Faculty and Research

Professor of Anthropology Charles Golden researches Mayan civilizations

Professor of Anthropology Charles Golden researches Mayan civilizations

Brandeis faculty are accomplished scholars, who bring their expertise into the classroom. Whether it’s conflict in the Middle East or the global economy or post-colonial literature – or a host of other topics – Brandeis faculty are contributing to the advancement of knowledge in their fields. Their work can be found in scholarly journals and books, and is presented at national and international conferences. Here is a small sample:

International Health

Joan Kaufman is a senior scientist at the Heller School’s Schneider Institutes for Health Policy with expertise in AIDS, gender, reproductive health, international health, and international health sector reform. Her 2006 book, AIDS and Social Policy in China, was the first English language book on China’s AIDS epidemic. Chinese officials have begun acting on some of the book’s recommendations, particularly in the areas of AIDS testing and treatment. Her current research includes studies on health, governance, and women’s participation in China’s countryside, Chinese AIDS orphans, and AIDS public policies in Vietnam. 

Donald ShepardHealth economist Donald Shepard, a professor at the Heller School, has studied cost issues surrounding the treatment of AIDS, substance abuse, and cardiac rehabilitation. Most recently he has been focusing on efforts to prevent and treat dengue fever in Vietnam and Cambodia.   

Uncovering Global and Local Historical Identities

Sarah Lamb is a cultural anthropologist who studies the ways people construct their social-cultural worlds and identities, particularly surrounding gender, aging, the body, family and nation. Her primary ethnographic research has been carried out in West Bengal, India and among Bengali and Gujarati immigrants in the San Francisco and Boston areas of the U.S.

FreezeGregory L. Freeze is the Victor and Gwendolyn Beinfield Professor of History. His primary teaching interests are modern Russian history, with a particular focus on religious and social history. Freeze teaches courses and seminars in modern Russian history and has directed a number of dissertations in Russian religious history. He regularly presents papers at international conferences. He has also taught extensively in Germany, including the universities in Tübingen, Heidelberg, and Göttingen, where he offered lecture courses and seminars on Russian religious history, on Imperial Russian and Soviet history, and on a variety of specialized subjects.

Development Economics

Can ErbilCan Erbil is a Research Fellow of EcoMod, Global Economic Modeling Network, where he is involved in research and teaching on economic modeling. Erbil is also currently a consultant at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. On two different occasions, Professor Erbil has worked in the International Trade Division of the World Bank, as a consultant and data manager. He has conducted intensive empirical research using international data sources and delivered policy recommendations to client countries on issues such as market openness.   

Stephen G. Cecchetti is the Barbara and Richard Rosenberg Professor of Global Finance. His work focuses on the connections between the financial system and the real economy, including how housing prices should be included in common measures of inflation. His multi-dimensional background includes work with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking; the National Bureau of Economic Research; the American Economic Review, and the Journal of Economic Literature.

Collaborative Research in the Sciences

Neuroscientist Robert Sekuler's visual cognition lab typifies the Brandeis approach to research, one that is collaborative and cross-cultural. With post-docs from Korea, India, Northern Ireland, Iran, and Alabama, the lab is a hive of international collaboration with expertise across a range of subjects including medicine, computer science, and psychology. 

Physicists Jim Bensinger, Craig Blocker, Hermann Wellenstein and Larry Kirsch make up the Brandeis High Energy physics group collaborating on ATLAS at the Large Hadron Collider being built at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. CERN is the world’s largest particle physics center and is located on the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva.

Wangh

UK-based Smiths Detection will launch a portable diagnostic system to test for avian flu and other diseases using technology developed by biologist Larry Wangh and his lab.

Regional Expertise

As a graduate student at Brandeis, ChaeRan Freeze convinced wary Russian archivists to give her access to piles of paper dating back to the 1830s, as part of her research for a dissertation on Jewish marriage and divorce in Russia. She translated and organized her findings into her first book, Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Russia, in 2002. In 2005, she co-edited Polin: Jewish Women in Eastern Europe with Paula Hyman and fellow Brandeis professor Antony Polonsky. Professor Freeze is currently at work on a documentary history, Everyday Jewish Life in Imperial Russia, and a book, Sex and the Shtetl: Jewish Sexuality in Tsarist Russia.

In addition to winning numerous awards for her teaching and mentoring, Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow is the Chair of Classical Studies and author of numerous books and scholarly articles. Her forthcoming works include The Archaeology of Sanitation in Roman Italy: Water, Sewers and Toilets (University of North Carolina Press) and Pompeii and Herculaneum: Roman Daily Life in the Shadow of Vesuvius (Cambridge University Press). 

 

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