Leslie Sprout, Program Director, Fine Arts and Media Studies, Historical Studies
Leslie Sprout (PhD, University of California, Berkeley) is the author of The Musical Legacy of Wartime France, which won the Béla Kornitzer Award for the best Drew faculty book published in 2013-15. Her scholarship focuses on music, modernism, and national identity in twentieth-century France. Additional research interests include the film music of Arthur Honegger and the engagement of European composers with American popular music and jazz between the two world wars. Dr. Sprout’s work has been supported by a Fulbright fellowship to France and by travel grants from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris.
Matthew Ayres, Teaching in the Two-Year College
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, Fine Arts and Media
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 <em>Don Giovanni</em> with BONJ Opera. He was nominated for the 2013 prize for his conducting of Donizetti’s <em>L’elisir d’amore</em> and Mozart’s <em>The</em> <em>Magic Flute</em>. 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.
Robert Carnevale, Writing, Literary Studies
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.
Sloane Drayson-Knigge, Historical Studies; Literary Studies
Sloane Drayson-Knigge is the third member of her immediate family to receive graduate degrees from Drew (Master in Theological Studies, magna cum laude, 1986; PhD in Religion and Society, with distinction, 2002). Given her extensive background in theatre and related arts and her resolute interest in the The Shoah, writing her dissertation on women and the Czech theatre/cabaret in the staged “model ghetto” of Theresienstadt was a natural path:Theatre As A Response To Everyday Life In The Nazi Ghetto Theresienstadt: Scenes of Resistance, Acts of Survival.
Sloane’s interest in the arts, history and culture was engendered by the diversity of people and communities she encountered on childhood trips in the family’s Studebakers. Her courses engage a spectrum of experiences and events in these academic fields. Among them are: Women in the Holocaust; Staging the Nation: The Presentation of Ourselves in American Drama; and Graphic Medicine: Embodiment, Illness, Health and the Visual Narrative. Sloane enjoys the rigor of independent studies. Material Culture and Memory Studies are particular areas of application.
Ron Felber, Literary Studies; Writing
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. Ron’s writing career began with articles for True Detective magazine based on his experiences as a deputy sheriff. He is author of twelve fiction and non-fiction books including Mojave Incident, for which he received the Albright Award, Il Dottore, the basis for FOX television’s The Mob Doctor, The Hunt for Khun Sa, a film documentary, The Privacy War, J. Edgar Hoover and the Fight for the Fourth Amendment, and his most recent effort, The Unwelcomed, optioned by Blumhouse Pictures. Formerly the CEO of a major manufacturing company, Ron has written numerous business articles including “America’s World War II Manufacturing Miracle” (Industry Week) and “Harry Houdini: Escaping the Corporate Box” (Manufacturing Today). He resides in Madison, N.J. and St. Petersburg, Florida.
Bill Gordon, Writing
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.
Sandra Jamieson, Teaching in the Two-Year College, Teaching Writing
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.
Jens Lloyd, Literary Studies, Teaching Writing
Jens Lloyd completed his PhD in English with a focus in rhetoric/composition at UC Irvine. Arriving at Drew in 2018, he is a faculty member in the English department and serves as the Director of First-Year Writing. He specializes in spatial approaches to rhetoric/composition theory and pedagogy. Other interests include writing program administration, travel writing, nineteenth-century US literature and rhetoric, and young adult fiction. His scholarly writing appears in, among other venues, Rhetoric Review, Literacy in Composition Studies, Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society, and Reflections: A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric.
Jesse Mann, Historical Studies, Studies in Religion
Jesse D. Mann (PhD, University of Chicago) is the Theological Librarian at the Drew University Library and teaches in both the Theological School and the Caspersen School. Trained as a medieval historian, he has published extensively on medieval law and theology, medieval manuscripts, and Muslim-Christian relations in the Middle Ages. He is currently collaborating with Professor Ulli Roth of the Universität Koblenz (Germany) on a critical edition of the selected works of Juan de Segovia (d. 1458). Mann serves on the editorial board of Theological Librarianship. He is a two-time Fulbright scholarship recipient (Spain and Switzerland). In 2016 and again in 2021, Mann received the Karen McCarthy Brown Award for Excellence in Teaching from the Graduate Theological Student Association at Drew, and in 2018 he won the Maxine Clarke Beach Excellence in Service Award. He also has over 20 years of experience in the rare book business.
