The Johnston Center for Integrative Studies

 Contributors’ Biographies for Disgrace:

Nancy Best (Johnston 1981) is a Lecturer in English at California State University, San Bernardino. She earned her MFA in creative writing from San Diego State.  An accomplished diver and underwater photographer, she is completing a novel about deep sea diving.

James Boobar (Johnston 2002) graduated from the Stonecoast Writing Program at the University of Southern Maine.  He is a visiting alumni faculty member at the Johnston Center.  For the last eight years, he has led a “seminar in the streets” on the life and writings of Fyodor Dostoevsky for the internationally recognized Summer Literary Seminar in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Bradley Butterfield (Johnston 1986) is an associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse.  He has published essays on twentieth-century critical theory and fiction.

Jane Creighton (Johnston 1973) is a poet, writer, and Associate Professor of English at the University of Houston—Downtown, where she also serves as the Director of the Cultural Enrichment Center. Her work has been published in such journals as Ploughshares, The American Voice, and Gulf Coast, as well as in the anthologies We Begin Here: Poems for Palestine and Lebanon (Interlink Books); Still Seeking an Attitude: Critical Reflections on the Work of June Jordan (Lexington Books); Unwinding the Vietnam War (Real Comet Press); and Close to the Bone: Memoirs of Hurt, Rage, and Desire (Grove Press). In 2006/2007, she held a Fulbright Fellowship at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland.

Matt Gray (Johnston 2005) is Civic Engagement Programs Manager at Johnson & Wales University, Denver Campus. His pedagogy focuses on integrating issues of social justice, personal authenticity, and sustainable living. He was recognized as a young leader in his field when he and his colleague won a National Case Study Competition in 2007. He is currently working on a collaborative collection of poetry and wine ink drawings with his brother, Daniel Gray (Johnston 2001).

Patrick Harrigan (Johnston 1994) is a Minneapolis-based writer and editor. He has worked on new media projects with Improv Technologies, Weatherwood Company, and Wrecking Ball Productions, and as Marketing Director and Creative Developer for Fantasy Flight Games. He is the co-editor of The Art of H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos (2006, with Brian Wood), and the MIT Press volumes Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives (2009), Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media (2007), and First Person: New Media as Story, Performance and Game (2004), all with Noah Wardrip-Fruin (Johnston 1994). He has also written a novel, Lost Clusters (2005).

Gary Hawkins (Johnston 1991) is a poet, essayist, and teacher. His work—poems, criticism, and pedagogy—collects around his concerns of beauty, identity, and democracy, and it has appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Emily Dickinson Journal, American Book Review, and the forthcoming Teaching Creative Writing in Higher Education (Palgrave Macmillan). Collaborator on artefact, a re-current letterpress anthology of poetry and beauty, he lives in Black Mountain, North Carolina and directs the Undergraduate Writing Program at Warren Wilson College.

Rabbi Patricia Karlin-Neumann (Johnston 1976) is the Senior Associate Dean for Religious Life at Stanford University.  She was ordained at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in 1982.  She teaches and lectures widely on the relationship between religion and education, student well-being, rabbinical ethics, Jewish feminism, and social justice. She works on campus with profound gratitude for those at Johnston who lavished blessings upon her as an undergraduate and helped her to imagine vistas beyond what she had previously known.

Daniel Kiefer has taught at the University of Redlands since 1991, in the Department of English and the Johnston Center.  He offers a wide range of courses in Romantic poetry, Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, critical reading and theory, and queer culture.  He also directs the university’s Proudian Interdisciplinary Honors Program. Before coming to Redlands he taught Romantic and Victorian poetry at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, after taking his doctoral degree at Yale in 1985.  He has written on W. B. Yeats and on Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, and he’s working on a book about Walt Whitman and the figural body, called Whitman's Darkest Leaves.

