Jonathan Baldo

Associate Professor of English

A specialist in Shakespeare and early modern studies, Professor Jonathan Baldo regularly offers courses in Elizabethan and Jacobean Shakespeare and Shakespeare’s history plays. A secondary interest in twentieth-century literature and culture has led him to develop courses in modern and contemporary poetry and film studies, and seminars on James Joyce, William Faulkner, and Toni Morrison at the Eastman School of Music. At the River Campus, he has offered graduate courses in the romantic movement and the theory of the novel for the departments of English and Modern Languages and Cultures, respectively.

Professor Baldo is currently completing a book on nationhood and memory in Shakespeare. His other recent work links parliamentary and theatrical representation in Shakespeare’s history plays.

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Sylvie Beaudette

Assistant Professor of Chamber Music & Accompanying

Professor Beaudette has a diversified career as a collaborative artist, vocal and instrumental coach, soloist, and teacher. She has performed with several artists and groups in Canada, USA, and Switzerland. As a member of the Athena Trio, she performed extensively in Northern California, Pennsylvania and New York States, and recorded Fabulous Femmes, a CD of music by women composers released on the Centaur label in July 2000. Their latest disc, (In)Habitation, features settings of Margaret Atwood poems, composed expressly for them by some of the top female composers of our time, including Libby Larsen, Lori Laitman, Amanda Harberg, Elisenda Fábregas, Tania León, and Judith Cloud.

Professor Beaudette is currently working at the Eastman School of Music as Assistant Professor of Chamber Music and Accompanying. She is the founder and artistic director of Eastman’s Women in Music Festival and is the new director of Summer@Eastman.

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Elena Bellina

Assistant Professor of Italian

Professor Bellina joins the Eastman School of Music from New York University, where she is completing a Ph.D. dissertation on autobiographical writing in confinement, focusing on unpublished diaries and memoirs written by Italian prisoners of war in British military camps in Africa during WWII, including a study on cross-dressing POW's.

Her areas of expertise include autobiographical writing, modern and contemporary Italian literature, poetry, literary theory and criticism, and gender studies. She owns an MA in English from Youngstown State University and a laurea in Foreign Languages and Literatures from the University of Bergamo (Italy). She has always been passionate about music, and earned degrees from the Conservatory of Music of Verona (Italy). During her years at the University of Bergamo, she developed an interdisciplinary approach to literature, musical semiotics and self-construction. She has continued to explore the relationships between Renaissance and Baroque music, literature, and cinema over the years. She also works on issues related to the representation of violence, war literature and documentary films.

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Janet Berlo

Professor of Art History; Professor of Visual and Cultural Studies

Professor Berlo's research interests include museum representations of indigenous peoples, Native North American visual cultures—particular areas: Plains Indians Graphic arts since 1850, Inuit Art, Women's representational practices, and American quilt history and nineteenth century visual culture. She teaches courses including "The Museum and 'the Other," "Beyond the Boundaries: Folk, Outsider, and Visionary Arts," and "Women, Cloth, and Culture." She served as the Susan B. Anthony Professor of Gender and Women's Studies from 1997-2002.

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Joanne Bernardi

Associate Professor of Japanese

Professor Bernardi's research interestes include Japanese cinema, literature, and culture; film and media studies; media history and historiography; visual and material culture; moving image archiving and preservation; nuclear culture and the visual image; animation; screenwriting history. She teaches such topics as Japanese culture; film history, theory, and visual analysis; nuclear history, culture and the visual image; animation; history of US-Japan relations; material culture studies; tourism studies; moving image archiving and preservation COURSES: Anime: Japanese Animation; Atomic Creatures: Godzilla; Cartoon Culture (20th c. - present); and The Japanese New Wave.

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David Bleich

Professor of English

Professor Bleich's research has been principally concerned with language and literature in society, including the history of the university and postsecondary pedagogy; the study of the use of language and the function of literary and other symbolic "written" texts in social contexts; and the history and philosophy of language research and pedagogy. He teaches such classes as Family Repression and Rage in Film and Society, All Is Fair in Love and War and The Changing Genres of Erotica.

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Edward Brockenbrough

Assistant Professor and Director, Urban Teaching & Leadership Program

Professor Brockenbrough directs the Urban Teaching and Leadership Program, a Warner School initiative in partnership with the Rochester City School District that prepares urban teachers with a commitment to social justice. He also teaches courses on concepts and issues in social science research, pre-service teacher preparation, and diversity and social justice in American education.

