Matthew Ayres is associate professor of English and Philosophy at County College of Morris and says: “I have always been moved by the written word. Great writers are able to give voice to some of the most significant moments of the human experience. I remember reading James Joyce’s “The Dead” for the first time and being touched by his description of the snow falling ‘generally all over Ireland’ and of Gabriel’s epiphany, as he ruminates about life and death at the end of the story. I love what I teach, and I hope this passion is evident to anyone who walks into my classroom.”

Robert W. Butts has shared his passion, enthusiasm and knowledge of music through his work as conductor, composer, educator, writer and lecturer. He was the 2011 recipient of the American Prize Citation for educational excellence and was the 2012 American Prize second-place winner for community opera conducting, for his critically acclaimed performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni with BONJ Opera. He was nominated for the 2013 prize for his conducting of Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore and Mozart’s The Magic Flute. Butts has also conducted the Baroque Orchestra of New Jersey since its founding in 1996. He has developed the orchestra into one of New Jersey’s leading ensembles, expanding the repertoire to include major works of all periods.

Mónica Cantero has published on the areas of linguistics (Spanish word-formation,
pragmatics, gender and language) and contemporary Spanish cinema (Pedro
Almodóvar, Alex de la Iglesia, Iciar Bollaín, Llorenç Soler, Guillermo del Toro, etc.)
She is particularly interested in the crossroads of images and linguistic
representation of ideology (identity, violence, and immigration) in the filmic
discourse. More recently she has begun working in visual studies: El discurso de la
inmigración en el cine hispano: tragedias personales y realidades sociales; Combining
visual form and meaning: Multimodal representations and pragmatic function in
word-formation. Her great passions—Spanish film and linguistic theories—are also
her profession. She considers herself to be fortunate to bring this knowledge into her
classroom.

Robert Carnevale (MFA, Columbia University) is a teaching artist who writes and translates poetry. He is co-translator—with Drew colleague Carol Ueland—of the internationally celebrated Russian poet Aleksandr Kushner’s work Apollo in the Grass. Their translations have also appeared in The Kenyon Review, Agni, World Literature Today, The Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature and twice in Poetry Daily, supported by an NEA Literary Translation Fellowship. Carnevale’s own poems have been published in the Paris Review, The New Yorker, Sidereal Times, The Alaska Quarterly and various other magazines. He has been teaching at Drew for 20 years, most of them in the Arts and Letters Program. Earlier, he was assistant coordinator of the Dodge Foundation Poetry Foundation program for six years and also worked on the Voices & Visions film series on American poets.

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(PhD, Drew University) Check back for bio.

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Prior to re-entering academe, C. Wyatt Evans (PhD, Drew University) served in the Peace Corps and as a civil affairs officer in the U.S. Army. He teaches history at the graduate and undergraduate levels. A member of the Council of Independent Colleges’ Senior Leadership Academy, he is very involved with developing digital scholarship and literacy initiatives at Drew. His research areas include the Civil War and the use of historical memory in politics. His first book, The Legend of John Wilkes Booth, won the 2005 OAH Avery O. Craven award and he is currently at work on a study of domestic security in the Civil War North.

Ron Felber is a graduate of Georgetown University where he earned his BA, Loyola University-Chicago where he earned his MA and Drew University where he earned his Doctorate in Arts and Letters. Ron has published numerous fiction and non-fiction books including The Privacy War: One Congressman, J. Edgar Hoover and the Fight for the Fourth Amendment; Il Dottore: The Double Life of a Mafia Doctor, which was later turned into the FOX television drama Mob Doctor; A Man of Indeterminate Value, and Mojave Incident, the basis for two television documentaries; and Presidential Lessons in Leadership: What Executives Can Learn from Six Great American Presidents (his Doctoral dissertation). Felber has worked as a Deputy Sheriff, a writer for True Detective magazine and CEO of a major manufacturing company. He lives in Mendham, New Jersey.

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.

Bill Gordon’s first novel, Mary After All, was published by Random House to positive reviews. His short stories and essays have been published in such outlets as The New York Times Magazine, Mississippi Review, New York Press, Newark Star-Ledger, Christopher Street, Downtown, and Men on Men 2000, an anthology by Plume/Penguin. He received an MFA from Columbia University and a BA from Syracuse University. Since 2006, he has taught creative writing (literary fiction and memoir) at Drew University’s Caspersen School of Graduate Studies, Arts and Letters Program. He lives in New York City.

James Hala specializes in the areas of Old and Middle English literature; Celtic and continental European medieval literatures, linguistics, critical theory, gender studies and film. His most recent publications include a study of Grendel’s mother from Beowulf and a biographical essay on Bernard of Clairvaux. Hala is also the founder of That Medieval Thing, an annual Drew event known to the community as Med Fest.

Jennifer Holly Wells’ (PhD, Drew University) work centers on the connections between early- and late-20th-century literary movements, using an interdisciplinary approach to examine the role of history, community and even meteorology in literary texts. In 2005, Jennifer won the Caspersen School of Graduate Studies Teaching-Mentoring award.

Sandra Jamieson (PhD, Binghamton University) specializes in writing across the curriculum, contemporary rhetorical theory, social media communications, information literacy, composition theory and pedagogy and creative nonfiction. Popular classes include Writing for Social Media, Introduction to Writing and Communication Studies and Travel Writing. She serves as a consultant and reviewer for writing programs and facilitates faculty development workshops around the country; she has also served on various committees of the National Council of Teachers of English, including as Chair of the Committee on the Major in Rhetoric and Writing. A principle investigator with the Citation Project (citationproject.net), she is working on a book with Rebecca Moore Howard discussing the research findings, Struggling with Sources and an edited collection on information literacy, Not Just for Librarians, with Janice Walker, Barry Maid and Barbara D’Angelo. She garnered the WPA Best Book Award for 2000-2001 for her publication Coming of Age: The Advanced Writing Curriculum (co-edited with Linda Shamoon, Robert Schwegler and Rebecca Moore Howard), and has penned other books, journal articles and book chapters in authorship and writing studies.

