American Studies

Director, American and New England Studies Program
Anita Patterson, Associate Professor of English, College of Arts and Sciences. BA, Harvard College; MA, PhD, Harvard University. Selected Publications: Race, American Literature and Transnational Modernisms (forthcoming); "Japonisme and Modernist Style in Afro-Caribbean Literature:  The Art of Derek Walcott," Review of International American Studies 2.2 (2007); "Emerson, il transnazionalismo e l'enigma dell'amicizia," in America at large:  Americanistica transnazionale e nuova comparatistica (2004); "Emerson, Transnationalism, and the Enigma of Friendship," in Emerson at 200:  Proceedings of the International Bicentennial Conference (2004); "Pastoral Poetry and Transculturation in Guyana:  The Contexts of Wilson Harris's 'Trail'," The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 37.2 (2002); “Contingencies of Pleasure and Shame: Jamaican Women's Poetry,” in Feminist Consequences: Theory for the New Century (2001); “Jazz, Realism and the Modernist Lyric: The Poetry of Langston Hughes,” Modern Language Quarterly 61.3 (2000); “Doing More than Patrick Henry: Douglass's Narrative and Nineteenth-Century American Protest Writing,” in Approaches to Teaching Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1999); “Images of the Internment: Mitsuye Yamada's Camp Notes,” MELUS 23, 3 (1999); From Emerson to King: Democracy, Race, and the Politics of Protest (1997); “Harriet Jacobs, Henry Thoreau, and the Character of Disobedience,” in Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: New Critical Essays (1996); “American Philosophy as Praxis: From Emerson and Thoreau to Martin Luther King,” Salmagundi 108 (1995); “Negotiating Claims of Race and Rights: DuBois, Emerson, and the Critique of Liberal Nationalism,” The Massachusetts Review 35 (1994); “Comparative Identities: Exile in the Writings of Frantz Fanon and W.E.B. DuBois,” in Borders, Boundaries, and Frames (1994). Work in Progress: Modernist Japonisme in the Americas.

Director, Preservation Studies Program
Claire W. Dempsey, Associate Professor of American and New England Studies, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. AM, Wheaton College; MA, Boston University. Ms. Dempsey has taught architectural history and research methods courses in the Program since 1991. She has conducted preservation research within the compliance, identification, and evaluation areas for the Massachusetts Historical Commission and for a number of cities, towns, and research institutions. Research for New England area museums and historic sites has complemented her preservation work, for clients including the Haverhill Historical Society; Old Sturbridge Village; the Dickinson Homestead, Amherst, MA; the Mashantucket Pequot Museum, Ledyard, CT; and the John H. Chafee Blackstone River Valley Heritage Corridor (National Park Service). Ms. Dempsey is the author of Building Hardwick: Community Histories in Landscape and Architecture, co-author of The Historical and Archaeological Resources of Central Massachusetts and The Historic and Archaeological resources of Cape Cod and the Islands, and contributor to Building Portsmouth: the Neighborhoods and Architecture of New Hampshire's Oldest City (1992) and The Early Architecture and Landscapes of the Narragansett Basin (2001). She serves as archivist for the Vernacular Architecture Forum and as president of its New England Chapter.

Director, Undergraduate Studies
Jessica Sewell, Assistant Professor of American and New England Studies and Art History, College of Arts and Sciences. BA, Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges; Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley. Jessica Sewell is a specialist in Material Culture with a joint appointment in American and New England Studies and Art History. She joined Boston University in 2003 after teaching at Binghamton University and New York University. Her specialties are American material culture, urbanism, architectural history, cultural landscapes, and gender theory. She is currently completing a book entitled Gendering the City: Women and Everyday Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915 and has published articles on gender and urbanism in a number of recent anthologies. She is presently beginning a new book project on the material culture of masculinity.

David Bittermann, Lecturer in American & New England Studies, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. BS, M Architecture, University of Illinois; MA, Boston University.  Mr. Bittermann returned to Boston University in 2006 after having taught there in the capacity of Adjunct Assistant Professor from 1993 through 2001.  In 1984, Mr. Bittermann joined the staff of the Lowell Historic Preservation Commission, an agency of the Department of Interior charged with developing the newly created Lowell National Historical Park.  In 1989, he began work with the National Park Service’s North Atlantic Historic Preservation Center, and he is currently a Project Manager for the Northeast Regional Office of the National Park Service.  He provides stewardship consultation and project guidance for a diverse array of nationally significant sites and monuments which have ranged geographically from the Dry Tortugas to Campobello.  Mr. Bittermann has been active in the Association for Preservation Technology International as a peer reviewer and juror for its APT Bulletin, and serves on the Board of Directors of the APT Northeast Chapter.