Professor Brockenbrough’s research focuses on negotiations of identity, pedagogy, and power in urban educational spaces, with particular attention to black, masculinity, and queer issues in education. He is currently conducting a critical ethnography on the identities and educational experiences of LGBT youth of color, with an emphasis on youth agency in the midst of multiple systems of oppression.

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Anthony Carter

Professor of Anthropology

Professor Carter has done fieldwork in India on rural politics, kinship and marriage, households and personhood. He has studied the cultures of children in India and the United States. He is currently doing fieldwork in a family planning clinic in the United States. His research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Health, and the National Geographic Society.

Professor Carter is Chair of the Committee on Demography and Anthropology of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population.

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Catherine Cerulli

Director, Susan B. Anthony Center for Women's Leadership

Dr. Cerulli is the Director of the Susan B. Anthony Center for Women's Leadership and the Laboratory of Interpersonal Violence and Victimization (LIVV), Associate Professor of Psychiatry, at the University of Rochester.  The National Institute of Mental Health awarded Dr. Cerulli a five-year grant to conduct a randomized control trial in Family Court to assess whether enhanced mental health enables intimate partner violence (IPV) victims to better navigate safety.  She was also to the Co-Principal Investigator on a National Institute of Justice award to assess whether victim participation in prosecution impacts their subsequent safety.  She was formerly an Assistant District Attorney in Monroe County, New York, where she created a special misdemeanor domestic violence unit in 1995. She has been working on issues surrounding domestic violence and child abuse for almost three decades, in a variety of capacities.  Dr. Cerulli currently has funding from the Center for Disease Control to work with a national IPV hotline to help address the intersection of violence and mental health. She works internationally to ameliorate violence against women and currently is assisting with a project addressing the health and welfare of sex workers and trafficking victims in Laos. She is a founding and current Board Member for the Crisis Nursery of Greater Rochester, Inc., a grass roots organization providing emergency respite care for greater Rochester area families with young children.

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Nancy Chin

Associate Professr of Community and Preventive Medicine (SMD)

Professor Chin use an ethnographic approach at the level of the household and neighborhood to elucidate these pathways. Her MPH thesis research looked at the relationship between household organization, wealth, and child health as reflected in the growth of children five years and under in southwest Tibet. Topics of interest include social class gradient in health; women's position in society and its impact on their health and the health of their children

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Stephanie Brown Clark

Associate Professor of Medical Humanities (SMD)

Professor Brown-Clark teaches in the Division of Medical Humanities, an interdisciplinary division drawn from the medical specialties and the humanities. Its application of philosophy, history, literature, and jurisprudence to the study of medicine and the care of patients is a part of the University of Rochester's traditional consideration of the social and ethical contexts of medicine. She currently teaches courses in literature and medicine, and medical history topics to medical students. As part of her recent work on the history of the disabled body, Professor Brown-Clark examines the medical explanations of congenital malformations or "monstrosities" at the turn of the 19th century in the nascent science of teratology, and the literary explorations of monstrosity in Mary Shelley's novel, Frankenstein.Professor Brown-Clark is a member of the SBAI Grants Committee.

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Elizabeth Cohen

Associate Professor of Art and Art History

Elizabeth Cohen is an interdisciplinary artist who has shown her work both nationally and internationally at galleries, museums and festivals including The New Museum, Blum Helman Gallery, Nikolai Fine Art, Apex Art and Franklin Furnace in NYC, The Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago, The Davis Museum at Wellesley, The Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art in Gainesville Florida, Korean American Museum in LA CA, The Bonner Kunstverein in Bonn Germany, Cimelice Castle Czech Republic, and The Bogota Film Festival. Cohen's interests include: Contemporary art and video production, critical theory, three-dimensional media, and new media production.

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Jennifer Creech

Assistant Professor of German

Professor Creech received her Ph.D. in Germanic Studies from the University of Minnesota in 2006. She is currently Assistant Professor of German in the Department of Modern Languages & Cultures at the University of Rochester, and is an Affiliate Faculty member in the Film & Media Studies Program and the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Women's Studies. Her research and teaching interests include late 20th-century German literature, film and culture; cinema studies; Marxist and feminist theories. She has published and presented on East German, Austrian and post-unification cinema. Jennifer’s current research explores the critical impulses in East German women’s films, and the revolutionary and reactionary aspects of post-unification representations of the East. Professor Creech is a member of the SBAI Speakers Committee.

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Douglas Crimp

Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History

Professor Crimp began teaching on the faculty of the Visual and Cultural Studies program and the Department of Art and Art History in 1992 and was appointed the Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History in 2003. He divides his time between Rochester and Manhattan.

