Faculty Biographies

Faculty Biographies

Janis Barry, Associate Professor of Economics. B.A., Old Dominion; M.A., Ph.D., New School.

Susan A. Beck, Associate Professor of Political Science and Adviser of Pre-Law Program. B.A., Pennsylvania; M.A., Ph.D., Columbia.

Doron Ben-Atar is Professor of History at Fordham College at Lincoln Center. He is the author of The Origins of Jeffersonian Commercial Policy and Diplomacy (MacMillan/St. Martin, 1993), Trade Secrets: Intellectual Piracy and the Origins of American Industrial Power (Yale University Press, 2004), and Federalists Reconsidered together with Barbara B. Oberg (University Press of Virginia, 1998). The book he co-authored with his mother, Roma Nutkeweicz Ben-Atar, about her holocaust experience, The Death and Rebirth of Zosha Samosha, will be published by the Holocaust Museum Press in 2005. Professor Ben-Atar is working on a book about turn of the nineteenth century Litchfield and is also the director of the web project "Crossroads of Revolution to Cradle of Refore: Litchfield Connecticut 1751-1833."

Susan Berger, Associate Professor of Political Science. B.A., University of Michigan; Ph.D., Columbia University. She is the former co-director of Women's Studies at Fordham University's College at Lincoln Center. She is the author of Political and Agrarian Development in Guatemala (1992) and Guatemaltecas: The Women's Movement 1986-2003 (2006).

Arnaldo Cruz-Malave, Associate Professor of Spanish, B.A., Yale; Ph.D., Stanford.

Nicole Fermon, Professor of Political Science. B.A., Hawaii; M.A., Ph.D., Columbia. She is the author of The Political Education of Sentiment: Rousseau's Teaching on Women and the State and co-editor of Princeton's Readings in Political Thought. She is on the executive board of Women's Studies at Fordham.

Elisabeth Frost is an Associate Proffessor of English and the Director of Poets Out Loud at Fordham University. She is the author of The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry (Iowa, 2003). She has held grants from the Rockefeller Foundation-Bellagio Center, the MacDowell Colony for the Arts, Blue Mountain Center, and other foundations. Her poetry appears in numerous periodicals, and her essays, reviews, and interviews in the fields of contemporary poetry and women's writing have appeared in such journals as Contemporary Literature, Genders, How2, and Postmodern Culture. In 2004-05, she will hold a residential fellowship at the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute, where she will be working on a book called In Another Tongue: Image, Text, and the Body in Contemporary Feminist Visual Art and Poetry.

Anne Hoffman, Professor of English and Comparative Literature. B.A., Cornell; M.A., Ph.D., Columbia.

Gwenyth Jackaway, Associate Professor of Communication and Media Studies, B.A., Columbia; M.A., Ph.D., Pennsylvania.

Margaret A. Lamb, Associate Professor of English. B.A., Vassar; M.A., Ph.D., New York University.

Fawzia Mustafa, Associate Chair, English Department and Associate Professor of English, comparative literature and African and African American Studies. B.A. and M.A., Kinnaird (Pakistan); M.A., Ph.D., Indiana. She is the author of V.S. Naipaul (Cambridge University Press, 1995) and is the Co-Director of Women's Studies at Fordham University, Lincoln Center.

Margot Nadien, Associate Professor of Psychology. B.A., CUNY (Hunter); Ph.D., CUNY (Graduate Center).

Astrid O'Brien, Associate Professor of Philosophy. B.A., Mount St. Vincent; M.A., Marquette; Ph.D., Fordham.

