Pre-Tenure Faculty
To Entering Faculty as You Start Your Journey at UMass Boston
Welcome! We are thrilled to have you join our community, and we deeply value you. You are joining New England’s most diverse university and the country’s third-most diverse institution of higher education. We take great pride in our diversity, knowing that it helps prepare our students and ourselves to be fully engaged contributors to a world of complex and multifaceted societies. We’ve compiled the following resources to help you become a fully engaged contributor to our university.
Faculty Development
Research
We deeply value and support research in all domains of knowledge, including interdisciplinary research that transcends subject-area boundaries. Our faculty are robust researchers who train graduate and undergraduate students to discover the lifelong joy of inquiry. Community-engaged research is also a strength and commitment of our campus. UMass Boston recently acquired Research 1 (R1) status.
Current UMass Boston NSC Fellows
Hadi R. Banat
Dr. Banat will pursue a proposal for an advance contract book project titled Becoming Culturally Attuned Communicators: Navigating Difference in Times of Global Turmoil with Bloomsbury Publishing. This book project culminates his nine years of research on intercultural competence conducted through the Transculturation Pedagogical Research Group. The book offers an approach called ‘culturally attuned communication’ to navigate differences. It will contribute both a rationale for contending with difference and practical means by which educators and those who work in settings that involve some element of education, training, or mentorship can engage difference more effectively in an increasingly polarized and, at times, violent climate. Specifically, the book will offer a framework for understanding differences starting from—but moving beyond—the classroom space, followed by an exploration of how writing can move people towards the kinds of reflection that create culturally attuned communicators. This book explains how to create compassionate spaces—the ones that invite people to share their home cultures and strengths, to build bridges across differences, and to consider but look beyond difficult or traumatic experiences. By blending theory with actionable strategies, this book project aims to cultivate inclusive and empathetic communities capable of thriving amidst diversity and global uncertainty.
Karen Okigbo
Dr. Okigbo’s work focuses on intermarriage and endogamy among second-generation Nigerian Americans and explores their marital decision-making processes. During the NSC Faculty Fellowship, she will work on her book manuscript, Not So Black and White: Why Selecting a Life Partner is So Complicated. This monograph makes several contributions to the literature of race, ethnicity, religion, immigration, gender, and family. Using Nigerian Americans as a strategic case, this research goes beyond an examination of intermarriage among Black individuals through a strictly racial lens to emphasize heterogeneity and ethnic variation within the Black racial category. It considers intermarriage involving Black individuals as a phenomenon that is not only about unions with White partners. By examining intermarriage in terms of racial, ethnic, and religious differences, this study sheds light on the often-elided heterogeneity of the Black population.
Keyana Parks
Over the course of the fellowship, Dr. Parks plans to focus on revising two chapters from her book project, The Real Absurd: Black Women Writers and the Satiric Mode. Her work in chapter two examines the indomitable figure of Ishmael Reed in the late 20th century and queries his literary output in the context of shifting gender and racial norms as influenced by Black feminist theory. Dr. Parks will also work to expand chapter three's "Stereotypically Real: Staging the Paradox of Black Representation," exploration of a satiric mode of writing in the work of playwrights Lorraine Hansberry and Ntozake Shange, whose respective realist and lyrical dramas, she argues, are unrecognizable within the strict confines of formal satire. These chapters are integral to how her monograph seeks to illuminate the ways Black feminist thought expands our understanding of satire as a substantive mode of political and cultural critique well-positioned to address the "real absurd" norms informing our contemporary moment.
Qian Song
During the fellowship, Dr. Song hopes to make progress on revising a NIH/NIA proposal that she received a competitive score on but which was not funded. The project is on developing a measure of living arrangements for older adults and examining the association between living arrangements and cognitive function for older Americans.
Important Faculty Resources
We’ve compiled the most important links for faculty, including the Annual Faculty Report (AFR), a repository of your yearly teaching, research, scholarship, service, and creative activity.
- The Red Book (Academic Personnel Policy)
- WISER Faculty Guide
- Faculty Staff Union
- Annual Faculty Report
Major Personnel Reviews
For tenure-track faculty members over their professional lifetime, the major personnel reviews include the fourth-year review, tenure review, and promotion to (full) professor. For non-tenure track faculty members, promotions to senior lecturer ranks constitute significant milestones. Your department chair is the person to consult for details.
Frequently Asked Questions
We’ve curated a list of FAQs for all faculty. From teaching and student questions to general campus quandaries to advising queries and more, you’ll find everything you need to know right here.
Additional Resources
TEACH Sessions
Stay tuned for TEACH session announcements! These virtual sessions are specifically designed to address faculty concerns and questions about a range of issues, including how to create innovative assignments in an age of AI tools and how to ensure students keep up with work when their attendance has suffered due to unavoidable circumstances.
Mentoring Plans
A number of departments have mentoring plans for pre-tenured faculty. We’ve included some of these mentoring plans below. If you aren’t sure who your mentor is or don’t see your department’s mentoring plan below, please ask your department chair.
College of Liberal Arts
College of Science & Mathematics
Manning College of Nursing & Health Sciences
School for the Environment
Department Chairs
Your department chair is your first point of contact for all things academic. To learn the full scope of your department chair’s responsibilities and how they can help you, visit our Department Chair section.