Karen Pechilis, Historical Studies, Global Studies
Karen Pechilis (Ph.D., University of Chicago) is an historian of religions with a research specialization in the history of India and South Asia and teaching specialization in both global history and comparative religion. 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 scholarly discussions about the making of religious tradition, including interpretive history, translation, cultural analysis, visualities and feminist and gender studies. She is the author of The Embodiment of Bhakti and Interpreting Devotion: The Poetry and Legacy of a Female Bhakti Saint of India; the editor of The Graceful Guru: Hindu Female Gurus in India and the United States; the co-editor with Selva Raj of South Asian Religions: Tradition and Today and co-editor with Barbara A. Holdrege of Refiguring the Body: The Body in South Asia.
Liana Piehler, Fine Arts and Media; Writing
Liana Piehler (PhD, Drew University) teaches courses that have blended literature and the visual arts. Recent courses have included focus on Watercolor as a creative medium in the Humanities (The Watercolorist’s Craft–a recurring topic-based course); 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); as well as participation in ARLT 801–the interdisciplinary introduction to the program. Piehler regularly teaches the Joy of Scholarly Writing to students in the Arts and Letters and Medical Humanities programs, guiding and mentoring them on the dissertation journey. In addition to scholarly and creative writing, Liana Piehler is a visual artist specializing in watercolor, printmaking, collage, book arts, and other 2-and 3-D mediums. Along with her work in the A&L program, she serves as a faculty writing consultant at the CAE for graduate students and a writing instructor in Drew’s Theological School.
Ben Pranger, Fine Arts and Media
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, Literary Studies, Historical Studies
Robert Ready (PhD, Columbia; DHL, Drew), Professor Emeritus of English, was Drew’s first National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished Teaching Professor; Donald R. and Winifred B. Baldwin Professor of Humanities; Director of the Arts and Letters Program; and the last dean solely of the CSGS. He was also director of the A&L summer program, “Sentences: A Conference on Writing Prose.” He began teaching literature and creative writing at Drew in the third quarter of the twentieth century. His publications include literary scholarship and fiction in over two dozen refereed journals. His novel, Eck: A Romance, appeared in 2021. His CSGS courses include “British Romantic Extremes,” “Victorians: Visionary Ones, Impossible Ones”; “Re-Reading Great Books”; “Blood America: Reading Cormac McCarthy”; and “Forces and Figures: History and Literature.”
William B. Rogers, Historical Studies, Irish Studies, Global Studies
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, Historical Studies
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 a founding 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 (1986), The Revised Orwell (1991), The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation (2001), A Companion to the History of the Book (2007, revised and enlarged edition 2019), The Literary Churchill: Author, Reader, Actor (2014), Readers’ Liberation (2018), and the four-volume anthology The Edinburgh History of Reading (2020). His current research focuses on Playboy’s female readers. He occasionally reviews books for the Wall Street Journal and other publications.
Erin Sheehan, Studies in Religion
Bio to come.
Billy Tooma, Fine Arts and Media
Billy Tooma (DLitt, Drew University) is the documentary filmmaker behind Poetry of Witness (2015) and the nine-part series Ken Forsse: Come Dream with Me Tonight (2022). Over his career, he has served in leadership positions with the Community College Humanities Association and the Biographers International Organization. He is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Essex County College where he also serves as Chairperson of the Humanities & Bilingual Studies Division.
Laura Winters, Literary Studies, Writing, Studies in Religion
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.
Jonathan Golden, Program Director, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies
Golden holds several certificates in conflict resolution and works closely with interfaith and peace organizations in New Jersey and around the world. As author of Ancient Canaan and Israel: New Perspectives and the forthcoming Dawn of the Metal Age, he is currently working on a third book based on interviews with ex-combatants and victims of conflict who become peace activists. In addition to leading the Conflict Resolution program, Golden is director of Drew’s Center on Religion, Culture and Conflict, an interdisciplinary center focused on global peacebuilding and interfaith leadership, and assistant professor in the departments of Comparative Religion and Anthropology.
