Faculty & Staff

Co-founders & Co-directors

Lindsay Davis
Assistant Professor of Teaching, Humanities & Arts

Phone: +1 (508) 8316368

I am a broadly trained interdisciplinary scholar of 19th and 20th American history and critical feminist studies. Along with Dr. Rebecca Moody, I serve as the co-founder and co-director of the Gender, Sexuality & Women's Studies (GSWS) program. My scholarly and pedagogical interests vary widely, ranging from reproductive justice to sexual harassment law to the intersection of feminist theory and STEM. In the classroom, I teach a variety of history courses on late 19th and 20th century American social, cultural, and legal history, including "Race, Gender, and the Law," "Introduction to US ...

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Rebecca Moody
Assistant Professor of Teaching, Humanities & Arts

Phone: +1 (508) 8315079

My research centers around religion in North Africa and the Middle East with a focus on Islam; I approach the study of Islam through its representation in visual culture. My first book project, an outgrowth of my dissertation, focuses on recent fiction film by Moroccan women filmmakers as oblique forms of resistance to dominant narratives about Muslim women. My research tends to be very interdisciplinary: I draw on religion, cultural studies, feminist theory, film theory and affect theory. I hope that, in doing so, I can help introduce diversity into conversations about Islam, particularly the ...

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Affiliated Faculty

Francesca Bernardi
Assistant Professor, Mathematical Sciences

Phone: +1 (508) 8314183

I am an applied mathematician working in the fields of small-scale fluid mechanics and microfluidics. My research includes both mathematical modeling and physical experiments. In particular, I am interested in particle and solute transport in small-scale systems, such as municipal water filtration facilities. I am the PI of the FMNTS Lab - Small-scale Fluid Mechanics and Transport Lab hosted at LEAP. I enjoy teaching courses fundamental to applied mathematics and modeling, and I look forward to mentoring students on projects both in and outside the lab. I am very active in ...

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Crystal Brown
Assistant Professor, Social Science & Policy Studies

Phone: +1 (508) 8315163

Dr. Crystal Brown earned her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Oregon in Comparative Politics, International Relations, and Public Administration. She also has a Master of Public Administration (MPA) from Pennsylvania State University and a certificate in Data Analytics from Harvard University.She is an internationally focused scholar who examines the inclusivity of marginalized groups such as immigrants, people of color, Black people, women, and others. As a computational social scientist, she uses mixed methods, combining statistical approaches with qualitative techniques to ...

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Michelle Ephraim
Professor, Humanities & Arts

Phone: +1 (508) 8315000 x6129

 Michelle Ephraim is a Shakespeare scholar and a Professor of English. Her book GREEN WORLD: A Tragicomic Memoir of Love and Shakespeare was awarded the 2023 Juniper Prize in Creative Nonfiction by the University of Massachusetts Press and was published by them in 2024.Professor Ephraim is the author of Reading the Jewish Woman on the Elizabethan Stage (Routledge, 2008) and numerous articles on Shakespeare and other early modern dramatists. At WPI, she teaches literature courses, as well as memoir and speculative fiction writing.She and Caroline Bicks ...

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Emily Gioielli
Assistant Professor of Teaching, Humanities & Arts

Phone: +1 (508) 8315404

Emily Gioielli is a historian of modern European history, with a special focus on Central and Eastern European history, the history of gender and sexuality, and the history of violence. I am currently finishing a social history that traces women's involvement and the role of gender in the social and political revolutions that took place in Hungary during the long World War One period. I am also working on a project that brings together the social and environmental history of the Holocaust in Central Europe entitled "Cataclysm: An Environmental History of the Holocaust in Central Europe." ...

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Zoe Reidinger
Associate Teaching Professor, Biomedical Engineering

Phone: +1 (508) 8316735

My areas of interest and enthusiasm lie in biomaterial fabrication and tissue engineering. Bringing this enthusiasm to the classroom is easy with WPI’s focus on undergraduate education and project-based learning. My goal as an instructor is to lead students to higher levels of thinking and understanding by slowly increasing the depth of the course to engage more complex learning behaviors. It is my earnest belief that integrating students into open-ended projects, student mentorship, and self-directed work, where they obtain increasing amounts of responsibility for their progress and learning ...

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