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.

Check back for bio.

(PhD, Drew University) Check back for bio.

Check back for bio.

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 Director 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.

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; 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, will appear in 2021. His CSGS courses include “British Romantic Extremes,” “Victorians: Visionary Ones, Impossible Ones”; “Re-Reading Great Books”; and “Blood America: Reading Cormac McCarthy.”

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.

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.

Check back for bio.

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.

Check back for bio.

Check back for bio.

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 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.

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. 

Jeongkyu Lee received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Arlington in 2006. Before that, he earned a BS from Sungkyunkwan University in Mathematic Education and an MS from Sogang University in Computer Science, both of South Korea. Before he pursued his doctorate, he worked as a database administrator for seven years with companies including Boram Bank, Hana Bank and IBM Korea. Dr. Lee’s primary research area is in big data, data analytics, and multimedia in artificial intelligence. Research interests include machine learning, social network data analytics, big data system, topological data analysis, and computer science education. His research work utilizes various techniques, such as deep learning, deep neural networks, topological data analysis, multimedia data mining, video processing, multimedia ontology, medical imaging/video, and natural user interface.

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.

Nipa has a strong background in the health sciences. She transitioned and graduated with a MS in Statistics from Rutgers University in January 2019. She has worked for biotech and pharmaceutical companies applying her statistical skills, and currently works for a software company as an associate data scientist. In her spare time, she enjoys spending time with her three rescue dogs and being active. She loves to run, hike, and kayak.

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 is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Finance 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. Prior to joining Drew, Steve served for seven years as a U.S. Treasury official in The Office of The Comptroller of the Currency, providing effective oversight of institutional trading and lending activities at some of the country’s largest banks. His tenure in government 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, serving on the Zoning Board of Adjustment in Hoboken, N.J. and serving as both a Planning Commissioner and Zoning Board Member 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 Ph.D. from University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Steve completed his Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst (CAIA) designation in 2009 and is active in the CAIA Association and the International Association for Quantitative Finance. He is also an avid runner, and completed two TCS New York City Marathons (2017,2018).

David 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.

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.

John Nolan joined WBB Asset Management in 2016, where he is a Managing Director co-managing an investment strategy dedicated to investing in public, early-stage life-science companies mostly within the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical device industries. Prior to this role, he worked at JP Morgan as a vice president and co-head of Manager Selection Quantitative Investment Research. He has also worked at Barclays Wealth America, Excaliber Group, LLC, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and New York University School of Medicine. John received a Masters in Public Health from Johns Hopkins University (2007) and B.A. in Physics and History from Cornell University (2001).

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

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.

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 (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.

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.

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.

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 (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.

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.

Merel Visse (PhD) works in the interdisciplinary fields of care ethics, care theory and qualitative and artistic inquiry. Her research, writings and teachings revolve around connecting the arts with central insights of care. Insights such as relationality, affectivity, precariousness, responsibility, embodiment, vulnerability and (inter)dependency, and political theory on care.

Merel’s work builds bridges between the everyday lived experiences of people and the socio-political realm of public issues. She follows a dialectic approach to research that is both responsive and critical. On the one hand, this approach involves being receptive to the movements that occur in everyday situations of care, and on the other hand a critical analysis of ideological and theoretical concepts that inform the concept of care. Care research is not only seen as a deliberate act of analysis in order to produce knowledge, but also as an event that requires a praxis of unknowing by living one’s questions real time.

Merel serves multiple roles and aims to create intersections between the diverse set of communities she is affiliated with. At Drew, she works as the Director of Medical Humanities at the Caspersen School of Graduate Studies and as an Associate Professor in Health Studies. She is also affiliated part-time as an Associate Professor with the Care Ethics group of the Dutch University of Humanistic Studies. Together with her Dutch colleagues, she coordinates the International Care Ethics Research Consortium (www.care-ethics.org).

She draws upon her prior experience with the coordination and execution of complex evaluation and qualitative inquiry projects, as well as the acquisition of grants. She is a published author of peer reviewed articles in impact-factor journals and several books. She is a regular speaker at conferences and facilitates labs and workshops.

For up-to-date news, her inspirations and background, please visit www.merelvisse.com.
Feel free to contact Merel at: mvisse@drew.edu.

 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.

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.

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.

Dr. Kate Ott is a social ethicist addressing the formation of moral communities with specializations in sexuality, technology, children/youth, and professional ethics. She is Associate Professor of Christian Social Ethics at Drew University Theological School and University Scholar of Everyday Ethics. She has served as a faculty member in Medical Humanities since her start at Drew teaching Medical and Healthcare ethics courses.

She recently release a new book, Christian Ethics for a Digital Society (2019). Her other books include: Sex + Faith: Talking with Your Child from Birth to Adolescence and the co-edited volume Faith, Feminism, and Scholarship: The Next Generation.  She lectures and leads workshops across the country on sexuality and technology issues related to children, teens, young adults and parents. Kate is also the co-editor for the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion.

Prior to Drew, Kate was the Deputy Director of the Religious Institute, a nonprofit 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 in addition to other guidebooks and policy statements. To find out more about her outreach work visit www.kateott.org. Follow Kate on Twitter @Kates_Take.

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.

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.

Check back for bio.

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.

Patrick McGuinn (PhD, University of Virginia) is professor of political science and education at Drew University and a senior research specialist at the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE). He holds a PhD in government and a MEd in education policy from the University of Virginia and has held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Rockefeller Institute for Government, the Taubman Center for Public Policy at Brown University, and the Miller Center for Public Affairs. McGuinn’s 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. He is also the co-editor of The Convergence of K-12 and Higher Education: Policies and Programs in a Changing Era (Harvard Education Press, 2016) and Education Governance for the 21st Century: Overcoming the Structural Barriers to School Reform (Brookings Institution Press, 2013). McGuinn has published many academic articles and book chapters and has produced policy reports for the Brookings Institution, the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for American Progress, the New America Foundation, and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. He is a regular commentator on education policy and politics in media outlets and was recognized as one of the nation’s top Edu-Scholars by Education Week for the past eight years.  He is a former high school social studies teacher and the father of four daughters in public 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.