Clara E. Rodriguez is a Professor of Sociology at Fordham University's College at Lincoln Center. She is the author of nine books including: Heroes, Lovers and Others (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2004), Changing Race: Latinos, the Census and the History of Ethnicity in the United States (New York University Press, 2000), Hispanics in the Labor Force: Issues and Policies, with Meléndez, E. and Barry Figueroa, J. (Eds.) (NY: Plenum Press, 1991), Puerto Ricans: Born in the USA (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991), and Latin Looks: Images of Latinas and Latinos in U.S. Media (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997). She is the recipient of numerous research and teaching awards, most recently, the American Sociological Association’s 2001 Award for Distinguished Contributions to Research in the Field of Latina/o Studies and her University’s Award for Distinguished Teaching in the Social Sciences in 2003. She has been a Visiting Professor at Columbia University, MIT, and Yale University. She has also been a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation and a Senior Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. Previously, she was the Dean of Fordham University's College of Liberal Studies. She has written over 50 articles on Latinos in the United States and is currently at work on an update of the classic Coser, Kadushin and Powell text, Books: The Culture and Commerce of Publishing, which will be published by Stanford University Press.

Kirsten Swinth is Associate Professor of History and Magis Distinguished Professor of History (2005-2008), B.A. Stanford University, 1986; Ph.D. Yale University, 1995. She is currently at work on a cultural history of the working mother in the United States since 1950. This study provides a much-needed history to make sense of recent so-called mommy wars. Bringing Home the Bacon and Frying it Up Too: A Cultural History of the Working Mother in the United States, 1950-2000 offers a fresh approach to this topic by showing how working mothers have been a lightning rod for deeper transformations in American culture and society. Also forthcoming are entries on “9 to 5, National Association of Working Women” and “Take Our Daughters to Work Day” in the Women’s History Encyclopedia. Additional current scholarship builds on her previous study of the American art world, Painting Professionals: American Women Artists and the Development of Modern American Art, 1870-1930 (2001). “Anna Richards Brewster Among Her Peers,” in Anna Richards Brewster, American Impressionist (2008), is part of the catalogue accompanying a traveling exhibition of Brewster’s work. Another forthcoming piece examines women artists from 1900 to 1960 and will be part of an upcoming exhibition on American women’s art groups. Swinth is the recipient of numerous awards, including a recent awards from the American Council of Learned Societies (2007), the Arthur & Elizabeth Schlesinger Library (2008), and the Sophia Smith Collection (2008) for Bringing Home the Bacon . She is the past winner of a John Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship in Art and the Humanities and a Fulbright Fellowship to Mozambique. Other awards in her career include the Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities and a Truman Scholarship. She has spoken about her work on local radio stations, including WFUV and WNYC. Swinth is also past director of the American Studies Program.

Eva E. Sandis, Professor Emerita of Sociology. B.A., Oberlin; M.A., Ph.D., Columbia.

Cynthia Vich (Associate Professor of Spanish and Literary Studies). Prof. Vich completed her B.A. in Linguistics and Literature at the Catholic University in Lima, Peru. She then obtained her Ph.D. in Latin American Literature at Stanford University, specializing on the Latin American vanguards of the 1920's and 30's. She first taught at Mount Holyoke College and then came to Fordham where she teaches in the Modern Languages and Literatures Department and in the Latin American and Latino Studies, Women's Studies, and Literary Studies programs. Her book, Indigenismo de vanguardia en el Perú, is a study of the crossroads between avant garde culture and the esthetics and politics of indigenismo as seen in the Peruvian journal Boletín Titikaka. Prof. Vich has also published several articles on contemporary Peruvian literature and culture, focusing on issues of Andean identity, modernization, urbanization and gender politics. Her work has concentrated on authors such as Eleodoro Vargas Vicuña, Edgardo Rivera Martínez, Carlos Oquendo de Amat, Sebastián Salazar Bondy and Blanca Varela.

Irma Watkins-Owens, Associate Professor of African and African American Studies. B.A., Tougalou; M.A., Atlanta; Ph.D., Michigan. She is the author of Blood Relations: Caribbean Immigrants and the Harlem Community, 1900-1930 (Indiana University Press, 1996) and is on the executive board of Women's Studies at Fordham University.