Co-Principal Investigator Biographies
Robert J. Beck is visiting professor of education at Lawrence
University. Beck earned his A.B. in Social Sciences from the University
of Chicago, where he also received both the M.A. and Ph.D. from the
Committee on Human Development. He is also currently professor emeritus
of education at the California Institute for Telecommunications and
Information Technology, University of California, Irvine, studying the
effects of online professional development for math teachers on
students' algebra skills. Beck researched educational discussions at UCI
where he also taught research methods and evaluation of educational
programs in the doctoral program in education. In 2007 Beck received a
grant from the Spencer Foundation to study factors contributing to
productive discussions of great works in the Freshman Studies program at
Lawrence University. He is the co-author of Home Rules: Culture,
Environment and the American Family, The Johns Hopkins University Press.
E-mail: robert.beck@lawrence.edu
Bill Skinner is Director of Research Administration at Lawrence
University. Skinner earned his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of
Iowa. As a faculty member at the University of Kentucky since 1984, he
served as professor and chair of the Department of Sociology before
coming to Lawrence in 2005. Co-editor of AIDS and the Social Sciences:
Common Threads and numerous scholarly articles, he received grants from
the National Institute of Drug Abuse, the Office of Juvenile Justice and
Delinquency Prevention, and the National Institute on Child Health and
Human Development. While at Lawrence Skinner has participated in a
number of grants, including being the principal investigator on a Teagle
Foundation grant to evaluate the Lawrence Fellows Program, a research
associate on a grant from the Associated Colleges of the Midwest to
determine the beliefs of students, faculty, and alumni from ACM schools
about liberal education and a Spencer Foundation grant to study
diversity, active discussion pedagogies, and educational benefits for
undergraduates in classroom and electronic discussions.
E-mail: william.f.skinner@lawrence.edu
Faculty Biographies
Nancy M. Grace is a professor of English and former director of the
Program in Writing at The College of Wooster, where she has been a
member of the faculty since 1987. She specializes in 19th- and 20th-century
American literature, 20th-century British literature, women's studies,
and rhetoric and composition.Grace received her B.A. from Otterbein
College and her M.A. and Ph.D. from The Ohio State University. An
authority on Beat literature, James Joyce, and gender, Grace is the
author of The Feminized Male Character in Twentieth-Century Literature,
co-editor of Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation,
and co-author of Breaking the Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading
Beat Women Writers. Her most recent book is Jack Kerouac and the
Literary Imagination. Grace is a member of the Modern Language
Association, the International James Joyce Society, and a founding
member of the Beat Studies Association.
E-mail: [click to reveal e-mail address]
Joseph Macfarland is a tutor at St. John's College in Annapolis, MD. An
alumnus of St. John's, he was a Fulbright Scholar in Bologna, Italy
(1993-94), and earned a Ph.D. with the Committee on Social Thought at
the University of Chicago (1996). His research has been in medieval and
early modern political thought. After adjunct teaching in the Common
Core at the University of Chicago, he returned to St. John's as a tutor
in 1998.
E-mail: [click to reveal e-mail address]
Rob Neilson is Associate Professor of Art at Lawrence University.
Neilson trained at the College for Creative Studies and earned a Master
of Fine Arts degree from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
He works with a variety of materials in composing sculpture and public
art. In addition to his many gallery exhibitions and installations,
Neilson has received public art commissions from the City of Los
Angeles, the Los Angeles Metro Transit Authority, the Arts & Science
Council of Charlotte, North Carolina and St. Elizabeth's Hospital in
Appleton, among others. One such commission, awarded by the City of Long
Beach Transit Authority is a steel sculpture of a figurative male
stepping onto a bus while holding an armload of books. The sculpture is
permanently installed at the public transportation station in front of
the Mark Twain branch of the Long Beach Public Library.
