 Lin Aanonsen, professor, chair of the Biology Department and chair of the Health Professions Advisory Committee, focuses on the neurochemicals and receptors that may be involved in the spinal processing of chronic pain. Students are actively engaged in collaborative research with her and often present their work with her at regional or national scientific meetings. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota.
 Daniel (Danny) Kaplan, DeWitt Wallace Professor of mathematics and computer science, has a Ph.D. in biomedical physics from Harvard and also has been a professor of physiology at McGill University. His mathematical interests deal largely with chaos and time series analysis with applications in biology. He is the author of Understanding Nonlinear Dynamics.
 Carleton Macy, professor of music, directs the Collegium Musicum and is active in
MacJazz and the Macalester New Music
Ensemble. He is an internationally
performed composer of more than 100
works. His latest CD features the Parisbased
saxophone quartet 4uatre in
performances that include quartets with
piano, accordion, strings and percussion.
A recently released CD on the
Dapheneo label features Macy’s “Faust”
concerto for alto saxophone and string
orchestra.He received his D.MA from the University of Washington.
 Kendrick Brown, associate professor of psychology, teaches courses on social psychology,
understanding and confronting racism,
psychology of multiculturalism, and
research methods and statistics. His
research interests focus on racial and
ethnic identity, racial prejudice and
racism, and the psychological
consequences of perceiving oneself to be
the target of discrimination. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.
 Joëlle Vitiello, associate professor and
chair of French, specializes in 20th century French
literature and culture. She teaches
contemporary French culture; Cinema
(French, North African and Sub-Saharan
African); Haitian literature and culture;
and francophone literatures. Recent
publications include articles on Haitian
writers and artists, representations of
friendship in literature and
representations of violence in
contemporary literature. Her research
interests include the study of colonial
French representations and their
legacies, and postcolonial identities in
the francophone world. Vitiello received her Ph.D. from Stanford University.
 Paula Cooey, Margaret W. Harmon
Professor of Christian Theology and
Culture, teaches courses on history of
Christian traditions, comparative ethics,
and religion and globalization. Her
scholarly expertise lies at the
intersection of history of Christian
thought, theory of religion and gender
studies. She is currently completing a book titled Jesus, Dissent and Desire. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University.
 Andrew Latham, associate professor of political science,
teaches courses on international politics,
comparative foreign and defense policy,
and international security. His research
includes the changing nature of war, the
social construction of the land-mine ban
and various issues related to Canadian
foreign policy. He received his Ph.D. from York University.
 Clay Steinman, professor of humanities, media and cultural studies, specializes
in cinema studies and has been a
journalist, writing for magazines and
news organizations such as The Nation
and Xinhua, the New China News
Agency. He co-authored Consuming
Environments:Television and Commercial
Culture. He received his Ph.D. from Duke University.
 Vasant Sukhatme, Edward J. Noble
Professor of economics, is interested in
microeconomics and the economic
prospects of developing countries. He
was given the college’s Thomas Jefferson
Award in spring 2002 for lifetime
teaching, research and serviceHe received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.
 Diane Brown, assistant professor of French, specializes in 18th century French
literature. Her research interests include
the intersections of culture and
literature, the material history of books,
educational treatises, Enlightenment
philosophy and literary theory. She is
completing a book project on
educational theories and the 18th
century novel. She has taught courses on
literature as social critique, tolerance and
intolerance, literary and artistic
constructions of the body, literary
analysis, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard.
 Beth Cleary, associate professor and
department chair of theater and dance, directed Ellen
McLaughlin’s play about mothers and
daughters, Tongue of a Bird. She has
continued her own work in
playwrighting in the past year, and
offers a new course,"Playwrighting and
Textual Analysis."
Two monologues from her plays,
Findings Uncertain and Break, now appear
in Monologues for Women/Men from the
Playwrights Center. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley.
