Directors

James Schmidt , Director

Professor Schmidt is Professor of History and Political Science and Director of Honors Program in the College of Arts and Sciences. Professor Schmidt specializes in the history of European political and social thought from the eighteenth century to the present. He is the author of Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Between Phenomenology and Structuralism Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Between Phenomenology and Structuralism (1985) and the editor of What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions (1996) and Theodor Adorno (2007) and co-editor, with Amelie Rorty, of the forthcoming Critical Guide to Kant's Idea for a Universal History.

He has received a number of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and, in 1999, was awarded the James L. Clifford Prize from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

He has taught a wide range of courses in the areas of intellectual history and history of political thought. In the fall 2008 semester, he is teaching the CAS Honors Program section of PO 291, Introduction to Political Theory. Professor Schmidt received his Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Jocelyn Emerson, Associate Director

Jocelyn Emerson was educated at Smith College (AB) and the University of Iowa (MA, MFA) where she held the Teaching-Writing Fellowship at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is a recipient of the Angela J. and James J. Rallis Memorial Award from the Humanities Foundation at Boston University. In 2008, she received the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her collection of poems, Sea Gate, won the New York/New England Award from Alice James Books.

Her poems, book reviews, and criticism have appeared widely in journals such as American Book Review, Black Warrior Review, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Contemporary Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, Electronic Poetry Review, New American Writing as well as in the The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries (University of Iowa Press, 2004).

Published scholarship includes book chapters on John Donne and alchemy in Textual Healing: Essays on Medieval and Early Modern Medicine (Brill Academic Publishers, 2005) and American poetics and chaos theory forthcoming in Science and Literature (Rodopi, 2009). She has taught a wide range of undergraduate courses in British and American literature as well as in creative writing, both poetry and fiction.