Core Planning Group

The Core Planning Group comprises a diverse and inclusive range of humanities departmental faculty at both junior and senior levels; current Ph.D. candidates in several humanities disciplines; recent humanities alumni; and senior administrators within GSAS and Arts and Sciences.

Nathan Ballantyne, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University. He writes on questions concerning good inquiry and biases. From 2012 to 2016, he served as Fordham's Philosophy Placement Director and he is currently chair of a new departmental committee on non-academic placement

John Bugg, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of English and the author of Five Long Winters: The Trials of British Romanticism (Stanford UP, 2014), and ​The Joseph Johnson Letterbook (Oxford UP, 2016). His essays and reviews have appeared in PMLA, ELH, Eighteenth-Century Studies, TLS, Romanticism, The Huntington Library Quarterly, European Romantic Review, and Keats-Shelley Journal. He is co-founder, with Sarah Zimmerman, of the Fordham Romanticism Group.

Leonard Cassuto, Ph.D. is Professor of English and the author or editor of eight books on American literature and culture, most recently The Graduate School Mess: What Caused It and How We Can Fix It (2015), inspired by the monthly column, “The Graduate Adviser,” that he writes for the Chronicle of Higher Education. His Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History of American Crime Stories was nominated for the Edgar and Macavity Awards and named one of the Ten Best Books of 2008 in the crime and mystery category by The Los Angeles Times. He is also an award-winning journalist who writes on subjects ranging from science to sports, in venues from The New York Times to salon.com.

Elizabeth Cornell, Ph.D. is the Director of Communications for Fordham IT. Prior to that she was a post-doctoral fellow in English at Fordham. She is a member of the steering committees for NYC Digital Humanities and the Fordham Digital Humanities Working Group, is on the advisory board for Digital Stowe, and is a contributing editor to Digital Yoknapatawpha.

Steven D’Agustino, Ph.D. is the Director of Online Learning in the Office of the Provost. He supports the development and enhancement of distance learning at Fordham University. He has written a number of grants and published research analyzing the enhancement of teaching and learning through the integration of technology in real and virtual environments.

John Drummond, Ph.D. is the Robert Southwell, S.J. Distinguished Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy. He specializes in early phenomenology, especially that of Edmund Husserl. His research interests are in phenomenology and the philosophy of mind, including issues concerning intentionality, cognition, the emotions, value theory, and ethics.

David Hamlin, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of History and the author of Work and Play: The Production and Consumption of Toys in Germany 1870-1914 (2007). He writes on the development of consumer industries in Germany and the impact of consumer culture on Wilhemine German society, and he has recently started a project on the construction of formal and informal empires in southeast Europe, particularly Romania, from the Congress of Berlin to the collapse of the Third Reich.

Glenn Hendler, Ph.D. is Chair of the English Department, Professor of English and American Studies, and the author of Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. He is the co-editor of two editions of Keywords for American Cultural Studies with Bruce Burgett, as well as the accompanying interactive website for research and pedagogy, the Keywords Collaboratory. His most recent publications include articles on the 1863 New York City Draft Riots, and on the life and legacy of David Bowie.

Ms. Lisa Radakovich Holsberg is a Ph.D. candidate in Theology. She comes to her doctoral studies from a career in the arts as a professional soprano, composer, and music educator (www.raceforthesky.org). Her research centers on questions of creativity, freedom, evil, and suffering in theological aesthetics, anthropology, and religious philosophy; and particularly in the 20th-century thought of Simone Weil and Nikolai Berdyaev.

J. Patrick Hornbeck, II, Ph.D. is Chair and Associate Professor of Theology, as well as Co-Chair of Fordham's ongoing strategic planning process. He studies and teaches the history of Christianity, with special attention to groups and individuals who have been labeled heterodox or have been otherwise marginalized in communities of faith. He brings to the work of the Living Humanities Ph.D. program his experience as a former co-chair of the Digital Humanities Working Group at Fordham.

Matthew Keil, Ph.D. is a high school teacher in the New York City public school system where he teaches classes in Latin, Greek, and classical philosophy. He is also an adjunct professor for the City University of New York, Fordham University, and Saint John's University, teaching classes in Greek and Latin classics in translation, Roman history, and classical mythology. He recently received his doctorate in Classics from Fordham University.

Julie Kim, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of English. Her research and teaching interests include eighteenth-century British and early American literature, as well as race, science, and empire in the early Atlantic world. She has published articles and essays on Afro-Caribbean medicine, indigenous land rights and resistance, and natural history and is working on a book about the politics and practice of botany in the Age of Revolutions.

Melissa Labonte, Ph.D. is Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and Associate Professor of Political Science at Fordham University. Her research and teaching interests include the United Nations system, humanitarian politics, peacebuilding, multilateral peace operations, conflict resolution, human rights, and West African politics. She currently serves as UN Liaison for the International Studies Association; sub-Saharan Africa Advisor to Freedom House; Core Planning Committee member of the Campaign to Elect a Woman UN Secretary-General; and member of the Advisory Committee responsible for publishing the official papers of UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon.

Ms. Erin McKenna is a fifth-year Ph.D. student in Classical Philology. She holds an A.B. in Classics from Harvard University and is currently working on a dissertation examining the response to Lucretius in Roman love elegy. For the past two years, Erin has also been involved with the Paideia Institute's Aequora program, promoting active Latin pedagogy and bringing after school Latin instruction to young children in the Bronx.

Nicholas Paul, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of History and Associate Chair for Graduate Studies at Fordham University. His research and teaching concerns political culture in the central middle ages, particularly the intersection between the world of nobility and the history of the crusades. His first book, To Follow in Their Footsteps: The Crusades and Family Memory in the High Middle Ages (Ithaca, 2012) won the John Nicholas Brown prize of the Medieval Academy of America.

Sarah Peirce, Ph.D. is a classical archaeologist with special interests in Greek vase-painting iconography, Greek religion, and Greek social history. She has a book forthcoming on the "Lenaia Vases" and Bacchic cult and has published reviews and articles on Greek art and religion. She has long-standing ties to the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, Greek and has served as chair of its Committee on Admissions and as co-director of its summer session.

Ms. Dewis Shallcross is the Director of Student Development and Special Events for the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. She develops alternative career and professional development programming, working with student representatives and school administrators to provide programming that is relevant to and enriches a diverse graduate student body.

Kirsten Swinth, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of History and American Studies. She is the author of Painting Professionals: Women Artists and the Development of Modern American Art, 1870-1930 (2001) and “Having It All”: A Real Feminist History (forthcoming). Her current research interests focus on the social and cultural history of the U.S. since World War II, particularly the intersections among gender, cultural, and labor and economic history. She has interests as well in visual and popular culture, and has worked to design a "pop-up" exhibition to travel to elementary and middle schools with the Gilder Lehrman Institute.

Magda Teter, Ph.D. is Shvidler Chair in Judaic Studies and Professor of History. She specializes in early modern religious and cultural history, with emphasis on Jewish-Christian relations, the politics of religion, and transmission of culture among Jews and Christians across Europe in the early modern period. She is the author of Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland (Cambridge University Press, 2006), Sinners on Trial (Harvard University Press, 2011), and a co-editor of and contributor to Social and Cultural Boundaries in Pre-modern Poland (Littman, 2010).

James Van Wyck, Ph.D. is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the English Department at Fordham University. He speaks and writes regularly on graduate education, and has been dubbed one of the "nation’s most articulate graduate student advocates" by the editors of the ABD Survival Guide. His writing can be found in venues such as The New England Quarterly, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Inside Higher Ed.