Brian Merry (PhD Drew University) was born and raised at the Jersey Shore, where he spent his time playing sports, going to the beach and skiing. Merry always loved a “good story” and was a voracious reader of history and fiction as long as he can remember. He attended Loyola University in Maryland, where he majored in history and minored in political science. Merry studied at the Catholic University in Leuven, Belgium his entire junior year of college, an experience that would shape his worldview and future academic pursuits. Contemplating a legal career, Merry worked as a paralegal at the law firm, Wilentz, Goldman, and Spitzer upon graduating from Loyola. While the work at the firm was stimulating and interesting, Merry could not shake his love of academic learning and scholarship. Confident that he found his true passion, Merry entered Drew University’s Modern History and Literature PhD program, where he specialized in Shakespearean drama and Elizabethan and Jacobean history. In the spring of 2012, Merry defended his dissertation, Fair and Foul: The Politics of Chivalry and Pragmatism in Shakespeare’s English History Plays with distinction and was awarded the Dean James H. Pain Prize for the best interdisciplinary approach in a Caspersen School of Graduate Studies dissertation. In the several years preceding and succeeding the completion of his graduate work, Merry taught undergraduate and graduate level courses at Monmouth University in the History and English Departments, as well as the Honors School. Recognizing his true love of teaching, Merry moved to the secondary school classroom at Morristown-Beard School in 2014, where he currently serves as a teacher of history and chair of the same department. In the meantime, he has maintained his relationship with Drew by teaching a graduate seminar on Shakespeare, conducting independent studies, and serving on a DLitt dissertation committee. Merry currently lives in Morristown and spends his summers at the Jersey Shore..

(PhD, New York University) Check back for bio.

Professor Pechilis explores issues of interpreting the embodied self through poetry, biography and practice in devotional traditions of Hinduism. She understands ‘devotion’ to be a site for the intersection of wonder and self-expression and for an exquisitely participatory impulse, especially in the arts and letters. Over the past twenty years she has conducted research in Chennai (Madras), south India through grants from the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Fulbright Program and the Asian Cultural Council. Her published work, both independent and collaborative, engages many scholarly discussions about the making of religious tradition, including interpretive history, translation, cultural analysis and feminist and gender studies.

Virginia Phelan (PhD, Rutgers) is interested in the links between ancient and modern literatures and mythology, especially in its contemporary manifestations. She created Writing to Heal for Medical Humanities and several courses for the Irish Studies Concentration, including Joyce’s Journey, and The Importance of Being Witty. Publications include her dissertation, Two Ways of Life and Death, (Garland, 1990), Praying in Your Own Voice through Writing (Liguori, 1994) and articles in journals such as the Yeats-Eliot Review, America and The New York Times. Current projects include a manuscript of “Writing to Heal” and ongoing research on mythology and the journey and Charles Williams.

Liana Piehler (PhD, Drew University) has often taught courses that have blended literature and the visual arts. Recent courses have included focus on the Victorian landscape as seen by novelists, poets and artists; Victorian women artists and their twentieth-century descendants; Provincetown’s arts colony (1900-1950) as a reflection of American culture; and poets as observers of the natural world (from Emily Dickinson in the nineteenth century to Mary Oliver in the twentieth). Piehler has also frequently taught the Joy of Scholarly Writing to students in the Arts and Letters and Medical Humanities programs, guiding them on the dissertation journey.

Ben Pranger (MFA, Art Institute of Chicago) has shown his artwork throughout the U.S. His work has been reviewed in publications such as Artforum, Art in America, ArtNews and Art Papers.  He has received sculpture grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, New Jersey State Council for the Arts, the Virginia Commission for the Arts and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. He has taught at Bloomsburg University of PA, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Hollins University.

Robert Ready (PhD, Columbia University) is the former dean of the Caspersen School. A longtime Drew faculty member and administrator, he specializes in the areas of nineteenth-century British literature, writing fiction and graduate liberal studies. His recent work has appeared in Keats-Shelley Journal, Journal of Narrative Theory, WaterSedge, Water~Stone Review and Reconfigurations.

In addition to his administrative duties, William B. Rogers (PhD, Drew University) teaches nineteenth-century American history (particularly antebellum reform movements and the Civil War), the impact of war on American society and Irish/Irish-American history and literature. His publications include “The Great Hunger: Act of God or Acts of Man,” in Ireland’s Great Hunger: Silence, Memory and Commemoration; “Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison and the Prophetic Tradition in Nineteenth Century America,” in Let Justice Roll; and “We Are All Together Now” in Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison and the Prophetic Tradition.

Jonathan Rose (PhD, University of Pennsylvania) specializes in modern Britain, British intellectuals, the history of the book and the history of reading. He was the founding president of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, and he continues to serve as an editor of the society’s journal, Book History. He was also a past president of the Northeast Victorian Studies Association. His book The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001) won numerous awards, including the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History and the Longman-History Today Historical Book of the Year Prize. His other books include The Edwardian Temperament 1895-1919, The Revised Orwell, The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation, A Companion to the History of the Book (2007), The Literary Churchill: Author, Reader, Actor (2014), Readers’ Liberation (forthcoming early 2018) and the two-volume anthology The Edinburgh History of Reading (forthcoming late 2019). He occasionally reviews books for the Wall Street Journal and other publications.

Ann Saltzman is also director of Drew’s Center for Holocaust/Genocide Study. She has dedicated her career to exploring the interface between psychology and Holocaust studies. Author of numerous presentations made at both psychology and Holocaust studies conferences and in community forums, her Holocaust studies publications include a co-authored chapter in New Perspectives on the Holocaust: A Guide for Teachers and Scholars; an invited chapter in Obedience to Authority: Current Perspectives on the Milgram Paradigm; “Obedience to Authority” in Understanding Genocide (in Clio’s Psyche) and a review of Approaching an Auschwitz Survivor (in the journal Biography). She has been teaching Holocaust courses since 1990 and serves as the faculty coordinator for the minor in Holocaust studies. Her other research and teaching interests include history of psychology, psychology of women and social issues psychology.

David Thaler (MPP, Harvard and JD, New York University) is adjunct professor of mediation and conflict management and is the recipient of the 2018 Thomas H. Kean Graduate Teaching/Mentoring Award at the Caspersen School of Graduate Studies.  Thaler’s courses cover all stages of the mediation process, from pre-mediation activities and initial contact through final agreement and implementation. As the various stages of mediation are covered, students develop core competences such as active listening, brainstorming, objective criteria assessment, consensus decision making, and large meeting facilitation. Courses apply theory to practice for the Standard Mediation, Interest Based Problem Solving, Transformative, and Understanding Models of mediation. In considering these four models, courses explore cultural issues impacting mediation, the neuroscience of conflict, as well as several issues impacting the veracity of what is said in mediation, such as cognitive perception, epistemology and standard legal principles of evidence flowing therefrom.