 Ahmad Atif Ahmad, assistant professor of religious studies, grew up in Egypt where he studied Islamic Law at Al Azhar, a mosque with an ancient tradition of scholarship. He specializes in Islamic legal history. His first book in Arabic dealt with reviewing court decisions in Islamic law (Cairo, 1997) and a forthcoming work deals with the interrelationship of theoretical and practical legal reasoning in Islam. Upcoming courses at Macalester include: Introduction to Islam, Truth, Language, and Community in Medieval Muslim Philosophy, Islam and the West and Qur'an and Its Interpretations. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard.
 David Bressoud, professor of mathematics and computer science, is interested in number theory and combinatorics with occasional forays into analysis (special s, modular forms) and algebra. He enjoys the history of mathematics and has drawn on it in his books on Factorization and Primality Testing, Vector Calculus and Real Analysis. He teaches Discrete Mathematics, Real Analysis, Calculus and Differential Equations. He is the author of seven books and more than 40 research articles. He received his Ph.D. from Temple University.
 Andy Overman, professor of classics,
specializes in religion, culture and
ethnicity in the Greco-Roman world,
having earned a Ph.D. at Boston
University. He has written widely on the
development of Judaism and
Christianity in the Roman world; the
interaction between cultures and races
within the Roman Empire; diaspora
Judaism; and archaeology of the Roman
world. He teaches Jews, Christians and
Pagans; India and Rome; Introduction to
Archaeology; and Greek language
courses. He directs Macalester’s
archaeological excavation. See photos»
 Duchess Harris, associate professor of American studies,
teaches courses in African American
studies and is a specialist on 20th
century African American political
history. Within that broad subject, she is
specifically interested in the civil rights
movement, the contributions of women
of color to feminist theory post-1970,
autobiography and critical legal studies.
She was a Woodrow Wilson National
Foundation Fellow in 2002 – 2003. She
is the co-editor of Racially Writing the
Republic: Racists, Race Rebels and
Transformations of American Identity. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota.
 Jim Laine, Arnold C. Lowe Professor and chair of religious studies, specializes in the religions of South Asia and Islam. He works with the study-abroad program in India sponsored by the Associated Colleges of the Midwest and continues to research Hindu-Muslim relations in 17th century India. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard.
 Janet Folina, professor of philosophy, specializes in
the philosophy of mathematics. She also
works on the philosophy of science and
on the epistemological foundations of
science. Her broader philosophical
interests include Kant,Wittgenstein,
realism-antirealism debates, the concepts
of objectivity and normativity, and other
topics in 20th century analytical
philosophy. She is the author of Poincaré
and the Philosophy of Mathematics. Her
current research interests include the
philosophy of mathematics of the 19th
and 20th centuries, and the concept of >
proof in mathematics. She received her Ph.D. from St. Andrew's University.
 Thomas Varberg, professor, is a
physical chemist. Trained at MIT, he was
a NATO Fellow at Oxford University
before coming to Macalester in 1993.
He teaches introductory and physical
chemistry. His collaborative research
with students is focused on the
spectroscopy of gas-phase free radicals.
To support this work, he has in the last
five years received $650,000 in funding
through four different research grants
from NSF and ACS. He has spent
sabbaticals at NIST, Oxford and the
University of British Columbia. He received his Ph.D. from MIT.
 Bill Moseley, associate professor of geography,
is an economic and environmental
geographer. He teaches Introductory
Human Geography, People and the
Environment, Regional Geography of
Africa, and a senior seminar in
Comparative Environment and
Development Studies. He has been
studying land reform in South Africa
with grant support from the National
Science Foundation. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Georgia
 Paul Fischer, associate professor of chemistry, is an
inorganic chemist with a background in
the synthesis of low valent transitionmetal
carbonyl complexes. His graduate
training emphasized the laboratory
techniques required to manipulate airand
moisture-sensitive substances. His
current research, funded by a grant from
the American Chemical Society
Petroleum Research Fund, encompasses
the broad area of organometallic
synthetic chemistry. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota.
