Graduate Alumni Classnotes
Image from the Brandeis 75th Anniversary
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Image from the Brandeis 75th Anniversary
If you'd like to add a classnote, please fill out this survey.
I did not move far away--I am now the Assistant Director of Operations and Academic Administration for the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Brandeis! I love working with the team there and writing articles about Brandeis's amazing graduate students for our website. In my free time, I'm reading a lot, including in a Victorian book club with two fellow Brandeis PhDs, and walking around Waltham.
I taught at the Humanities Dept at Howard University for 3 years after Brandeis. Since 1985 I have lived in Albuquerque doing my own sculpture and design work, as well as working at Tamarind Institute for 15 years. My sculpture is in the collections of the Albuquerque Museum, Albuquerque Academy, CNM, and many private collections.
Contact: cbarber@unm.edu
Finally retiring this summer from Teachers College, Columbia University, after 16 years as Professor of Practice in English Education. I am also Professor Emeritus of English & Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara where I taught for 39 years, after four years teaching in the English dept at the University of Michigan, straight out of Brandeis. I continue to teach Milton, along with courses in English education. Publications mostly about teaching and learning literature and writing, but some on Milton and Herbert. Fondly remember and remain influenced by beloved Brandeis profs. J.V. Cunningham and Allen Grossman. Still miss my former classmates and dear friends at Brandeis who have have passed away, including Gill Henkin (long ago) and Mark Krupnick, who became one of the most important cultural critics of our generation.
Contact: blau@tc.columbia.edu
I managed, without finishing my PhD (left after I'd passed my orals), to pursue my writing, leaving scholarship behind. I've published 11 books -- novels, stories, poetry and a miscellany embarrassingly titled A Rosellen Brown Reader (not named by me; it was part of a series by people who'd been on the faculty of the Bread Loaf Writers Conference.) I taught for many years (without that degree!) in the writing program of the University of Houston and am retiring in a couple of months from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where I've taught for 27 years. If you're curious, you can check out my books at rosellen@rosellenbrown.com
Contact: rosellen@rosellenbrown.com
Assistant Professor of English at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania for three years, now Managing Director of the Boston University Center for the Humanities. Stop by and say hello!
Contact: cavender@bu.edu
Howdy to all my fellow Brandeisians -
I'm sending this update from beautiful, sunny Las Vegas. I'm happy to let you know I accepted a position as an administrative assistant at The Care Center at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The Care Center is the campus resource for students, faculty, and staff who are victims and survivors of interpersonal and power-based violence (this includes domestic, intimate partner, dating, and stalking.) We offer a crisis hotline, counseling, and financial resources, especially for people who need to move from their residence urgently.
I'm so proud of the work we do in The Care Center; this work has been incredibly satisfying and professionally fulfilling. While I have placed any aspirations of obtaining a PhD on the way, way back burner for now, I am full of joy to be contributing in another very meaningful way to life here on campus.
Also, I have been having so much fun attending free lectures, screenings, and exhibitions associated with the university. In October, I attended a panel titled "Sex Acts: The Possibilities and Politics of Writing about Sex." This panel featured Lynn Comella, Tina Horne, Edgar Gomez, and Vi Khi Nao. All are published authors, and I'm recommending them to everyone. I will also be attending a screening of "Orlando: My Political Biography," hosted by the UNLV English Department and Black Mountain Institute. (This documentary draws from the eponymous Woolf text.)
Other than that, all is well here, and I'm hoping the same for you and yours. May you all stay warm, well-fed, and well-loved.
Contact: lncvach13@yahoo.com
After obtaining my PhD in comparative literature from Rutgers and teaching at the University of Leuven in Belgium, I am relocating to New York City in the spring. I look forward to reconnecting with friends from the Brandeis English Department, see you soon!
Professor, Southeastern Louisiana University, 1974-2004.
