My primary research interest is to understand decision making and problem solving by small groups and teams. My research has investigated how group members' initial solution preferences affect the processes that groups use to solve a particular problem, how well they perform, and how much their members learn in the process. Other research has investigated personal factors and emotional reactions associated with resisting majority influence and whether working as a group can help people overcome the performance pressures and deficits that occur when they face negative stereotypes about their ability.

As a social cognitive neuroscientist, my interests are in explaining the cognitive and neural mechanisms behind social interactions. I am particularly interested in how the basic mechanisms of executive function can help facilitate plasticity in the mind and brain. For example, I have used training of cognitive inhibition to reduce implicit racial bias. In my developmental research I examine girls’ implicit attitudes to math. I ask whether girls’ schools or single-sex math instruction improves attitudes towards and performance in math.

My work centers on early modern fiction and its relationship to the history of the novel as a literary form.  I focus primarily on Spanish fiction though my approach is explicitly comparative, looking at philosophical, theoretical and aesthetic intersections between early modern Spain and England in particular, as well as situating individual literary works within a wider horizon of both intellectual and popular practices throughout Western Europe from the Middle Ages through the 17th century.  Within this broad field I am especially interested in representations of interpretation and artistic creation and reception in early modern fiction, and in the implicit theoretical underpinnings of the works of authors such as Miguel de Cervantes, Thomas Deloney and Thomas Nashe.

I work mainly in behavioral economics, on how tradeoff decisions are influenced by irrelevant details about the context in which the decision is made. The work is mostly theoretical, but I also do some experiments and collect data on pricing.

My areas of interest are political anthropology, African Studies, social theory, everyday life, slums, protest and popular movements, violence, democracy, and South Africa.

My areas of specialization include Hebrew Bible and ancient Semitic languages. My dissertation, Sexual Pollution in the Hebrew Bible (Harvard, 2010), explores the Hebrew Bible's use of purity and contamination language to characterize sexual relations that are deemed problematic. I am currently engaged in research into the concept of human sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible and related literature.

No description available

I specialize in British literature and culture of the long 18th century, with particular interests in literature, law, and ethics as well as the history of the novel, gender studies, moral and political philosophy, and transatlantic literary and cultural relations.  I am currently completing a book manuscript entitled Public Vows: Fictions of Marriage in the English Enlightenment, which examines the ways in which early novels both responded to and participated in debates about the contractual nature of the nuptial tie.  Essays from this project have appeared or are forthcoming in Eighteenth-Century Fiction and The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation.  I have also published essays on George Eliot and the practice of promising (ELH), on The Portrait of a Lady and the divorce debates (The Henry James Review), and on gender, sentiment, and storytelling in a nineteenth-century murder trial (Yale Journal of Law and Feminism).  My new research projects examine constructions of gender and race in eighteenth-century transatlantic literature, and the role of British novels in Enlightenment controversies about the moral emotions.

My teaching and research interests include comparative politics, political behavior, global migration, citizenship, and Muslim politics. My previous research focused on alienated and participatory political behavior in Western democracies, using case studies of Western Muslim communities. This work was collected in Apart: Alienated and Engaged Muslims in the West (Columbia University Press/Hurst, 2010). My recent research examines international migrants' rights and comparative migration policies.

No description available

No description available

My interests are in the area of organic synthesis, physical organic chemistry, and computational chemistry. I currently maintain collaborations with Professor Singleton (Texas A&M, quasiclassical dynamics of organic systems) and Professor Jacobsen (Harvard University, computational catalyst design).

I'm a cultural psychologist by training, and my current research focuses on the effect of religion and science on moral behavior. My past work has specialized in the areas of emotion, physiological self-perception, terror management processes, and group perception. I take a multi-method approach to my research, relying on surveys, physiological measures, virtual environments, and behavioral observations.