 Mark Mazullo's, assistant professo of music,
appears frequently as a pianist in solo
and chamber settings; in 2000 and 2001
he performed two solo recitals in
Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, as benefits
for the city’s music academy. His
research focuses on 20th century
popular music and the music of
Shostakovich. Recent articles on
Nirvana, PJ Harvey and music in the
films of David Lynch have appeared in
the Musical Quarterly, Popular Music and
American Music.
 Libby Shoop, assistant professor of mathematics and computer science, is interested in bioinformatics, data visuaization and exploration. She teaches courses on database systems, Internet programming, object-oriented programming,
software development and operating systems. She has worked on large computational biology projects such as helping to coordinate research on data from the human geonome project. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota.
 Stan Sears, associate professor of art,
teaches sculpture and 3-D design. His
professional career includes public
sculpture throughout the United States.
He and his collaborative partner Andrea
Myklebust ’95 (Minneapolis, Minn.)
completed “The Hamilton Gateway,” a
66-foot-tall sculpture and lantern in
Hamilton, Ohio, and “Weatherdance,” a
fountain and plaza in Iowa City, Iowa,
and the World War II memorial at the
Minnesota State Capitol. His mosaicfloor
inlays can be seen at the Lindbergh
Terminal at the Minneapolis – St. Paul
International Airport.
 Galo Gonzalez, professor and
department chair of Hispanic and Latin American Studies, teaches and researches
primarily 20th century Latin American
literatures and cultures.Areas of special
interest include the literature of social
protest movements in Latin America, the
study of race relations in Latin American
narrative fiction, and the study of
Hispanic/Latino literature and culture in
the United States. He is the author of
Love and Eroticism in the Narrative of José
María Arguedas (Pliegos, 1990), a study of
the Peruvian indigenista novelist; and The
Island of Gold:A Brief Account of the
Exploration of Upper and Lower California
(Universitas Castellae, 2006), a colonial
chronicle written by Rodrigo
Motezuma. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley.
 Mark Davis, DeWitt Wallace Professor of Biology and director of the Katharine Ordway Natural History Study Area, is
an ecologist with teaching interests in
both regional and global ecological
issues. His nationally funded research
into the effects of fire and climate
change and non-native species on
prairies and oak savannas has involved
more than 50 Macalester students
during the past 15 years and has resulted
in numerous co-authored publications
with those students.He received his Ph.D. from Dartmouth.
 Wang Ping, associate professor of English, is a
poet, fiction writer, translator and editor.
She is the recipient of the National
Endowment for the Arts Award for
poetry, the New York Foundation for
the Arts Award for poetry, the 2001
Minnesota State Arts Board Artist
Fellowship grant for fiction, and the
2000 – 2001 Eugene M. Kayden Book
Award “for the best book in the
humanities published by an American
university press.” Her publications
include a novel, Foreign Devil; a
collection of short stories, American Visa;
two collections of poetry, Of Flesh and
Spirit and The Magic Whip; New
Generation: Poetry from China Today, an
anthology of poetry she edited and cotranslated;
and Aching for Beauty:
Footbinding in China. She received her Ph.D. from NYU.
 Brooke Lea, associate professor of psychology,
teaches courses in cognitive psychology,
psychology of language, and research
methods and statistics. He specializes in
human cognition, with an emphasis on
higher mental processes such as language
processing and deductive reasoning. His
research interests include theories of
discourse comprehension, models of
human logical competence, and the
interaction He received his Ph.D. from NYU.
 Ron Brisbois, professor and chair of chemistry,
is a synthetic chemist. His varied
research interests include synthetic
methodology development, natural
product total synthesis, ligand and
catalyst design, cyclophane construction,
and transition metal-mediated
supramolecular self-assembly. On a
sabbatical in the Biomaterials
Technology Center at 3M, he initiated
and is now continuing investigations
regarding highly fluorescent
heaazaanthracene derivatives. In 1993,
President Clinton designated him a
Presidential Faculty Fellow, a five-year
award given to support teaching and
research efforts. He received his Ph.D. from MIT.
