Faculty & Staff

Kathryn M. Moncrief is Paris Fletcher Distinguished Professor of Humanities and Head of Humanities and Arts at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in Worcester, MA. She was previously Professor and Chair of English at Washington College, in Chestertown, MD where she taught courses in Shakespeare, Milton, and early modern literature and culture and received the Washington College Alumni Association Award for Distinguished Teaching. She serves as co-editor of the Shakespeare Life and Times section of the Internet Shakespeare Editions and has published widely on Shakespeare and performance. She ...

Joe Aguilar's teaching and research interests include creative writing, Chicano literature, folklore, science fiction, and the contemporary American novel. He’s the author of Half Out Where and has work in Strange Horizons, Conjunctions, and Threepenny Review. He also serves as a board member of the Worcester County Poetry Association, a co-editor of hex, and the art editor of The Worcester Review.

Gizem Arslan's research and teaching interests include post-war literatures in German, French and Turkish, translation studies, migration studies, theories of language, literary-mathematical experiments, and writing systems of the world. She enjoys teaching German at all levels and learning new languages. Particularly important to her teaching are exploring connections between German and other languages, integrating culture and intercultural learning into her courses, and continually educating herself on diversity, equity and inclusion issues in language programs. Her current work in ...

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. I am ...

Professor Frederick Bianchi works in the area of music technology. As the director of music technology research, Bianchi works with students from all disciplines. His particular focus is Virtual Orchestra technology, multichannel sound design, and neuroscience research. In addition to overseeing the Media Arts Group Innovation Center (MAGIC), Professor Bianchi is also the director of the Bar Harbor, Maine Project Center and the Glacier National Park Project Center.

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. She is the founder and editor of an ...

Dr. Boucher-Yip has taught in many parts of the world including Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, China, Laos, the United Kingdom, and the United States. She has taught communication skills and writing courses at university level for over a decade. Her teaching approach is informed by her own experience in language learning and with theories of second language acquisition and their pedagogical applications. Both her studies and her experience have taught her that there is no one method or idea that guarantees successful language learning. While the mastery of standard English is necessary, she ...

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. WPI's unusually trans-disciplinary and collaborative ...

Born in Michigan in 1956, I graduated from the University of Michigan in 1978, earning my PhD at Stanford University in 1985. I have enjoyed teaching British literature at WPI since 1990. I like the intelligence and good work ethic of WPI students; I especially enjoy the opportunity to meet and interact with students in small groups and on an individual basis. The bulk of my scholarly work falls into three principal areas. I work on the Victorian novelist Charles Dickens (1812-1870), on textual scholarship (especially textual editing and manuscript work), and on the American guitarist and ...

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. He is the author of Tea Sets and Tyranny: The Politics of Politeness in Early America (University of Pennsylvania, 2017), Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730-1840 (University of North Carolina Press, 1996), and The American Revolution: A History in Documents (Oxford University Press, 2003). He ...

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. These experiences have shaped my research interests in the history of life sciences and evolutionary thought, the history of natural history museums and science ...

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. Professor Cocola's primary teaching opportunities have ...

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. Having previously taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Dartmouth College and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he finds teaching WPI students especially invigorating because of their abiding ...

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. Althea also serves as an Insight Advisor for new freshman and particularly enjoys welcoming ...

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. Davis teaches a variety of courses on late 19th and 20th century American social, cultural, and legal history and seeks to incorporate a ...

Daniel DiMassa is a scholar of German literature and culture from the eighteenth century to the present. His research resides at 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 book, Dante in Deutschland: An Itinerary of Romantic Myth (Bucknell/Rutgers), is forthcoming in 2022.  In addition to teaching courses in German language, literature, and film, DiMassa is an avid participant in WPI's Global Projects Program. He has twice advised projects ...

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. I have published on a variety ...

  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, University Park (2010-2017), and a visiting assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (2009-2010). Her expertise is in the areas of language teaching, curriculum design, and program development. Dr. Du has been an active participant in the SoTL communities in the field of Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL). She has also collaborated on two ...

Laura J. Eckelman is a theatrical lighting designer, production manager, and educator. She has worked professionally with theater companies, schools, and other institutions across the country, including Yale Repertory Theatre, Studio Theatre, Theater J, Keegan Theater, Triad Stage, The Welders, Perseverance Theatre, the Bearded Ladies Cabaret, Bang on a Can’s Asphalt Orchestra, Capital Fringe, the New York Urban Theatre Festival, PTP NYC, the Byrdliffe Arts Festival, the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, University of the Incarnate Word, Connecticut College, the Bard College ...

