Faculty

Dr. Ilan Stavans is Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities, Latin American and Latino Cultures at Amherst College, co-founder of Great Books Summer Program, host of NPR’s In Contrast, and publisher of Restless Books, devoted to world literature in translation. He received his PhD and MA from Columbia University.  A renowned literary and cultural critic and prolific author, Dr. Stavans is the recipient of many awards and honors including the Guggenheim Fellowship. His work, translated into a dozen languages, has been adapted into stage and film. 

Dr. Steven Volk is Professor of History Emeritus at Oberlin College where he taught Latin American history and museum studies for 31 years. He continues to serve as the director of the Center for Teaching Innovation and Excellence. In 2011, he was named US Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. In 2001, he was recognized by the government of Chile for his efforts in helping to restore democracy to that country. 

Dr. Rob Reich is Professor of Political Science and Ethics in Society at Stanford University, where he received his MA and PhD. He is the faculty director of the Program on Ethics in Society and the faculty co-director of the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society.  He is the author, co-author, and co-editor of many political works. Dr. Reich is the recipient of several teaching awards, including the Phi Beta Kappa Undergraduate Teaching Award and the Walter J. Gores Award, Stanford University. 

Noah Rosenblum earned his JD from Yale Law School and is Assistant Professor of Law at NYU. Noah is the recipient of a Javits Fellowship from the US Department of Education, a Seigel Fellowship from the Consortium for Intellectual and Cultural History, and is a former Yale Law School Legal History Fellow. He is a graduate of Harvard and Deep Springs College.

Dr. Amanda Lagji is an assistant professor of English and World Literature at Pitzer College, one of the Claremont Schools. She has multiple degrees with honors in English and Philosophy from Dickinson College and a PhD in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her research examines the temporality of waiting in postcolonial literature from Africa, India, and the Caribbean.

Dr. Amos Rothschild attended Yale University and graduated magna cum laude with a BA in English. He earned an MA in Education from Fordham University and his PhD from Boston University. At present, he is Associate Professor of English at St. Thomas Aquinas College in Rockland County, New York.

Dr. Chris Bobonich is the CI Lewis Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University, where he received the Dean’s Award for distinguished teaching. Professor Bobonich received his a PhD from Berkeley and has taught at the University of Chicago. His main areas of research are Greek Philosophy and History of Ethics.

Dr. Irina Troconis is an Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies at Cornell University.  Dr. Troconis studies the politics of memory in contemporary Latin American literature, film, and performance. She holds a BA in French and Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought from Amherst College, and an MPhil in Latin American Studies from the University of Cambridge. Irina received her PhD from New York University’s Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures Department.

Dr. Joseph Coulson is the President and Chief Academic Officer of Harrison Middleton University. He is the past president of the Great Books Foundation, our mission partner. Beyond teaching, his poetry, drama, and fiction have been widely published, including two novels, Of Song and Water and The Vanishing Moon, that have been translated into German and French. Joe studied at Wayne State University and the University of Oxford, and he holds a PhD in American Literature from SUNY Buffalo.

Alex Johnson is an educator and theater artist and is director of impact at the College for Social Innovation. His academic writing has studied educational change in Shakespeare’s England, economic fraud, and performance in the 1820s. As an actor, writer, and director, his work has been seen in Boston, New York, San Francisco, and Alaska. Alex is a graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and holds an MA in Theater and Performance Studies from Stanford University.

Dr. Kelly González is a first-generation Mexican American who received his PhD from The Ohio State University in English with emphasis in Latinx Studies and Video Game Studies. He also minored in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Carlos is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Humanities Research Center at Rice University where he continues to work on his research into video game narratives. Carlos seeks to challenge how we think about and study video games through US Latinx studies and lived experience. He is a firm believer that video games are the future of storytelling and continues to push the field with innovative research. In addition to scholarly pursuits, he is also a published poet with his 2019 debut collection Wounds Fragments Derelict.

Dr. Jacob Burg is a Lecturer at Boston University in the College of Arts and Sciences’ Writing Program. He was the winner of the 2015-16 Brandeis University Shirle Dorothy Robbins Creative Writing Prize, and the 2019-20 Milton Hindus Dissertation Fellowship. He received his BA in English from Boston College and his PhD in American Literature from Brandeis University.