Eric Dray, Lecturer in American & New England Studies, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. BA Brown University, JD Boston University School of Law, MA Preservation Studies, Boston University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.  Mr. Dray has taught preservation planning courses in the Program since 2005.  As a consultant, Mr. Dray has worked throughout Massachusetts, as well as Rhode Island and New Hampshire, providing preservation planning, historic district consulting, and documentation services.  Mr. Dray is co-author, along with faculty alumna Gretchen Schuler, of two training videos produced by the Massachusetts Historical Commission for training local historic district commissions.  Mr. Dray was Chair of the Provincetown Historic District Study Committee, member of the Provincetown Historic District Commission, and is currently Chair of the Provincetown Historical Commission. 

Elaine Finbury, Adjunct Assistant Professor of American and New England Studies, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. BA, Simmons College; MA, Boston University.  Ms. Finbury has taught courses in adaptive use and financing historic preservation in the Program since 1999. In early 2007 she embarked on a new enterprise called Overlook Associates with current Preservation Studies student Fred Phillips.  Overlook Associates was established with a focus on historic preservation and adaptive reuse of historic structures.  The firm will undertake real estate development projects and provide real estate consulting services.  Before this, Lanie was principal of Rufus Choate Associates (RCA), in Salem, and was in a joint venture with Architectural Heritage Foundation, in Boston. As Senior Community Development Finance Specialist at t he National Trust for Historic Preservation from 1998 to 2002, she provided real estate development consulting services. She also managed a regional effort to remedy disinvestments in historic cities, producing Rebuilding Community: A Best Practices Toolkit for Historic Preservation and Redevelopment, a major publication that highlights preservation and community revitalization success stories. From 1994 to 1998, she was Senior Project Manager for the Massachusetts Development Finance Agency, the redevelopment agency for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts; prior to that, she served as Vice President and Project Manager for the Crowninshield Corporation in Peabody, MA. She currently serves on the Board of the Boston Preservation Alliance, a non-profit advocacy organization.

African American Studies

Allison Blakely Chair of African American Studies; Professor of History. BA, University of Oregon; MA, PhD, University of California, Berkeley. Professor Blakely came to Boston University in 2001 after teaching for thirty years at Howard University. He is the author of Blacks in the Dutch World: Racial Imagery and Modernization (Indiana University Press, 1994); Russia and the Negro: Blacks in Russian History and Thought (Howard University Press, 1986--a winner of an American Book Award in 1988); several articles on Russian populism; and others on various European aspects of the Black Diaspora. His interest in comparative history has centered on comparative populism and on the historical evolution of color prejudice. He is the national President of the Phi Beta Kappa Society (2006-2009) and the Consulting Editor of its journal, The American Scholar.

Anthropology

Anthony G. Barrand, University Professor; Professor of Anthropology, College of Arts and Sciences. BA, University of Keele (England); PhD, Cornell University. Much of Tony's research and teaching has focused on various forms of the seasonal display dances now known generically as Morris dancing. His 33-year collection of film and video of English and American was recently acquired by the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress and has been digitized and made available on-line. Tony’s current work with his archive concerns the nearly 300-hours of recordings of lessons with the late Anna Marley, a wooden-shoe dancer from the mill town of Rockville, CT. He is probably best known, however, as part of the singing team John Roberts and Tony Barrand who have delighted audiences across the USA for almost four decades with their "a capella" duets of English folk bawdry and balladry, Morris and clog dancing, monologues and storytelling. Recent releases are Heartoutbursts: Lincolnshire Folksongs Collected by Percy Grainger and Naulakha Redux: Songs of Rudyard Kipling. Just Say Nowell is the 6th recording in a series over 30 years with the Christmas pageant Nowell Sing We Clear with Andy Davis and Fred Breunig. Their numerous recordings are available from Golden Hind Records.

Charles Lindholm, University Professor; Professor of Anthropology, College of Arts and Sciences. BA, MA, Ph.D., Columbia University. Presently working on a book about authenticity using cases from different levels of experience: aesthetic, collective, personal. Professor Lindholm sees the search for authenticity as a modern secular religion and is interested in exploring the varieties of this new faith. Previous selections: Is America Breaking Apart? and The Muslim Middle East: Continuity and Change (2002).

Archaeology 

Mary C. Beaudry, Professor of Archaeology and Anthropology, College of Arts and Sciences. BA, College of William and Mary; MA, PhD, Brown University. Professor Beaudry has edited Documentary Archaeology in the New World (1988), co-edited The Art and Mystery of Historical Archaeology (1992) and The Cambridge Companion to Historical Archaeology (2006), co-authored “Living on the Boott”: Historical Archaeology at the Boott Mills Boardinghouses in Lowell, Massachusetts (1996), and is author of Findings: The Material Culture of Needlework and Sewing (2006). She is past president of the Society for Historical Archaeology and served as editor of Northeast Historical Archaeology. Her research interests in historical and industrial archaeology include comparative colonialism; the archaeology of households, farms, and landscapes; and the contextual analysis of small finds. In addition to her ties to American Studies and Preservation Studies, Professor Beaudry is affiliated with Metropolitan College’s Program in Gastronomy.