No description available

No description available

I specialize in the history and theory of music in 15th century Italy. I am currently writing an interdisciplinary book-length study on music education in early modern Italy, focusing on the different spheres of humanistic and scholastic learning at Italian courts, cathedrals, and universities. My other research interests include late medieval chant, the motets of Orlando di Lasso, the music of 17th century Germany, and connections between music and classical philology and mythology, especially in late 19th century America. I co-edited with Edward Roesner the seventh and final volume of the Magnus Liber Organi edition, and I have several articles in press on different aspects of late medieval music and music theory, many of which explore intersections of music with other areas of history, including political diplomacy, legal rhetoric, and intellectual history.

My current research is focused on locating new sources of neural stem cells (NSCs) that have therapeutic potential. NSCs have previously been isolated from regions of the central nervous system that are essential to normal brain function and are difficult to access surgically. In contrast, the filum terminale is a vestigial structure at the caudal end of the spinal cord that is easily accessible through surgery and plays no functional role in the postnatal nervous system, which makes it a potential source of autologous NSCs for therapeutic use. My project involves isolating NSCs from the filum terminale of rats and humans and culturing them under conditions that promote their differentiation into dopaminergic neurons.

My main area of specialization is philosophy of perception. I work on issues at the intersection of philosophy of mind, philosophy of cognitive science, epistemology and the history of philosophy.

My field of specialty is macroeconomics. I study the implications of household-level behavior for aggregate demand over the business cycle. My research uses applied theory to understand how households’ response to risk and credit availability can drive cyclical fluctuations and what policies might be effective in reducing the costs of recessions.

Retroviruses such as HIV are equipped with tiny genomes and few proteins, yet they hijack host organisms and replicate themselves through a set of exquisitely complex molecular mechanisms. One such mechanism is the reverse transcription of their single-stranded RNA genome into double-stranded DNA for subsequent integration into the genome of the host cell. My work focuses on understanding how RNA elements within the retroviral genome are remodeled to promote initiation of the reverse transcription process. By learning more about how the retroviral genome looks and works, I hope to gain information that can ultimately be used in designing new anti-retroviral therapies.

I am broadly interested in early working memory development. How do infants keep track of multiple items or events at once, and what can they remember about these items? Once they have these items in memory, what sorts of manipulations or transformations can be performed? Exploring the early capabilities and limitations of working memory can lend insight into the basic foundations of the human mind. Currently, I am pursuing projects that examine how infants represent causal relationships in working memory.

I take a social cognition approach to studying automatic social behaviors, including how they develop and change. In my research, I study how physical actions, such as nodding one's head or making a fist, influence attitudes and behavior. I am interested in how styles of behavior (e.g., sitting in a confident vs. submissive way) influence how we interpret situations and how others view us. In a representative current project, I am investigating the ways in which gender-typical vs. gender-atypical postures affect others' perceptions of an individual, as well as the individual's self-perception.

My research focuses on causal inference, currently with applications to medicine, public health, and law. I extend and apply causal methods by emphasizing balance on observed covariates in randomized and non-randomized (observational) studies. Specifically, when randomization isn't feasible in a medical study, background differences between treated and control patients are addressed by matching or subclassification; I am designing several such studies and developing interval estimation methods appropriate for these designs. The same causal framework applies to the legal area: together with a professor at Harvard Law School, I am running a series of randomized experiments designed to evaluate the effectiveness of legal aid programs.

No description available

I specialize in later European prehistory with a particular interest in Iron Age Western Europe (1st Millennium BC). My doctoral research focused on feasting and social complexity during the later Iron Age. My current research looks at the performance of violence during the later Iron Age by exploring warrior regalia and burials. I am also exploring the role of animal symbolism in Iron Age society and the appropriation of animal imagery and characteristics by warriors.