E-mail: rob.neilson@lawrence.edu
Christopher Nugent is an assistant professor of Chinese in the
Department of Asian Studies at Williams College where he teaches both
Chinese language and literature. His research focuses on the literary
culture of the Tang dynasty, with a special emphasis on the production
and circulation of poetry.
E-mail: [click to reveal e-mail address]
Ron Peck is an Assistant Professor of Biology at Lawrence University. He
completed the Ph.D. and a Post-doctoral fellowship at UW-Madison. Ron's
research focuses on an 'extreme-loving' microbe, Halobacterium
salinarum, that lives in exceptionally salty conditions such as Utah's
Great Salt Lake and Israel's Dead Sea. Students in his laboratory use
molecular biological and biochemical techniques to study how
Halobacterium thrives in this harsh environment. Ron has long had an
interest in assessing student learning and using that assessment to
improve learning outcomes. During his post-doctoral research at
UW-Madison, Ron participated in the NSF-funded Delta Program in
Research, Teaching and Learning that uses a teaching-as-research
approach to improve teaching in the STEM disciplines. After training in
the program, Ron was part of a group of researchers that studied if
physical models of molecules aided in the understanding of molecular
structure-function relationships in an introductory biology class. The
results of this study are being published in the journal Cell Biology
Education.
E-mail: ron.f.peck@lawrence.edu
Pamela Pierce is a Professor of Mathematics at The College of Wooster,
where she has taught for the past fifteen years. She holds a BA from
Amherst College, an M.Ed. from the University of Massachusetts, and an
MS and PhD in Mathematics from Syracuse University. At Wooster, she
recently served a term as Associate Dean for the Class of 2009. Her
research focuses on functions of generalized bounded variation, and she
is also interested in the undergraduate teaching and learning of
mathematics. During the last few summers she has advised groups of
students on undergraduate research projects—some in pure mathematics and
others in applied math projects for local businesses. This year her
senior I.S. (Independent Study) students are working on DNA topology,
the Calculus of Variations, Models for Insulin Growth, and a Mathematics
Learning Style Inventory.
E-mail: [click to reveal e-mail address]
Jerald Podair is Professor of History, the Robert S. French
Professor of American Studies, and chair of the history department at
Lawrence University, where he has taught since 1998. He specializes in
twentieth-century United States history, with research interests in the
areas of urban history and race relations. He is a native of New York
City and a former practicing attorney. He received his B.A. from New
York University, a law degree from Columbia University Law School, and a
Ph.D. in American history from Princeton University. At Lawrence, he
teaches introductory courses in 19th and 20th century United States
history and American studies, and upper- level courses on the Civil War;
the 1920s, Great Depression, and New Deal; the 1960s; and American race
relations. He also teaches the history department's capstone course,
"The Practice of History," where he supervises senior history majors on
research projects that have resulted in papers presented at conferences
and symposia, including Lawrence's annual Richard A. Harrison Symposium
for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
E-mail: jerald.podair@lawrence.edu
Stefanie Solum, Associate Professor of Art at Williams College, specializes in Italian Renaissance Art. She received the M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, and joined the Williams College faculty in 2001. Solum's courses, grounded in contextual and historiographic issues, range from geographically-based surveys of the period to specialized courses on such topics as the domestic visual culture of the Italian Renaissance, and Michelangelo and the myth of the Renaissance artist. She also teaches courses in Women's and Gender Studies and serves on the Advisory Committee for that program. Solum's recent work, which focuses on the issue of women's patronage and power in fifteenth-century Florence, has been supported by the Fulbright Program and the American Council of Learned Societies and published in the Art Bulletin. Her recently-completed book manuscript, Saving the Medici: Lucrezia Tornabuoni and the Unworldly Power of Patronage, provides a new model for understanding women's contributions to the visual arts in Renaissance Florence, based on contemplative spirituality. Solum's most recent project is a study of the intersection between Christian piety and innovation in the visual arts in Renaissance Italy.
E-mail: [click to reveal e-mail address]
