Julia Williams
Julia M. Williams joined the faculty of the Humanities and Social Sciences Department at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in 1992, then assumed duties as Executive Director of the Office of Institutional Research, Planning, and Assessment in 2005. In 2016, she was appointed Dean of Cross-Cutting Programs and Emerging Opportunities. In this role, she supports the work of faculty who create multi-disciplinary learning opportunities for Rose-Hulman students. Her experience in undergraduate teaching began in 1985 when she taught English Composition at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, then continued through her graduate years at Emory University, where she received the Excellence in Teaching Award from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Throughout her career at Rose-Hulman, she has blended her work in the classroom with work in assessment. Williams’ publications on assessment, engineering and professional communication, and tablet PCs have appeared in the Journal of Engineering Education, IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, Technical Communication Quarterly, and The Impact of Tablet PCs and Pen-based Technologies in the Classroom, among others. She has been awarded grants from Microsoft, HP, the Engineering Communication Foundation, and NSF. Currently she collaborates with colleagues at Rose-Hulman and at the University of Washington Center for Evaluation & Research in STEM Equity (CERSE) to support the work of the Revolutionizing Engineering and Computer Science Departments (RED) grant recipients. She has received numerous awards including the 2015 Schlesinger Award (IEEE Professional Communication Society), and the 2010 Sterling Olmsted Award (ASEE Liberal Education Division).
Dr. Laura Severin
Dr. Laura Severin has worked for North Carolina State University for thirty-four years as a faculty member and an administrator. She is currently the head of the English department, where, among other duties, she is tasked with balancing disciplinary and interdisciplinary commitments. She has been dedicated to interdisciplinary work throughout her career, first leading an interdisciplinary program (Women’s and Gender Studies) from 1996-2001, then managing the College of Humanities and Social Sciences interdisciplinary programs as Associate Dean of Academic Affairs from 2004-2007, and finally facilitating the Chancellor’s Faculty Excellence Program, an interdisciplinary cluster hiring program, as Special Assistant to the Provost from 2012-2015. She has written on cluster hiring for Inside Higher Ed and served as a contributing expert on the APLU publication on cluster hiring. In addition, she has acted as an interdisciplinary consultant for several universities. In collaboration with social science and STEM faculty, she has written several successful interdisciplinary grants, funded by NSF, on women in science; her most significant and most sustained effort was as a co-PI on NC State’s ADVANCE grant (2008-2012), intended to better recruit and retain women faculty and faculty of color. She is a former ACE Fellow (class of 2011-2012), hosted by Duke University to study their approach to cluster hiring. She continues to be an active researcher and teacher in the area of contemporary British poetry. Her research is focused on artistic collaborations between Scottish women poets and visual artists around topics of the environment and human health.
Paula Krebs
Paula M. Krebs is the Executive Director of the Modern Language Association, whose 25,000 members are scholars and faculty members in languages, literature, writing, and cultural studies. In her role as executive director, Krebs advocates nationally for humanities education and the value of the humanities, working with faculty members, employers, and public humanities agencies. She has written on higher education and humanities issues for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, the Washington Post, Slate, and other publications, and she serves on the board of the National Humanities Alliance, Krebs has long worked on issues of race, class, and access in higher education. She is a Victorianist by training and inclination, with a doctoral degree in nineteenth-century British literature and culture from Indiana University and a B.A. in English from La Salle University. She is the author of many articles on Victorian literature and culture as well as Gender, Race, and the Writing of Empire, (Cambridge UP, 1999), and she is co-editor of The Feminist Teacher Anthology (Teachers College P, 1998) and Kim, A Longman Cultural Edition (Pearson, 2010). She worked during college and graduate school as a sportswriter.