Darrell Cole, Professor of Comparative Religion
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, Associate Professor of Anthropology
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, Professor of Sociology
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, 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, 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, Assistant Professor
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, Professor of Economics
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.
Christopher Rodriguez
Check back for bio.
David Thaler, Adjunct Professor of Arts and Letters
Check back for bio.
Carlos Yordan, Associate Professor of Political Science
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.
Sarah Abramowitz, Program Director, John H. Evans Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science, Mathematics and Computer Science
Sarah Abramowitz received a B.A. degree in Mathematics from Cornell University, an M.S. degree in Mathematics from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and a Ph.D. in Mathematics Education from New York University. Dr. Abramowitz has been a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Drew University since 1998. She specializes in Educational Statistics. She is the co-author with Sharon Weinberg of “Statistics Using IBM SPSS: An Integrative Approach”, “Statistics Using Stata: An Integrative Approach,” “Statistics Using R: An Integrative Approach,” and is an Associate Editor and Social Media Editor of the Journal of Statistics Education.
Prasad Kothapalli, Adjunct Professor
Bio to come.
Diane Liporace, Adjunct Professor, Mathematics and Computer Science
Diane received a BS degree in Mathematics with a minor in Computer Science from Mercy College. She earned her MS in Computer Science from Montclair State University. She is co-author of a research paper Urban Legislation Assessment by Data Analytics with Smart City Characteristics. In 2017, she joined the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Drew University as an adjunct instructor. Before working in academia, Diane was a Staff level Software Engineer at IBM automating semiconductor manufacturing equipment and processes.
Yi Lu, Norma Gilbert Junior Assistant Professor, Mathematics and Computer Science
Yi Lu joined the Drew faculty in fall 2017 after receiving a Ph.D. in Statistics from the Ohio State University in 2017. She has taught a few undergraduate classes at Ohio State and worked as a statistical consultant on various research projects with graduate students from other disciplines. 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. She recently moved to New Jersey and loves running in her spare time.
Elizabeth Pemberton, Adjunct Professor
Elizabeth Pemberton received a BA in Physics from Drew University and an MS in Applied Mathematics and Statistics from Stony Brook University. Elizabeth is currently a PhD Candidate in Data Science at Northcentral University. Her research is in the field of computational content analysis and focuses on using a combination of network analysis, natural language processing, and computer vision to programmatically evaluate representation across hundreds of films from the past 40 years. Elizabeth also has five years of experience as a full-time data scientist and currently works at a New York City startup as a senior data scientist. When she’s not thinking about the ways she can use data science to quantify the realities of our world, Elizabeth enjoys playing video games on her playstation, building 3D puzzles, and reading science fiction.
Alexander Rudniy, Assistant Professor
Alex Rudniy earned his PhD in Computer Science from New Jersey Institute of Technology in 2012.Before joining Drew, he taught courses at University of Scranton and Fairleigh Dickinson University. He earned his MS and BS in Applied Mathematics at National University of Radio Electronics, Ukraine. Dr. Rudniy’s research interests are in artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing, time series forecasting, cybersecurity and the amalgamation of the above. Dr. Rudniy enjoys spending time outdoors doing hiking, biking, kayaking, swimming, or fishing.
Ellie Small, Norma Gilbert Junior Assistant Professor, Mathematics and Computer Science
Ellie Small received a BSc degree in Mathematics with Statistics and Computer Science from the University of London, Birkbeck College. She earned her PhD in Statistics from Rutgers University, New Brunswick, in 2019, and joined the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Drew University that same year. Dr. Small has taught statistics and mathematics at Centenary University in Hackettstown for 6 years. She specializes in data science and has completed research papers in networks and text mining. In her spare time she enjoys any type of dance, and she goes ballroom dancing with her husband whenever the opportunity presents itself.