When he is not teaching at Drew, Thaler is a senior advisor in the Office of the Director of the U.S. Federal Mediation & Conciliation Service. Prior to his appointment as senior advisor, Thaler served as a Commissioner in the Metropolitan New York Field Office of FMCS, where he mediated disputes involving collective bargaining, grievances filed by employees to enforce their rights under collective bargaining agreements, and employment discrimination cases in the equal employment opportunity context for multiple federal sector agencies. In addition to his dispute resolution caseload, Thaler designed and facilitated labor-management committee cooperation efforts involving major hospitals and unions in the New York City area, and also trained labor and management partners in many industries in core relationship and communications skills to help them better administer their collective bargaining agreements.

Internationally, Thaler has trained officials from several U.S. and foreign government agencies in mediation and conflict management. He has worked in Argentina, Bangladesh, Canada, Colombia, the Czech Republic, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Hungary, Mexico, Mozambique, Panama, Peru, South Korea, Thailand, Uganda, and Vietnam, in addition to training incoming delegations from China, Haiti and Tajikistan. In 2015, Professor Thaler was named to the international roster of mediators for United Nations and United Nations Staff Management Committee.

Billy Tooma (DLitt,Drew University) is the award-nominated filmmaker of the documentaries Clarence Chamberlin: Fly First & Fight Afterward, Poetry of Witness, and The Black Eagle of Harlem. He holds leadership positions in the Community College Humanities Association, the New Jersey College English Association, and the Biographers International Organization. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor of English at Essex County College.

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Laura Winters, (MA Rutgers, PhD Drew) is the author of Willa Cather: Landscape and Exile. She has taught at the College of Saint Elizabeth since 1982, where she is chair of the English Dept. She has taught in the graduate school at Drew since 1991, and her areas are Modernist and Post-Modern literature and film.

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(PhD, Drew University)Check back for bio.

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Darrell Cole (PhD, University of Virginia) teaches courses in religious ethics, philosophy and theology. His primary areas of specialization are religious engagement with politics, business and medicine. He is the author of When God Says War Is Right and the coauthor of The Virtue of War: Reclaiming the Classical Christian Traditions East and West. Cole’s articles and essays have appeared in scholarly and popular journals such as The Journal of Religious Ethics, Pro Ecclesia, Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics and Public Policy and First Things.

Allan C. Dawson (PhD, McGill University) researches issues of ethnicity and identity in West Africa and in the African Diaspora, ethnicity and globalization, identity and violence, religious innovation, chieftaincy and traditional religious practice in the West African Sahel. His research is also concerned with issues of Blackness and Afro-Brazilian identity within the context of the broader Black Atlantic world. Dawson has conducted extensive ethnographic research in Brazil, Ghana, Benin and Nigeria.

Caitlin Killian (PhD, Emory University) teaches courses on gender, families, reproduction and immigration as well as globalization with a focus on the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. Her areas of interest include gender and ethnic socialization, identity processes, immigration and cultural adaptation, Muslims in Western societies, sexual health, reproductive technologies, infertility and childbearing. She is the author of North African Women in France: Gender, Culture and Identity. Other publications include articles in Social Psychology Quarterly, Gender & Society, Sociology of Religion and Women’s Studies International Forum. Currently she is writing (with Nikki Khanna) about how parents decide which route to take when adopting a child and knowledge and decision-making about the HPV vaccine among young adults (with Susan Rakosi Rosenbloom).

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, explored 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.

Sangay Mishra (PhD, University of Southern California) specializes in immigrant political incorporation, global immigration and racial and ethnic politics. Before joining Drew University, he was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Lehigh University. He teaches courses on race and politics, immigration, public policy and international relations. His current research project focuses on the emerging patterns of interaction between Muslim communities and the law enforcement agencies in the post-9/11 period. Another project is concerned with the transnational engagements of the Indian American diaspora. He recently authored the book Desis Divided: Political Lives of South Asian Americans.

Jennifer Olmsted (PhD, University of California–Davis) specializes in development economics, gender economics, labor economics and globalization. She speaks Arabic and has lived and traveled extensively in the Middle East and North Africa. She is director of Middle East studies and has led previous Drew travel-study seminars to Morocco.

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.

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Christopher Taylor (PhD, Princeton University) has more than 25 years of experience as a professor and administrator at Drew. He is an expert on religion and Middle East studies who still dedicates some of his time to classroom teaching. His research and scholarship deal with the social history of religion in the medieval Islamic world and the crisis of religious leadership in the contemporary Islamic world. He is the author of In the Vicinity of the Righteous: Ziyara and the Veneration of Muslim Saints in Late Medieval Egypt and a number of articles on aspects of popular piety in Islam. He is currently working on a study about the social construction of moral imagination in the medieval Islamic world.

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Carlos Yordan (PhD, International Relations) is interested in three research areas. First, he examines the legal and political ramifications of humanitarian interventions and post-war peace-building efforts. Second, Carlos is interested in contemporary debates on U.S. foreign policy. Third, he is researching the emergence and the evolution of post-9/11 global counterterrorism strategies. He is especially intrigued by terrorist organizations’ financing efforts and how global governance networks have encouraged states, especially in the Arab world, to adopt new counterterrorism financing laws and regulations.

MBA, Erasmus University – Rotterdam School of Management | PhD, Leiden University

Jennifer Kohn (PhD, Rutgers Business School) brings a combination of business, government and academic experience to her teaching and research. Jennifer has two branches of research: applied microeconomics in the fields of health care, risk management and econometrics; and management theory and pedagogy. In health economics, Jennifer is focused on modeling the demand for medical care in ways that reflect the dynamic nature of individual medical care decisions over the lifecycle.This research has led her to propose new statistical methods that can estimate the impact of a myriad of unobservable factors on demand decisions. Her ultimate goal is to design risk management tools for health care providers that hedge the financial risk associated with so-called “pay for performance” compensation systems that are subject to patient non-compliance and treatment uncertainty. Currently, Jennifer is integrating her work in management theory and health economics by applying the lessons of Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom to the design of health systems. Her ongoing research seeks to better understand the demographics and dynamics of the top 5% of medical care users who consume nearly 50% of the resources in order to better manage financial health care risk.

Yi Lu (PhD, The Ohio State University) has worked as a statistical consultant on various research projects.  She studied both History and Mathematics as an undergraduate (Mars Hill University, North Carolina) and enjoys using statistics in very diverse applications.  Her current research interests include Bayesian methods, functional data, and curves and images.