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. Also, as a first-generation college graduate, Mohammed relies on the intellectual and practical obstacles he faced to help students acclimate to different learning ...

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. Her award-winning blog, Everyday Shakespeare, co-written with fellow Shakespearean Caroline Bicks ...

I am a scholar of the black experience in the Americas, with specialization in the movement of people and ideas, cultural productions, gendered experiences, and oral history. I use an interdisciplinary methodology grounded in historical analysis, my research examines how the racialization of people of African descent operates transnationally and asks how these people, regardless of national histories, have rallied against racial marginalization on a global scale. I completed my doctoral degree at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in African Diaspora History, Caribbean History, and Visual ...

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. Unlike homeostasis, which describes an ongoing physiological balance, the term allostasis has been used to describe conditions in which ...

Kara Parks Fontenot is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Writing and Rhetoric. She has eighteen years of experience teaching a wide variety of undergraduate courses in writing, rhetoric, literature, and the humanities more broadly, including first-year composition, technical writing, African American and Ethnic American literature, folklore, world culture, and ethics. Kara's undergraduate coursework at the United States Air Force Academy gave her a general knowledge base in engineering disciplines and prepared her well for teaching at a STEM-focused ...

John Galante’s scholarly interests are primarily in Latin American history and global studies. His teaching and research focus on international migration and the patterns of homeland connection and receiving-country adaptation associated with migratory movement. His professional experience in the energy sector informs his teaching on the history, geopolitics and global market dynamics of energy. He has particular expertise in South America and the Southern Cone, where he has worked, conducted fieldwork and traveled extensively.

Emily Gioielli is a historian of modern European history, with a special focus on Central and Eastern European history, the history of gender and sexuality, and the history of violence. I am currently finishing a social history that traces women's involvement and the role of gender in the social and political revolutions that took place in Hungary during the long World War One period. I am also working on a project that brings together the social and environmental history of the Holocaust in Central Europe entitled "Cataclysm: An Environmental History of the Holocaust in Central Europe." ...

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. Two of his books received Nautilus Book Awards: ...

Edward R. Gutierrez comes to WPI from a long and illustrious career in the animated feature film industry; having worked on films such as The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991), The Lion King (1994) and many others. With degrees in both 2D Traditional Animation and 3D Animation and Visual Effects he has transitioned into independent filmmaking and dedicating his life to sharing his knowledge, love, and passion for drawing with new generations of students interested in drawing and storytelling. His most recent animated short film ESCAPE has made its way through the film ...

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. He also serves on the board of the Northeast Popular Culture/American Culture Association and the Friends of the Goddard Library at Clark ...

Peter H. Hansen is Professor of History and Director of International and Global Studies at WPI. In this role, responsibilities include enhancing the curricular components of WPI’s global programs, exploring new partnerships, and advising students in global projects. International and Global Studies brings together faculty from arts and sciences, business, and the global school to enrich students' experience of global engagement on campus and around the world. He enjoys teaching courses in history or international and global studies, seminars on sports or global studies, and working with ...

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. I am here to help you surprise yourself ...

Abigail Koo joined WPI Philharmonic Orchestra in August of 2021. She brings musical experiences from podiums around the world, such as Lucerne, Salzburg, Moscow, Seoul, and throughout the US. Equally at home with various musical mediums, Abigail Koo is a recipient of numerous awards and scholarships, including Lauren Dilsner Choral Conducting Scholarship, Bertlesmann’s World of Expression Award for Composition, Young Artist Competition winner for piano, Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society Competition winner, to highlight a few. Abigail began her musical studies as a pianist at the age of ...

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. Having spent a long career as a technical writing practitioner, I believe in ...

  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. What makes us think that students’ knowledge of the parts of speech ...

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. He has created numerous software projects including the Modal Object Library, a collection of programming objects to control ...

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. In order to accomplish this, I include role-plays, team work, films, presentations and group activities that combine oral and written ...

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 short story collection, Mad Prairie, was selected by Roxane Gay as the winner of the 2020 Flannery O'Connor Award and is out now from University of Georgia Press.  Learn more about WPI's new minor in creative writing!

