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

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 found 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

Wen-Hua Du is an assistant teaching professor of Chinese in the Department of Humanities and Arts. Prior to joining WPI, she worked as a senior lecturer and coordinator of the Chinese Program at the Pennsylvania State University and visiting assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her expertise is in the areas of language teaching, curriculum design, and program development. Her research interests include culture teaching and learning, language learning strategies, and pedagogy of Chinese as a foreign language and Chinese as a heritage language. ... View Profile

Mohammed El Hamzaoui teaches academic writing to native and non-native speakers of English, Arabic as a foreign language to non-native speakers and ISE (Integrated Skills of English) courses to international students. Mohammed adopts an eclectic approach to teaching languages; he uses a communicative and interactive methodology to help students overcome persistent fears related to learning, speaking and writing in foreign languages. ... 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 poetry collections The Soft Path (2019), Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie (2011), and Scape (2009); the essay collection The Annotated Mixtape (2014); the short fiction collection History of Cold Seasons (2014); and the novel Quinnehtukqut (2007). He has also published two poetry chapbooks, Cascading Failures (2014) and The Poughkeepsiad (2010), as well as the nonfiction chapbook Outtakes, B-Sides, & Demos (2019). His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared widely in periodicals. ... 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

V.J. Manzo (Ph.D. Temple University, M.M. New York University) is Associate Professor of Music at WPI. He is a composer and guitarist with research interests in theory and composition, artificial intelligence, interactive music systems, and music cognition. V.J. is author of several books published by Oxford University Press including Max/MSP/Jitter for Music, Foundations of Music Technology, and co-author of Interactive Composition and Environmental Sound Artists. ... View Profile

Dr. McIntyre’s research interests include fiction and creative nonfiction, collaborative writing, narrative theory, literary magazine publishing, the contemporary novel, the intersection of literary and genre fiction, and the gothic. Her fiction and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in journals including Denver Quarterly, the Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, and the Cimarron Review. She has a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2014 and a Special Mention in the 2016 Pushcart Prize anthology. She is the managing editor of the literary journal The Worcester Review. View Profile

My research centers around religion in North Africa and the Middle East with a focus on Islam; I approach the study of Islam through its representation in visual culture. My first book project, an outgrowth of my dissertation, focuses on recent fiction film by Moroccan women filmmakers as oblique forms of resistance to dominant narratives about Muslim women. My research tends to be very interdisciplinary: I draw on religion, cultural studies, feminist theory, film theory and affect theory. ... 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

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