Alexandrina Agloro
Currently still at WPI. Alexandrina Agloro is a game designer, community-based researcher, and media artist who believes in the possibilities of the decolonial imaginary using digital media as an emancipatory tool. Before joining WPI, she earned her Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California and an M.A. from the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University. Alexandrina blends her knowledge of the digital with an aesthetic sense of tactile design; some of her past work includes The Resisters, a participatory design alternate reality game (ARG) about social movement history in Providence, Rhode Island and collection of dresses made entirely from recycled goods as a benefit for a cancer wellness nonprofit. Professor Agloro utilizes principles of self-determination and relevant education in her teaching and research. She teaches at university and high school levels, and specializes in digital media skill building with young people of color. She is currently a co-chair of the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Committee of FemTechNet, a multi-university collaborative feminist technology organization. She is the Futurist for the Latinx Pacific Archive and is working on developing a line of ovulation-tracking jewelry that is both affordable and flawlessly stylish. As a community-based researcher and participatory designer, her speculative work is still anchored in lived experience. Professor Agloro is currently faculty with the Bard College-supported Worcester Clemente Course in the Humanities. Previously, she has served on the National Advisory Board of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life and as the scholar-in-residence at New Urban Arts, a youth art studio and imagination incubator. She uses critical pedagogy and community-based research as platforms to work with institutions, community organizations, researchers, and artists. Her research has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-John E. Sawyer Seminars, the Teagle Foundation, the Rhode Island Council of the Humanities, and the Voqal Fund.
Lucinda Roy
Lucinda Roy, Alumni Distinguished Professor in Creative Writing at Virginia Tech, has authored six books, including her latest poetry collection Fabric, the novel Lady Moses, and a memoir-critique entitled No Right to Remain Silent: What We’ve Learned from the Tragedy at Virginia Tech. Among her many awards are the Commonwealth of Virginia’s statewide Outstanding Faculty Award, an honorary doctorate from the University of Richmond, the Eighth Mountain Poetry Prize, a Discover Great New Writers novel selection from Barnes and Noble, and the 2017 Zenobia Hikes Faculty Woman of Color Award. She has been a guest on numerous TV and radio programs. These include The Today Show, Good Morning America, and CBS’s Sunday Morning. Her poetry, fiction, articles and political commentaries have appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the New York Times, the Guardian, USA Today, North American Review, American Poetry Review, and many other publications. She delivers keynotes and conducts workshops on creative writing, campus safety, teaching, and diversity. She is currently at work on a sci-fi novel about slavery, a book of ekphrastic poems celebrating African art, and a series of oil paintings depicting the Middle Passage.
Jacqueline Royster
Dr. Royster is Dean of Georgia Tech’s Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts. She holds the Ivan Allen Jr. Dean’s Chair in Liberal Arts and Technology, and is Professor of English in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication. A graduate of Spelman College in Atlanta, Royster earned an M.A. and D.A. in English from the University of Michigan. Her research centers on rhetorical studies, literacy studies, women’s studies, cultural studies, areas in which she has authored and co-authored numerous articles and book chapters. She is the author or co-author of four books: Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1997), Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women (2000), Profiles of Ohio Women, 1803-2003 (2003), and Feminist Rhetorical Studies: New Horizons in Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies (2012). She is the co-editor of two books: Double-Stitch: Black Women Write about Mothers and Daughters (1991) and Calling Cards: Theory and Practice in the Study of Race, Gender, and Culture (2005), and the editor of an anthology for college writing courses, Critical Inquiries (2003). She was consulting writer for Writer’s Choice, a textbook series for grades 6 – 8, and co-editor of Reader’s Choice, a literature series for grades 9 – 12, both published by Glencoe/McGraw-Hill. Prior to joining Georgia Tech in 2010, Royster served as Senior Vice Provost and Executive Dean of the Colleges of Arts and Sciences at The Ohio State University (OSU).