 Satoko Suzuki, associate professor of Asian languages and culture, is
the chair of the department. She is a
specialist in Japanese linguistics and
teaches all levels of the language courses
(from elementary to fourth year) as well
as Japanese linguistics courses. Her
research interests are in linguistic pragmatics
and discourse analysis. She is the
editor of Emotive Communication in
Japanese and is the author of a number
of journal articles and book chapters. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota.
 Jim Von Geldren, professor of German and Russian Studies, is an
expert on Soviet mass culture and early
Soviet cinema. He has published a
monograph, Bolshevik Festivals, 1917–
1920, and two anthologies, Mass Culture
in Soviet Russia and Entertaining Tsarist
Russia. His latest project is a digital
source book on Soviet history accessible
at http://www.soviethistory.org.
He received his Ph.D. from Brown University.
 Sung Kyu Kim, professor of physics and astronomy, is the
author of Physics: The Fabric of Reality and co-author of Modern Physics for
Scientists and Engineers. He is currently
engaged in a textbook project on the
physics of the Big Bang in collaboration
with cosmologists from other
universities. He directs the Macalester
Summer Physics Institute for premedical
students.He received his Ph.D. from Duke.
 David Lanegran, John S. Holl
Professor of Geography and department
chair, teaches courses in human and
urban geography. His interests have led
to extensive studies and comparisons of
urban planning processes around the
world. He has published several books,
including Minnesota on the Map, A
Historical Atlas, and articles on urban and
cultural geography. He is a past president
of the National Council for Geographic
Education (1998). He received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota.
 David Chioni Moore, associate
professor of English and international
studies, is a specialist in the literatures of
the Black Atlantic world and has allied
interests in postcolonial theory,
globalization and cultural critique.He
edited Martin Bernal’s 2001 Black Athena
Writes Back and has published a score of
articles and two dozen reviews in
journals such as Transition, Diaspora,
Genre, Frontiers, PMLA, Research in
African Literatures, Callaloo and many
other venues.He received his Ph.D. from Duke.
 Susan Fox, associate professor of mathematics and computer science, is interested in artificial intelligence; in particular case-based reasoning, introspective reasoning, and al programming languages. She teaches Computer Science I, Algorithm Design and Analysis and Theory of Computation. She is the author of numerous articles on the subject of artificial intelligence and received her Ph.D. from Indiana University.
 David Itzkowitz, professor of history, teaches
courses in modern British, European
and Jewish history. He regularly teamteaches
an interdisciplinary course on
the Victorian period with a member of
the English Department. His early
publications are on Victorian social
history, particularly the history of leisure.
In recent years, he has moved his
research into the history of Victorian
Anglo-Jewry. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University.
 Beth Severy-Hoven, associate
professor and chair of Classics, has a Ph.D. from the
University of California at Berkeley and
is a specialist on Rome in the Age of
Augustus. She has taught in Rome at
the Intercollegiate Center. She also has
degrees from Oxford University and
Bryn Mawr College. She teaches courses
on Women, Gender and Sexuality in
Ancient Greece and Rome; Greek
Myths from Troy to Hollywood;The
Roman World; as well as Greek and
Latin courses. She is the director of the
department’s popular January in Rome
program.
 Jaine Strauss, professor and chair of psychology,
teaches courses in clinical and
community psychology. She studies
gender and mental health, with a
particular focus on body image, eating
concerns and depression. Her recent
research focuses on women’s
internalization of body ideals
throughout the lifespan. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Rochester.
 Sonita Sarker is chair of Women’s,
Gender and Sexuality Studies and
associate professor in the English
Department. She is co-editor of Trans-
Status Subjects: Gender in the Globalization
of South and Southeast Asia and is
currently editing a selection of essays
presented at the Sustainable Feminisms
Conference at Macalester College. She has
published essays on Shashi Deshpande,
Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain and Virginia
Woolf in publications by The Feminist
Press, in Archiv Orientalni and in the
National Women’s Studies Association
Journal. She is the recipient of awards
from the Ford, Mellon, Bush, Hewlett
and Wallace Foundations. She received her Ph.D. from UCLA.