Contact: wmdowie1632@gmail.com
I am Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, where I also co-direct the Center for Humanities, Culture, and Society. I am at work on a book called Beach Reading: A Literary History.
Contact: sari.edelstein@umb.edu
Finished the doctoral dissertation in Ireland, which made sense since it concerned Yeats. Married and we had our first child there. In time, moved to NYC, where I still reside. Second child is the only true New Yorker in the family!
After Brandeis and Yale (MBA ‘81), I worked for 35 years at NYC charitable foundations — including as E.D. of a new foundation working to prevent and reverse developing-world blindness and help the blind access adaptive education and work. My wife Lois and I are now retired — and blessed with three exuberant toddler grandsons. Would love to connect with Brandeis-English classmates.
Contact: loisandandrew1@gmail.com
After 40 years in the software industry as a business analyst, I retired in 2019. Retirement consists of lots of international travel, visits to grandkids in Seattle, and summers at our condominium on the Jersey Shore. I also attend courses as a "senior scholar" at Temple U. OLLI, University of Pennsylvania, and our local public library: mostly literature, history, art appreciation and film. It's wonderful to have the time to read and study literature and non-fiction that you never had the time for while a graduate student or employee.
Contact: gfish1684@gmail.com
Merrill Joan Gerber lived beside Schwartz Hall in 1960, completed her MA courses (especially loved classes with Milton Hindus) and got her MA in 1980 by taking a written exam in Pasadena, California! She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. She has written thirty-one books, The Kingdom of Brooklyn was winner of the Ribalow Prize from Hadassah Magazine, and King of the World was winner of the Pushcart Editor's Book Award. Her new book of essays is Revelation at the Food Bank, whose title essay was also chosen to be in the Best American Essays 2023. She taught for 32 years at the California Institute of Technology, and her literary archive resides at the Yale Beinecke Rare Book Library.
Contact: merrillgerber@yahoo.com
David's book Maurice was published in 2023 and excerpted in Literary Hub. His book All the Devils Are Here, on literary influence and American Romanticism, will be published in April 2024.
I work at the University of New England in rural New South Wales, Australia, mostly teaching children's literature and fantasy literature, with some writing and generalist literature teaching alongside. Since graduating from UNE, I've developed a research profile in children's literature from 1789 to the present, with an emphasis on classical reception, gender studies, and aesthetics. From 2016, I've been part of a collective working on classical reception in contemporary children's culture called Our Mythical Childhood. Led from Warsaw, Poland, this collective has developed large-scale online survey tools to gauge how classical mythology operates in texts for young audiences. Based on this work, I've written a guide to the field: Classical Mythology and Children's Literature...An Alphabetical Odyssey (Warsaw, 2023: available online, open access, funded through the European Research Council). I'm now co-editing a Routledge Historical Resources project in children's literature (1789-1914), in collaboration with Dr. Leslee Thorne-Murphy (also a Brandeis grad), and enjoying the return to the long nineteenth century, which brings back memories of my time studying at Brandeis in the 1990s, and the many nineteenth-century American texts I came into contact with.
Contact: ehale@une.edu.au
Associate Professor, English and Africana Studies, University of Virginia
Contact: njhamilton@virginia.edu
My first FT academic job was also my last; I retired as Professor Emeritus in 2014 after 44 years at the Univ. of San Francisco. In addition to a more or less traditional academic career, I served for 13 years as VP and then 17 years as President of the USF Faculty Assn., AFT Local 4269; we were and remain one of the few unionized private sector universities west of the Mississippi.
Married Toni Vaughn Heineman, MSW, DMH, in 1970. We have two extraordinary sons who are depressingly approaching middle age, and a beautiful 17-month-old granddaughter.
Currently in private practice as a Jungian psychoanalyst in Charlotte, NC.
Contact: khodges@jungiananalyticpraxis.com
I've transitioned from academia to fiction-writing, drawing on all I learned from my Brandeis professors (esp. Dr. Staves) to craft historical romance novels. My pen name is Bliss Bennet, and I've published 6 books to date.