Richard Scheines
With his experience in interdisciplinary research and education — the heart of a liberal arts education, Richard Scheines is leading Carnegie Mellon University’s Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences as it continues to use research and education to solve problems and impact society. Scheines, professor of philosophy, built his career on crossing academic disciplines and brings that approach to the Office of the Dean. “The reason you go into academics is that you’re curious, and you like the stimulation and the activity of working with ideas,” Scheines said. “At the dean’s level, I hope to find opportunities to seed projects that involve faculty from humanities and social sciences as well as other parts of the university.” Before becoming dean of the Dietrich College in July 2014, Scheines served as head of the Department of Philosophy since 2005. In that role, he led the department to distinction with a focus on research that directly connects to a wide array of other fields, including computer science, math, statistics, brain science, medical ethics and psychology. Under his leadership, the department more than tripled its external research funding, strengthened its global reputation and attracted and retained the highest quality faculty and students. He also was instrumental in working to establish a new Center for Formal Epistemology, which collaborates with similar centers at Stanford University and in Europe and Japan. Additionally, he is credited with helping to create the Patrick Suppes Chair developing a new interdisciplinary major in linguistics, and working with the Department of History to upgrade the ethics, history and public policy major. Scheines joined the CMU faculty in 1990 and has additional appointments in the Machine Learning Department and Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII). His research focuses on causal discovery, the philosophy of social science, and educational technology and online courses. With CMU’s Peter Spirtes and Clark Glymour, Scheines pioneered the development of the modern theory of statistical causal models, which have been successfully applied in fields from genetics to climate modeling, brain imaging to social psychology and educational research to economics. He led the design of the undergraduate major in human-computer interaction, and, with the late Steven Klepper, he redesigned a core methods course in social and decision sciences that received honorable mention in the American Statistical Association’s Causality in Statistics Education Awards. In technology-enhanced learning, Scheines directed the creation of two online courses and published the first empirical study to show that appropriately applying interactive, web-based instruction can lead to improved learning outcomes in college courses. He also has played a major role in the development of the university’s new Simon Initiative, which aims to accelerate the use of learning science and technology to improve student learning, and to harness and leverage CMU’s decades of learning data and research to improve educational outcomes for students everywhere. Scheines has served on three committees for the National Academies of Science, all of which have completed their work and published books describing their findings: “Improving the Presumptive Disability Decision-Making Process For Veterans,” “Food Marketing to Children and Youth: Threat or Opportunity” and “Review of EPA’s Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) Process.”
Michael Nitsche
Coming Soon.
Rosalind Williams
Rosalind Williams attended Wellesley College and received degrees from Harvard University (B.A. History and Literature), the University of California at Berkeley (M.A. Modern European History) and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (Ph.D. History). Beginning in 1982 she taught in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies at MIT. From 1995 to 2000 she served as MIT’s first Dean of Students and Undergraduate Education. In 2001 she joined the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, serving as program head from 2002-06. Her main scholarly affiliation is the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT), of which she served as president in 2005-06, and from which she received its highest award, the Leonardo da Vinci Medal, in 2013. She has been awarded honorary degrees from KTH in Stockholm and the Technical University of Eindhoven. Her first three books (Dream Worlds, Notes from the Underground, Retooling) address this question: what are the implications for human life, both individual and collective, when we live in a predominantly self-constructed world? In responding to it, she has studied the emergence of consumer culture in late l9th century France; in the creation of underworlds, both imagined and actual, as models of a technological environment; and the retooling of MIT as the Institute confronts the effects of an information age of which it has been such a prime generator. The Triumph of Human Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2013) surveys the overarching historical event of our time: the rise and triumph of human empire, defined by the dominance of human presence on the planet. The book examines the works and lives of three well-known writers (Jules Verne, William Morris, and Robert Louis Stevenson) to illuminate the event of consciousness at the end of the 19th century, when humans realized that they were close to mapping the entire globe and that the global frontier was closing. Human Empire is about a still unfolding event of consciousness, as grasped by three writers exceptionally successful in conveying its depth and significance.