He received a doctorate in art history at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Between 1977 and 1990 he was an editor of the journal October. Professor Crimp is the author of On the Museum's Ruins and Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics. He is currently completing a book on Andy Warhol's films, scheduled for publication by MIT Press in the spring of 2012. Before Pictures is tentatively scheduled for publication the following year.

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Thomas DiPiero

Dean for Humanities and Interdisciplinary Studies; Professor of French

Dean DiPiero works with matters related to the humanities and the humanistic social sciences, as well as with programs spanning multiple disciplines across the college. A focus has been working with faculty to develop new programs and research initiatives bridging the humanities and the sciences and engineering.

Dean DiPiero is a specialist in early European prose fiction, focusing principally on the literary effects considered to be realistic. Writing extensively on the social and political dimensions of the novel and on the forms of knowledge in early modern Europe that helped structure narrative, he has also published on race, gender, and the formation of subjectivity.

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Ayala Emmett

Associate Professor of Anthropology

Professor Emmett's current research focuses on women and religion in America and the ways that the public square and secular ideas on gender, citizenship and justice have penetrated and affected faith communities.  She is doing fieldwork on Jewish women who in their synagogues take on traditionally religious male rituals, objects and roles; this research follows her earlier fieldwork among Presbyterian women ministers. Professor Emmett has widened her scholarly, publication, and teaching interests to include creative ethnography.

Professor Emmett is the founder of Seeds for College, a university affiliated and community-based foundation with the goal of helping inner city minority children to successfully graduate from high school and awards them seed money to go to college. Professor Emmett is an Associate Editor of Sex Roles. She is the 2008 Chair of the Society for Humanistic Anthropology Fiction Award.

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Roger Freitas

Associate Professor of Musicology

Professor Freitas has presented papers at the annual meetings of the American Musicological Society, Royal Musical Association, Society for Seventeenth-Century Music, and Modern Language Association. He has also spoken at more specialized conferences, including the 13th Biennial International Conference on Baroque Music (Leeds, 2008), Attending to Early Modern Women—and Men (Univ. of Maryland, 2006), and Italy’s Eighteenth Century: Gender and Culture in the Age of the Grand Tour (Clark Memorial Library/UCLA, 2002).

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Thomas Gibson

Professor of Anthropology

Professor Gibson has carried out fieldwork in the Philippines (1979-81, 1985) and Indonesia (1988, 1989, 2000, 2006), and library research in the Netherlands (1994). Support for his research was provided by a grant from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and by a Fulbright Fellowship. His work on the Philippines was published in a series of articles and in a monograph, Sacrifice and Sharing in the Philippine Highlands: Religion and Society among the Buid of Mindoro (Athlone Press 1986). His work on Indonesia has appeared in a series of articles and in a series of monographs, the first two of which have appeared as And the Sun Pursued the Moon: Symbolic Knowledge and Traditional Authority Among the Makassar (Hawaii 2005) and Islamic Narrative and Authority in Southeast Asia from the 16th to the 21st Centuries (Palgrave 2007). A third monograph, Ritual and Self-Knowledge in Southeast Asia, will analyze the relationship between the twelve different models of the polity outlined in the first two volumes and the equally diverse models of the inner self embedded in life-cycle rituals. A final volume will contain annotated translations of the myths, oral epics and written chronicles that formed the basis for the analyses carried out in the first three monographs.

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Jeanne Grace

Professor Emeritus of Clinical Nursing

Professor Grace managed the School of Nursing’s transformation of nursing education into an evidence-based practice paradigm, developing a progressive curriculum from the undergraduate to doctoral level. In 2006 she received a New York State Nursing Education Award, and the School’s chapter of the nursing honor society named an award for evidence-based practice in her honor.

Professor Grace earned her master’s degree in women’s health care from the University of Rochester and her doctorate in nursing from the University of Rochester School of Nursing.

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Susan Groth

Assistant Professor of Nursing

Dr. Groth has used focus groups to gain an understanding of how pregnant African-American women view weight gain, physical activity and diet. She is conducting an observational study of pregnant African-American women to assess weight change, diet, and physical activity during and after pregnancy. The goal of these two projects is to develop interventions to prevent excessive gestational weight gain and a base from which to look more closely at genetic effects on weight.

Dr. Groth is a co-investigator on an EARLY Trials study funded by NHLBI. Electronic technology is being used to intervene with pregnant women to promote healthy pregnancies with appropriate gestational weight gain.Since 1993 she has practiced as a Women's Health Nurse Practitioner, primarily with low-income underserved women and teens. Her current practice is focused on teens at Hillside Family of Agencies where she provides gynecological and obstetrical services to girls in long-term residential, emergency placement, and juvenile justice services.

