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

Coming from a family with a long teaching tradition going back at least to her great-grandfather, teaching has always been fundamental to Professor Brisson’s well-being. Being a German professor at WPI in particular has been a great privilege because the students are motivated, hardworking, and eager to learn. She feels that teaching German language and culture is particularly important at an engineering school with a strong focus on environmental technology and sustainability for a number of reasons. ... View Profile

In addition to teaching the history of science and technology, I have at various times in the past raised baby birds at the Bronx Zoo and the Baltimore Aquarium, curated and inventoried mammal skeletons in attics at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum, designed biology teaching labs at the University of Colorado, and collected dinosaurs and other fossils while camping in the Wyoming badlands with paleontology field crews. ... View Profile

One of Professor Cullon's students recently called him "strangely fascinating." He knew that he was strange but he was happy to learn that a student founding his approach to teaching fascinating. He likes to encourage students to see history not as a mass of dead facts but as a vital mode of inquiry and a moral project that has the potential to inform the present as much as illuminate the past. ... View Profile

Dr. Lindsay Davis is a broadly trained interdisciplinary historian whose research interrogates the gendered, racial, and cultural foundations of the American prison state. Her current book project, "Lessons in Captivity: A Cultural History of Gender and Criminality During the Transitional Carceral Era, 1930-1973," examines the cultural coverage of women prisoners - in "real life" and in film - in an era preceding mass incarceration. In the classroom, Dr. ... View Profile

Daniel DiMassa is a scholar of German literature and culture from the eighteenth century to the present. His research interests center on the intersection of literature, religion, and aesthetics in the wake of the Enlightenment, with a particular interest in how literary texts participate in religious and mythical enterprises. His articles have appeared in German Quarterly, Religion and Literature, and the Goethe-Jahrbuch. He's finishing a book manuscript that charts the significance of Dante as a poetic muse among German Romantics, Idealists, and Neo-Romantics. ... View Profile

Professor Eddy focuses on American pragmatism and American religion in her work. She also enjoys working with students on the moral aspects of the biological sciences. Improving student reading comprehension and writing skills are important to her as a teacher. She enjoys facilitating class discussions on important but controversial questions where the answers are not clear, but the issues remain important ones. 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: Short Story, Creative Non-Fiction, and 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

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

Joshua Harmon is the author of the essay collection The Annotated Mixtape, the short fiction collection History of Cold Seasons, the novel Quinnehtukqut, and the poetry collections Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie and Scape. His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared widely in periodicals. He is currently working on a novel, a collection of poems, and a book-length essay on cultural iterations of fantasy c. 1977. At WPI, he has taught courses in creative writing and American literature. View Profile

My primary focus is technical and professional writing. However, I also teach general writing courses that are less technical in nature. Having spent over 20 years in industry as a professional writer, I tend to think about how I can help students become stronger writers in the workplace. I also believe that, in becoming stronger writers, students should enjoy the process. So I try to structure my classes in a way that allows students to improve their writing skills while writing about topics that interest them. As a professor of practice, I believe in learning by doing. ... View Profile

When new acquaintances find out I teach writing, it’s not unusual for them to lament a broad decline in the nation’s writing skills. How does it make me feel, they ask, that students, say, don’t know the difference between adjectives and adverbs? Or, can I believe it that people hardly even know what apostrophes do, let alone where to put them? As someone who treasures good, careful prose, I’m sympathetic to these worries. But as an educator, I think it’s important to steer the conversation in a different direction. ... 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

Jennifer McWeeny is Associate Professor of Philosophy in the Humanities and Arts Department. Her training in philosophy is pluralistic in nature, engaging work from a variety of schools and traditions including Continental philosophy, analytic philosophy, feminist philosophy, pragmatism, and Asian and comparative philosophies. ... View Profile

My scholarly and professional interests lie in three areas: new forms of narrative emerging in our multi-media age; comparative and environmental literature; and interdisciplinary pedagogy. Over the years, I have taught teaches a variety of writing and literature courses from The Elements of Writing and Introduction to Literature, to Moral Issues in the Modern Novel and The American Literature and the Environment. With Diran Apelian, I co-teach a Great Problem Seminar on Sustainable Development, currently focusing on Recycling of all classes of materials. ... 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

Douglas Weeks is the administrator of music at WPI and in that capacity coordinates music activities and classes. In addition, he directs the WPI Orchestra, Concert Band, and Brass Ensemble. These ensembles perform at a high level, presenting numerous concerts on campus during the year. They have also performed frequently overseas, most recently on a concert tour in Prague and Berlin in March 2012. Professor Weeks’ own background is in performance and education, with degrees in both areas from several colleges including a doctorate from Boston University. ... View Profile