Marc Tomljanovich (PhD, Cornell University) specializes in the impact of monetary policy structures and information releases on financial markets, and the influence policymakers have on regional and national economic growth. In 2006 he was the recipient of a National Sciences Foundation grant that helped fund an annual national workshop for macroeconomics research at liberal arts colleges. Marc also writes a weekly education piece for the Wall Street Journal. Marc has taken students on numerous short-term study programs to study financial markets, financial institutions and policymaking in London, Dublin, Brussels, and Tokyo. In 2010 he received the “Distinguished Teacher of the Year” award at Drew.

Edward Baring (PhD, Harvard University) is Associate Professor of Modern European History, specializing in twentieth-century intellectual life. Professor Baring is the author of The Young Derrida (Cambridge 2011), which won the Morris D. Forkosch Prize awarded by the Journal of the History of Ideas for the best book in intellectual history. With Peter. E. Gordon he edited The Trace of God: Derrida and Religion (Fordham University Press, 2014). In addition, he has published a number of articles in Critical Inquiry, Modern Intellectual History, Journal of the History of Ideas and New German Critique among others. His 2014 article “Ne me raconte plus d’histoires: Derrida and the Problem of the History of Philosophy,” in History and Theory, was the joint winner of the Society for French Studies Malcolm Bowie Prize for the best article by an early-career researcher in French. His work has been funded by the ACLS, the Mellon Foundation, the NEH and the American Philosophical Society. He is a 2015 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow.

Frances Bernstein (PhD, Columbia University) teaches courses in Russian and European history, with a special focus on the history of medicine, disability, sexuality and the body. In 2007 she published The Dictatorship of Sex: Lifestyle Advice for the Soviet Masses. In 2010 she co-edited and contributed to Soviet Medicine: Culture, Practice, and Science. She is actively researching the culture and politics of disability in the Soviet context. Recent publications include “Prosthetic Manhood in late Stalinist Russia,” OSIRIS 30: Scientific Masculinities (2015), ed. Robert A. Nye and Erika Lorraine Millam, “Rehabilitation Staged: How Soviet Doctors ‘Cured’ Disability in the Second World War” in Disability Histories, ed. Susan Burch and Michael A. Rembis, 218-236 and “Prosthetic Promise and Potemkin Limbs in late-Stalinist Russia,” in Disability in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union, ed. Michael Rasell and Elena Iarskaia, 42-66. In recent years she has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities, New York University, and the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research.

James M. Carter (PhD, University of Houston) specializes in American foreign relations, the Vietnam War, the United States and East Asia, the Cold War, modernization theory, political economy and nation building. His book Inventing Vietnam: The United States and State Building, 1954-1968 was published by Cambridge University Press in 2008. He also has written articles on war profiteering in Vietnam and Iraq and the U.S. advisory effort in Vietnam, and he has published reviews and essays in The Journal of Military History, Peace & Change, Education About Asia, Itinerario, History News Network, The Asia Times and the BBC. Currently he is pursuing two research projects: the first focuses on U.S.-China relations during the Boxer Rebellion, the second examines the relationship between the government and private corporations in the realm of foreign policy from World War II through the 1960s.

Allan C. Dawson (PhD, McGill University) is Associate Professor of Anthropology. His research is concerned with issues of ethnicity and identity in West Africa and in the African Diaspora, ethnicity and globalization, identity and violence, religious innovation, chieftaincy and traditional religious practice in the West African Sahel. Dawson also explores questions of Blackness and African identity within the context of the broader Black Atlantic world. His recent book, In Light of Africa: Globalizing Blackness in Northeastern Brazil (2014), seeks to reconcile theories of African cultural survival in the plantation with ideas of creolization by engaging the symbolic constructions of Africanity in Brazilian Black identities. His other works include Negotiating Territoriality: Spatial Dialogues between State and Tradition (2014) and Shrines in Africa: History, Politics and Society (2009). His current ethnographic fieldwork in West Africa explores the interface between urban migration, climate change and religious radicalization in the Ghanaian Sahel.

Prior to re-entering academe, Wyatt Evans (PhD, Drew University) served in the Peace Corps and as a civil affairs officer in the U.S. Army. He teaches history at the graduate and undergraduate levels. A member of the Council of Independent Colleges’ Senior Leadership Academy, he is very involved with developing digital scholarship and literacy initiatives at Drew. His research areas include the Civil War and the use of historical memory in politics. His first book, The Legend of John Wilkes Booth, won the 2005 OAH Avery O. Craven award and he is currently at work on a study of domestic security in the Civil War North.

Joshua Kavaloski is Professor of German and his primary research explores early twentieth-century European culture. He is the author of the book High Modernism: Aestheticism and Performativity in Literature of the 1920s. He has also published scholarly essays about texts by Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Jurek Becker and Daniel Kehlmann, as well as about graphic novels. He teaches a wide variety of topics at Drew, encompassing language, literature, film and history. Recent courses include: The Culture and History of the Weimar Republic, Perspectives on the Holocaust, Vampires on Film from German Expressionism to Today, Monsters of Modernity, Fantasie und Literatur, Das Roadmovie im deutschen Kino and Die Liebeskomödie im deutschen Kino.

Angie Kirby-Calder (PhD, University of Houston) specializes in modern American cultural history and women’s and gender studies, with secondary fields in environmental history and the Atlantic world. Her areas of interest include popular culture, identity politics, marginal spaces/places in society, material and ephemeral cultural products, pornography and sex work and historical theory. She teaches graduate seminars in American popular culture, gender identities/identity formation and sexuality. Her dissertation, More than a Centerfold: Gender and the Politics of Playboy Magazine in Modern America, explores identity formation via consumption and commodity culture. She has recently developed a course on the cultural history of American foodways.

John Lenz works on the history of ideas, especially the legacy of ancient Greece, on ancient history and on 20th century British philosopher Bertrand Russell. John received his PhD from Columbia, was a Fulbright fellow in Greece and was trained as an ancient historian. He is currently completing with a colleague the first English translation with commentary and revised text of a work by the primary figure of the modern Greek Enlightenment and plugging away at a book in progress, The Ideal World of Bertrand Russell: Russell as a Utopian Thinker. He formerly served as President of the Russell Society. His H&C courses are The Classical Tradition and Utopias and Utopian Thought from the Bible to the WWW. Some publications are available on academia.edu.