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Susan Gustafson

Karl F. and Bertha A. Fuchs Professor of German Studies

Professor Gustafson teaches courses on 18-20th century German literature and culture, comparative literature, and women's studies, such as Poe and Hoffmann, Sexuality and Gender, and Monsters, Ghosts, and Aliens. She has published numerous articles on Lessing, Goethe, Kleist, Hoffmann, Kafka, and Dickens. She received a GSA book award in 2004 for her second book, Men Desiring Men and a Goergen Award for Distinguished Achievement and Artistry in Undergraduate Teaching in 2006. Professor Gustafson was Director of the Institute from 2002-2007.

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Thomas Hahn

Professor of English

Professor Hahn's teaching centers on the sponsorship, production, and interpretation of texts and images from the earlier Middle Ages through the early modern period. Recent papers, publications, and seminars have concentrated on those scattered or huddled at the edges of emerging European identities, including women, Indians, Jews, heretics, Robin Hood and other outlaws, virtuous pagans, popular chivalric heroes, and other monstrous types. This work has entailed engagement with recent theory and practice in feminist criticism, visual and cultural studies, and social history. During the last decade and more he has put much energy into collaborative projects such as the Chaucer Bibliographies and the TEAMS Middle English Texts Series. He continues to work with Latin, and Old and Middle English texts.

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Rachel Haidu

Associate Professor of Art History

Professor Haidu studies modern art, with a particular emphasis on postwar European and contemporary art. She has published a book, The Absence of Work: Marcel Broodthaers, 1964-1976 (October Books/MIT Press, 2010) and numerous articles on artists such as Daniel Buren, Gerhard Richter, Edward Krasinski, and Thomas Hirschhorn. She is currently completing a second book.

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William Hauser

Professor Emeritus

Professor Hauser's research interests are both early modern and modern Japanese history. He teach courses on Asian Women's History, Modern Japan, the Asian American Experience, and traditional Japanese society.

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Sarah Higley

Professor of English

Professor Higley's primary interests lie in northern medieval literatures with an early emphasis on language, linguistics, and poetic structure. Her later work in fantasy and science fiction led her to explore medieval and modern notions of magic, machinery, monstrosity, and artifice. Her recent publications investigate the early origins of the werewolf, the medieval concept of the "robot," and manifestations throughout time of "simulacra"—lately, miniatures and artificial languages.  This last interest has inspired her book on Hildegard of Bingen's "Lingua Ignota." In the meantime, Higley is investigating the educational possibilities of New Media, especially that of immersive environments and Virtual Realities.

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Larry Hudson

Associate Professor of History

Professor Hudson's current project presents the enslaved as patient, hardworking subversives who were able to shape their world as they prepared themselves for freedom. It looks at the work environment, family life, and religious and health practices of the slaves as each of these areas was important to them because they provided the enslaved with the cultural tools with which to ensure more than mere survival of an awful system of human exploitation.

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June Hwang

Assistant Professor of German

Research and teaching interests include early twentieth-century literature, film and culture; German Jewish topics; urban spaces; questions of modernity; film theory; critical theory. Professor Hwang's recent courses include The Urban Imagination, Strangers in a Strange Land: German Jews, On the Move: Travelers, Wanderers and Explorers. Her current work explores how discourses of wandering, urban alienation, and the stranger intersect in the figure of the German Jewish intellectual.

Beth Jorgensen

Professor of Spanish

Professor Jörgensen teaches 20th century Spanish-American literature and culture, focusing on women writers, literary nonfiction, narrative fiction, theater and poetry. Her primary research area is Mexican literature. She is the author of The Writing of Elena Poniatowska (Texas, 1994), co-editor of The Contemporary Mexican Chronicle (SUNY, 2002), collaborator on a revised translation of Azuela's Los de abajo (Modern Library, 2002), co-editor of the summer 2006 issue of Letras Femeninas, and author of numerous articles.

Rosemary Kegl

Associate Professor of English

Professor Kegl works on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English Renaissance literature and culture. Her research interests include the complicated relationships among the formal properties of Renaissance writing, the tensions in Renaissance society, and the texture of a utopian sensibility; among various models of literary and historical analysis; and among sites and kinds of intellectual activity.

