Undergraduate Faculty

As a geographer, Becky Catarelli is interested in the countless ways we can "write" the "earth," so that knowledge production involves constructing and inhabiting worlds, a process epitomized by the Marlboro education and its self-directed Plan of Concentration. Becky graduated from Marlboro in 2004 with a Plan on changing gender boundaries in Hanoi, Vietnam, after which she returned to Vietnam to work in conservation for several years. She parlayed this experience into a master's in nature, society, and environmental policy at Oxford University, followed by a doctorate in geography and the environment. Her dissertation work focuses on the Florida Keys, and explores the multiple futures emerging as the low-lying archipelago is confronted with the dual threat of rapidly rising seas and the increasing potential for destruction by a catastrophic hurricane. This work is used in resonance with Becky’s experience during Hurricane Irene, which devastated Vermont in 2011, as well as the persistent interruption brought about by having two children while completing her research, events that draw out the erratic, non-linear temporalities of climate change itself. Becky has a particularly eclectic and interdisciplinary approach to research and writing, employing poetic and photographic methods and drawing heavily on personal experiences to foreground the ways climatic events inhabit the pre-personal, affective dimensions of our worlds, a practice she cultivated in the beautiful hills of Marlboro.

Filmmaker Jay Craven launched the Catamount Arts performing arts program, northern New England’s largest independent arts producer and presenter. Jay creates award-winning films on modest budgets, combining the talents of a regular ensemble with well-known actors like Michael J. Fox, Rip Torn, Ernie Hudson, Treat Williams, Martin Sheen, Kris Kristofferson and Genevieve Bujold. Jay’s awards include the Producers’ Guild of America’s 1995 NOVA Award for most promising new theatrical motion picture producer. His films, such as A Stranger in the Kingdom (1998), The Year that Trembled (2002) and Disappearances (2006), have played at more than 40 festivals, including Sundance. Jay says he likes working with "imaginative students who are ready to try new things and want to get to work."

“A liberal arts education teaches a student how to think critically,” says Marcus, a lens-based artist whose work is concerned with science and exploration in relation to the history of photography. “As such, I operate the classroom as a laboratory where failures can be just as important as successes. Education should not be about the end result, as the process of how we get there is just as important.” Marcus is a graduate of Marlboro College (class of 2010), and received his MFA in studio art from the University of South Florida in 2015. He has teaching experience from the University of South Florida and New College of Florida. Marcus often assumes the role of the amateur scientist in his work in order to investigate photography's historic relationship with science in regards to the notion of the invisible. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at Art Basel Miami, The Center for Fine Art Photography, The Light Factory, Rayko Photo Center of San Francisco, The Center for Photography at Woodstock, and various other galleries and museums, and has also been featured in a variety of publications from Smithsonian Magazine to Wired.

A scholar with diverse and eclectic theatrical interests, Brenda Foley is as happy teaching Jacobean tragedy as she is rehearsing Tennessee Williams or Sarah Kane, or searching for the correspondences between female characters in 18th-century plays and the rhetoric of masking so prevalent onstage in that period. “Studying and practicing theater,” says Brenda, “gives us an extraordinarily visceral opportunity to experience human behavior from a perspective other than our own.” She has worked at a number of Equity theaters herself, including The Roundabout, La Jolla Playhouse, GeVa, Studio Arena, StageWest, the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Florida Stage (where she won the 1994 Carbonell Award for Best Actress in Keely and Du) and Vienna’s English theater.

In addition to having a doctorate in history, with a dissertation on the new sexual morality in the early middle ages, Clare Gillis spent four years as a journalist in the Middle East. “I began foreign reporting in Bethlehem in 2010, and went on to Egypt, Libya, Syria, Mali, Turkey, and Iraq,” says Clare. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The American Scholar, Foreign Policy, USA Today, and other magazines and newspapers in the U.S. and abroad. In 2014 she also worked as a researcher for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, reporting on the harsh ordeals of women refugees of the Syrian war. With interests ranging from Roman and medieval societies to the Arab Spring, and a knowledge of Marlboro’s intellectual community from visiting her sister Eleanor Gillis ’02, Clare brings a unique perspective to the classroom.