Karen Pechilis (PhD, University of Chicago) explores issues of interpreting the embodied self through poetry, biography and practice in devotional traditions of Hinduism. She understands ‘devotion’ to be a site for the intersection of wonder and self-expression and for an exquisitely participatory impulse, especially in the arts and letters. Over the past twenty years, she has conducted research in Chennai (Madras), south India through grants from the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Fulbright Program and the Asian Cultural Council. Her published work, both independent and collaborative, engages many scholarly discussions about the making of religious tradition, including interpretive history, translation, cultural analysis and feminist and gender studies.

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 teaches courses on 19th century art, 20th century art and the history of photography. She also is the director of Drew’s New York Semester on Contemporary Art. Her 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 (Ashgate, 2008), “Double Take: Tom Hunter’s The Way Home (2000)” in The Afterlife of Ophelia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and “Degenerate Detail: John Everett Millais and Ophelia’s Muddy Death” in John Everett Millais: Beyond the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (Paul Mellon Centre, 2001). Her current research projects continue the exploration of relationships among Shakespeare’s plays and visual culture, primarily in the arena of landscape, and gender and sexuality in Victorian art.

Jonathan Rose (PhD, University of Pennsylvania) specializes in modern Britain, British intellectuals, the history of the book and the history of reading. He was the founding president of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, and he continues to serve as an editor of the society’s journal, Book History. He was also a past president of the Northeast Victorian Studies Association. His book The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001) won numerous awards, including the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History and the Longman-History Today Historical Book of the Year Prize. His other books include The Edwardian Temperament 1895-1919, The Revised Orwell, The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation, A Companion to the History of the Book (2007), The Literary Churchill: Author, Reader, Actor (2014), Readers’ Liberation (forthcoming early 2018) and the two-volume anthology The Edinburgh History of Reading (forthcoming late 2019). He occasionally reviews books for the Wall Street Journal and other publications.

Christopher Taylor (PhD, Princeton University) has more than 25 years of experience as a professor and administrator at Drew. He is an expert on religion and Middle East studies who still dedicates some of his time to classroom teaching. His research and scholarship deal with the social history of religion in the medieval Islamic world and the crisis of religious leadership in the contemporary Islamic world. He is the author of In the Vicinity of the Righteous: Ziyara and the Veneration of Muslim Saints in Late Medieval Egypt and a number of articles on aspects of popular piety in Islam. He is currently working on a study about the social construction of moral imagination in the medieval Islamic world.

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Frances Bernstein (PhD, Columbia University) teaches courses in Russian and European history, with a special focus on the history of medicine, disability, sexuality and the body. In 2007 she published The Dictatorship of Sex: Lifestyle Advice for the Soviet Masses. In 2010 she co-edited and contributed to Soviet Medicine: Culture, Practice, and Science. She is actively researching the culture and politics of disability in the Soviet context. Recent publications include “Prosthetic Manhood in late Stalinist Russia,” OSIRIS 30: Scientific Masculinities (2015), ed. Robert A. Nye and Erika Lorraine Millam, “Rehabilitation Staged: How Soviet Doctors ‘Cured’ Disability in the Second World War” in Disability Histories, ed. Susan Burch and Michael A. Rembis, 218-236 and “Prosthetic Promise and Potemkin Limbs in late-Stalinist Russia,” in Disability in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union, ed. Michael Rasell and Elena Iarskaia, 42-66. In recent years she has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities, New York University, and the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research.

Darrell Cole (PhD, University of Virginia) teaches courses in religious ethics, philosophy and theology. His primary areas of specialization are religious engagement with politics, business and medicine. He is the author of When God Says War Is Right and the coauthor of The Virtue of War: Reclaiming the Classical Christian Traditions East and West. Cole’s articles and essays have appeared in scholarly and popular journals such as The Journal of Religious Ethics, Pro Ecclesia, Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics and Public Policy and First Things.

Nancy Gross (MMH, Drew University) was a long time full time faculty member at the City University of New York (CUNY) teaching academic writing to non-native English speakers. With many years of experience of also working with people at the end of life, Gross returned to being a student at Drew University’s program in Medical Humanities where she received a second Master’s degree. She has continued her education at Columbia University’s Narrative Medicine program and is actively involved in professional development in the field of Medical Humanities. She has been at Overlook Medical Center since 2005, serving in several capacities: Palliative Care Community Liaison and Humanities Scholar.

In her role as a humanities educator she works with resident physicians, medical students, hospital professional and support staff, community members and patients bringing humanities activities to support reflection and to evoke stories of illness and insight into the illness experience. The goal of her sustained work is to illuminate the voices of patients, families and clinicians as they intersect at the time of illness, in order to support each as they travel the path together. Gross has developed many programs which support this work at the hospital. As Palliative Care Community Liaison, Gross develops educational programs which help community members understand the philosophy and practice of Palliative Care. She facilitates Literature and Medicine seminars to provoke conversation of medical themes. She has worked with stroke patients, cancer patients, elders and people living with Parkinson’s disease and memory loss. She works with diverse populations in helping people tell their stories.

Kirk Johnson (MDiv, Drew University/ DMH, Drew University) teaching experience includes courses in Bioethics, Global Issues, Philosophy and Religion. His primary areas of specialization are medicine and religion, race and medicine, health disparities and the physician-patient relationship. He is a member and presented for the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities, The New York Academy of Medicine, American Culture Association and the Society of Christian Ethics. He serves as a member of the Atlantic Health Systems Bioethics Committee and is fellow emeritus of The American Heart Association’s Multicultural Initiatives Leadership Fellowship Program. Johnson has publications in the Journal of Religion and Health and Journal of Public Health.

Paul Kadetz holds the Robert Fisher Oxnam Chair of Science and Society at Drew University. In addition to serving as the Director of the Medical Humanities programs at Drew, Paul is in the Department of Anthropology. He is also a senior research fellow at the University of Liverpool in China, an Associate and Lecturer of the China Centre for Health and Humanity at University College London, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts (UK). Prior to coming to Drew University, Paul designed, taught and convened global and public health programs at Leiden University (in the Netherlands) and The University of Liverpool in China, and assisted in the development of a masters program in medical humanities (China Health and Humanity) at University College London. Paul comes to Drew from Marshall University where he served as the Chair of the Department of Public Health and Director of the MPH program.

