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I am a Professor of English, core faculty in Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies, and I teach French 101 in World Languages and Culture. I co-designed ZHON 192 Introduction to the Humanities, an interdisciplinary general education humanities course in the University Honors Program.

My undergraduate and doctoral degrees are in the interdisciplinary field of Comparative Literature. I primarily study language, literature, and history in various cultural contexts. I have always been drawn to the innovative possibilities of interdisciplinarity. I get excited about projects that bring together multiple literatures in cultural and historical contexts. As an example, at a time when many humanities and social science scholars claimed there was no colonialism before the eighteenth century, I wrote a . It was part of a new and distinctly interdisciplinary way of reconsidering medieval studies. A more recent project brings together .

My ideal interdisciplinary project would be collaborative: to combine my qualitative methods with someone else’s quantitative methods to examine some intersection of culture, history, and race; or to combine my linguistic and cultural knowledge with someone else's to build a comparative analysis of the relationship between national literatures and politics.

My shark avatar is .

I am a cultural anthropologist and have been a member of the Northeastern faculty for 20 years. I have researched religious healing in southern Africa, taxi drivers in Chicago, and my latest project is an interdisciplinary exploration of dogs and their profound yet contradictory relationships with humans. As a cultural anthropologist, my research is qualitative social science. This means that my work entails collecting stories from people about their ideas and experiences, spending time in communities to understand day-to-day life in that place, and interpreting what I see and hear in cultural and historical context in order to better understand bigger questions about what it means to be human.

In addition to working within the discipline of cultural anthropology, I spend a lot of time in interdisciplinary spaces, as well. Through my work in Africa, I have long engaged with the field of African Studies. I have taught in the field of Gender Studies and I have coordinated Northeastern’s Global Studies program. I am also a part of the Chicago Cancer Health Equity Collaborative (ChicagoCHEC), an interdisciplinary project across multiple universities and Chicago residents that brings together physicians, medical researchers, social scientists, community advocates and activists, and community members to address health equity in the city.

In interdisciplinary fields and projects, researchers with a wide range of specialities, who employ varying methods, theories and approaches, bring their ideas together in order to look at a subject in a holistic way. I am excited to participate in SHARC because we also embrace this broadly interdisciplinary and collaborative approach to research, teaching and mentoring students.

My shark avatar is the Puffadder Shyshark (Haploblepharus edwardsii), also known as Happy Eddie. .

I am Chair of Anthropology, Economics, Geography and Environmental Studies, Global Studies, and Philosophy; Economics Professor and Economics Advisor. My Ph.D. is in Economics, but I have a B.S. in History. My current research interests lie in the intersection of Economics and Geography. I started out analyzing international macroeconomic topics, but now I look at urban and regional issues such as bank locations, segregation and the geographic distribution of poverty across metropolitan areas.

One of my key strengths is quantitative analysis; I use statistics, programming and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in my research. Lately, I have been collaborating with a number of colleagues — primarily at the Warsaw School of Economics — exploring topics such as innovation, health, public corruption and carbon emissions.

My shark avatar is the !

I am a Professor in the Department of Political Science at ����Թ�. I am interested in the question why some countries are better able to protect their democratic institutions and practices while others are more likely to embrace authoritarian politics. In other words, what makes democracies resilient to autocratic, majoritarian or populist challenges? 

As a member of the SHARC team, I am interested in engaging students in research opportunities. This includes attending academic conferences and supporting student research at Northeastern with the aim of publishing in student focused journals. I am also interested in bringing speakers to our University and providing opportunities for issue diversity, that is to say, allowing multiple perspectives to be heard on a particular issue. The great strength, in my mind, of the SHARC approach to research are the multiple lenses through which we can interpret and analyze important social, economic, cultural and political issues that impact the lives of our communities. 

My name is Dr. Juan Martinez and am currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Northeastern. 

I’m a first-generation college student from the Chicago area. I attended Proviso West High School (Hillside, IL) and then Triton Community College (River Grove, IL) where I majored in automotive technology and wrestled for Triton’s 1997 NJCAA National Championship Wrestling Team, where I was a two-time national qualifier and earned All-American Honors (eighth place) at 118 pounds (wow, that was a long time ago). Wanting to wrestle at a four-year school, I transferred to Northern Illinois University (NIU) but unfortunately the head NIU wrestling coach didn’t like my dyed pink hair so my ambitions to compete in the NCAA were quickly thwarted. However, I found a new love: Sociology. I went on to earn a B.A. in the field and eventually attend the University of Illinois Chicago to earn an M.A. and Ph.D.

My teaching and research interests are in urban sociology, the sociology of space and place, U.S. Latinx, immigration, religion, and race and ethnic relations. I am particularly interested in how race, ethnicity and class inform placemaking processes, shape interactions in public spaces and reproduce social structures. My research has explored white/Latinx relations through political, religious and cultural dimensions of neighborhood life. In addition, I have written on the role of religion in shaping meaning and social action in the U.S. immigrant rights movement. I am currently working on two projects: The first is a book manuscript exploring White/Latinx relations in a community and the second is a National Science Foundation funded study exploring educational and career trajectories of community college STEM students.

My research interests inform my classroom teaching, whereby I challenge students to develop their sociological imagination, think critically about social structures, and make connections between course topics and their everyday lives. 