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Cilas Kemedjio

Director, Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African American Studies

Professor Kemedjio is an expert on Francophone African and Caribbean literatures, French theory, and the French novel during the 20th century. He is the author of De la Négritude à la Créolité. Édouard Glissant, Maryse Condé et la malédiction de la théorie (Hamburg: LIT Verlag, 1999) and guest editor of a special issue of Présence francophone (No. 62, 2004) on Postcolonial Mythologies. Kemedjio's latest work, a biography of Cameroonian novelist and activist Mongo Beti titled The Alien Condition, is nearing completion.

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Eleana Kim

Assistant Professor of Anthropology

Professor Kim's research interests include kinship/reproduction, environment/nature, citizenship, nationalisms, globalization, transnational adoption, Korean Diaspora, South Korea, Korean DMZ. Her teaching interests include Environmental Anthropology, Anthropology of Media, Migration, and Ethnographic Film.

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Ellen Koskoff

Director, World Music Certificate and Ethnomusicology Diploma Program

Music in Lubavitcher Life, 2000, winner of ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for excellence in music Scholarship 2001. Editor, Music Cultures in the United States, 2004. Ethnomusicology advisor for The New Amerigroves. General editor, Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, Vol. 3: United States and Canada. Editor and contributor, Women and Music in Cross-Cultural Perspective. Publications in Ethnomusicology, Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM) Yearbook, Worlds of Music, and The Journal of Women and Music. Book review editor, Ethnomusicology (1983-86).

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Christina Koulouglioti

Assistant Professor of Nursing

Professor Koulouglioti's research program focuses on young children's health promotion and especially the prevention of unintentional injuries and obesity. She is currently testing a routines intervention in the community for single mothers with children ages 3 to 5. The intervention is based on self-determination theory and provides mothers the necessary skills to foster and maintain everyday routines and improve their children's quality and quantity of sleep and diet. Professor Koulouglioti is also interested in parental behaviors and practices of mothers from diverse ethnic backgrounds, and is currently exploring safety concerns, practices, and everyday routines of Greek-American mothers.

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Jennifer Kyker

Assistant Professer of Musicology

Professor Kyker's doctoral research, supported by a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship, explored issues of audience reception in postcolonial Zimbabwean popular music, with a special focus on vocalist and guitarist Oliver Mtukudzi. In addition to her work on popular music, Professor Kyker has a long history of involvement studying the mbira dzavadzimu, an instrument played at various ritual events within Zimbabwe. Among her research interests are how women navigate expectations of gender in mbira performance, as well as the evolution of neo-traditional musical styles, such as the contemporary Zimbabwean marimba.

She is deeply involved in HIV/AIDS research and activism and founded the nonprofit organization Tariro, which works to educate and empower teenaged girls in Zimbabwean communities affected by HIV/AIDS. In recognition of her work on HIV/AIDS, she has been honored with several fellowships and awards, including a Leboy-Davies Fellowship in Women’s Studies from the University of Pennsylvania, as well as an alumnae fellowship from Mount Holyoke College.

Professor Kyker has a joing appointment at the College and the Eastman School of Music.

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Elizabeth LeCuyer

Assistant Professor of Nursing

Professor Lecuyer's research interests include mother-toddler interactions, socialization, and child development.

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Stephanie Li

Associate Professor of English

Stephanie Li's research focuses on the ways in which issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality influence conceptions of freedom. Her third book, Signifying Without Specifying: Racial Discourse in the Age of Obama, was published this fall by Rutgers University Press. Courses that Professor Li teaches include Slave Narratives and Neo-Slave Narratives, Toni Morrison and Critical Theory, and Narratives of Immigration and Assimilation. She is a member of the SBAI Steering Committee.

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Ralph Locke

Professor of Musicology

Professor Locke's research interests include history of music; social and cultural contexts, including politics and gender issues; exoticism and orientalism; opera; pedagogy of music history.

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Bette London

Professor of English

Professor London's research has been largely concerned with questions of authorship, broadly conceived, in the context of 19th and 20th-century British writing, especially the novel. She has explored such issues as the cult of authorship surrounding modernist and feminist icons; the construction of voice as a contested site of cultural and aesthetic authority; modes of literary production; and reception history. She regularly engages debates within feminist, gender, and postcolonial theory, and explores the usefulness of these critical practices for the production of close textual readings. While much of her work has focused on highly canonical texts and authors, she has also been interested in authorial practices that have not generally been celebrated, sometimes not even recognized as such. This has led her to the non-canonical writings of some of the most canonized writers: the juvenilia of the Brontës, for example, or the automatic writing of W. B. and Georgie Yeats. And it has prompted her investigation of alternative writing practices, such as literary collaboration and mediumship—practices, she argues, that deserve a more prominent place in our understanding of the social construction of authorship and its literary history.