Paul completed his doctorate in the Department of International Development, at The University of Oxford. He also holds a MPH in International Health and Development (Tulane University School of Public Health & Tropical Medicine); a MSc in Medical Anthropology (Oxford); a BA in Psychology (NYU); a BSN in Nursing, and a post-masters certificate in Teacher Education (Pennsylvania). Clinically, Paul is an Adult Nurse Practitioner (MSN, Vanderbilt), a critical care nurse and an Acupuncturist/Herbalist (LAc; MSOM, Samra University, USA with internship at Dong Zhi Men Hospital/Beijing University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, China). In his youth, Paul attended the Juilliard School.

Paul’s areas of research bridge the fields of International Health and Development, Critical Medical Anthropology and Global Health. Paul served as a researcher for the Western Pacific Region Office of the World Health Organization. His co-edited volume, Handbook of Welfare in China, was published by Edward Elgar in July 2017. And his co-edited volume, Creating Katrina, Rebuilding Resilience: Lessons from New Orleans on Vulnerability and Resiliency published by Elsevier is forthcoming Autumn 2017.

Jeanne Kerwin is the Manager of Palliative Care and Bioethics at Atlantic Health System. She has been instrumental in the development and growth of the palliative care and bioethics programs at Overlook Medical Center since 1988. She has provided bedside palliative care and bioethics consultations for patients, families and caregivers for the past 25 years and is now working with a five-hospital system to standardize the delivery of best practice palliative care and bioethics in all sites. She serves as the co-chair of the Overlook Bioethics Committee and the Atlantic Health Bioethics Oversight Committee. She is a consultant member of the Medical Society of NJ’s Bioethics Committee and serves on several community bioethics committees for those with developmental disabilities and has been involved in statewide changes to improve end-of-life care for this vulnerable population.

She was a leader in the State’s initiatives for out-of-hospital DNR orders in 1997 and currently serves on the New Jersey POLST Task Force. As a member of the NJ Bar Association’s End-of-Life Task Force, she promotes partnering with the legal community to create more effective advance directives for health care and serves on Allspire Health Care Partners, a five-health care system partnership in NJ and PA to improve advance care planning and end-of-life care in our hospitals and communities. Most recently, Kerwin was appointed by the Governor of New Jersey to serve on the State’s newly formed Advisory Council on End-of-Life Care. Prior to her work in palliative care, she was the Director of Emergency Medical Services for Atlantic Health System and a practicing mobile intensive care paramedic until 2002, bringing her passion and expertise for high quality end-of-life care to the field of emergency medical care.

Kerwin holds a Master’s and Doctorate of Medical Humanities from Drew University, has a Bachelor’s in Public Health from Rutgers University, a Certificate in Bioethics and Medical Humanities from Columbia University and is a Faculty Scholar in the Palliative Care Education & Practice Program from Harvard Medical School.

 Gaetana Kopchinsky is a philanthropist, writer, humanist, and educational mentor of underprivileged and exceptional elementary, undergraduate and graduate students. She has published many articles in her graduate and post-graduate capacity on clinical contemporary physician-patient issues through the Schwartz Rounds Conference Program with circulation to 23 hospitals across the United States.

Kopchinsky has served as an educational officer on the board of directors of rehabilitation facilities. She specializes in written procedures, policies in a rehabilitative environment for young women of diverse backgrounds who suffer from addictions. She develops “self-wellness, ethics and esteem” programs for female residents of such facilities. She lectures for the New Jersey Drug Court Program on expressive, therapeutic narrative and ethics; and has collaborated on numerous publications for the New Jersey Drug Court Program.

She is affiliated with the “Angel for Students” program for community student scholarship based upon financial need in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Paterson, as well as a member of Phi-Theta Kappa International Scholastic Order; Member of Psi Chi: The National Honor Society in Psychology; Pinnacle Honor Society: Winner of Outstanding Achievement Award Spring 2006 for outstanding business, academic and cultural achievement. She is winner of the Schering-Plough Scholarship (2008) for Outstanding Achievement in Medical Humanities. She is a three-time alumna of Drew University and serves on the Drew Alumni Council. As a professor at Drew Caspersen Graduate School, her expertise is in clinical narrative; humanism; contemporary psycho-social issues including pain and major chronic depression on the human condition. Kopchinsky coaches dissertational students by utilizing unique narrative templates of composition and ethics.

A newly appointed trustee of Drew University, her special talent develops existing Drew University strengths, especially in the Caspersen School of Graduate Studies; extends and build medical humanity offerings; her past, vast business expertise offers medical links to military medicine and to addiction issues; and supports new programming in the area of business humanities. These opportunities will strengthen and expand the construct of business humanism at Caspersen Graduate School in terms of the commercial applications of the Medical Humanities degree and its product offering/capability to students.

Richard Marfuggi (MD, University of Vermont College of Medicine; DMH, Drew University) is an American medical professional and author who is the first medical doctor to earn a doctorate in the medical humanities. He is a board-certified plastic surgeon who has been featured in publications such as Marie Claire, The Advocate, Cosmopolitan and Men’s Health. He has also provided insight on numerous television programs, including The Early Show on CBS. He is the academic director for the National Student Leadership Conference’s Medicine and Health Care Program.

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Sean Nevin is the author of Oblivio Gate (Southern Illinois University Press) and A House That Falls (Slapering Hol Press). His honors include a Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry selected by Robert Pinsky, the Alsop Review Poetry Prize, the Katherine C. Turner Academy of American Poets University Prize, and two fellowships from the Arizona Commission on the Arts. His poetry has appeared in numerous journals including The Gettysburg Review, North American Review, and JAMA, and anthologies including Family Matters: Poems of Our Families (Bottom Dog Press), Beyond Forgetting: Prose and Poetry about Alzheimer’s (Kent State University Press) and the anthology from the Academy of American Poets, New Voices: University and College Prizes 1998-2008. His poetry and interviews have recently been featured on NPR’s nationally syndicated shows, The Story with Dick Gordon and Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippett. He directs the MFA Program in Poetry and Poetry in Translation at Drew University.

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.

Roberto Osti (MFA, New York Academy of Art) has worked as illustrator for a variety of publications including Scientific American, Natural History and Scholastic. His work has been featured in exhibits in New York City, Philadelphia, Newark, Cincinnati and other locations in the United States and Europe.