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. She has also developed cross-cultural philosophical methodologies that engage diverse perspectives along multiple axes (cultural, historical, social, political, and ...

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. I hope that, in doing so, I can help introduce diversity into conversations about Islam, particularly the ...

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. As I enjoy interdisciplinary modes of ...

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. He is also the Co-editor (with West Gurley) of Phenomenology and the Political ...

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. Professor Rivera’s focus is on studying how "marginal" groups (radical Caribbean male intellectuals and women writers) view themselves within those borders and devising new representational ...

Dr. Joshua W. Rohde is the Director of Choral Activities at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where he conducts all four of the university’s choral ensembles – Men’s Glee Club, Women’s Alden Voices, Festival Chorus, and the Chamber Choir. He is also the Music Director of both the Rhode Island Civic Chorale & Orchestra and the Quincy Choral Society, and performs as an active professional cellist throughout the Boston area. Dr. Rohde’s work spans multiple musical genres, with an emphasis on new music from living composers. This is seen in his dissertation on living Scottish composer Sir ...

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. While working at ...

By training, I am a political historian of China and Japan. Coming to WPI has expanded how I view my own research and teaching and what can be done with them. I’ve led WPI’s efforts to build China-related programs for STEM students on campus and off. With like-minded colleagues I helped establish and now direct WPI’s East Asia Hub (formally China Hub), established and co-direct WPI’s Hangzhou and Taiwan Project Centers, and advise the Chinese Studies minor. With WPI’s student body in mind, I’ve developed and teach classes on China and Japan’s popular culture, US-China-Japan relations, ...

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. Expression and function are intimately intertwined in all the ...

William San Martín (He/Him/El) is an interdisciplinary scholar of earth-systems sciences and global environmental governance trained in history, international politics & relations, and science & technology studies (STS). His work focuses on international development; Latin America & the Global South; socio-environmental (in)justices; and science, technology & the human environment. He is currently a Research Fellow at the Earth Systems Governance Project. William is a former Fulbright Scholar (2011-2015); a Visiting Scholar and a Postdoctoral Associate jointly ...

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

Lance Schachterle enjoys the excitement of the classroom--meeting new students each term, sharing ideas about works of literature that matter, and learning to communicate more effectively. He teaches courses at the 1000 and 2000 levels, mostly in modern literature, but also really likes interdisciplinary courses that involve science. WPI students work harder than most, and students pursuing their minor in literature often really get intellectually and emotionally involved in what they are studying.Professor Schachterle has published on the postmodern novelist--also a great student of ...

Matthew Scinto is an emerging conductor based in Cape Cod, where he currently serves as Founder and Music Director of the Cape Cod Chamber Orchestra and Visiting Director of Orchestra at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He has twice studied conducting at the Tanglewood Music Center, was recently finalist for the Assistant Conductor of the San Antonio Symphony, and also currently serves as a cover conductor for the Portland (ME) Symphony. He received his Doctor of Musical Art's degree from Boston University, where he received the Conducting Department Award for Excellence in ...

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.More ...

Professor Stoloff’s research focuses on Chinese religious beliefs and practices from the late Warring States Period (ca. 475-221 BCE) to the Western Han dynasty (202 BCE-9 CE). Specifically, he studies the classical Daoist idea of wuwei (effortless action)

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. Such situations, I believe, capture an important aspect of the human ...

Huili Zheng is a scholar on late imperial Chinese literature and culture (1500-1895). Her research interests focus on late imperial Chinese literary culture and development of social, cultural and intellectual history, with a particular interest in issues of gender, ethnic/cultural identity, cultural politics of representation, and the relations of late imperial China to the formation of modern China. She is finishing a book manuscript on late imperial Chinese intellectuals’ changing conceptualizations of the world and China’s place in it. Professor Zheng is also interested in pedagogy of ...

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. Since joining WPI, she has been an active faculty member in the Interactive Media  Game ...

Pam joined the WPI family in 2011. Pam provides administrative support for both the Data Science program and the School of Arts & Sciences. She grew up in Worcester and graduated at nearby Assumption College.  She now resides in Holden with her family.  A mom to three adult sons, Pam is aware of what families go through during the financial aid process and sacrifices parents make to allow their child to obtain a college degree.  During the summer months she enjoys going to the beach and or relaxing by her pool.  She is an avid sports fan, especially when cheering on the New England ...