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Katherine Mannheimer

Associate Professor of English

Jacqueline McCausland

Instructor, Program of Movement and Dance

McCausland has studied dance since the age of four, enjoying the many styles of movement expression - ballet, modern dance, jazz, tap, multi-cultural dances, and yoga.  She is co-director of the Shakti Yoga Center.

Joyce McDonough

Chair and Associate Professor, Linguistics and Brain & Cognitive Sciences

Research interests: Phonetics, laboratory phonology, morphology. The sound (phonetic) structures in the Dene languages and phonetic typology; Athabaskan linguistics; morphology and paradigmatic processes; speech production (ultrasound) and online speech processing. Music, speech and language.

Professor McDonough is working on a long-term project documenting and modeling the phonetic and phonological structure of the Athabaskan language, with special attention to the interaction of phonetic and morphological structure. She is also interested in the similarities between rap music and traditional oral history storytelling/chanting.

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Ernestine McHugh

Associate Professor of Anthropology, The College; Senior Instructor in Community and Preventive Medicine, The Medical School

Professor McHugh's research interests include comparative religion and cultural anthropology.

She specializes in Asia, with extended field research in the Himalayas. Articles and reviews in The Anthropology of Tibet and the Himalaya, Comparative Studies in Society and History, The Encyclopedia of World Cultures, American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Kailash, and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Awards from National Endowment for the Humanities (1976, 1995), Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (1980), National Science Foundation (1980), National Institute for Mental Health (1986), and Institute for Comparative Research in Human Culture (1992). Faculty member, University of California-San Diego (1988-90); Pitzer College, Claremont Colleges (1990-93); Eastman (1993-).

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Honey Meconi

Susan B. Anthony Professor of Gender and Women's Studies; Director, the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women's Studies; Professor of Music, the College; Professor of Musicology, Eastman School

Professor Meconi is the Director of the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women's Studies. View Honey Meconi's full bio here.

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Anne Merideth

Senior Lecturer, Religion and Classics

Professor Merideth teaches courses in the Old and New Testaments and ancient Christianity, and is a frequent participant in programs sponsored by the Interfaith Chapel. A veteran of the University's excavations in Israel, she has lectured in the Rochester community about the archaeological dig and other topics.

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John Michael

Professor of English and Visual and Cultural Studies

Professor Michael's research interests include contemporary relations between academic intellectuals and popular politics, the problematics of national identity in American literary romances and films, and the complex interrelations between the interpretation of literature and the reading of history.

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Deborah Modrak

Professor and Chair of Philosophy

Professor Modrak teaches the Philosophical Foundations of Feminism. She is a member of the SBAI Curriculum Committee. Her research interests include Aristotle, History of Ancient Philosophy, and Philosophy of Mind.

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Karen Mustian

Assistant Professor of Radiation Oncology (SMD), Community and Preventative Medicine

Professor Mustian's research is focused on the field of exercise and cancer control. She is currently the primary investigator on several clinical trials and is a member of several organizations. She has authored numerous papers and has been recognized for her excellence in research with awards from oncological societies.

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Alyssa Ney

Associate Professor of Philosophy

Alyssa Ney is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Rochester. Professor Ney received her Ph.D. in Philosophy in 2005 from Brown University. She is primarily interested in Metaphysics, philosophy of physics, and philosophy of mind. Professor Ney directs the University’s Philosophy Colloquium series and another interdisciplinaryseries featuring lectures and discussions on the philosophy of physics.

Lisa Norwood

Assistant Dean, Hajim School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

Professor Norwood is Director of the Women in Science and Engineering Program (UR WISE). UR WISE was established in 1992 to support women's participation in scientific, engineering, and quantitative disciplines at all levels. The WISE Program seeks to ensure that women may fully explore science through study, research experience, and career–building opportunities. URWISE has recently received Student Activities recognition as a sub-committee of the student section of SWE. Norwood serves as the Assistant Dean in the Hajim School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

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John Osburg

Assistant Professor of Anthropology

Professor Osburg’s research is broadly concerned with the relationship between market economies and systems of cultural value, affect, and morality. His current book project, Anxious Wealth: Money, Morality, and Social Networks among China’s New Rich, examines the rise of elite networks in China and documents the changing values, lifestyles, and consumption habits of China’s new rich and new middle classes. His research also examines changing gender relations in Post-Mao China and the ways in which money and material wealth intersect with ideologies of love and feelings in people’s social, marital, and romantic relationships. His other research interests include consumer culture, political corruption, post-socialism, and organized crime.