Dr. Kate Ott holds a doctorate in Christian Social Ethics from Union Theological Seminary in the city of New York and a Masters of Arts in Religion from Yale Divinity School. She recently published ‘Searching for an Ethic: Sexuality, Children, and Moral Agency’ in New Feminist Christianity: Many Voices, Many Views. Dr. Ott is also co-editor of Just Hospitality: God’s Welcome in a World of Difference and Faith, Feminism, and Scholarship: The Next Generation. Prior to Drew, Dr. Ott taught as a lecturer at Yale University Divinity School and Union Theological Seminary. In addition, she was the Deputy Director of the Religious Institute, a non-profit committed to sexual health, education, and justice in faith communities and society. There she led the project and publication of Sex and the Seminary: Preparing Ministers for Sexual Health and Justice. Dr. Ott conducts workshops related to sexuality, youth, and parenting. She has served as a youth minister and religious education director. Her writings for congregational audiences include: the forthcoming, Let’s Talk about Sex: A Progressive Christian Parent???s Guide from Toddlerhood through the Teenage Years; A Time to Speak: Faith Communities and Sexuality Education; The Age of AIDS: A Guide for Faith-based Communities; A Time to Be Born: A Faith-based Guide on Assisted Reproductive Technologies, and numerous youth and parent guides for ThoughtfulChristian.com. Dr. Ott has been married for over a decade and is the proud mother of a 10 year old daughter and 7 year old son.

Virginia Phelan (PhD, Rutgers) is interested in the links between ancient and modern literatures and mythology, especially in its contemporary manifestations. She created Writing to Heal for Medical Humanities and several courses for the Irish Studies Concentration, including Joyce’s Journey, and The Importance of Being Witty. Publications include her dissertation, Two Ways of Life and Death, (Garland, 1990), Praying in Your Own Voice through Writing (Liguori, 1994) and articles in journals such as the Yeats-Eliot Review, America and The New York Times. Current projects include a manuscript of “Writing to Heal” and ongoing research on mythology and the journey and Charles Williams.

Darrell Cole (PhD, University of Virginia) teaches courses in religious ethics, philosophy and theology. His primary areas of specialization are religious engagement with politics, business and medicine. He is the author of When God Says War Is Right and the coauthor of The Virtue of War: Reclaiming the Classical Christian Traditions East and West. Cole’s articles and essays have appeared in scholarly and popular journals such as The Journal of Religious Ethics, Pro Ecclesia, Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics and Public Policy and First Things.

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Philip C. Scibilia (DMH, Drew University) has more than 35 years of experience in the health care industry, including senior executive positions in medical information, education and publishing. He was a partner in Strategic Healthcom, a health policy and pharmacoeconomic consulting group. He also was president and CEO of Macmillan Publishing’s Healthcare Group and served as president of Simon & Schuster/Appleton and Lange and had international operating responsibility for the Healthcare Group of Reed/Elsevier. He served as chairman of the Hospital Satellite Network, a national health care broadcasting network. Working with the Annenberg Center for Health Sciences, Scibilia produced several national and international television broadcasts, including Substance Abuse in the Workplace, Alzheimer’s Disease and Transplants: Who Lives Who Dies. He spent a year in the former USSR during perestroika, working with the Soviet Ministry of Health, negotiated the first Soviet-USA health care joint venture, Soyuz-Medinvest, and arranged the first joint USA/USSR Conference on Genome Mapping.

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Robert Carnevale (MFA, Columbia University) is a teaching artist who writes and translates poetry. He is co-translator—with Drew colleague Carol Ueland—of the internationally celebrated Russian poet Aleksandr Kushner’s work Apollo in the Grass. Their translations have also appeared in The Kenyon Review, Agni, World Literature Today, The Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature and twice Poetry Daily, supported by an NEA Literary Translation Fellowship. Carnevale’s own poems have been published in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Sidereal Times, The Alaska Quarterly and various other magazines. He has been teaching at Drew for 20 years, most of them in the Arts and Letters Program. Earlier, he was assistant coordinator of the Dodge Foundation Poetry Foundation program for six years and also worked on the Voices & Visions film series on American poets.

Aracelis Girmay (MFA, New York University) is the author of three poetry collections, Teeth, The Black Maria and Kingdom Animalia, the latter of which won the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her collage-based book, changing, changing, was published in 2005. In 2011, she was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Girmay has received fellowships from Cave Canem, The Jerome Foundation, the Watson Foundation and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. She was the 2008-2009 visiting writer in Queens College’s MFA program and for years has facilitated arts/activism workshops with young people in the Bronx. In 2015, she received the prestigious Whiting Writers’ Award.

Mihaela Moscaliuc (MFA, New England College; PhD, University of Maryland–College Park) focuses on Roma/Gypsies and immigration literature. She is the author of Immigrant Model and Father Dirt, is translator of The Hiss of the Viper, co-translator of Carmelia Leonte’s Death Searches for You a Second Time and edited Insane Devotion: On the Writing of Gerald Stern. Her poems, translations, reviews and articles appear in The Georgia Review, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, Arts & Letters, Mississippi Review, Connecticut Review, Absinthe, Poetry International, Pleiades, Vestoj: A Journal of Sartorial Matters and Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal. She received two Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Awards, an Individual Artist Award from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and a Fulbright Scholar Award. Moscaliuc was born and raised in Romania. In addition to her work at Drew, she is assistant professor of English at Monmouth University.

Sean Nevin (MFA, Arizona State University) is the author of Oblivio Gate and A House That Falls. His honors include a Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry, the Alsop Review Poetry Prize, the Katherine C. Turner Academy of American Poets University Prize and two fellowships from the Arizona Commission on the Arts. His poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including The Gettysburg Review, North American Review, JAMA and anthologies including Family Matters: Poems of Our Families, Beyond Forgetting: Prose and Poetry about Alzheimer’s and New Voices: University and College Prizes 1998-2008. His poetry and interviews have recently been featured on NPR’s nationally syndicated shows The Story with Dick Gordon and Speaking of Faith’with Krista Tippett.

Alicia Ostriker (PhD, University of Wisconsin–Madison) is Drew’s Distinguished Poet in Residence. She has published sixteen 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.

Sarah Vap (MFA, Arizona State University) is the author of six collections of poetry. Her most recent book, Viability, was selected by Mary Jo Bang for the National Poetry Series and was released by Penguin in 2016. Her first book, Dummy Fire, received the Saturnalia Poetry Prize. Her second, American Spikenard, was selected for the Iowa Poetry Prize. End of the Sentimental Journey, released in 2013 from Noemi Books, initiated their Infidel Poetics Series. She is recipient of an NEA Literature Fellowship for Poetry and most recently, a Research Enhancement Fellowship from the University of Southern California for a year of writing and research in West Africa.

