Faculty & Staff

I compose, perform, record, mix and produce electroacoustic music; I am interested in how we can use the tools and techniques of audio production to explore new musical territory. I build mechatronic and robotic musical instruments; I am interested in how we can free electronic music from the world of speakers through computer-controlled automatic mechanical instruments. I conduct research and experiments that explore how our cognitive and perceptual processes affect our musical experience; I am interested in how we can use such research to guide our compositional and analytic activities. ... View Profile

Roshanak Bigonah has studied Education and Technology, and Media with concentration in Video Production and Advertising. For the past 13 years, she has taught a wide range of courses in Digital Arts including  Graphic Arts, Web Design,  Photography, Videography and 3D Design. Roshanak Bigonah has worked as a freelance graphic and web designer.  In addition to her teaching interests Roshanak Bigonah, is a poet and has published four poetry books in her native language, Farsi. A collection of her works has been translated and published in Dutch and German. ... View Profile

My research interests include literature and culture, humanities and STEM integration, and engineering education. These areas are unified by broad concerns for justice, inclusion, and social progress. My literary scholarship considers the ways literature helps to advance social progress and justice, while my educational research investigates educational environments and works to develop pedagogies and content that open STEM education to broader populations by bringing the humanities and arts to scientific and technical subjects. ... View Profile

Steven C. Bullock is professor of history at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where he was a recipient of the Trustees' Award for Outstanding Research and Creative Scholarship. He has also served as a Fulbright Lecturer in Okinawa, Japan. ... View Profile

In research and in teaching, Jim Cocola focuses on intersections between geography and the humanities, primarily in the field of modern and contemporary American literature and culture. His most recent study examines place making in American poetry and poetics through a comparative, multiethnic, and transnational lens. His newest project reflects on cultural production by Americans and others of Mediterranean descent, looking mainly at literary and visual artifacts. He is also interested in experiential and experimental forms of writing. ... View Profile

Althea started teaching English as a second language in 2000, when she moved to West Africa. Over the next seven years she lived and taught in Senegal, Niger and Benin. In 2007 she moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she taught ESL to immigrants and refugees at the Hubbs Center and developmental reading at St. Paul College. Her teaching passions include integrating culture and social justice issues in the classroom, building critical thinking skills in her students, and teaching with technology. ... View Profile

Jennifer deWinter has long been interested in how culture (which is local) moves internationally. She has spent a number of years analyzing anime, comics, and computer games as part of global media flows in order to understand how concepts such as "art," "culture," and "entertainment" are negotiated. In 2003, Professor deWinter joined the Learning Games Initiative, a group of scholars and game designers dedicated to the general study of games and the use of games to teach concepts and skills in particular. ... View Profile

I am an historian of 19th- and 20th-century U.S. history, with a special focus on imperialism, capitalism, and the Pacific Ocean. In my book, Coconut Colonialism: Workers and the Globalization of Samoa (Harvard University Press, 2022), I argue that the globalization of Samoa at the turn of the twentieth century was driven by a diverse group of working people on and off the islands. Currently, I am doing research for my next book, "War Workers," which tells the global story of non-citizen civilians working for the U.S. military from the Civil War to Iraq. ... View Profile

Laura J. Eckelman   is a theatrical lighting designer, production manager, and educator. ... View Profile

Michelle Ephraim is the Shakespeare scholar at WPI. She is the author of Reading the Jewish Woman on the Elizabethan Stage (Routledge, 2008) as well as numerous articles on 16th- and 17th-century literature. Professor Ephraim also teaches writing courses on Creative Nonfiction and Speculative Fiction (Sci-Fi/Horror/Fantasy). Her essays have appeared in publications such as the Washington Post, McSweeney’s, Lilith, Tikkun, The Morning News, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. ... View Profile

Brenton Faber studies medical writing and the human factors that influence medical diagnosis, treatment, and patient care. He is a practicing paramedic who volunteers with a rural ambulance squad and at a free urban clinic. I am currently interested in the concept of "allostasis" and "allostatic load." The terms have been used to describe a continued activation of the body’s neural, neuroendocrine, and immune systems as an adaptive response to prolonged stress. ... View Profile

Roger S. Gottlieb is the author or editor of twenty books and more than 150 articles. He is internationally known for his work on religious environmentalism, spirituality in an age of environmental crisis, environmental ethics, and the role of religion in a democratic society. He has edited six academic book series, serves on the editorial boards of several academic journals, is contributing editor to Tikkun Magazine, and has appeared online on Patheos, Huffington, Grist, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Real Clear Religion, and many others. ... View Profile