Steve Firestone, Program Director and Assistant Teaching Professor
Steve Firestone is an Associate Teaching Professor of Finance, Associate Chair of the Department of Business, and the Director of the Master of Science in Finance program at Drew University. His research focuses on market and credit risk, fixed income valuation, behavioral finance, and real estate economics. Steve worked for over seven years at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency as a capital markets and credit team leader. His tenure in the federal service followed a twenty-year career in the financial markets as a fixed income trader, portfolio manager, and investment banker. Steve has also been committed to public service, recently serving on the Site Plan Review Advisory Board in Princeton, N.J. He has also previously served on the Zoning Board of Adjustment in Hoboken, N.J. and both the Planning Commission and Zoning Board in Charlotte, N.C. He received a B.A. in Economics from Bucknell University, an M.B.A in Finance and Public Policy from Indiana University, and is working towards his Doctorate of Business Administration (DBA) at Drexel University. Steve completed his Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst (CAIA) designation in 2009 and is active in the CAIA Association where he serves on the Standards Committee and the International Association for Quantitative Finance. He is also an avid runner, completing two TCS NYC Marathons.
David Anderson, Adjunct Professor
David Anderson (Phd, Princeton University) has an MBA from the University of Rochester (1997), a PhD in English from Princeton University (1980), and B.A. from the University of Florida (1973). Over his considerable career in auditing, he has been a Partner at Anderson Management Partners LLC, a Manager-Director at EisnerAmper LLP, a Director at Kane Reece, and a Senior Associate at Empire Valuation Consultants. David has taught at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Tuebingen (Germany), and been a lecturer at multiple U.S. and European institutions.
F. Michael Hussain, Adjunct Professor
Michael Hussain is an Adjunct Professor at Drew University. Michael has 30 years of experience across a variety of roles in the Financial Services industry. After graduating from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) in 1992 with a degree in Economics, he began his career with Dean Witter Reynolds as an Account Executive specializing in investments, retirement, and estate planning. After 6 years he sold a $100MM book of business and went on to earn his MBA in Finance at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business in 2000. Michael served on the institutional sales and trading desks in New York for 12 years delivering research insights and corporate C-level access to hedge funds and mutual funds across the country for firms such as UBS, Janney Montgomery and ended his Institutional Sales & Trading career investing in with a start up research, sales and trading firm, Soleil Securities. He has re-established and re-built multiple regions, established a middle markets desk and was last in charge of the West Coast Region for sales and trading. He has extensive experience in sell side research, investments, trading, banking operations, IPO’s, secondary offerings in equity, preferred and fixed income securities, derivatives investing, risk and portfolio management. His extensive time on the institutional sales desks working with portfolio managers and hedge fund managers has given him insight into the inner workings of our modern financial markets. Having worked with firms private, public, having gone public and merged/acquired give him an added unique viewpoint on the management and and leadership in and around such events and across organizations.
For the last 9 years he has been employed with IHS Markit (under proposed Merger with S&P Global; expected to close in Q2’22) covering a variety of roles including Quantitative Models, Factors and Research Product Specialist, IHS Markit PMI Product Specialist, built out the vendor community for a new compliance and due diligence software solution (KY3P), and has most recently served as an Executive Director leading a US Client Success team for the Enterprise Data Management (EDM) software application & now serves as the Global Head of Private Capital Markets for the iLevel, Qval, Credit, and Full Service Valuations product lines within the Financial Services Solutions division.
Michael has previously co-founded a non-profit foundation raising funds for local cancer related charities and causes in San Diego and continues to volunteer his time and give to causes serving to alleviate children’s illnesses, promote animal welfare, and support for post action military related issues. Michael is currently on the Advisory Panel for the Managing a Remote Workforce program at the Pace University Lubin School of Business. He enjoys martial arts, is currently kick boxing (yellow belt), a licensed sky diver, and an avid student of self mastery, spirituality, self awareness, conscious based living as well as discovering, nurturing and promoting the inherent power that lies within each and every one of us as individuals.
Yi Lu, Assistant Professor
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.