Richard Glejzer came to Marlboro after teaching at North Central College in Illinois and College of Idaho. "I have always admired Marlboro's approach to teaching and service, where students work closely with faculty to develop their own academic path and where students, faculty, and staff work together in a shared community," he says. Richard is especially excited to be working in an environment where he can continue to work across traditional disciplinary divides, and even teach yoga.

“I am fascinated by the algebraic structures on elliptic curves, especially elliptic curves defined over fields of finite characteristics,” says Ziyue “Zoey” Guo, Marlboro’s mathematics fellow for the 2015-2016 academic year. Zoey completed her doctorate in mathematics in 2015, at Northwestern University, with a dissertation on Abelian graphs. “In particular, I look at the behavior in the Perron-Frobenius eigenvalues when a finite graph is expanded by adjoining two-valent trees,” she says. Zoey has experience teaching math at Northwestern, where she is also webmaster for the Women in Mathematics organization and organizes reading seminars on elliptic curves. She also enjoys playing the piano and viola, and rock climbing.

Born in Saudi Arabia and raised in Egypt by scholarly parents, as a young man Ahmed Hassanein gained an uncommon appreciation for intellectual and religious diversity. “The diverse titles of the books in my father’s library have underlined the moral lesson of accepting and respecting the differences among all people.” With a bachelor’s degree in English from Ain Shams University, and a teaching certification from the College of Teachers, London, Ahmed has taught English at secondary schools in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. He is looking forward to the opportunity of this Fulbright fellowship to teach his native Arabic, and to share with students his wealth of knowledge of Arabic culture, literature, and art. “I believe that my participation will not only allow me to be introduced to different cultures, but it will also help me work toward increasing my knowledge of my own country, which will be apparent in my attempts to clarify the Egyptian image in the minds of many."

When he left his home in Islamabad, Pakistan, Amer Latif hoped to find some answers to his many questions about the universe in science. But by the time he graduated with a degree in physics from Bard College, Amer knew that the answers to his questions—and often the questions themselves—transcended science. His liberal arts education had allowed other questions to surface: "questions of beauty and meaning," he says. He found himself driven by a desire to know the deeper significance of things in addition to the measurement of them. "The first place I found that did not shy away from these questions was in the writings of Rumi," says Amer.

“As an artist—a potter, painter, and performance artist—my work is a reflection of the diversity of my life experiences,” says Roberto Lugo, who teaches ceramics. Roberto’s life as an artist began in the streets of Philadelphia, where he grew up painting graffiti on abandoned buildings, and has taken him as far as painting porcelain china in Hungary. He still calls himself a “ghetto potter,” reflecting on his inner-city origins, but he equates ghetto with the word “resourceful.” “I juxtapose porcelain with graffiti in the hopes that we can start to see how different cultural histories can work together.”

“I strongly believe in the importance of teaching students to think critically, not only about academic subjects but also about their lives,” says Frédérique Marty, a French language and francophone literature fellow. A native speaker of French with experience teaching in higher education in the U.S., Frédérique is well versed in different methodologies to help students acquire competency in a foreign language. Most recently she taught French language and culture at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and before that she was a visiting lecturer at the University of Idaho, Moscow. “From my teaching evaluations, it is clear that I am a dynamic teacher who cares about students and also has high expectations of them,” says Frédérique. In addition to her teaching, she is a dedicated researcher in her field and has been active in presenting and publishing her work. Her doctoral dissertation is an annotated edition of the Pelerin de Lorete (1604), a voluminous tome by the Jesuit Louis Richeome highlighting some of the religious feuds raging in Europe in the 17th century. “Despite having been a ‘best-seller’ during its time and translated into several languages, there is no critical edition of the work to date,” she says. She is currently working on publishing her edition, which would be the first publication of the work since 1628. She recently presented at the Renaissance Society of America and has published her work widely.

With almost two decades of experience as a professional director, Jean O’Hara’s practice and theoretical work is informed by her desire to address marginalized voices. She has directed everything from professional theater to community performances, from Dell’ Arte International School of Physical Theatre student productions to Inuit performances at the Alianait Festival, Nanavut. In every venue she has pursued performances that critically examine cultural diversity, gender, and sexuality. She has also founded and directed three ensemble-based theater troupes that address issues of social justice. “I see theater and storytelling as an important way to connect, build community, and create a much-needed space for the variant voices in and outside the college to be heard.”