Rafique Mughal, Professor of Archaeology, College of Arts and Sciences. BA, Gordon College (Pakistan); MA, University of Punjab (Pakistan); PhD, University of Pennsylvania

Art History 

Melanie Hall, Associate Professor of Art History, College of Arts and Sciences. BA, University of Leeds (England). Her publications include over 30 historic district and town reports for the British government and articles and reviews in Furniture History, Architectural History, and Transactions of the Ancient Monuments Society. Her recent work on the origins of the English National Trust is in publication with Yale University Press' Studies in British Art series. Her current research focuses on museums dedicated to poets and writers and landscape preservation in New England and England. She is a contributor to the Buildings of England series.

Patricia Hills, Professor of Art History, College of Arts and Sciences. BA, Stanford University; MA, City University of New York, Hunter College; PhD, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Major books and catalogues for exhibitions she organized include: Modern Art in the USA: Issues and Controversies of the 20th Century (2001); (co-author) Eastman Johnson: Painting America (1999); Stuart Davis (1996); John Singer Sargent (1986); Alice Neel (1983); Social Concern and Urban Realism: American Painting of the 1930s (1983); (co-author) The Figurative Tradition and The Whitney Museum of American Art: Paintings and Sculpture from the Permanent Collection (1980); Turn-of-the-Century America: Paintings, Graphics, Photographs, 1890-1910 (1977); The Painters' America: Rural and Urban Life, 1810-1910 (1974); The American Frontier: Images and Myths (1973); and Eastman Johnson (1972). She has also contributed essays to catalogues of major exhibitions, such as Over the Line: The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence (2001); Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series (1993); Breaking the Rules: Audrey Flack, a Retrospective 1950-1990 (1992); The West as America (1991); and Eastman Johnson: The Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket (1990). Her articles have appeared in American Art; Oxford Art Journal; Prospects; Archives of American Art Journal; Dictionary of Women Artist; The Encyclopedia of New York City; American Paintings in the Detroit Institute of Arts, Vol. 2; Art in Bourgeois Society, 1790-1850 (1998); and Redefining American History Painting (1995). She is currently finishing a book, Painting Harlem Modern:  The Art of Jacob Lawrence.

Keith Morgan, Professor of Art History, College of Arts and Sciences. BA, College of Wooster; MA, University of Delaware; PhD, Brown University. Professor Morgan has taught courses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century European and American architecture at Boston University since 1980. A former director of both the American & New England Studies Program and the Preservation Studies Program, he has chaired the Art History Department for two terms. He is a former national president of the Society of Architectural Historians and has received numerous grants and awards. His publications include Charles A. Platt: The Artist as Architect (1985) and Shaping an American Landscape: The Art and Architecture of Charles A. Platt (1990). With his BU colleague Naomi Miller, Professor Morgan wrote Boston Architecture 1975-1990 (1990). He has also written introductions for new editions of Charles Platt's Italian Gardens, originally published in 1894, and Charles Eliot's Landscape Architect. His current book project is Buildings of Massachusetts: Metropolitan Boston, to be published by Oxford University Press for the Society of Architectural Historians.

Paolo Scrivano, Assistant Professor of Art History, College of Arts and Sciences. D.Arch., Ph.D., Politecnico di Torino (Italy). Professor Scrivano’s research focuses on 19th and 20th century architecture with a specific interest in historiography and the postwar years. He has organized symposia and exhibitions, edited books and contributed essays and chapters to collective works: his publications and activities include Tra Guerra e Pace. Società, Cultura e Architettura nel Secondo Dopoguerra (Milan 1998, as co-editor), Storia di un’idea di architettura moderna. Henry-Russell Hitchcock and the International Style (Milan 2001), Olivetti Builds: Modern Architecture in Ivrea (Milan 2001, with Patrizia Bonifazio), the exhibition “Building the Human City: Adriano Olivetti and Town-Planning” (Milan Triennale, 2002) and the organization of the international conference “The Americanization of Postwar Architecture” (University of Toronto, 2005).

Jessica Sewell (See above, under the American Studies heading)

Kim Sichel, Associate Professor of Art History, College of Arts and Sciences. AB, Brown University; M.Phil., PhD, Yale University. Professor Sichel, a historian of photography, a has published numerous articles, book chapters, and exhibition catalogues in Europe and the United States. Her most recent publications are Germaine Krull:  The Monte Carlo Years  (Montreal:  Museum of Fine Arts, 2007)  and TO FLY:  Contemporary Aerial Photography (Boston University Art Gallery and University of Washington Press, 2007) She is the author of Germaine Krull: Photographer of Modernity, 1999, published in English by MIT Press and in German by Schirmer/Mosel Verlag. This book was a finalist for the Kraszna-Kraus Foundation award for best photographic history book of 1999 and won an award for best photography monograph for 1999 from the Maine Photographic Workshops. Her other exhibition catalogues include Street Portraits 1946-1976: The Photographs of Jules Aarons; Brassaï: Paris le jour, Paris la nuit; From Icon to Irony: German and American Industrial Photography; Black Boston: Documentary Photography and the African American Experience; Mapping the West: Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Photographs from the Boston Public Library; Turn of the Century Photographs by Robert Demachy; Power and Paper: Margaret Bourke-White, Modernity, and the Documentary Mode; and Philip Guston 1975-1980: Private and Public Battle

College of General Studies

Cheryl Boots, Assistant Professor of Humanities, College of General Studies. BA, Mount Union College; MA, Michigan State University; MA, PhD, Boston University. Her research interests include music in American literature and culture, especially 19th–20th century, and U.S. cultural history, 1800–1940.