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Dorinda Outram

Gladys I. and Franklin W. Clark Professor of History

Professor Outram's research interests include revolutionary France, women's history, history of science and the Enlightenment and the history of religious conversion in the eighteenth century.She has written five books, and is currently working on the sixth, tentatively entitled Brilliant Light: Conversion in the Enlightenment, which will discuss modern religious controversies. Her teaching philosophy is to welcome and draw students into subject through conversation, toleration, and mutual respect, making a bond with text and subject. Professor Outram is a member of the SBAI Grants Committee.

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Jean Pedersen

Associate Professor of History

Besides her appointment at Eastman School of music, Professor Pedersen has additional appointments in the History Department and the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies of the University of Rochester.  Her main research interests focus on the intellectual and cultural history of nineteenth and twentieth century France, and she offers courses on a wide range of topics in French history, European history, and comparative European and American history from the eighteenth century to the present day. Professor Pedersen’s course offerings include thematic courses such as Americans in Paris, Comparative Revolutions, and Men, Women, and War in the Twentieth Century; and single author courses on modern literary and philosophical figures such as Virginia Woolf, Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Hannah Arendt.  Her seminars in History and Women’s Studies at the University of Rochester include European Cultural History, International Human Rights, Approaches to the History of Women, and Gender in Modern Europe.

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Terry Platt

Professor of Biology

Professor Platt is Co-Director of the Center for Workshop Education. His courses and publications include topics exploring the connection of sex and gender with education and science, including WST 252 Biochemistry of Male-Female Difference. In addition, he is a guest writer for the SBAI blog and serves frequently on the Kafka Prize Committee.

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David Pollack

Professor of Japanese

Professor Pollack is the author of numerous articles on Japanese literature, art, religion, and culture. His current projects include rhetorical strategies in Matsuo Basho's haiku poetry, the cultural history of Kyoto, and studies in various aspects of Edo art and literature. He teaches courses on Japanese culture, literature, drama, art, and urban history.

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Ryan Prendergast

Associate Professor of Spanish

Professor Prendergast's research and teaching interests include the literary and cultural production of both 16th- and 17th-century Spain and Colonial Latin America. Recent articles appeared in Bulletin of the Comediantes and Modern Language Studies. His book, Reading, Writing, and Errant Subjects in Inquisitorial Spain, is forthcoming from Ashgate Press (April 2011). His current research focuses on the entremés and other short theater in early modern Spain.

Rachel Remmel

Assistant Professor of American Studies

Professor Remmel studies nineteenth-century American architectural history. She is currently revising her dissertation on Boston public school architecture from 1800 to 1860 for publication as a book. She is also writing articles about the founding of the Cincinnati Art Museum and the architecture of Chicago picture palace movie theatres. Her research interests include building types, theories of environmental influence, and architectural process. Remmel teaches courses on the history of American art, the history of African-American art, modern architecture, the architecture of American houses, the history of American education, the history of photography, writing and composition, and antebellum culture.

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Raúl Rodríguez-Hernández

Associate Professor of Spanish

Professor Rodriguez-Hernandez has published extensively on Hispanic literatures and cultures, including postmodern fiction, cinema, alterity and art, and European philosophical traditions in Latin American texts. The aesthetic representation of the "past"—how writers and artists incorporate the cultural remains of the past millennium—are central to his research. His book Mexico's Ruins: Juan García Ponce and the Writing of Mexican Modernity was published in 2007. He is currently writing a book on Latin American architecture.

Nora Rubel

Assistant Professor of Religion

Joan Rubin

Director, American Studies Program; Professor of History

Professor Rubin's interests include the values, assumptions, and anxieties that have shaped American life, as reflected in both high culture and the experiences of ordinary people. Her present work is in part an outgrowth of her previous study of a neglected aspect of the literary scene in the interwar period: The Making of Middlebrow Culture. She sees herself as having moved over the years from the practice of fairly traditional intellectual history to wider interests in popular culture. Professor Rubin is a board member for the New York Council for the Humanities. Professor Rubin is a current member of the SBAI Steering Committee.