Judith Vollmer (MFA, University of Pittsburgh) is author of The Apollonia Poems, which has been awarded the 2016 Four Lakes Poetry Prize of the University of Wisconsin Press and is forthcoming in early 2017. She also earned the Brittingham, the Cleveland State and the Center for Book Arts publication prizes; grants from the National Endowment and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts; finalist honors for the Paterson Poetry Prize; a National Book Critics Circle nomination; and the Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award of the University of Pittsburgh. Poems, reviews and essays have appeared, or are about to, in The Women’s Review of Books, Poetry International, Prairie Schooner, Agni, Poet Lore, The Stillwater Review, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Insane Devotion: On the Writing of Gerald Stern and The Cambridge Companion to Baudelaire. Vollmer is professor emeritus of English at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg.

Michael Waters (MFA, University of Iowa; PhD, Ohio University) 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.

Ellen Doré Watson (MFA, University of Massachusetts) is an American poet, translator and teacher. Her most recent volume of poems is Dogged Hearts. Her fifth collection, pray me stay eager, is forthcoming in 2017. Other books include This Sharpening, We Live in Bodies and Ladder Music, winner of the New England/New York award. Individual poems have appeared widely in literary journals, including The American Poetry Review, Tin House,and The New Yorker. Among her honors are a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Grant, a Rona Jaffe Writers Award, fellowships to Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, the Zoland Poetry Fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center, and a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship. She has translated a dozen books from Brazilian Portuguese, including The Alphabet in the Park: Selected Poems of Adélia Prado (Wesleyan University Press) and Ex Voto: Poems of Adélia Prado (Tupelo Press, 2013). She has also co-translated contemporary Arabic-language poetry with Saadi Simawe. Watson was hailed by Library Journal as one of “24 Poets for the 21st Century.” Watson lives in western Massachusetts, where she directs the Poetry Center at Smith College and serves as poetry and translation editor of The Massachusetts Review. She is also a core faculty member for the Colrain Manuscript Conference.

Afaa Michael Weaver (MA, Brown University) was influenced by the Black Arts Movement and the poetry of Lucille Clifton. He was the editor of Obsidian III from 1997 until 2001. Weaver has received numerous awards, including the 2014 Kingsley Tufts Award for The Government of Nature, multiple Pushcart Prizes, a Pew fellowship and the May Sarton Award. His first collection of poetry, Water Song, was ten years in the making. In 2014, Weaver completed his Plum Flower Trilogy with the publication of his 14th collection of poetry, City of Eternal Spring. Weaver was a member of Cave Canem’s first faculty at the retreat in 1997 and in 1998 he became the first “Elder” of the Cave Canem organization.

Bio to come

Patrick McGuinn has previously held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Taubman Center for Public Policy at Brown University, and the Miller Center for Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, and was a visiting scholar in the Education and Politics program at Teachers College, Columbia University. His first book, No Child Left Behind and the Transformation of Federal Education Policy, 1965-2005, (Kansas, 2006) was honored as a Choice outstanding academic title. His work has been published in Perspectives on Politics, Journal of Policy History, Publius: The Journal of Federalism, The Public Interest, Teachers College Record, Educational Policy, and Governance. He has contributed chapters to a number of books including: Educational Innovation and Philadelphia’s School of the Future, Judging Bush, Conservatism and American Political Development, No Remedy Left Behind, Educational Entrepreneurship, and The Great Society and the High Tide of Liberalism.

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.

Carolyn Rooney (PhD, Fairleigh Dickinson University) specializes in clinical psychology, nueuropsychology assessment and rreatment, educational consultation, law enforcement/critical incidence and stress management.

Susan Rakosi Rosenbloom (PhD, New York University) worked in the New York City and Yonkers public high schools organizing conflict resolution programs and completed two years of public service with AmeriCorps. Her first book, The Multiracial Urban High School: Fearing Peers and Trusting Friends, is based on a four-year qualitative study about how school shapes adolescents’ friendships. Other published research includes topics such as: racial/ethnic discrimination among minority youth, peer groups, the emotional content of social movement protest, school choice and classroom self-disclosure among student sex workers. Her current research is about child soldiers. Also, with Dr. Caitlin Killian she researches vaccination decision-making among young adults.

Linda Swerdlow (PhD, New York University) specializes in history, social studies and global education. She has published articles in her field and presented at national and international conferences. Her new book is titled Global Activism in an American School.

Nancy Vitalone-Raccaro (PhD, Temple University) has a teaching career dedicated to the field of Special Education. As an expert teacher educator, Dr. Vitalone-Raccaro is committed to training teachers who are critical thinkers and prepared to meet the challenges of 21st century classrooms. Her teaching interests include student assessment, high leverage teaching practices and instructional strategies for exceptional learners. Vitalone-Raccaro is part of an interprofessional research team that has designed and implemented innovative curriculum changes for second- and third-year medical students to improve their understanding of special education programs and facilitate collaboration between families, doctors and school personnel entitled Improving the Medical Academic Curriculum to Gain Increased Understanding of the Needs of Families of Children with Exceptionalities (IMAGINE). Vitalone-Raccaro has published several articles related to this line of research, as well as articles related to teaching students with disabilities.

Kristen Hawley Turner (PhD, Rutgers University) focuses on the intersections between technology and literacy, and she works with teachers across content areas to implement effective literacy instruction and to incorporate technology in meaningful ways.  Turner is author of several journal articles and book chapters dealing with adolescent digitalk, technology and teacher education, and writing instruction, and she regularly provides professional development workshops related to literacy instruction for teachers. She is the co-author of Connected Reading: Teaching Adolescent Readers in a Digital World and Argument in the Real World: Teaching Students to Read and Write Digital Texts. A former high school teacher of English and social studies, she is the founder and director of the Digital Literacies Collaborative, a professional network for teachers in the tri-state area, and a Teacher Consultant for the National Writing Project. She can be found on Twitter @teachKHT, and she blogs about being a working mother of twins at twinlifehavingitall.blogspot.com.

Brandie Waid (PhD, Teachers College, Columbia University) strongly believes there is no such thing as a “math person” and has dedicated her teaching career to making mathematics accessible to all learners. As a teacher educator, she works to train teachers to present their content in open and engaging ways and to create inclusive classroom spaces where all voices are valued and where learning is a democratic, communal process. Her research interests include growth mindset assessment practices, mathematics education, culturally responsive mathematics, teacher education, and LGBTQ Education. She has published articles in journals such as The Mathematics Teacher and Mathitudes.