Adam Sweeting, Associate Professor of Humanities, College of General Studies. BA, Clark University; MA, PhD, New York University. His writing and research interests focus on the overlap of natural and cultural forces in American life. In his most recent book, Beneath the Second Sun: A Cultural History of Indian Summer, 2003, I explore the numerous ways that Indian summer weather has been experienced and portrayed in poetry, folklore, painting, and the popular imagination. He is also in the very beginning stages of a new book entitled Evening’s Empire: A Cultural History of Nighttime in America. In this book he considers the history of technologies that illuminate the night: fire, whale oil lamps, gas lamps, electricity, and neon. He is especially interested in how our technological and cultural innovations have altered our sense of the naturalness of the night.

Communication 

Ray Carney, Professor of Film Studies, College of Communication. AB, Harvard College; PhD, Rutgers University. Professor Carney is general editor of The Cambridge Film Classics, a series of compact guides to the masterworks of film, and the author of many books on film and American culture, including: The Films of Mike Leigh: Embracing the World; Shadows; John Cassavetes: The Adventure of Insecurity; American Dreaming: The Films of John Cassavetes; American Vision: The Films of Frank Capra; Speaking the Language of Desire: The Films of Carl Dreyer; and The Films of John Cassavetes: Pragmatism, Modernism, and the Movies; as well as of numerous articles and essays. His most recent book is Cassavetes on Cassavetes, based on his own personal conversations with the distinguished independent filmmaker in the final decade of his life. He manages the largest non-commercial web site in the world devoted to film and other art at: http://www.Cassavetes.com.

Roy Grundmann, Director of Film Studies; Associate Professor of Broadcasting and Film, College of Communications. MA, PhD, New York University. He is the author of Andy Warhol's Blow Job (Temple U Press, 2003; 220pp, 40 illustr.) and a Contributing Editor of Cineaste Magazine.

English

Robert Chodat, Assistant Professor of English, College of Arts and Sciences. B.A., M.A., McGill University; Ph.D., Stanford University. He is the author of Worldly Acts and Sentient Things: The Persistence of Agency from Stein to DeLillo (2008) and is currently working on Person and Presence: Ideas of Agency from Stein to DeLillo.

Bonnie Costello, Professor of English, College of Arts and Sciences. BA, Bennington College; PhD, Cornell University.

Gene Jarrett Associate Professor of English, College of Arts and Sciences. AB, Princeton University; MA, PhD, Brown University. Professor Jarrett specializes in African-American literature and literary theory. He is the author of Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006) and edited African American Literature beyond Race: An Alternative Reader (NYU Press, 2006), The Complete Stories of Paul Laurence Dunbar (Ohio University Press, 2006), A Long Way from Home by Claude McKay for the Multi-Ethnicc Literature of the Americas Series (Rutgers University Press, 2007) and New Negro Criticism: Essays on Race, Representation, and African American Culure, 1892-1938, co-edited with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Princeton University Press, 2007).

Laura Korobkin, Associate Professor of English, College of Arts and Sciences. BA, Williams College; MA, Brandeis University; JD, Harvard Law School; PhD, Harvard University. Selected Publications: “Law and the American Novel,” A Companion to American Fiction 1780-1865, ed. Shirley Samuels (2004); “Legal Narratives of Self-Defense and Self-Effacement in Their Eyes Were Watching God,” Studies in American Fiction (2003); “Murder by Madman: Criminal Responsibility, Law, and Judgment in Wieland,” American Literature (2000); Criminal Conversations: Sentimentality and Nineteenth-Century Legal Stories of Adultery (1998); “The Scarlet Letter of the Law: Hawthorne and Criminal Justice,” Novel (1997); “Narrative Battles in the Courtroom,” in Field Work: Sites in Literary and Cultural Studies, ed. Marjorie Garber, Rebecca Walkowitz, Paul Franklin (1996); “The Maintenance of Mutual Confidence: Sentimental Strategies at the Adultery Trial of Henry Ward Beecher,” Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities (1995). 