Contact: jackie.horne@aya.yale.edu
I've been serving as Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health since 2019 (previously Assistant Dean for Faculty Development at the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences). When not full-time faculty concierge, I have been tinkering with an anxiety-ridden reboot of James Joyce's Ulysses for about five or a hundred years... Would be interested in connecting with other alums in higher ed administration similarly starved for better brain food than appointments policy and annual data reporting.
Contact: ivers@hsph.harvard.edu
Currently Humanities Teacher/Mentor, Fusion Academy Newton, and Administrator, Brandeis University Writing Program. Recent publication: “Frederick Douglass and His British Allies” (2021), One More Voice.
Contact: dkirshen@gmail.com
Daniela Kukrechtová is is a poet, scholar, and translator. Her scholarly work has been published in African American Review, the CEA Critic, and Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Her book manuscript is under review at Bloomsbury Publishing, plc. Her poetry and translations have appeared in The Sunlight Press, Circumference: Poetry in Translation, and Asymptote’s Translation Tuesdays blog and her nonfiction in Persephone’s Daughters, Indiana Review and Nowhere Magazine. She won Nowhere Magazine’s Fall 2021 Travel Writing Prize for her nonfiction. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at College of the Holy Cross.
Daniel Morris will be entering his thirtieth year as a professor of English at Purdue. In 2023 he edited The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry and Politics since 1900. His forthcoming book is Essays and Interviews on Contemporary American Poets, Poetry, and Pedagogy: A Thirty-Year Creative Writing Workshop. (Anthem Press)
Contact: dmorris@purdue.edu
I am in my third year of a doctorate program in English literature at UC-Irvine.
Contact: nnagel@uci.edu
Professor of English and Creative Writing, Oakland University, Rochester MI
Contact: pfeiffer@oakland.edu
Dara Rossman Regaignon is an associate professor in the NYU Department of English, where she focuses on rhetoric and writing studies and nineteenth-century British literature and culture. Her first book, Writing Program Administration at Small Liberal Arts Colleges (Parlor Press, 2012, co-authored with Jill M. Gladstein), is the first empirical study of writing programs at 100 small liberal arts colleges. Her second book, Writing Maternity: Medicine, Anxiety, Rhetoric, and Genre (Ohio State UP, 2021), historicizes the anxious affects of middle-class motherhood and offers a literary-rhetorical history of maternal anxiety as a cultural formation. She has also published on writing fellows programs, writing pedagogy, and children's literature. Regaignon is currently at work on Vulnerabilities, a study of how elite women's claims of gendered, classed, and racialized vulnerability underwrote and justified imperial expansion in the late nineteenth-century British Empire.
Contact: dr133@nyu.edu
When Covid hit in 2020, I realized that it was at last time to retire. That was after some 53 years as a member of the William and Mary faculty. For ten years I served as Dean of Graduate Studies--overseeing the establishment for four new doctoral programs, including one in American studies. My wife, Sylvia, and I split our time between Williamsburg and Boston, where we have a condo. Sylvia earned a PhD from Brandeis in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies in 1975.
Contact: rjscho@wm.edu
It's been a long and winding road. After getting my PhD, I served for a time as editor at the Godine Press, where I started the Godine Poetry Chapbook Series, then migrated into the social sciences, starting and running the Social Science Institute, which studied prison violence and competency to stand trial. Along the way I learned to program small computers, worked with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, and founded a software company called MicroSolve, which ran for some 20 years and was ultimately bought by the Vermont firm NEMRC.
Contact: jansch@verizon.net
After teaching and working at MIT part time for a year or so after finishing my dissertation, I was offered a full time position at MIT as a special projects coordinator in the School of Science. My work gradually moved to communications, given my skills honed in graduate work and my background in biology. I picked up some new skills on the way—including some fun things like design, photography, and videography. I'm currently the communications manager at the MIT Koch Institute for Integrative Research, which has been a lovely place to work.