I specialize in conflict, peace and security studies. My work focuses on the role of power-sharing rules and diplomacy in war and peacemaking. My current book project, Diplomacy and the Legitimacy of Peace Agreements, uses formal theory, statistical and experimental methods, and field research to understand why leaders choose to bargain publicly, privately or use adjudication processes when managing crises, when do talks break down or succeed, and what can make unpopular agreements acceptable to the public. My other projects examine the effect of rebel and insurgent military strategy on post-conflict health, and the effects of network structures in terrorism and conflict.

I am interested in human reproductive ecology, the role of environment and behavior in human reproduction. The emphasis of my research is on the adolescent life history transition, the time at which bodies shift their major energy allocations from linear growth to reproductive function. I'm fascinated broadly by the life history patterns and tradeoffs that characterize human breeding communities, particularly communities under energetic stress, such as the West African agriculturalist population where I have done field work. In addition, my work touches on intersections between women, gender, and sexuality studies, life history as it appears in literature, and evolution.

My work is situated at the intersection of religion and international politics. Previous work queried the proper place of religion in the public sphere through an examination of three cases before the European Court of Human Rights involving limitations on religious freedom.  Current research interests include the regulation of religious dress in public spaces and the role of religion in public education.

I specialize in Russian and American literature of the past two centuries, and in film.  My areas of interest include deception narratives by Gogol, Nabokov, David Mamet, and Flannery O'Connor; irony and satire; questions of point of view, structure, and genre in narrative; and cognitive approaches to literature and art.  My next project will consider films and novels that use unusual narrative means to explore themes of causality, agency, responsibility, chance, and fate.

My work explores the intersection between modernist poetics, philosophy and American avant-garde film. My first book manuscript,“Keeping you in the Present”: Structural Film, Paradox and the Embodied Spectator, charts an alternative history for American avant-garde film through philosophical paradoxes that structure literary modernism. The manuscript examines how the films of Stan Brakhage and Marie Menken, Hollis Frampton and Michael Snow frame the experience of film as an extension of those subjective anxieties and affects that arise through these paradoxes in the work of Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound. My second book project, Cinema’s Laocoön: the Time of Sculpture in Avant-Garde Film, looks at the role of sculpture and photography in avant-garde films of the 1940s-60s. Beginning with the photographs Auguste Rodin commissioned of his sculptures, the book considers the influence of the photographic arts on sculpture, a medium which since Lessing’s “Laocoön” essay has figured in the world of aesthetics as a spatial art. The project studies how cinema temporalizes sculpture and brings the sculptural arts to bear on contemporary discussions of the virtual, arguing that sculpture represents the first virtual three-dimensional reality.

I study social cognition in children and how certain aspects of social cognition both relate to behavior and change with age.  For example, over the past two years I've been studying how children think about sharing, and how this thinking relates to the choices they make when they are given chances to share. I've also been studying how children think about the emotions that go along with transgression, and when children are likely to anticipate that people will feel guilty after they upset another person.

No description available

My research areas of specialization include liberal theory, pluralism, democratic theory, human rights, the intersections between moral and political theory, and theories of rights. Other areas of competence include ancient and medieval political thought, social theory, and late modern political theory.  I have written various articles on Isaiah Berlin’s political theory, on pluralism and on liberal political legitimacy (all forthcoming). I am currently working on a manuscript on liberal political legitimacy under the aegis of pluralism.

I study ancient conceptions of decline, particularly as they manifest themselves in the writing of the Roman poet Horace (65-8 BC). I also like to think about the early Greek poet Hesiod, particularly his Works and Days, and Greek and Latin expressions for the English verb “to mean.”

I work in British, American, European and Latin-American literature and film of the 20th and 21st centuries, with a focus on modernism and the relationship between philosophy and literature. My current book project deals with the ethics of enigma in the modernist puzzle text, looking primarily at works by Wittgenstein, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka and Musil and the unorthodox modern narratives of quest and conversion that resonate in their writing. I am also working on a project that examines the legacy of modernism’s absorption in riddles and transformative longing in the work of J.M. Coetzee and Ricardo Piglia.