Core Fellows

Tara Casebolt is a Core Fellow/Visiting Assistant Professor in Global Health. She has a PhD in Maternal and Child Health with a minor in Population Studies from University of North Carolina Chapel Hill's Gillings School of Global Public Health. Her research is focused on access to reproductive health services for people with disabilities in low- and middle-income countries. During her PhD program, she was a predoctoral Trainee at the Carolina Population Center and served as an adjunct professor at Elon University in the department of Public Health Studies and Poverty and Social Justice Studies. Before beginning her PhD, she spent two years as an ASPPH/CDC Allan Rosenfield Global Health Fellow serving in the Ethiopia and Zambia CDC offices. Her work with the CDC focused on HIV prevention, gender-based violence, and monitoring and evaluation. She also spent a year as a William J Clinton Fellow for Service in India, working with a children's health and sanitation education program in Darjeeling, India. Tara also holds bachelors degrees in social work and women and gender studies from Ohio University and a Masters of Public Health and Masters of Social Work with an emphasis on international development was Washington University in St Louis.

Nora Gross is a 2020-2021 Core Fellow/Visiting Assistant Professor in Sociology. She received her PhD in 2020 from the University of Pennsylvania in Sociology and Education, where she was a Harry Frank Guggenheim Dissertation Fellow. Nora’s research examines educational inequality with a focus on race, gender, and emotion in secondary school contexts. She is currently working on a book manuscript from her dissertation research: an ethnographic study of the role of grief in the school lives of Black adolescent boys who lose friends to neighborhood gun violence, and the school practices and policies that shape their emotional and educational recovery. A secondary project explores the way white students in elite private high schools experience their schools’ diversity and inclusion efforts. Nora is also a documentary filmmaker and recently completed her first feature-length film – about Black gay men in the South and role of performance in sharing others’ stories – as well as a short film related to her research on gun violence and grief. Before her PhD, Nora was a high school teacher in Chicago and earned a Graduate Certificate in Documentary Media Studies from the New School, an M.A. in Sociology of Education from NYU, and a B.A. in Art History and African American Studies from Princeton University.

Courtney Humphries is a Core Fellow/Visiting Assistant Professor in Environmental Studies. She received a Ph.D. in Environmental Sciences from the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her research focuses on connections between urban infrastructure history and current adaptation planning for climate change, particularly around the governance of waterfront development. During her PhD program, she was a fellow in UMass Boston’s National Science Foundation-funded Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) focused on Coasts and Communities, and a Public Research Fellow with the Leventhal Map and Education Center at the Boston Public Library. Courtney is also an award-winning science writer, journalist, and author who has written about science and urban issues for numerous publications such as the Boston Globe, the Atlantic, Science, Nature, Technology Review, Harvard Magazine, and Nautilus. She holds a B.A. in English from the University of Washington and an M.S. in science writing from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and is also a former Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT.

Vena Offen is a Core Fellow/Visiting Assistant Professor in Environmental Studies. She received a Ph.D. in Oceanography from the University of Connecticut. Her research examines the interactions between humans and the coastal environment, focusing on marine pollution and commercially important shellfish. During her Ph.D. she was an EPA STAR Fellow and a Chateaubriand STEM Fellow in France for her work on emerging contaminants, including the effects of nanoparticles on the development of oyster larvae. Current projects include the impact of plastic pollution on the physiology of oysters and mussels. Vena also holds a B.S. in Biology from Pacific University, and a M.S. in Environmental Science and Engineering from Oregon Health and Science University.

Russell Powell is the 2020-21 Core Fellow/Visiting Assistant Professor in Environmental Theology and Ethics. Before earning his PhD from Princeton Theological Seminary in 2019, Russell earned his B.A. in Religious Studies from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and his M.Div from the Yale Divinity School. Russell's research is in contemporary environmental issues and their religious, ethical, and political resonances, and particularly the religious dimension of American environmental thought. He is currently at work on a manuscript focused on John Muir, the famed nineteenth-century American conservationist and founder of the Sierra Club, and Muir's influence on conceptions of the sacred in modern American religious consciousness. Russell's research also examines the intersection of race, religion, and environment. He is currently editing a special issue of the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture that reappraises cornerstone American environmental thinkers in light of contemporary justice concerns over race, gender, and class. For the last two years Russell has worked as Visiting Assistant Professor at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, and as Visiting Lecturer in the Religion Department of Amherst College.

Robin Wright is a Core Fellow in Environmental Studies. She received her PhD in Geography, Environment, and Society from the University of Minnesota. Her research is broadly interested in the ways that race and law function as sites for the creation of identities and environmental landscapes. In particular, her scholarship is concerned with the production of whiteness, and explores the spatial dynamics of resurgent nationalism in the U.S.  Her current research project investigates the mainstreaming of far-right politics by examining the production of a right-wing discourse focused on the radical defense of the U.S. Constitution in the Pacific Northwest. Prior to Boston College, Robin taught Geography at the University of Minnesota and Environmental Studies at St. Olaf College. In her courses, Robin teaches to inspire students to confront the consequences of our changing climate and information environment, with a particular focus on how we can build more racially and environmentally just futures. Prior to her PhD, Robin worked on immigrant rights and economic development in Oregon. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in History from Willamette University.

Hongyan Yang (杨鸿雁) is a Core Fellow/Visiting Assistant Professor in History, (Digital) Humanities, Comparative Migration and Ethnic Studies. Trained as an urban planner, cultural geographer, and architectural historian, her interdisciplinary research considers the underexplored spatial and material dimensions of Asian American experiences. Intellectually invested in ethnic foodways and immigration history, she explores how Asian immigrants’ culinary traditions, cultural sensibilities, and complex identities invest new meanings to the cultural landscapes in the United States. She is currently working on several research projects, including her first book manuscript Landscapes of Resistance: Chinese Placemaking across the Pacific, a museum project that documents the contributions of American architects of Chinese descent in collaboration with the Society of Architectural Historians and the Copper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, and an oral history project, “Places of Their Own,” funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and Oral History Association. In addition to her research, she has developed community-centered teaching in Asian and Asian American architecture, as well as professional practices in historic preservation. She is the recipient of several awards, including the Sophie Coe Prize Honorable Mention, the Vernacular Architecture Forum Ambassadors Award, and the American Pacific Coast Geographers Committee Award for Excellence in Area Studies. Her recent work is featured in American Chinese Restaurants (2020) and Routledge Handbook of Food in Asia (2019). She holds a Ph.D. in Architecture in the Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures Program from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.