Bill McDonald is a Faculty Fellow Emeritus of the Johnston Center and a Professor of English and the Virginia C. Hunsaker Chair of Distinguished Teaching Emeritus of the University of Redlands (1969-2005).  He has co-authored two volumes on the Johnston Center (1989, 2004) and published a book on Thomas Mann (1999).  His other academic fields include international modernism, literary theory, ancient Greece, pedagogy, and interdisciplinary studies in the humanities. 

Michael McDunnah (Johnston 1991), an independent scholar, has been a nonprofit fundraising and communications professional for ten years, and currently serves as the Communications Director for Project Vote, a national organization working on voting-rights and election administration issues. He lives in Washington, DC.

Kim Middleton (Johnston 1994) is an Associate Professor of English and an affiliated faculty member in the American Studies Program at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York.  Her classes and previous publications concern the connections between popular culture and contemporary literature. 

Raymond Obstfeld (Johnston 1972) teaches creative writing at Orange Coast College.  He is the author of over forty books, including poetry (The Cat with Half a Face), novels (The Joker and the Thief), and non-fiction (On  the Shoulders of Giants with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar).  He has also co-authored, with his wife Loretta, books on the Italian Renaissance, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Moby Dick. He has been nominated for an Edgar award and has a new novel in print: Anatomy Lesson (2007).

Kathy Ogren is the Virginia C. Hunsaker Chair of Distinguished Teaching at The University of Redlands, where she teaches in the Johnston Center as well as the History and Women’s Studies Departments.  Her scholarly interests include Jazz Studies and the history of cowboy poetry and music.  She is the author of The Jazz Revolution:  Twenties America and the Meaning of Jazz (Oxford, 1989), as well as essays, articles and book reviews in her field.

Kevin O'Neill is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Redlands and a founding faculty member of the Johnston Center. He has co-written a history of the Johnston program (with Bill McDonald) and has presented and published papers on representations of death, Greek philosophy, and interdisciplinary teaching and learning. He is currently working on a project involving representations of death in the work of J. M. Coetzee.

Kenneth Reinhard (Johnston 1976-78) is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA. His fields of research and teaching include the History of Critical and Aesthetic Theory, Contemporary Critical Theory (Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, Political Theory), and Jewish Studies. He is the author, with Slavoj Zizek and Eric Santner, of The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (U of Chicago P, 2005)  and with Julia Reinhard Lupton, of After Oedipus: Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis (Cornell UP, 1993).  Currently he is writing a book on the ethics of the neighbor in religion (Torah, Talmud, and Patristic writings), philosophy (Kant, Kierkegaard, Adorno, Rosenzweig, and Levinas), and psychoanalysis (Freud and Lacan) for Princeton University Press.

Sandra D. Shattuck (Johnston 1977) is a Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. An intrepid blogger, her research interests include the use of technology in writing pedagogy and reading/writing connections, as well as multicultural and international young adult literature.

Patricia Casey Sutcliffe (Johnston 1990)is an editor for the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC. Her graduate work in Germanic Studies at the University of Texas at Austin focused on the history of linguistics, particularly in Germany in the nineteenth century. She held visiting assistant professorships at Colgate University and Montclair State University, and she continues to pursue research on nineteenth-century language scholars. Since 2000, she has published articles on Wilhelm von Humboldt, Friedrich Max Müller, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, Benjamin Lee Whorf, and William Dwight Whitney among others, as well as several short biographies for the Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (2nd ed., 2006) and Lexicon Grammaticorum (2nd ed., 2007).

Julie Townsend is an Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities in the Johnston Center at the University of Redlands. Her book The Choreography of Modernism: La Danseuse, 1830-1930 will come out in the fall of 2009. Recent articles include “Staking Salomé: the Literary Forefathers and Choreographic Daughters of Wilde’s ‘hysterical and perverted creature’” in Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture:The Making of a Legend and “Synaesthetics: Symbolism, Dance, and the Failure of Metaphor,” which appeared in the Yale Journal of Criticism in April 2005. At the Johnston Center, she teaches seminars in literature, aesthetics, dance theory, and French conversation.