in International relations, political economy, climate change, energy politics.
Emilia Oddo
Emilia Odd is an archaeologist of Ancient Greece, with a specialty on social organization and cultural expression. Her work is centered on the study of pottery sherds, looking at them like opportunities to explore the way the ancient people interacted and engaged with each other.
Areas of Tutorial Interest - Ancient Greek society and culture, Classical reception (movies, architecture, art), artifact analysis, pottery production and decoration, iconography, Greek art and architecture, networks of the ancient mediterranean.
Christopher Oliver
Christopher Oliver's research interests include Political ecology, environmental sociology, urban sociology, toxic neighborhoods, environment and public health, digital media (visual methods and digital activism) and data visualization (mapping), community engagement and public scholarship / public sociology, science, technology, and society (science and technology studies, or STS), urban development, planning, and policy, and housing inequality.
Virginia Oliveros
Virginia Oliveros research interests include political behavior, clientelism, corruption, and patronage politics, with a regional focus on Latin America.
Stephen Ostertag
Stephen Ostertag is an expert in Criminology, Deviance, Criminal Justice, Culture, Media, Social Movements.
Mauro Porto
Mauro Porto is an expert on the relationship between media and democracy in Latin America, with a focus on Brazil.
Areas of Tutorial Interest - Political communication; Latin American politics and history; the rise of the far right; critical whiteness studies; the intersection of gender/race/class inequalities; paid domestic work and inequalities.
John “Ray” Proctor
John "Ray" Proctor is an expert in the semiotics of performance, theatre, Shakespeare, casting, and the intersection of race and performance, with a focus on contemporary African American and African Diaspora Theatre and African American Theatre History.
Areas of Tutorial Interest - Performance and audience studies of race and identity; Racial and gendered representations in arts
William Saas
William Saas is an expert in political economic heterodoxy and movements for economic justice.
Ana Sánchez-Rojo
Music history, Latin America, Spain, eighteenth century, music criticism, Latinx Studies, Mexico, law and music.
Karl Schmid
Karl Schmid is an expert on Buddhist philosophy, meditation, comparative philosophy of mind, and Buddhist ethics, with a focus on the philosophical analysis of meditative practices in classical India.
Areas of Tutorial Interest - non-Western philosophy; well-being; ethical development and moral psychology, in particular the topics of empathy and fear
Aidan Smith
Aidan Smith is an expert in the American presidency, particularly gendered and heteronormative representations of claims to executive office. Aidan also explores maternal politics, particularly in pursuit of elected office.
Areas of Tutorial Interest - 20th century and contemporary American popular culture, political communication, and gender and sexuality studies.
Chelsea Stieber
Chelsea Stieber is an expert "Haiti, Haitian literature, politics, and history; Nineteenth-century, French Caribbean literature, history, and culture.
Areas of Tutorial Interest - Haiti and the Haitian Revolution; the relationship between literature and politics; ideas of freedom, rights, and republicanism; French universalism; Black Atlantic thought.
Raymond Taras
Raymond Taras is an expert on the collapse of the USSR, Russia's identity in international relations, the rise of liberal and illiberal nationalisms, the internationalization of ethnic conflict, the threats of xenophobia and Islamophobia in Europe, an interdisciplinary critique of multiculturalism, the impact of fear on foreign policy making, and a reimagined understanding of nationhood. His interests include world literature, world cinema, and winter sports.
Ferruh Yilmaz
Ferruh Yilmaz is an expert in Communication with training and research interests in the politics of immigration, race & ethnicity, discourse and rhetorical analysis, the reality-mind relationship, moral panics & crisis, populism, and populist themes in popular culture.
Lidia Zhigunova
Lidia Zhigunova is an expert in Russian and Post-Soviet Studies (literature, arts, history, politics), with a special focus on the Baltics, the Caucasus and Central Asia, as well as Russia's ethnic minorities and the history of Russia as a multiethnic empire.
Areas of Tutorial Interest - The ex-Soviet nationalities and the ethnic minorities in Russia (memory, history, identity politics); Russian politics and the dynamics between the Russian state and the states and the republics of the Caucasus region, as well as studies of trans-diasporic mobility, indigenous activism, and decolonizing practices in Russia's North Caucasus region.