An artist well versed in diverse media, from painting and drawing to printmaking and experimental works, Cathy Osman taught at Smith, Mount Holyoke, and Hampshire Colleges before coming to Marlboro. Her perspective on the visual arts, as both a creative and a problem-solving process, ties in well with Marlboro's approach to liberal studies. "One learns to balance success with experimentation, and work through the discomfort of not knowing," says Cathy. "This unknowing, as mysterious as it sounds, is critical to the defining elements of art. One must have patience and curiosity for this course of action, which yields not only a tangible object but also skills for engaging in complex thinking and connection to the outside world."

A biologist with a passion for rare plant conservation, Jenny Ramstetter graduated from Marlboro College herself. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts, with a dissertation on the dynamics of pollination and fertilization in two wild plant species, and did postdoctoral research on rare plants in France. Jenny recognizes that biology is only one of many pieces to the conservation ‘puzzle.’ "One of the most exciting things about being at Marlboro is that it offers so many opportunities to integrate biology with policy issues and cultural considerations," says Jenny, who has team-taught a course in Conservation Biology with economics professor Jim Tober.

Felicity Ratté teaches across the discipline of art history from antiquity to modern times and from New York to Istanbul. Although specializing in 13th and 14th century Italian painting and architecture, over the course of her time at Marlboro she has developed an interest in Southeast Asian art and architecture, Islamic Art and Architecture of the Mediterranean world and contemporary public art all over. Felicity is continuously striving to make her art history offerings globally inclusive. "I have begun to think of my discipline in a much more cross-disciplinary way," she says. She served as dean of faculty and graduate education from 2005 to 2010 and director of world studies from 2003 to 2005.

The infectious enthusiasm of politics professor Lynette Rummel builds on her valuable field experience in international, comparative, and area studies. She came to Marlboro following a three-year stint as a Fulbright-Hays lecturer in Tunisia, where she and her husband (also a Fulbright scholar) taught political science. Lynette earned her doctorate in political science from U.C.L.A., taught at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and served as a visiting fellow at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, working on an African drought research project.

With a wealth of ethnographic experience and a focus on multidisciplinary theorizations of social and cultural processes, Nelli Sargsyan brings sociocultural anthropology into the 21st century for Marlboro students. “My research explorations, as also echoed in my teaching, are theoretically informed by feminist cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, queer studies, and diaspora studies,” says Nelli. She has taught in culturally diverse college settings, from State University of New York at Albany to Yerevan State Linguistic University, in Armenia, and welcomes the opportunity to collaborate with colleagues and students pursuing a variety of geographical, topical, and methodological interests, including international ethnographic research.

"Writing is absolutely necessary if you want to know something,” says John Sheehy, who came to Marlboro after teaching composition and literature at University of Washington. He explains that writing is an essential part of the learning process because it forces people to organize and present their thoughts with a discipline, something people don’t always do when they are simply reading or talking about what they’ve read. John's literature seminars cover everything from Faulkner to Emerson, Toni Morrison, Norman MacLean and Cormac McCarthy.

With a doctoral degree in both zoology and ecology, evolutionary biology and behavior, Jaime Tanner has spent much of her academic career studying spotted hyenas in Kenya's Masai Mara Game Reserve. In addition to her field research in Kenya, Jaime taught a study-abroad program on the behavioral ecology of African mammals. She also received the College of Natural Science Excellence-In-Teaching Award at Michigan State University.

Tom Toleno has broad interests in psychology, from the history and theory of the science to educational, developmental and clinical psychology. His long-standing interest in perception is based on his graduate work at Cornell University under the tutelage of the late James J. Gibson. Tom believes the study of psychology is especially useful for liberal arts students, because it places so much emphasis on "the individual process," which students can apply to their own lives. "Psychology is distinguished from other fields by its emphasis on a person's individual experience in understanding phenomena."

John Willis teaches photography to students who find interesting ways to combine fine arts photography with academic work. John’s teaching credits include the Boston Museum School, the Zone VI workshops, and Harvard University. He also co-founded In-sight, a Brattleboro-based project that uses photography as a medium for reaching out to local young people.