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Jeffrey Runner

Director, Center for Language Sciences; Associate Professor, Linguistics and Brain & Cognitive Sciences

Professor Runner was the Acting Director of SBAI from 2008-2009. He has been teaching at the University of Rochester since 1994. During that time he has taught both undergraduate and graduate students in a variety of courses, from introductory courses targeting freshmen to graduate seminars in theoretical syntax. In particular he regularly teaches Introduction to Linguistic Analysis, Introduction to Grammatical Systems, a novel and quite popular course he developed called Language & Sexuality, as well as more advanced courses on Syntactic Theory (both minimalism and Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar)

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Joan Saab

Chair, Art and Art History; Associate Professor of Art and Art History/Visual and Cultural Studies

Professor Saab's interests include Twentieth-century American cultural history, media and culture, urban and community studies, popular culture, cultural studies, and aesthetic categories and values. Courses the Professor Saab teaches include Vernacular Architecture in the USA, African American Visual Culture, Politics of Space, and the Modern City. Her current book project is titled How to Take a Picture: The Creation of Photographic Meaning in the United States. She has written articles on Oprah's Book Club and the gendering of public taste, nostalgia and the New Urbanism, and motherhood and anti-feminism in the popular media.

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Claudia Schaefer

Professor of Spanish

Professor Schaefer's research and teaching interests encompass all aspects of cultural production in Latin America and Spain of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She has published five books and numerous articles in these areas. Her latest book is a biography of Frida Kahlo (Greenwood Press, 2008). She is currently writing on the Mexican film director Arturo Ripstein, and is completing a volume on anarchism and utopian thought.

Joanna Scott

Roswell Smith Burrows Professor of English

Scott's interests include character and the motion of thought; the effects of varied narrative form; contradictory perceptions of time and place; the idiosyncracies of voice; mystery and the impact of disclosure; beauty and ugliness; comedy, temptation, collapse, and recovery; the elusive potential of imagination. Modern and contemporary authors she has written about include Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, W.G. Sebald, Maureen Howard, William Gass, and J.M. Coetzee. Her stories have been included in Best American Stories (1993) and the Pushcart Prize. She has won several book awards for her fiction and short stories. Scott has received critical acclaim for her novels. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she is a reciepient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and a Guggenheim fellowship.

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Grace Seiberling

Associate Professor of Art History

Professor Seiberling's research interests include nineteenth-century painting and photography, early British photography, and museums. She teaches courses on Women as Image and Text, Arts in American Culture, and Culture on Display. She is a member of SBAI's steering committee.

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Valeria Sinclair-Chapman

Director of Recruitment, David T. Kearns Center; Senior Lecturer in Political Science

Professor Sinclair Chapman's interests include African-American and minority politics, political representation, voting rights and redistricting, legislative politics, and political participation. Her research examines the substantive and symbolic representation of black interests in Congress as well as minority agenda-setting on the national level. She co-author with William D. Anderson and Janet M. Box-Steffensmeier of "The Keys to Legislative Success in the U.S. House of Representatives," Legislative Studies Quarterly (2003). She also co-authored of Countervailing Forces: Exploring the Macro-Dynamics of Black Political Participation in the Post-Civil Rights Era, with Fredrick C. Harris and Brian McKenzie (Cambridge University Press, 2006). Professor Sinclair Chapman teaches courses in American politics and African-American politics. She is Director of the Washington Semester Program, student adviser, core faculty member of the Center for the Study of African-American Politics, and associate member.

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Reinhild Steingröver

Chair, Humanities at ESM; Associate Professor of German

Professor Steingrover's teaching and research interests focus on contemporary German and Austrian film and literature, in particular the intersection of art and politics and the role of the artist in society.

Steingröver is the author of a monograph on Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, (Einerseits und Andererseits, Essays zur Prosa Thomas Bernhards. New York: Peter Lang, 2000) and the editor of the anthology Not So Plain As Black and White: Afro-German History and Culture 1890-2000 (with Professor Patricia Mazón, State University of New York at Buffalo). She is currently writing a book on the last generation of film directors of the East German state-run film studio DEFA, entitled Last Features: DEFA’s Lost Generation, 1990-92 and editing the volume After the Avant-garde: Engagements with Contemporary German and Austrian Experimental Film (with Professor Randall Halle, University of Rochester).

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Allen Topolski

Associate Professor of Art and Art History

Professor Topolski's art is constructed primarily of found materials or objects which are reworked and combined through a variety of transformative activities. His interests are in studio production that incorporates found materials and a variety of processes to explore nostalgia and memory in technologies of domesticity and convenience. He regularly serves as a juror on the (en)Gendered Juror Committee.

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Sharon Willis

Professor of Art History and Visual and Cultural Studies

Professor Willis's interests include feminist theory, film theory and visual analysis, cultural studies, and modern French literature and literary theory. Publications include Marguerite Duras: Writing on the Body (1986), Male Trouble, co-editor, with Constance Penley (1993), and High Contrast: Race and Gender in Contemporary Cinema. Professor Willis served as the SBAI Director from 1991-1993.

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