Dr. Christopher González is the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Endowed Chair in the Department of English at Southern Methodist University. He is the author and editor of many books including the International Latino Book Award-winning Reel Latinxs: Representation in U.S. Film & TV; the Perkins Prize Honorable Mention Permissible Narratives: The Promise of Latino/a Literature; Reading Junot Díaz; and more. His research and teaching areas include 20th-century American literature; Multiethnic Literatures of the United States; Latinx Literary and Cultural Production; Film; Comics and Graphic Novels; Narrative Theory; and American Studies. He received his PhD in English from Ohio State University.

Eve Houghton is a PhD candidate in English at Yale University. Her research centers on English literature and culture from 1500-1800, the history of reading, and literary procrastination. She received her BA in English from Yale and an MPhil in Renaissance Literature from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Mellon Fellow. Her work has appeared most recently in the Times Literary Supplement. Eve is from Newport, Rhode Island.

Dr. Wes Alcenat is an Assistant Professor of History and Affiliated Faculty in the American Studies program at Fordham University. Recently serving as a Postdoctoral Research Associate and a Visiting Assistant Professor of African-American Studies at Princeton University’s Department of African American Studies, Dr. Alcenat is also an Associate Fellow at Harvard University.  He holds a PhD in History from Columbia University in addition to an MPhil and MA in American History from Columbia. He is a historian of the nineteenth-century U.S. and Caribbean.

Dr. Benjamin Thompson is a Fellow and Tutor in Medieval History and Associate Professor of Medieval History at Somerville College, the University of Oxford. He specializes in the role of the church in society and politics between the Norman Conquest and the Reformation in England. He received his PhD at Cambridge University and MA at the University of Oxford. Dr. Thompson is currently writing a book about ‘alien’ priories, lands, and monasteries in England.

Dr.  Amelia McConville received her PhD in poetry and poetics with Neurohumanities  at Trinity College in Dublin. After completion of her undergraduate degree in English Literature and Philosophy at Trinity, she commenced interdisciplinary doctoral research on poetry with Neurohumanities, investigating visual poetry and poetics using both literary criticism and experimental psychology. Along with interdisciplinary academic research, she is also interested in contemporary literature, visual culture, film studies, and yoga.

Susan Gentile is a professor in the Department of Environmental Studies and Sustainability at Antioch University teaching at both the New England and Los Angeles campuses. She received her MS in Environmental Studies from Antioch and is a graduate of Williams College.

Dr. Kathryn Miller is Associate Professor of Mediterranean History and International Studies at NYU Abu Dhabi.  She received her PhD from Yale and taught for 20 years at Wesleyan and Stanford. As a recipient of the William J. Fulbright, NEH, and ACLS Grants in 2010, Professor Miller joined the Center for Strategic Studies and has taught international law at the Prince Al Hussein bin Abdullah II School of International Studies at the University of Jordan.

Dr. Marcus Conley is a Dean and Tutor at Harrison Middleton University. He received a PhD in English from the University of Nottingham and has taught at the secondary and postsecondary levels in the United Kingdom and the United States. His areas of interest include the history of the novel, speculative fiction, and the representation of problems of knowledge and ethics in literature.

Dr. Kenneth Sammond is a senior lecturer at Fairleigh Dickinson University where he teaches writing and literature. He received his PhD in Comparative Literature from Rutgers University and an MPA from Baruch College-CUNY. A scholar of the conventions of “imagined communities,” especially exile literatures from Imperial Rome and their influences on postmodern literature. His most recent research examines the evolving uses of graphic novels and sports literature in the classroom.

Chris Schafenacker earned his MA from UMass Amherst. He is a professional writer and translator currently working in Granada as he completes his PhD. His translations have appeared in Translation Review, Traviesta, Palabras Errantes, and Suelta, as well as in multiple anthologies.

Dr. Andrew Sanchez earned his DPhil at the University of Oxford where he studied the future of work and basic income as an Ertegun Scholar. He is broadly interested in economic productivity and the impact of technological progress on labor policy. He has lectured at the World Basic Income Congress, at the University of Cambridge, and he has a forthcoming book chapter on the intellectual history of basic income. He is a graduate of Oxford, Harvard, and Phillips Academy and is the recipient of Clarendon and von Clemm scholarships. (Andrew was also a four-year Great Books camper!) 

