Our Faculty - Inspiring Leaders

Our Faculty – Inspiring Leaders

Caspersen School of Graduate Studies faculty are leaders the humanities, social sciences, poetry, medicine, education and more. They are active scholars, artists and scientists. They lead by example, but they also are generous mentors. You’ll make one-on-one connections and discover they want you to be their colleagues—not just their students.

See a sampling of our stellar faculty members here.

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History & Culture

Caoimhín De Barra

Assistant Professor for Irish History and Culture

Caoimhín De Barra (PhD, University of Delaware) joined the Drew University faculty in the fall of 2014. A native of Blarney in Cork, Ireland, De Barra's doctoral research focused on how nationalists in Wales and Ireland defined themselves in relation to their Celtic “other” at the turn of the twentieth century, studying each other and borrowing ideas from one another in seeking to forge new political and cultural movements in their respective nations. His main scholarly area of interest is in the field of identity formation, especially the development and evolution of national and regional identities in Ireland, Britain and Europe, on the basis of different accents, dialects and languages. He also has a strong interest in comparative and transnational history. His published research has compared efforts to revive the Hebrew and Irish languages, as well as the influence of the Welsh language on the development of Irish cultural nationalism.

Arts & Letters

Jonathan Golden

CRCC Director and Assistant Professor of Religious Studies

Jonathan Golden (PhD, University of Pennsylvania) is director of Drew’s Center on Religion, Culture and Conflict, an interdisciplinary center focused on global peacebuilding and interfaith leadership. He is convener of the Certificate in Conflict Resolution and Leadership offered in the Caspersen School of Graduate Studies. Golden, who in 2016 won the Thomas Kean Scholar/Mentor Award, is assistant professor in the Departments of Comparative Religion and Anthropology. He teaches courses on interfaith leadership, peace and conflict studies, and the Middle East. Golden is the author of Ancient Canaan and Israel: New Perspectives and the forthcoming Dawn of the Metal Age, as well as numerous articles. He is currently working on a third book based on interviews with ex-combatants and victims of conflict who become peace activists. He holds several certificates in conflict resolution and works closely with interfaith and peace organizations in New Jersey and around the world. Golden lives in Florham Park, New Jersey with his wife, Priscilla, and daughter, Lyla.

Conflict Resolution & Leadership

Jinee Lokaneeta

Associate Professor of Political Science

Jinee Lokaneeta (PhD, University of Southern California) is interested in law and violence, political theory (postcolonial, feminist and Marxist theory), transnational law, jurisprudence and cultural studies. Her research focuses on the debates on law, violence and state power in liberal democracies. Her first book, Transnational Torture, explores how the jurisprudence of interrogations in contemporary democracies dealt with the infliction of pain and suffering by state officials. She has served as a visiting scholar at the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, and the Center for the Study of Law and Society, University of California–Berkeley. Currently, she is the book review editor of Law and Society Review.

History & Culture

Kesha Moore

Associate Professor of Sociology

Kesha Moore (PhD, University of Pennsylvania) is interested in race and class stratification, urban neighborhoods and the symbolic construction of identity. Having published numerous scholarly articles on the relevance of class and racial identities for urban community development, Moore is currently preparing her book manuscript Creating the Black American Dream: Race, Class and Neighborhood Development for publication. She has earned recognition and recent awards from the National Science Foundation and the National Academy of Sciences. At Drew, she teaches a variety of courses, including Introduction to Sociology, Urban Sociology, The Politics of Beauty, Engendering Prisons, Race and Ethnicity, Comparative Perspectives on Race: U.S. and South Africa and Critical Race Theory.

Conflict Resolution & Leadership

Elias Ortega-Aponte

Assistant Professor of Latino/a Religion and Culture

Elias Ortega-Aponte (PhD, Princeton Theological Seminary) is an Afro-Latino scholar from Puerto Rico whose areas of expertise are critical race theory, critical theory, cultural sociology, Latino/a cultural studies, Africana studies and religious ethics. His primary concern is with the theorization of how the intersection of race and political actions leads to acts of resistance among Afro-diasporic communities. Ortega-Aponte approaches teaching from a transdisciplinary perspective that is committed to social justice. His research interests include prison and economic justice, social mobilization and issues broadly affecting Black and Latino/a communities.

Poetry

Alicia Ostriker

Distinguished Poet in Residence

Alicia Ostriker (PhD, University of Wisconsin–Madison) is Drew's Distinguished Poet in Residence. She has published 16 volumes of poetry, including The Old Woman, The Tulip and the Dog, The Book of Life: Selected Jewish Poems, 1979-2011, The Book of Seventy, The Volcano Sequence and No Heaven. Her poetry has appeared in notable publications such as The New Yorker, Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, Paris Review, Yale Review, Ontario Review and The Nation. Twice a National Book Award finalist, she has also received awards from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the Poetry Society of America, the San Francisco Poetry Center and the Paterson Poetry Center. As a critic, she is the author of Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America and other books on poetry and on the Bible. In 2015 she was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

History & Culture

Kimberly Rhodes

Professor of Art History

Kimberly Rhodes (PhD, Columbia University) writes and teaches about modern and contemporary visual culture and has worked as an art historian in both museum and academic settings. She regularly teaches courses on nineteenth-century art, early twentieth-century art and American art. She also is the director of Drew's New York Semester on Contemporary Art. Her recent publications include “Archetypes and Icons: Materialising Victorian Womanhood in 1970s Feminist Art” in Neo-Victorian Studies, Ophelia and Victorian Visual Culture: Representing Body Politics in the Nineteenth Century, “Double Take: Tom Hunter’s The Way Home (2000)” and “Degenerate Detail: John Everett Millais and Ophelia’s Muddy Death,” in John Everett Millais: Beyond the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Her work in the collection The Afterlife of Ophelia exemplifies her transhistorical, multidisciplinary approach to the study of art history. Her current research projects continue the exploration of relationships among Shakespeare’s plays and nineteenth-century visual culture, primarily in the arena of landscape art.

Poetry

Michael Waters

Professor of Poetry

Michael Waters (MFA, University of Iowa; PhD, Ohio University) is a poetry professor at Drew and has been lauded as being among the finest poets in his generation. His eleven books of poetry include Celestial Joyride, Gospel Night, Darling Vulgarity and Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems. His co-edited volumes include Contemporary American Poetry and Perfect in Their Art: Poems on Boxing from Homer to Ali. The recipient of five Pushcart Prizes as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright Foundation and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, he also served as chair of the Poetry Panel for the National Book Award. His poems have been published in countless journals, including Poetry, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Georgia Review and Rolling Stone.