Maurice Lee, Assistant Professor of English, College of Arts and Sciences. B.A. Stanford; Ph.D. UCLA.  Main interests include nineteenth-century American literature with particular emphasis on the intersections of culture, philosophy, and science; American literary and intellectual history; the literature of slavery and the Civil War; African American and Asian American literatures.  His first book is titled, Slavery, Philosophy, and American Literature, 1830-1860 (Cambridge, 2005).  He is currently working on a book project (“Chance, Skepticism, and Belief in Nineteenth-Century American Literature”) and editing the Cambridge Companion to Frederick Douglass.  Selected articles include: “Probably Poe,” forthcoming American Literature; “Dickinson’s Superb Surprise,” forthcoming Raritan; “Melville, Douglass, the Civil War, Pragmatism,” Douglass/Melville: Essays in Relations (2007); “Which World? Which Work? Which Melville?” Modern Intellectual History (2007); “‘Read it if you can’: The Language of Moby-Dick,” A Companion to Melville (2006), “‘The Old and the New': Double Consciousness and the Literature of Slavery,” ESQ (2004); “Absolute Poe: His System of Transcendental Racism,” American Literature (2003), “Writing Through the War: The Civil War Poetry of Melville and Dickinson,” PMLA (2000); “Melville's Subversive Political Philosophy: 'Benito Cereno' and the Fate of Speech,” American Literature (2000); “Du Bois the Novelist: White Influence, Black Spirit, and The Quest of the Silver Fleece,” African American Review (1999).  Professor Lee has won awards from the Melville Society and Poe Studies Association and has received an NEH Research Fellowship and the ACLS Charles Ryskamp Fellowship.

John T. Matthews, Professor of English, College of Arts and Sciences. AB, University of Pennsylvania; MA, PhD, Johns Hopkins University. Selected Publications: “Recalling the West Indies: From Yoknapatawpha to Haiti and Back,” American Literary History (2004); “This Race Which Is Not One: The More Inextricable Compositeness of William Faulkner's South,” in Look Away!: The U.S. South in New World Studies (Duke UP, 2004), “Whose America?  Faulkner, Modernism and National Identity,” in Faulkner at 100 (2000); “Touching Race in Go Down, Moses,” in New Essays on Go Down, Moses, ed. Linda Wagner-Martin (1996); “Faulkner and the Culture Industry,” in A Faulkner Companion, ed. Philip Weinstein (1994); “As I Lay Dying in the Machine Age,” Boundary 2, Vol. 19 (1992); The Sound and the Fury: Faulkner and the Lost Cause (1990); The Play of Faulkner's Language (1982).  Forthcoming publications: Faulkner: Seeing through the South (Blackwell); A Companion to the Modern American Novel, 1900-1950 (Editor) (Blackwell).  Metcalf Award for Excellence in Teaching, 2006. 

Susan Mizruchi, Professor of English, College of Arts and Sciences. BA, Washington University; PhD, Princeton University. Selected Publications: “Gibson’s ‘Passion’ in Ethical Perspective,” Journal of Renmin University of China (Spring 2007); Becoming Multicultural: Culture, Economy, and the Novel, 1860-1920 (Cambridge UP, 2005); “Lolita in History,” American Literature (Fall 2003); Religion and Cultural Studies, ed. (Princeton UP, 2001); “The Place of Ritual in Our Time,” American Literary History, (Fall 2000); The Science of Sacrifice: American Literature and Modern Social Theory (Princeton UP, 1998); “Neighbors, Strangers, Corpses: Death and Sympathy in the Early Writings of W.E.B. Du Bois,” in Centuries Ends, Narrative Means (1996, also in The Norton Souls of Black Folk); “Cataloging the Creatures of the Deep, Billy Budd and the Rise of Sociology,” in Revisionary Interventions into the Americanist Canon (1994) and Boundary 2 (1990); “Reproducing Women in ‘The Awkward Age,'“ in Representations (1992); The Power of Historical Knowledge: Narrating the Past in Hawthorne, James, and Dreiser (Princeton UP, 1988); “The Politics of Temporality in The Bostonians,” Nineteenth-Century Literature (September 1985). Professor Mizruchi has been awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship (2001-2002); Distinguished Teaching Award, Boston University Honors Program (2001); Fletcher S. Jones Fellowship, Huntington Library (1995); National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (1990-1991), and is currently working on a book project on risk and contemporary American culture.

Leland Monk, Associate Professor of English, College of Arts and Sciences. BA, University of California, Santa Cruz; MA, PhD, University of California, Berkeley. Selected Publications: “A Terrible Beauty is Born: Henry James, Aestheticism, and Homosexual Panic,” Bodies of Writing, Bodies in Performance, Genders, Vol. 23 (1996); “The Novel as Prison: Scott's The Heart of Midlothian,” Novel, Vol. 27 (1994); “Apropos of Nothing: Chance and Narrative in Forster's A Passage to India,” Studies in the Novel, Vol. 26 (1994); Standard Deviations: Chance and the Modern British Novel (1993); “Murder She Wrote: The Mystery of Jane Austen's Emma,” The Journal of Narrative Technique, Vol. 20 (1990).