 Jack Weatherford, DeWitt Wallace
Professor of antropology, holds an honorary doctorate
from Chinggis Khan College of
Mongolia. His most recent book,
Genghis Khan and the Making of the
Modern World, was a New York Times
bestseller and won the 2005 Minnesota
Book Award for history and biography.
He has published seven books, and his
works have been translated into more
than 20 languages. Student research
assistants have traveled with him to the
Caribbean, South America and West
Africa, and several have worked in
Mongolia. He has appeared on radio and
television programs around the country,
including The Today Show, ABC World
News Tonight with Peter Jennings,
Geraldo’s Now It Can Be Told, The Larry
King Show and documentaries for the
History Channel. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California-San Diego.
 Peter Ferderer, associate professor of economics, is
a macroeconomist whose teaching
interests include international finance,
macroeconomics and behavioral
economics. His research is in economic
history, financial markets and business
cycles. He received his Ph.D. from Washington University.
 Linda Schulte-Sasse, DeWitt Wallace
professor and chair of German Studies and Russian, teaches 18th- and
20th-century literature and specializes in
film and cultural studies. She has written
widely on German and American
cinema and political discourses. In 1996
Duke University Press published her
book on Nazi. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota.
 Terry Boychuk, associate professor
and chair of sociology, specializes in comparativehistorical
sociology, social policies, and
nonprofit organizations. His latest
publication, The Making and Meaning of
Hospital Policy in the United States and
Canada, is a comparative study of why
movements to establish national health
insurance failed in the United States and
succeeded in Canada. More recently,
Professor Boychuk has devoted his
attention to a study of the historical
origins of the legal frameworks that
define the nature and scope of the
charitable nonprofit sector in the United
Kingdom, the U.S., and the British
Commonwealth. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University.
 Keith Kuwata, associate professor of chemistry, is a
physical and analytical chemist with a
background in laser spectroscopy and
atmospheric chemistry. His research
involves using computer simulations to
determine the mechanisms of oxidation
reactions in the troposphere and the
properties and reactions of transitionmetal-
containing species. Students in his
laboratory use both quantum mechanics
and statistical rate theory for these
studies, which are supported by grants
from the American Chemical Society,
the Dreyfus Foundation and the
National Science Foundation. He received his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology.
 Joseph Rife, assistant professor of classics, earned
his doctorate in classical studies at the
University of Michigan. He specializes
in Greek literature, history and
archaeology and has published in the
areas of funerary ritual, social structure
and prose literature in the eastern
Mediterranean. He teaches courses in
Greek and Roman culture and history,
Greek and Latin language and literature,
and archaeology. He regularly takes
students overseas to participate in
interdisciplinary archaeological research
in southern Greece, where he has
directed a major excavation at the
ancient port of Kenchreai since 2002.
 Julie Dolan, associate professor of political science,
teaches courses on U.S. politics, research
methodology, women in politics and
public policy. Her research focuses on
the bureaucracy, Congress, and women
and politics. She received her Ph.D. from American University.
 James Dawes, associate professor of English,
(Harvard Society of Fellows, 1998 –
2001) teaches American literature. He is
the author of The Language of War as well
as numerous articles on topics including
narrative theory, human rights law,
literature and medical studies,
Shakespeare, gender and sexuality, and
pedagogical technique. The Language of
War examines the relationship between
language and violence, focusing on U.S.
literature and culture from the Civil War
through World War II. His teaching
interests include interdisciplinary
approaches to literary studies (ethics, law,
psychology, sociology, medicine) and
American literature from all periods. He
is a Lilly Fellow at Macalester College. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University.