Mike Harrington is a PhD candidate at Princeton University studying English Literature. His work focuses on American fiction with emphasis on the 20th Century. He is a long-time Academic Director at GBSP and a graduate of Amherst College.

Caroline Bell-Stewart is a writer originally from Shelter Island, NY. Her stories can be found in Gulf Coast, Denver Quarterly, Fairy Tale Review, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbook “Husbandly Things” and co-creator of a cartomantic ornithology narrative called “Mast Year: A Mystical Field Guide”. Caroline received a BA from Bard College and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Piers Gelly is a writer and radio producer based in Charlottesville, Virginia. He holds a BA from Wesleyan University and an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Virginia, where he is currently on the faculty of the English Department.

Mitch Pinkowski is a member of the Department of English Honors Faculty at Merrimack College, a member of the founding faculty at NewU University, and former longtime teacher of AP English in multiple prominent private high schools.  Mitch attended Deerfield Academy, Emory University, and St. John’s College’s Graduate Institute. Over the past decade, he earned literary research grants that allowed for eclectic travels, including retracing the plot line of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, exploring the works of Basho, Dazai, and Soseki in Japan, and more.

Nicole Schafenacker is a writer, artist, and researcher residing on the traditional territory of the Kwanlin Dün First Nation and Ta’an Kwäch’än Council in Whitehorse, Yukon. She holds a BA Honours degree in Drama and Creative Writing from the University of Alberta (Canada) and a Masters degree in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of Northern British Columbia (Canada). In addition to her Masters, she completed a ‘northern specialization’ certificate at Nord University in Bodø, Norway where she focused on the social dimension of climate change in northern regions.

She is the author of two plays, Fish at the Bottom of the Sea and 13 Encounters, and a co-editor of the climate fiction anthology, Our Entangled Future. She was the first artist in residence with the Yukon Chapter of Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS) and a member of the fourth cohort of the FUTURES/forward program at the International Centre of Art for Social Change.

Dr. Max Suechting received his PhD from Stanford University’s program in Modern Thought & Literature where he studied contemporary American popular culture, focusing on music, literature, and visual media post-WWII. He is a graduate of Amherst College.

Regina Robbins is a writer and director in theater and film. She received her BA from Yale, MFA from Columbia, and an MA from City University of New York. Her plays have been produced by New York’s Six Figures Theatre, Looking Glass Theatre, and Everyday Inferno Theatre Company, of which she is a Core Member. Her award-winning work as a filmmaker has been seen in cities across the U.S. She writes about theater for Time Out New York and TDF Stages.

Brendan McCauley is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst where he researches media industries and explores how digital platforms and more have altered broader artistic practice. He teaches film and television production alongside performance writing and has been a Gallery Director and curator for 10 years.

Isaiah Stavchansky is a Mexican American playwright and actor. His plays have been developed and produced with Atlantic Acting School, Blue Bird Theater Company, The Williamstown Theatre Festival, The Tank NYC, and Kenyon College. He is a current finalist for Ensemble Studio Theater’s Youngblood Writer’s Group and recently received an NYC Corps Artist’s Grant. He has performed at The Williamstown Theatre Festival and The Wellfleet Harbor Actor’s Theater, among other theaters. Isaiah holds a BA from Kenyon College and completed the Atlantic Acting School’s Conservatory.

Amy Zhang is a writer, educator, and producer. You can find her non-fiction and fiction in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Atlas Obscura, and Jellyfish Review, where her flash fiction was nominated for Best Small Fictions of 2020. She was formerly a Segment Producer at Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj and also worked in community engagement and arts education for a documentary theater company, Ping Chong + Company. Amy is winner of the 2022 Open Border Literature Prize and a graduate of Wesleyan University.

Duncan Andrew Crowe graduated from Cambridge, St. Andrews, and Glasgow Universities. He holds multiple debate titles, including World Masters Debating Championship, Champion 2018 (Spanish Language), World Universities finalist in 2014, European Universities finalist in 2015, and European Universities semifinalist in 2013. He is currently a debate coach at St. Paul’s School — one of the UK’s top public schools — where the teams have consistently made Oxford and Cambridge finals days since 2017.

Michael Vaclav is currently earning his PhD in English Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his BA and MA in English Literature from the University of Notre Dame where his work focused on Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature.