Profiles of the Harlaxton Faculty, Spring Term, 2013

The British Studies Faculty

Graham Baker, DPhil (University of Oxford)
Teaching Fellow in British Studies
gbaker@harlaxton.ac.uk

Dr Baker is a graduate of the universities of Bristol (BA), Oxford Brookes (MA) and Oxford (DPhil). In addition to working at Harlaxton, he is currently teaching two courses in the history of science, technology and medicine at Oxford and is a research associate at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in Paris.

Dr Baker’s research centres on the themes of science, religion, philanthropy and medicine in nineteenth and twentieth century Britain and the United States. He is especially interested in historical intersections between science and popular culture and is currently finalising three journal articles in this area.

Edward Bujak, PhD (University of East Anglia)
Senior Lecturer in British Studies and History
ebujak@harlaxton.ac.uk

Dr Bujak is a graduate of the University of East Anglia (BA, MA, PhD) and joined Harlaxton College as a Lecturer in 2001. In addition to teaching on the British Studies programme, a programme he led from 2004-2009, he teaches courses on British, European and international history and the two world wars.  In 2006, he received the Outstanding Teacher Award of the University of Evansville. In 2007 he was promoted to the rank of Senior Lecturer. His book, England’s Rural Realms: Landownership and the Agricultural Revolution was also published in 2007 by I. B. Tauris. In May 2008, Dr Bujak was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. In 2010 Dr Bujak was invited to become a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He is currently writing a book on landownership in the Edwardian countryside.

David Green, PhD (University of Nottingham)
Senior Lecturer and Chair of British Studies
dgreen@harlaxton.ac.uk

Dr Green is a graduate of the universities of Exeter (BA) and Nottingham (MA, PhD). Before coming to Harlaxton in 2007 he lived and worked in England, Scotland and Ireland, lecturing at the universities of Sheffield, St Andrews and Trinity College, Dublin. In 2009 he became Chair of the British Studies program and in 2010 he was appointed Senior Lecturer and a permanent member of the faculty.

A late medieval historian working on Britain, Ireland and France, his research deals with themes central to the British Studies course such as kingship, colonialism and concepts of national identity. He has written three books and numerous articles. Further details of these may be found here: http://www.harlaxton.ac.uk/academics/research/GreenDavid.cfm

He is currently working on a volume for Yale University Press on The Hundred Years War.

Gordon Kingsley, ThD (New Orleans Theological Seminary)
Lecturer in British Studies
Principal
jgkingsley@harlaxton.ac.uk

In a long academic career, Dr Kingsley has been professor of literature and religion at Tulane University, Mississippi College, the University of Louisville, and William Jewell College, all in the United States. At the latter school he also served as academic dean and, for thirteen years, as president. In a study funded by the Exxon Foundation, he was adjudged among the top 5% of America’s 'most effective university leaders'.

He holds degrees from Mississippi College (BA), the University of Missouri (MA), and the New Orleans Theological Seminary (BD, ThD), where his research was conducted jointly at Tulane University. He holds honorary doctorates from Mercer University (LittD), Seinan Gakuin University, Japan (DHum), and the University of Evansville (LHD). Though he describes the college presidency as a 'shortcut to illiteracy', he has managed to produce three books and some 100 articles, monographs, and reviews, chiefly in popular religious subjects.

Caroline Magennis, PhD (Queens University, Belfast)
Teaching Fellow in British Studies and Literature
cmagennis@harlaxton.ac.uk

Dr Magennis is a graduate of Queen’s University, Belfast (BA, MA, PhD). She has held research fellowships at the Institute of Irish Studies at Queen’s and University College Dublin. Before she joined the faculty at Harlaxton she was a Teaching Fellow at the University of Limerick.

Dr Magennis publishes in the area of modern and contemporary British and Irish literature and culture, and is the author of Sons of Ulster: Masculinities in the Contemporary Northern Irish Novel and co-editor of Irish Masculinities: Reflections on Literature and Culture. She has published articles in the Irish University Review, the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies and Irish Studies Review.  She is currently working on a monograph on the 'post'-Troubles Northern Irish novel. She is a commissioned contributor to Alluvium Journal of Twenty-First Century Writing and a member of the Council of the British Association of Irish Studies.

Her full publications list and CV can be found at http://harlaxton.academia.edu/CarolineMagennis

Helen Snow, PhD (The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham)
Lecturer in British Studies and English Literature
hsnow@harlaxton.ac.uk

After undergraduate work at the University of Southampton and her MA and PhD from The Shakespeare Institute of the University of Birmingham, Dr Snow first came to Harlaxton in the early 1990s.  She took an active role in the early years of the British Studies course, particularly in developing its interdisciplinary approach.  She led the teaching team for two years in addition to teaching Shakespeare and other literature courses. 

In 2006, after five years teaching Shakespeare and other arts courses with The Open University, Dr Snow returned to Harlaxton to teach British Studies and, of course, Shakespeare.  Her publications and research interests focus on Shakespeare in performance, gender and Shakespeare, and the ways in which perceptions and presentations of Shakespeare and heritage contribute to ideas of national identity.  Dr Snow is the convenor of “The Harlaxton Players”, and she and her two musical daughters are keen members of The Harlaxton Collegiate Choir.

Dr Snow is on leave during the Spring Semester 2013.

 

The Discipline-Specific British Faculty

Cliff Pettifor, PhD (Nottingham Trent University)
Lecturer in Politics
cpettifor@harlaxton.ac.uk

After twenty enjoyable years, Dr Pettifor relinquished a successful business career to become a mature student at Nottingham Trent University where he graduated and gained his PhD in the Economics of Higher Education.  He joined Harlaxton College in a part-time capacity in January 1982 and has since taught a range of social science courses, combining those duties with teaching similar courses for the Open University and until 2008 continuing his management role as Director of the Performance Indicator Project researching employers' views of graduate employability.  He now focuses his teaching on the single course in Modern British Politics and, at an age when most have taken retirement, he is reflecting Harlaxton's value of lifetime learning by recently completing another degree through the Open University.

Ian Welsh, MBA (Nottingham Business School)
Lecturer in Marketing
Vice Principal for Business and Technology
iwelsh@harlaxton.ac.uk

With an MBA from the Nottingham Business School, Professor Welsh has taught a popular introductory course in Marketing for the last 12 years. His academic interests include the development and effects of consumerism in higher education, service marketing in general and Britain's political relationship with Europe. In addition, he serves as the College's Vice Principal, a varied and interesting role which keeps him busy!

Professor Welsh currently serves as Chairman of the Association of American Study Abroad Programmes in the United Kingdom (http://www.aasapuk.org/) which was established in 1991 to represent the 120 or so American study abroad programmes in the UK. It provides a forum for programme directors and administrative staff to discuss and respond to common issues, in order to meet the needs of the present and anticipate the demands of the future for US study abroad in the UK.

Before Harlaxton College, Professor Welsh began his career in data processing management at a large London based group of Builders Merchants, at a time when computers were only just being introduced into the mainstream business arena. This was an exciting time to be 'in computing' and he has maintained a passion for technology ever since. He continued to develop his career and, via sojourns in operational and financial management, progressed to the financial directorship of a Midlands based retail group.

Tim Williams, MA, MPhil, PhD (University of Cambridge), ARCO
Choir Director
tim@stwulframs.com

Dr Tim Williams is a renowned choral director, church musician, music educator, recitalist (pianist and organist) and accompanist. Since moving to Grantham on completion of his doctorate in historical musicology at the University of Cambridge, Dr Williams has served for five years as Director of Music at St Wulfram’s Parish Church, the major town centre civic church in Grantham. During that space of time, he has strived to build a sustainable choral foundation at St Wulfram’s providing training and opportunity in sacred choral music to people of all ages, abilities and backgrounds. Some of the notable results of this have been the formation and development of a highly respected chamber choir, a seven-fold increase in the number of members of the church’s children’s choir, and significantly raised standards across the board that have enabled the choristers successfully to perform complex works from Allegri’s Miserere to Benjamin Britten’s Ceremony of Carols. Under Dr Williams’s direction, the choristers have sung in major British landmarks such as York Minster and Salisbury Cathedral.

With experience of a lectureship and temporarily directing the studies of undergraduates in music at Trinity College in the University of Cambridge, Dr Williams is a respected teacher of music, and holds posts in schools, including the King’s School, Grantham, the Grantham Preparatory School and the National Junior School, in addition to maintaining his own music teaching practice.

He is delighted to begin work in Harlaxton College. In many ways, it is a return to his academic roots, but he is primarily looking forward to bringing his choral directing experience to Harlaxton Collegiate Choir. Through his career, Dr Williams has found recurrently that choirs can help forge a powerful sense of community among diverse groups of people, and he hopes that many of the students who travel to Harlaxton will have their time immeasurably enriched by music.

 

The American Visiting Faculty

Jeanie Adams-Smith, MA (Western Kentucky University), MA (Ohio University)
Associate Professor of Photojournalism
Western Kentucky University
jeanie.adams-smith@wku.edu

When Jeanie Adams-Smith left the Chicago Tribune in 2002 to take a position at Western Kentucky University, she was looking forward to sharing her expertise with students in one of the nation’s premier photojournalism schools.  Her 10-year career at the Tribune culminated with her in the position of national/foreign picture editor during the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, which forever changed America. By then, Adams-Smith had already published a photo-documentary book on minor league baseball, and a multimedia piece on the children of divorce that won first place in Pictures of the Year International.

In the years since she joined the staff at WKU, powerful and affluent media outlets have collapsed or downsized and a “leaner and meaner” news industry is emerging in fast-paced and ever-changing web-based multimedia outlets. Adams-Smith is fully engaged in the technologies that drive these changes, while stressing that they are simply new tools that can help journalists accomplish their mission of gathering and communicating news in a professional and ethical manner.

Since arriving at WKU, Adams-Smith published two more books of social documentary photography and was named 2006 Photographer of the Year by the Kentucky News Photographers Association. The university nominated her book, Survivors: The Children of Divorce, the culmination of six years of work, for the Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction.

Adams-Smith has also won international awards for photography documenting women’s health clinics in Chicago neighborhoods, Vanderbilt University’s burn unit for children, a family’s struggle with traumatic brain injury, and a photographic testimonial by survivors of rape and sexual assault in Kentucky.

In the past several years, she has traveled twice to Cuba, documenting the everyday lives of people in Old Havana, a World Heritage Site as yet untouched by international commerce. She has also been to western Ireland to document family farms threatened by industrial agriculture. The work has won her several regional and national awards. She has just completed a multimedia project on cancer and hospice care in South-Central Kentucky.

Adams-Smith has been asked to judge regional and national photo competitions, including the White House News Photographers Association, Photographer of the Year International, and the Society of News Design. She regularly spends several weeks each summer teaching journalism to selected high school students in Kentucky’s Governor’s Scholars Program, and she takes great pleasure in introducing the joys of photography to children in two local programs.

She earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism and a master’s in communication from Western Kentucky University; she earned a master’s in visual communication from Ohio University.

Kathleen Allen, ABD (University of Kansas)
Assistant Professor of Health, Sport and Human Performance
Baker University
kallen@bakeru.edu

Kathleen Allen has worked at Baker University, where she is Assistant Professor of Health, Sport and Human Performance and Head volleyball coach, for the past 16 years.  She has established herself as one of Baker’s most successful volleyball coaches with the ‘Wildcats’ consistently finishing near the top of the Heart of America Athletic Converence. 

In addition, Kathy teaches courses in Motor Learning, Sport Psychology and Nutrition and will be bringing this expertise to Harlaxton. 

Kathleen has three children, aged, 32, 27 and 22, and resides in Lawrence, Kansas.

William Brown, MFA (Art Institute of Chicago)
Professor of Art
University of Evansville
bb32@evansville.edu

William F. Brown has been a Professor of Art at the University of Evansville since 1980. He was the Chairman of the Department of Art from 1998 to 2011 and continues as the gallery director, a position he has held since 1980.  Before he and his family moved to Evansville, he had taught at universities in Illinois, Arkansas and West Virginia. Prior to teaching he was a commercial artist and food illustrator in Chicago. His illustrations and designs have appeared in newspapers and magazines throughout the country.

Mr. Brown received his Bachelor of Science Degree from Indiana State University in Terre Haute Indiana and his Masters of Fine Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His major studios were painting and drawing with a secondary area of photography. Mr. Brown works both as a realistic and an abstract artist in oil paint, watercolor, graphite, ink and prisma color pencils. He has an extensive exhibition record as a painter, draftsman and photographer, locally, regionally and nationally, and is also included in numerous private and corporate collections.

Linda De Roche, PhD (University of Notre Dame)
Professor of English and American Studies
Wesley College
Linda.DeRoche@wesley.edu

Dr. Linda De Roche is Professor of English and American Studies at Wesley College in Dover, Delaware.  An Indiana native (from South Bend—about as far from Evansville as anyone can get!), she earned her B. A. in English from Ball State University and her M. A. and Ph. D. in English from the University of Notre Dame. 

A former Fulbright scholar who conducted research on the American Civil War in London, Liverpool, and Glasgow, she has published articles in popular history magazines such as Civil War Times Illustrated, British Heritage, and, in England, History Today.  She has also published essays on F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gail Godwin, and Edith Wharton and books on Mary Higgins Clark, Willa Cather, and Fitzgerald. 

Dr. De Roche also pursues her interest in unconventional women by lecturing on women spies of World War II and nineteenth-century women travelers for the Delaware Humanities Forum.  She is currently researching a biography of Mrs. Victor Bruce, a contemporary of Amelia Earhart and Amy Johnson, who held air, land, and sea speed records during the 1930s. 

At Wesley College, Dr. De Roche teaches courses in American literature and culture, including a course on “Henry James and the International Theme,” foreign film masters, women writers, the novel, and history of drama.  She also indulges her love of crime fiction by teaching a course entitled “Mysteries of Culture,” in which contemporary international crime novels establish the ground for study of culture.

Brian Ernsting, PhD (University of Michigan)
Professor of Biology
University of Evansville
be6@evansville.edu

Dr. Ernsting is a graduate of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.  His undergraduate degrees are in German and Molecular Biology, and he holds a Ph. D. in Molecular Biology.  In the Department of Biology at Evansville, he regularly teaches courses in Genetics and Molecular Biology as well as Gardening and Horticulture.  Research interests focus on using DNA sequences to reconstruct evolutionary histories in host-parasite systems.  In addition to teaching, Dr. Ernsting is a student of Spanish language and literature.

This is Dr. Ernsting’s second semester at Harlaxton, and he is accompanied by his son, Adam, who is 14 years old.

Elizabeth Hennon, PhD (Temple University)
Associate Professor of Psychology
University of Evansville
eh82@evansville.edu

Dr. Hennon has taught a variety of psychology and neuroscience courses at the University of Evansville since 2005.  Her research focus is on the language development of children with developmental delays (for example, children with Down's syndrome, autistic spectrum disorders, fragile X syndrome, or other neurological impairments).  She teaches courses in developmental, cognitive, and psycholinguistic areas of psychology.  

Dr. Hennon won the University of Evansville's Berger award for scholarship in 2008.  She completed a PhD in Developmental Psychology at Temple University in 2002, focusing on early word learning strategies of young children with autism and Asperger's syndrome.  Before moving to the University of Evansville, she then completed a post-doctoral fellowship and worked as Research Faculty at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill where she was involved predominantly in investigations of language and academic skills of children with Down syndrome, fragile X syndrome, and autistic spectrum disorders and a secondary project looking at related skills in low-income African American children.  At the University of Evansville, she serves as the faculty advisor for UE PRIDE (People Respecting Individual Diversity Everywhere) and has been involved with numerous other student organizations.

Outside of the classroom, Dr. Hennon enjoys reading and music and cheering for all Pittsburgh sports teams (at least when the Penguins are not in a lock-out!).  She is delighted to be accompanied to Harlaxton by her two sons, Jamie (age 5), and Joey (who will turn 4 in the middle of the semester), both of whom are quite excited to live in a "castle" and to hopefully get to see a "real" soccer match!

Timothy Hoye, PhD (Duke University)
Professor of Government
Texas Woman’s University
thoye@twu.edu

Timothy Hoye is Professor of Government at Texas Woman’s University with specializations in political philosophy, American politics, and comparative politics with an emphasis on Japan.  He teaches a variety of courses on American politics, European political thought, politics and literature, and on Japan.  He also teaches the senior seminar in government, a capstone course for majors.  He has taught in the American Studies Program at Hiroshima University in Japan as a Fulbright exchange scholar.  He is the author of a textbook on modern Japan entitled Japanese Politics: Fixed and Floating Worlds and is a regular contributor to the American Political Science Association annual conventions.

Professor Hoye was born in Providence, Rhode Island.  His PhD in political science, with a concentration in political philosophy, is from Duke University, and his BA and MA degrees in political science are from Texas A&M University – Commerce.  His wife Masako is from Fukuoka, Japan, and recently completed a PhD in linguistics at the University of Colorado, Boulder.  She currently teaches Japanese at Middlebury College in Vermont.  They have two children, Nathaniel and Christopher.  Nathan graduated from Bard College in New York in June of this year, and Christopher is a freshman at Denison University in Ohio.

Asha Sen, PhD (Purdue University)
Professor of English
University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire
sena@uwec.edu

Dr. Asha Sen is a native of Calcutta, India.  She grew up reading and loving Enid Blyton and Agatha Christie.  Her family moved around India quite a bit, so she went to school in Bombay, finished her undergraduate BA (Hons) degree in Calcutta, and then relocated to Bangalore with her parents.  She came to the US in the late eighties and got her MA and PhD in postcolonial literature from Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana.  She is a full professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire where she teaches Postcolonial literature and theory, Contemporary British literature, and Women's literature.  She loves her UWEC students but hates Eau Claire winters! 

She is looking forward to renewing her contact British literature and history during her time at Harlaxton.  Dr. Sen has been widely published in peer-reviewed journals such as ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature and Kunapipi.  Her book Postcolonial Yearning: Reshaping Sacred and Secualr Discourses in Contemporary Literature (Palgrave MacMillan) is due to be published in early 2013.

Bailey Young, PhD (University of Pennsylvania)
Professor of History
Eastern Illinois Evansville
bkyoung@eiu.edu

Bailey K. Young graduated from Williams College (1966), with Highest Honors in English, and received  his PhD in History (1975) from the University of Pennsylvania, with the help of a Ford Foundation Fellowship. He studied Merovingian Archaeology with Patrick Périn at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris, and was appointed as a Research Associate by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) from 1977-1981, excavating medieval sites in Paris (Montmartre), Languedoc (Psalmodi abbey) and Burgundy (Autun, Macon).  

He has held visiting appointments at the Universities of Paris XII and Lille III, Loyola University of Chicago and Assumption College (Worcester, MA).  He joined the History Department at Eastern Illinois University in 1994.   

In 1998, along with Honors Director Herbert Lasky, he launched the Summer Archaeology Program in Belgium, teaching archaeology to American students through the excavation of Walhain Castle, in partnership with the Université Catholique de Louvain. In May, 2011, Belgian cultural television (RTBF) broadcast a special, entitled Un Américain à Walhain, featuring footage shot both at the castle and in Charleston. In 2012 Dr. Young received EIU's Distinguished Faculty Award.