 Dianna Shandy, assistant professor of anthropology, is
a sociocultural anthropologist who
teaches courses on refugee migration,
transnationalism, humanitarian
intervention,Africa, social science
research methodology and cultural
anthropology. Her most recent research
is with African immigrants to Ireland.
She has co-edited a volume, Rethinking
Refuge and Displacement, for the
American Anthropological Association
and a volume on “Religion and Forced
Migration” for the Journal of Refugee
Studies, Oxford. Working with Professor
David McCurdy, she co-authored a
revised edition of The Cultural
Experience: Ethnography in Complex
Society, which features the work of 10
Macalester students. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University.
 Arjun Guneratne, associate professor
and chair of antropology, teaches courses on South
Asian society and culture, anthropology
of development, history of
anthropological ideas, environmental
anthropology, the anthropology of law
and ethnographic interviewing. His
book, Many Tongues, One People:The
Making of Tharu Identity in Nepal, was
published in 2002. His current research involves examining
the relationship between the local and
the global by studying a project to
conserve Sri Lanka’s biodiversity. He is a
former president of the Association for
Nepal and Himalayan Studies.
 Karl Wirth, associate professor of geology, came
to Macalester in 1990 from Cornell
University, where he earned his Ph.D.
He is an igneous petrologist and his
research interests include ophiolite
studies in Alaska, lava flow suites in the
Philippine Islands, mafic dikes in
northern and southwestern Minnesota,
and Antarctic meteorites.
 Yeu him Tam, professor of history, does
research in modern Japanese intellectual
history and Sino-Japanese relations. He was
recently elected honorary president of
the Global Alliance for Preserving the
History of World War II in Asia, a
federation of grassroots and scholarly
organizations worldwide advocating
redress, justice and responsibility for war
crimes and atrocities by Imperial Japan
in the Asian Pacific. He has published
articles and books in Chinese, Japanese
and English. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University.
 Joanna Inglot, associate professor of art,
teaches art history courses such as
“Race, Class & Gender in American
Art,” and “Contemaporary Art.” In 2006
she curated “WARM,” a retrospective of
the feminist art collective Women’s Art
Registry of Minnesota at the Weisman
Museum in Minneapolis. She is also the
author of an acclaimed book on the
Polish sculptor Magdalena Abakanowicz. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin.
 Nadya Nedelsky, assistant professor of international studies, is
a specialist in the areas of human and
minority rights, comparative
nationalisms and transitional justice. She
has authored several essays and a
dissertation on comparative Czech and
Slovak nationalisms, and is participating
in a multi-national,multi-scholar
research project on transitional justice.
Her book on comparative Central
European nationalisms will appear from
the University of Pennsylvania Press. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto, Canada.
 Paul Overvoorde, assistant professor of biology,
is a plant biologist whose research
focuses on understanding the signal
transduction mechanisms of the plant
hormone auxin. A recent collaborative
research project with students at
Macalester has been supported by
funding from the National Science
Foundation, the U.S. Department of
Agriculture, and most recently by a
Merck-American Association for the
Advancement of Science grant. He received his Ph.D. from Washington State University.
 Khaldoun Samman, assistant
professor of sociology, specializes in world historical comparative
sociology, urban sociology,
globalization, the sociology of religion,
and classical and modern sociological
theory. Professor Samman is currently
writing a manuscript titled “The Clash
of Identities: Arabs and Jews, Islam and
the West, and the Search for a
Sustainable and Pluralistic Middle East.”
Drawing comparisons between Turkey,
Israel and Greece and Iran, Jordan and
Saudi Arabia, Professor Samman’s
research surveys the origins of the
present strife in the region and suggests
alternative identities that may help
peacefully resolve conflicts in the
Middle East. He received his Ph.D. from State University of New York, Binghamton.
 Patrick Schmidt, assistant professor,
teaches courses on American politics
and law. His research focuses on lawyers
in America, judicial politics and the
Supreme Court. He is currently writing
a book on disclosure laws in the United
States. He received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. |