Contact: bendtams@gmail.com
I am Professor emerita of English and Creative Writing, and past chair of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Dartmouth College. My fields are early American literature, American poetry, women’s literature, gender and cultural studies, and public humanities. I am the author of The Work of Self-Representation: Lyric Poetry in Colonial New England, and Perfecting Friendship: Politics and Affiliation in Early American Literature, a member of the editorial board of the Heath Anthology of American Literature (and editor of volume A, Beginnings to 1800), and co-editor of The Literatures of Colonial America: An Anthology and Companion to The Literatures of Colonial America. In 2010 I won a 3 year NEH grant for The Occom Circle project, a digital edition of documents by and about Samson Occom, a Mohegan Indian activist. In 2018, I blogged weekly about the year 1862 in the creative life of Emily Dickinson at White Heat: Dickinson in 1862 and in 2019 co-edited a collection of essays in honor of the Occom Circle titled Afterlives of Indigenous Archives. In 2017, I was the executive producer for the full length documentary film, It’s Criminal: A Tail of Prison and Privilege, about the courses I co-taught through Dartmouth in jails and drug rehabs. In 2021, I collaborated on a digital pedagogical site, HomeWorks, which offers lessons from 19th women writers about the richness of staying at home. Most recently, my poems have appeared in the Passager Poetry Contest for 2022, Ritualwell, Tikkun, New Croton Review, Mississippi Review, and Spoon River Poetry Review. A collection of poems titled Within Flesh: In Conversation with Our Selves and Emily Dickinson, co-written with Al Salehi, appeared in February 2024 from Transcendent Zero Press. We are working on another co-written collection titled Dancing in Our Blood: Practicing Humility with Rumi, about the conflict in Israel and Gaza. My solo collection of poems, Tumult, Whitewash, and Stretch Marks, will be published next year by Finishing Line Press. Visit my author page at https://sites.dartmouth.edu/ivyschweitzer/.
Contact: ivy.schweitzer@dartmouth.edu
I've been part of the Department of English and American Studies of Tel Aviv University since my graduation. In addition, I am currently serving as Vice President of TAU, in charge of global engagement.
Contact: mshamir@tauex.tau.ac.il
Registered Yoga Teacher in Boca Raton, Florida
Married to Michael Freidson; mother of Maya Freidson
Contact: sskarf@brandeis.edu
I’ve had a wonderful career and a blessed life; I retired in the spring of 2022 and enjoy professor emerita status from Vanderbilt University, following appointments at Haverford College, Emory and Cornell Universities; occasional visiting appointments and more lectures at home and abroad than I can count! Still writing, still hope to write!
Contact: hortense.j.spillers@vanderbilt.edu
I always wanted to be a writer. After years of struggle I finally found my form in Jewish-themed picture books. I have five books published by Kar-Ben and one by Apples and Honey Press.
Contact: susan.tarcov@gmail.com
Retired as manager of editorial operations from Pew Charitable Trusts in 2015. Married, living in Washington, DC--in the city itself, not Annandale or Rockville.
Contact: jtyson202@gmail.com
Currently serving as vice president for administration at Colgate University.
Contact: cwells@colgate.edu
Grace is currently a PhD candidate in Film, Television, and Media at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her dissertation grew out of her MA thesis at Brandeis and is a transhistorical study of the author-function in emergent media technologies from the printing press to cinema to AI text generators.
After career years as a textbook editor, computer programmer, technical writer and trainer, and manager of technical staff, I retired to become a full-time fiber artist. It has been a winding road, but I've enjoyed it all. As I enter my 91st year, my art and my aerobics classes fill my days.
Contact: skymap@att.net
Notes on Career and Life of Steven Zemelman
Contact: stv.zemelman@comcast.net