I am very interested in collaborating with students on research. In fact, this past summer I served as a research mentor for three Northeastern undergraduate sociology students (each a community college transfer student) to conduct content analysis of news stories about pro-Palestinian campus college activists across the United States. The students received a financial stipend and will submit a paper on their findings to present at two conferences (The Midwest Sociological Society and the American Sociological Association) that will be held in Chicago in 2025. 

Transfer students interested in research collaborations, learning more about research-based internships or pursuing a career in social research should contact me to discuss opportunities at j-martinez102@neiu.edu.

My shark avatar is . Whale sharks are known to be docile and friendly to humans (especially student researchers). 
 

I am Professor, Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) Program Coordinator, and founding director of the Center for Genocide and Human Rights Research in Africa and the Diaspora (GHRAD) at ����Թ�. My research interests are in linguistics, language teaching, genocide studies and human rights in Africa. Since 2013, I have served as Chair of the Genocide and Human Rights Research Group at Northeastern, an interdisciplinary team that has been organizing annual conferences on this topic. In addition to several refereed journal articles and book chapters on linguistics and more recently on the African concept of ubuntu in mass atrocity contexts, my publications include a co-edited and co-authored book, Critical Perspectives on African Genocide: Memory, Silence, and Anti-Black Political Violence (Rowan and Littlefield International, 2021), and a chapter “Repenser pour mieux panser: A survivor’s account of the 1972 Burundi genocide.” With a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Chicago and being a genocide survivor and a Kirundi, English and French speaker, I have been engaged in the collection of genocide survivor and witness testimonies of the 1972 genocide in Burundi for the in collaboration with the GHRAD colleagues and students.

From 2017 to 2020, I served as the founding director of the Multilingual Learning Center and was the Principal Investigator on two grants: a 2018-2019 National Security Agency/Startalk grant to run an Arabic Language instruction and teacher training and a 2019 National Endowment for Humanities grant of $100,000 to create Kurdish Language and Culture Studies, and to organize an International Kurdish Studies Conference at ����Թ�.

Since 2017, I have served as co-leader on the Community Outreach core of the Chicago Cancer Health Equity Collaborative (ChicagoCHEC), an interdisciplinary project across three universities: Northeastern, Northwestern University, and the University of Illinois Chicago, and Chicago communities. In this project, community members and advocates work with physicians, medical researchers, and social scientists to address health equity in Chicago.

In all of these research endeavors, I have had the pleasure of collaborating with colleagues from various disciplines. It is this kind of collaboration that brings me excitement about SHARC, which is cross/interdisciplinary by nature.

My avatar is the . 

Hola, soy Denise Cloonan Cortez. I hold a Ph.D. in Romance Linguistics with specialties in phonetics and phonology, dialectology, second language acquisition and sociolinguistics. I also have an M.A. in Literature and my research blends linguistics with literature. I am published in both Spanish and English and I am fascinated by language and the power that it wields in a communicative setting. Language prestige is of particular interest to me and how language use (dialect) can create plot lines and power imbalances in a text in addition to the action itself.  

My most recent is a study of how to make regional literature in Spanish, more specifically, eye dialect literature, more accessible and understandable to students. Eye dialect is used to represent how someone speaks using our standard alphabet, not the phonetic alphabet, so that the reader can “hear” how someone speaks when they read a dialogue. For example, in English writing “wanna” instead of “want to” is a form of eye dialect. For someone whose native language is not English, this type of writing is challenging because you cannot readily find “wanna” in the dictionary; moreover, you might not even realize that it is two words. Even if you are a native speaker of a language, it might be challenging to decode eye dialect. Think of eye dialect as the oldest form of “voice to text” before there was this type of technology. Eye dialect literature doesn’t get the attention that it should because it is so problematic to read, especially if there is a high density of eye dialect words. However, I am trying to change that–my research has shown that people who learn languages orally, those immersed in the language, not through textbook learning, are best equipped to understand eye dialect because they aren’t influenced by standard orthography. I am currently collecting regional literature from all Spanish-speaking countries, both literatura campesina and literatura minera, these two genres have the highest frequency of eye dialect. My plan is to complete a manuscript with a selective sampling of these literary pieces from every Spanish-speaking nation so that they can be acknowledged, analyzed and appreciated for their immense cultural value.

I am currently the Chair of several departments and programs: World Languages and Cultures, English Language Program, School for the Advancement of English Language and Learning (SAELL) and Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). I am also the Peace Corps Prep Program Coordinator. I have been at Northeastern since 1997.

My shark avatar is the . 

I’m Professor and Chair of English and Linguistics specializing in Shakespeare, as well as teaching film, screenwriting and other subjects. My publications range from articles on Shakespeare to T. S. Eliot, Pushcart Prize-nominated short stories and poems, and a novel, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed (Sandstone Press, UK: 2014). Recent articles on the pandemic and and Billy Wilder’s film The Apartment can be found at .

My B.A. is in Political Science. I have an M.A. in Political Theory, as well as full Ph.D. coursework in the Programme in Social and Political Thought at York University in Toronto. From there I transferred to the State University of New York at Buffalo, where I earned my Ph.D. in English. I list these degrees to point out how much extensive interdisciplinary work I’ve done. Okay, I was kind of lost, but in a fun way.

I love projects with big ideas that cross times and disciplines, and cats, and wine, and bikes.

My shark avatar is the , the coolest cat in the sea.