Thomas Otten, Visiting Associate Professor of English, College of Arts and Sciences. BA, Lawrence University; MA, PhD, UCLA. Professor Otten focuses on American literature, literature and material culture, and literature and the visual arts. Selected Publications: A Superficial Reading of Henry James: Preoccupations with the Material World (2006); "Emily Dickinson's Brain (On Lyric and the History of Anatomy)," Prospects (forthcoming); "Jorie Graham's _______s," PMLA (2003); "Slashing Henry James (On Painting and Political Economy, Circa 1900)," Yale Journal of Criticism (2000); "The Spoils of Poynton and the Properties of Touch," American Literature (1999); "Pauline Hopkins and the Hidden Self of Race," ELH (1992). He is currently working on a series of essays on social theory and visual imagery, as well as a book on American material culture.

Anita Patterson(See above, under the American Studies heading)

Charles Rzepka, Professor of English, College of Arts and Sciences. BA, University of Michigan; MA, PhD, University of California at Berkeley.  Selected Publications:  Detective Fiction (2005); Sacramental Commodities: Gift, Text, and the Sublime in De Quincey (1995); The Self as Mind: Vision and Identity in Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats (1986); "Race, Region, Rule: Genre and the Case of Charlie Chan," PMLA (2007); “Pictures of the Mind: Iron and Charcoal, ‘Ouzy’ Tides and ‘Vagrant Dwellers’ at Tintern, 1798,” Studies in Romanticism (2003); “‘Cortez--or Balboa, or Somebody Like That’: Form, Fact, and Forgetting in Keats’s ‘Chapman’s Homer’ Sonnet,” Keats-Shelley Journal (2002); Obi: An edited online volume of taped performances and essays, Romantic Praxis (2002).  Professor Rzepka is co-editor of the Blackwell Companion to Crime Fiction and is currently working on a book project, Lyrical Empiricism on crime fiction and dramatic monologue.

Matthew Smith, Assistant Professor of English, College of Arts and Sciences. BA, Brown University; MA, University of Chicago; MA, PhD, Columbia University.  Selected publications: The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace (Routledge, 2007); “Orson Welles’ Shakespeare” (forthcoming); “Laughing at the Redeemer: Kundry and the Paradox of Parsifal” (forthcoming); "Scenography" and "Scene Design," in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance (2003); "Bayreuth, Disneyland, and the Return to Nature" (2002); "The Wild Duck: A Play of Play" (2002); "Schlemmer, Moholy-Nagy, and the Search for the Absolute Stage" (2002); "Joseph Urban and the Birth of American Film Design" (Columbia, 2000); "Angels in America: A Progressive Apocalypse" (1999).

History 

Brooke Blower, Assistant Professor of History, College of Arts and Sciences. BA, University of California at Berkeley; MA, PhD, Princeton University. Focusing on American cultural history, urban history and the history of the United States in a transnational perspective, her research seeks to reexamine modern American culture and politics in an international framework. She teaches courses in late-nineteenth and twentieth-century American history, and is the author of an article in Prospects, an American studies journal published by Cambridge University Press, and she is at work on a book that reconsiders the role of Americans in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s. She has previously taught in the History Department and the Writing Program at Princeton University.

Charles Capper, Professor of History, College of Arts and Sciences. BA, Johns Hopkins University; MA, PhD, University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of a two-volume biography, Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life, the first volume of which won the Bancroft Prize for 1993 and the second of which was published in 2007. He is now working on a book on the Transcendentalist movement and Romantic intellectual culture in America. He published a collection of new scholarship on his book's central circle in his and Conrad E. Wright's Transient and Permanent: The Transcendentalist Movement in Its Contexts (1999). He has coedited with David A. Hollinger The American Intellectual Tradition, 2 vols., 5th ed. (2006). He has received Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Humanities Center, and Warren Center fellowships. He is the co-editor with Anthony J. La Vopa and Nicholas Phillipson of Modern Intellectual History.

Louis Ferleger, Professor of History, College of Arts and Sciences. BBA, MA, PhD, Temple University. He is co-author of A New Mandate: Democratic Choices for a Prosperous Economy and editor of Agriculture and National Development: Views on the Nineteenth Century. He is also co-editor of Slavery, Secession, and Southern History.

Marilyn Halter, Professor of History, College of Arts and Sciences; Research Associate, Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs. AB, Brandeis University; Ed.M., Harvard University; Ph.D., Boston University. Her published works include Shopping for Identity: The Marketing of Ethnicity (2000), Between Race and Ethnicity: Cape Verdean American Immigrants, 1860-1965 (1993), The Historical Dictionary of the Republic of Cape Verde [with Richard Lobban] (1988), and her edited volume, New Migrants in the Marketplace: Boston's Ethnic Entrepreneurs (1995) as well as numerous articles and book chapters in the fields of immigration, race, ethnicity and consumer culture. Her current research project, “The Newest African Americans” is a study of issues of identity formation and socioeconomic incorporation among recent West African immigrants and refugees to the United States. She is the Senior Consultant and Project Historian for the Oasis Institute’s “The Immigrant Experience,” a national education project for older adults and she has served as the co-chair of the “Boston Immigration and Urban History Seminar” an on-going series in conjunction with the Massachusetts Historical Society since its inception in 1998.

Linda Heywood, Professor of History, College of Arts and Sciences. BA, Brooklyn College; MA, PhD, Columbia University. Her specializations include African history, in particular the African Diaspora. She is the author of Contested Power in Angola, 1840s to the Present (2000) and is now working (with John Thornton) on Angolans in the Early Anglo-Dutch Atlantic, 1615-50 (under contract with Cambridge University Press).  

Brendan McConville, Professor of History, College of Arts and Sciences. BA, Reed College; MA, PhD, Brown University. Brendan McConville's research focuses on the intersection of politics and social developments in early America. He is the author of These Daring Disturbers of the Public Peace (Cornell, 1999, paperback University of Pennsylvania, 2003), The King's Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America (forthcoming, OIEAHC-UNC Press, 2005), and The American Revolution (forthcoming, Longman Press, 2005).

Ronald Richardson, Director, African American Studies Program; Associate Professor of History, College of Arts and Sciences. BA, MA, PhD, State University of New York, Binghamton. He is the author of Moral Imperium. His current project is entitled Winston S. Churchill: Imagining the Racial Self.

Jon H. Roberts, Professor of History, College of Arts and Sciences. AB, University of Missouri; AM, PhD, Harvard University. He is the author of Darwinism and the Divine in America: Protestant Intellectuals and Organic Evolution, 1869-1900 and the co-author (with James Turner) of The Sacred and the Secular University. He is currently working on several projects dealing with the history of the relationship between science and religion, as well as a book dealing with the efforts of mainstream American Protestant intellectuals during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries to defend the privileged status of mind--divine and human--in the face of a series of challenges from forces associated with "modernity."

Bruce Schulman, Professor of History, College of Arts and Sciences. BA, Yale University; Ph.D., Stanford University. He is the author of From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938-1980 (1991); Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism (1995); and The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics.

Nina Silber, Professor of History, College of Arts and Sciences. BA, MA, Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of numerous publications, including The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900 (1993), which is an examination of Northerners' changing cultural attitudes toward the South after the Civil War. She also co-edited Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War (1992) and Yankee Correspondence: Civil War Letters Between New England Soldiers and the Homefront (1996).

International Relations

Andrew Bacevich, Professor of History and International Relations at Boston University.  A graduate of the U. S. Military Academy, he received his Ph. D. in American diplomatic history from Princeton.  He is the author of The New American Militarism:  How Americans Are Seduced by War (2005) among other books.

Law 

Peter L. Freeman, Lecturer in Law, School of Law; Partner, Wylie, Lipman, and Freeman. BA, Yale University; JD, Boston University. Before moving to Cape Cod in 1984, Mr. Freeman was chairman of the Town of Brookline, MA, Historical Commission. He was also general counsel to a Boston developer and worked on numerous adaptive use and renovation projects. On Cape Cod, he was chairman of the Barnstable Committee of the Old King's Highway Regional Historic District for twelve years and for many of those years was also chairman of the Old King's Highway Regional Historic District Commission. He has advised and represented clients on numerous historic preservation matters, before historic district commissions and in court.

Music

Victor Coehlo, Professor of Music, College of Fine Arts; Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education. BA, University of California, Berkeley; PhD, University of California, Los Angeles.

Philosophy 

Victor Kestenbaum, Associate Professor of Philosophy, College of Arts and Sciences; Associate Professor of Education, School of Education. AB, EdD, Rutgers University; MAT, Trenton State College.

Alfred Tauber, Professor of Philosophy, College of Arts and Sciences; Director, Center for the Philosophy & History of Science, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences; Professor of Medicine and Pathology, School of Medicine. BS, Tufts University; MD, Tufts School of Medicine.

Political Science 

John Gerring, Professor of Political Science, College of Arts and Sciences. BA, MA, PhD, University of California, Berkeley.

David A. Mayers, Chairman, Department of Political Science; Professor of Political Science and History, College of Arts and Sciences. BA, Oberlin College; MA, PhD, University of Chicago. He is currently writing a book entitled Dissenting Voices in America's Rise to Power, which examines establishment dissenters in the history of US foreign relations, from the Louisiana Purchase to the Korean War.

Graham Wilson, Professor of Political Science, College of Arts and Sciences. M.A., University of Essex; B.A., Ph.D., Oxford University. He is the author of Business and Politics: A Comparative Introduction (2002), Only in America? American Politics in Comparative Perspective (1998), Interest Groups (1990), The Politics of Safety and Health (1985), Interest Groups in the United States (1981), and Unions in American National Politics (1979).

Religion

Stephen R. Prothero,  Chair, Department of Religion; Professor of Religion, College of Arts and Sciences. BA, Yale University; MA, PhD, Harvard University. His first book, The White Buddhist: the Asian Odyssey of Henry Steel Olcott (1996), was awarded the Best First Book in the History of Religions for 1996 by the American Academy of Religion. He has published articles in Journal of the American Academy of Religion and American Religion and Culture. He is also the co-editor, with Thomas Tweed, of Asian Religions in America: A Documentary History (Oxford University Press, 1998) and the author of Purified by Fire: A History of Cremation in America (University of California Press, 2001). His recent book is American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004).  

Dana L. Robert, Truman Collins Professor of World Christianity and History of Mission; Co-Director, Center for Global Christianity and Mission. BA, Louisiana State University; MA, PhD, Yale University. Her book American Women in Mission:  A Social History of Their Thought and Practice was named an outstanding book in mission studies for 1997.  Her other publications include editor, Gospel Bearers, Gender Barriers: Missionary Women in the 20th Century (Orbis 2002);  and "Occupy Until I Come": A.T. Pierson and the Evangelization of the World,  both of which were chosen one of the 15 Outstanding Books in Mission Studies for their year of publication. She was also editor of African Christian Outreach: Vol 2: Mission Churches (SAMS, 2003) and co-author of Christianity: A Social and Cultural History, as well as other books and articles. With M.L. Daneel, she co-edits a book series on "African Initiatives in Christian Mission,” which includes ten volumes.

Sociology

Nancy Ammerman, Chair ad interim, Department of Sociology; Professor of Sociology of Religion, College of Arts and Sciences. BA, Southwest Baptist University; MA, University of Louisville; M.Phil., PhD, Yale University. Dr. Ammerman has spent more than a decade studying American religious organizations and the people who participate in them. Her 2005 book, Pillars of Faith: American Congregations and their Partners (University of California Press) describes the common organizational patterns that shape the work of America’s diverse communities of faith.  It was named distinguished book of the year by the American Sociological Association’s Religion Section.   She has also written extensively on conservative religious movements. She has served as President of the Association for the Sociology of Religion, the ASA Religion Section, and the SSSR and has lectured widely in the U.S., Europe, Israel, South Africa, and China.  Currently, with funding from the Templeton Foundation, she is exploring “Spiritual Narratives in Everyday Life,” a research project that will analyze how and when religion is present in the everyday worlds of ordinary Americans.

Julian Go, Assistant Professor of Sociology, College of Arts and Sciences. BA, University of Michigan; MA, PhD, University of Chicago.

Nazli Kibria, Associate Professor of Sociology, College of Arts and Sciences. MA, PhD, University of Pennsylvania. Publications include: Family Tightrope: The Changing Lives of Vietnamese Americans (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993)   Becoming Asian American: Identities of Second Generation Chinese and Korean Americans (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002) and Muslims in Diaspora: Bangladeshis at Home and Abroad (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, forthcoming)

Daniel Monti, Associate Chair of Sociology; Professor of Sociology, College of Arts and Sciences. BA, Oberlin College; MA, PhD, University of North Carolina. He is currently revising for publication his work More Alike than Equal: Civic Capitalism and the Paradox of Everyday Life in America, which deals with Boston's civic life at the end of the 20th century and start of the 21st century.

John Stone, Professor of Sociology, College of Arts and Sciences. BA, MA, Cambridge University; PhD, Oxford University. He specializes in race and ethnic conflict, international migration and social theory. Among his publications are Racial Conflict in Contemporary Society, Alexis de Tocqueville on Democracy, Revolution and Society, and Race and Ethnicity: Comparative and Theoretical Approaches. He is the Founder Editor of Ethnic and Racial Studies and was an Editor of the recently published, 11 volume Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology (2006). Before coming to BU in 2001, he was on the faculty at Columbia University, St. Antony's College, Oxford, The University of London and George Mason University.

Writing Program

Brad Queen, Lecturer, College of Arts and Sciences Writing Program; BA, University of California at Santa Cruz; PhD, Boston University. He is currently at work on a book analyzing the political economy of American consumerism, 1938-1976.

Emeritus

Richard M. Candee, Professor Emeritus of American and New England Studies, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. AB, Oberlin College; MA, State University of New York, Oneonta; AM, Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania. He first taught at Boston University in 1974 and helped found the Preservation Studies Program; in 1983 he became the Program director and served until 2004. Dr. Candee was an architectural historian at Old Sturbridge Village from 1969 to 1976 doing a regional survey of  New England textile mill villages, and from 1976 to 1983 worked as a preservation consultant for private clients, historical organizations, and public agencies. He has served as a founder and president of the New England Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians, trustee of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, and treasurer of Preservation Action, the national lobby. He was also president of the Vernacular Architecture Forum and chaired two national meetings at Sturbridge, MA (1981) and Portsmouth, NH (1992). He co-founded Portsmouth Advocates and served as a trustee of Strawbery Banke Museum in Portsmouth, NH, and Maine Citizens for Historic Preservation. His book Atlantic Heights: A World War I Shipbuilder's Community was published by the Portsmouth Marine Society in 1985. Building Portsmouth: The Neighborhoods and Architecture of New Hampshire's Oldest City (1992) is now in a second, enlarged edition (2006). In retirement has also published a CD book on American knitting machines, a study of Wallace Nutting's Portsmouth photographs (2007), ands several book chapters and essays. He currently serves as Vice President and exhibits chair of the Portsmouth Historical Society and chairs the Collections Committee at the American Textile History Museum.