Core Fellows

Peter Giraudo is a Core Fellow/Visiting Assistant Professor in Justice and the Common Good with a courtesy appointment in Political Science. His book project, Political Trade Unionism: Industrial Cooperation and the Construction of the Class Struggle in Fin de siècle Europe, discloses a tradition of thought that saw socialist unions as ‘laboratories’ of a new cooperative culture and institutions that trained working-class representatives to faithfully represent worker interests in the class struggle. His scholarship has been published in History of European Ideas. Peter received a Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University (2023). During the 2023-2024 academic year he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Justitia Center for Advanced Study at Goethe University Frankfurt. In the summer of 2025, he will be a visiting fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.

Gayathri Goel is a Core Fellow/Visiting Assistant Professor in Environmental Humanities with a courtesy appointment in English. She received a Ph.D. in English from Tufts University (2023). Her research focuses on representations of resource extraction and environmental conflicts in global Anglophone literatures. Her work attends to various interdependencies among humans, more-than-human beings, and places, and examines the way unsustainable capitalist extraction impacts human-nature relationships. Among other research projects, Gayathri is co-editing a collection of place-based essays that expand the lexicon of resource extraction beyond the conventional focus on fossil fuels, natural gas, and minerals to include the commodification of any part of nature that results in its impoverishment and harm. Gayathri is animated by interdisciplinary work that calls for collaboration with environmental scholars from various disciplines. She has been the recipient of numerous fellowships for research and teaching, including the prestigious year-long interdisciplinary research fellowship at Tufts Institute of the Environment (TIE).

Andrei Guadarrama is a Core Fellow/Visiting Assistant Professor in History and Social Science with a courtesy appointment in History. He earned a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University (2024). His scholarship focuses on the political economy of infrastructure and the social geography of modern cities. As an urban and public historian, he has experience with digital cartography, museum work, and community-based participatory research. Andrei is currently working on his first book manuscript, Circuits of Power: Economic Elites and the Politics of Development in Mexico City, 1870-1970. Based on original research, he curated the bilingual digital exhibit “Mobilities and the City” for Memorica Museum and Columbia University. His research has been funded by the International Dissertation Research Fellowship-Social Science Research Council (IDRF-SSRC), the Humanities New York Public History Grant, and several other fellowships. Andrei has taught courses on the history of the Americas and beyond. His teaching practice highlights the applications of historical thinking and interdisciplinary methods in ways that encourage students to value a diversity of experiences and thought in the past and present.

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 Ph.D. 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.

Luke Perreault is a Core Fellow/Visiting Assistant Professor in Engineering. He received his Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Tufts University (2021) and a B.S. (2015) and M.Eng. (2016) in Biomedical Engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute. In his research, he develops sustainable plant-based biomaterials and engineered tissue models for cellular agriculture (lab-grown meat) and human health. Before joining the Core, Luke was a postdoctoral associate in the BC Department of Engineering under Professor Glenn Gaudette, repurposing agricultural waste as edible scaffolds for cellular agriculture. He continues to collaborate extensively with engineering faculty on CellAg projects and grants. An advocate for the department’s dedicated approach to human-centered engineering, he enjoys helping students pursue their own ideas and encourages them to reflect on the broader impacts of their work as engineers within an interconnected global community.

Héctor E. Rodríguez-Simmonds is a Core Fellow/Visiting Assistant Professor in Engineering. Héctor received his Ph.D. in Engineering Education from Purdue University. Héctor has worked on a variety of research projects in the areas of computer engineering, from students’ engineering identities to the values that inform students' choice of engineering major. Héctor is driven by the tension between human and social concerns and the technological focus traditional to engineering problem-solving approaches. Héctor taps into critical methodologies and methods for conducting and analyzing research and exploring embodied cognition.

Ethan Tupelo is a Core Fellow/Visiting Assistant Professor in Environmental Humanities with a courtesy appointment in Political Science. His work is at the interdisciplinary intersection of environmental politics, political theory, and social movements, and he has taught courses on utopian separatism, the State, radical political theory, comparative politics, the politics of waste and recycling, and ethnographic and qualitative research methodologies. Ethan received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst (2022), and was Visiting Assistant Professor of Critical Social Thought at Hampshire College from 2022-24. Ethan’s book manuscript, Debris of Progress: A Political Ethnography of Critical Infrastructure, is based on his five-year ethnographic study of Pedal People, a twenty-year-old worker cooperative that is one of the main waste haulers in Northampton, Massachusetts, but does all of its work by bicycle, hauling eight-foot long trailers filled with over 300 pounds of waste. Ethan shows how they challenge the destructiveness of waste infrastructure by eliminating the use of fossil fuels, providing worker ownership and control, and reclaiming the value of dirty work.

Hongyan Yang (杨鸿雁) is a Core Fellow/Visiting Assistant Professor in History and Social Science with a courtesy appointment in History. 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.