James Hanlan teaches courses in American urban history, American labor history, and the American History survey sequence. His book-length publications include a study of 19th-century textile workers in Manchester, NH; a two-volume encyclopedia of American labor history; and a study of a 20th-century printing firm. Professor Hanlan serves as executive secretary of the New England Historical Association, a professional society with approximately 700 members. ... View Profile

WPI provides opportunities to investigate worlds beyond your major, and one of those worlds might be art. It might seem an alien world, but many art skills can be useful beyond making art. Drawing enhances spatial perception. Solving design problems hones communication skills. Dreaming up impossible ideas can illuminate what is possible. Sometimes students show up the first day of my course worried that they lack talent or experience. Instead, I recommend committing to practice the skills presented in class, as if approaching music or engineering studies. ... View Profile

Aarti Smith Madan is an Associate Professor of Spanish & International Studies in the Department of Humanities and Arts at WPI. Her research centers on the ways spatial practices inform the production and consumption of literature, film, and art in Latin America. In her recently published monograph, Lines of Geography in Latin American Narrative: National Territory, National Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), Professor Madan unearths the literary roots of the discipline of geography in nineteenth-century Latin America. ... View Profile

One of the most rewarding pleasures of teaching at WPI is the diversity of cultures you find in and around campus. So, besides teaching Spanish, I make my goal to broaden my students’ knowledge of Hispanic countries and to promote cultural understanding inside and outside the classroom. I teach the importance of understanding different lifestyles and ways of expression in other parts of the world-differences that we can find in each of the Hispanic countries. ... View Profile

Professor McWeeny’s research emerges at the intersections of the philosophy of mind, phenomenology, and philosophies of gender and race. Her work explores the bodily, historical, and social dimensions of mental phenomena such as consciousness, emotion, and perception, and attends to the ways that living within social categories such as gender, race, class, and ability affects the content and perspectival structure of experience. ... View Profile

Professor Pfeifer’s research focus in philosophy is on contemporary continental philosophy, social and political philosophy, global justice, and development ethics. He teaches philosophy courses, international studies courses, and for the Great Problems Seminars program. In addition to a number of chapters in edited collections, Professor Pfeifer's work can be found in journals such as Human Studies, The European Legacy, Crisis and Critique, Continental Thought and Theory, and Current Perspectives in Social Theory. ... View Profile

Professor Rivera has been conducting research on 19th- and 20th-century Spanish Caribbean literature and theories related to the exploration of limits or borders (i.e., the edges or places where multiple cultures touch or come into contact). He has been exploring how Caribbean traditional modes of representation have been restructured to significant changes in cultural, literary, and historical contexts. ... View Profile

Born to an artist mother and a musician father, Josh was destined from a young age for a life in the arts. An early interest in black and white darkroom photography and art-house cinema led him to study film and video art at Brown University. Fortuitously stumbling on a new course in multimedia art in his last term as an undergraduate, his zeal for digital media was unleashed. The next formative episode in Josh's career found him designing interactive exhibits, such as the claymation studio at Zeum, a hands-on, multimedia arts and technology museum for kids in San Francisco. ... View Profile

Professor Samson teaches art history, and his scholarship is in the history of architecture, especially the modern period. He studies and explains the moments of transition when styles change, and the spread of avant-garde creations into general currency. He is also interested in the history of industrial design, and enjoys introducing his students to it, revealing the complex background of forms and ideas behind common household objects. His architectural history courses explore both the left- and right-brain aspects of built form. ... View Profile

John Sanbonmatsu is interested in critical theory, including theories of social change, and political philosophy. View Profile

The history of science is a well recognized branch of inquiry about the past that concerns itself with interesting and significant questions about humans and their knowledge and beliefs about nature over the past few thousand years. As such, the history of science is neither a branch of science nor a simplified form of “history for scientists.” Instead, historians of science use the tools and methods of historical questioning and analysis to examine details about past scientific ideas and practices that their colleagues and predecessors have worked long and hard to uncover and document. ... View Profile

I am an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Rhetoric. Before joining WPI, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. My work is animated by an intellectual curiosity with how ideas travel across time and space, and generate diverse practices of acting, seeing, and being in the world. I am especially intrigued by situations in which people come to ask new questions about themselves and others, in ways that require reconsideration of past experiences and imagining of future possibilities. ... View Profile