Qiqi Liang, Adjunct Professor
Qiqi Liang is currently a PhD candidate in Business Administration and Finance at Old Dominion University. She received her Master of Science degree in Financial Risk Management from the University of Connecticut and her Bachelor of Economics with a concentration in Finance from the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing, China. Her research interests are in behavioral finance, asset pricing, investments, retail investors, risk management, FinTech, Market data, and high frequency trading (HFT).
John Nolan, Adjunct Professor
John M. Nolan is co-founder, Chief Science Officer and interim Chief Financial Officer at octaviantFINANCIAL, a boutique financial services firm that provides innovative, market-based, financing and reimbursement solutions for high-cost cell and gene therapies. Prior to founding octaviant, he was a Managing Director at WBB Asset Management where he co-managed an investment portfolio dedicated to investing in public, early-stage life-science companies within the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical device industries. His tenure in the financial services industry has also included charges at JPMorgan, where he was vice president and co-head of Manager Selection Quantitative Investment Research, and Barclays Wealth America. John began his career in academic medicine conducting clinical research at the University of Pennsylvania and the New York University Schools of Medicine. He received a Masters in Public Health from Johns Hopkins University (2007) and B.A. in Physics and History from Cornell University (2001).
Joy Palmer, Adjunct Professor
Joy Palmer is a finance and accounting professional with over 30 years of experience, primarily in the financial services industry. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of Dynex Capital, Inc. (DX) as the Audit Chair. She retired from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) in 2020, where she was the Deputy Chief Accountant. While at the OCC, she previously served in various positions over her 17+ years including as the Senior Accounting Policy Advisor to Large Banks and the Western District Accountant. At the OCC, Joy became a subject matter expert in GAAP and regulatory policies. Prior to that time, Joy was a Director in Equity Research at Merrill Lynch, where she was responsible for analyzing the financial statements and making investment recommendations to institutional investors in the specialty finance sector. Joy has also been a Controller and Director of Finance at other public companies during her career. Joy also taught accounting and personal finance courses at Diablo Valley College in California. Joy holds an MBA, concentration in Finance from New York University, Stern School of Business as well as her Bachelor of Science from Montclair State University.
Kerem Yaman, Adjunct Professor
Kerem Yaman (PhD, University of California at Santa Barbara) is currently the COO, CDO, and the head of Portfolio Risk Management at Morgan Stanley’s Market Risk department. He has previously served as global head of market risk for various areas including credit trading, rates trading, emerging markets, municipal markets, prime brokerage and clearing at top US investment banks. Kerem was in charge of Regulatory Management for market risk in the past, and is now leading major regulatory/capital implementation initiatives at Morgan Stanley’s market risk department. Kerem started his career in Wall Street in 1997 as a derivatives trader in emerging markets, and became the head of the emerging markets derivatives desk at Citigroup, Prior to switching to risk management, he spent time on the buy side trading an emerging markets strategy. Kerem has a BA in physics and mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania, and a PhD in theoretical physics from the University of California at Santa Barbara. He is an avid practitioner of Aikido, plays guitar, and enjoys skiing.
Jonathan Rose, Program Director and William R. Kenan Professor of History
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 a founding 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 (1986), The Revised Orwell (1991), The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation (2001), A Companion to the History of the Book (2007, revised and enlarged edition 2019), The Literary Churchill: Author, Reader, Actor (2014), Readers’ Liberation (2018), and the four-volume anthology The Edinburgh History of Reading (2020). His current research focuses on Playboy’s female readers. He occasionally reviews books for the Wall Street Journal and other publications.
Frances Bernstein, Associate Professor of History
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.
Jeremy Blatter, Assistant Professor of Media and Communications
Jeremy Blatter (PhD, Harvard University) teaches Media and Communications, with a secondary field in Film and Visual Studies. His research examines the intersection of the behavioral sciences, technology, media and material culture during the long twentieth century. His writing and research has been published in academic journals including Science in Context, Medical History, and Media Studien, as well as in the edited volume Thinking in the Dark: Cinema, Theory, Practice (Rutgers University Press). Jeremy was previously a lecturer on the History of Science at Harvard and a research associate with metaLAB@Harvard and the Sensory Ethnography Lab. His research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), Consortium for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, Charles Warren Center for North American History, and the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies.