As students arrive for the start of the academic year, they'll be reunited with the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences faculty they remember from last spring – and also greeted by some new faces.
Dean Steven Shapiro is pleased to welcome five new core faculty, all of whom have demonstrated a commitment to teaching and to mentoring students, to original research in their fields, and to social justice.
Our new professors Tatiana Cruz, Grace Ferris, James Mason, Uma Millner and Nafisa Tanjeem are active in their respective communities and come with interesting and unexpected backgrounds and hobbies. Stay tuned for all of these new faculty to quickly start contributing to the richness of the Lesley community, and be sure to extend your own personal welcome as you meet them this fall.
New College of Liberal Arts and Sciences faculty
Dr. Tatiana Cruz will be joining the Humanities Division as Assistant Professor of American History. Her dissertation, entitled “Boston’s Struggle in Black and Brown: Racial Politics, Community Development, and Grassroots Organizing, 1965–1985,” is groundbreaking scholarship—the first multiracial study of Boston’s African-American and Latino communities in the post-Civil Rights era.
Dr. Grace Ferris will be joining the Natural Sciences and Mathematics division as Assistant Professor of Chemistry. Dr. Ferris’s research focuses on improving the synthesis of organic chemicals for biomedical and material sciences.
Dr. James Mason will be joining us as an Assistant Professor of Business Management. An up-and-coming scholar, Dr. Mason helped to develop the emerging field of social enterprise systems engineering, as evidenced in his dissertation, “Social Enterprise Systems Engineering: A Development Intervention Paradigm.”
Dr. Uma Millner will be joining the Division of Psychology & Applied Therapies this fall. Her dissertation focused on the assessment of counselor perceptions of prostitution and how perceptions influence counselors’ clinical judgments.
Dr. Nafisa Tanjeem will be joining the Social Sciences Division as an Assistant Professor of Global Studies. Dr. Tanjeem is well-grounded in the interdisciplinary study of global issues. Her research and teaching interests include transnational and postcolonial feminism, globalization and feminist politics, transnational labor movements, comparative political economy, critical race theory, and feminist digital humanities.