Liberal Studies Faculty

David L. Curley (1996)
Professor
Ph.D., History
University of Chicago

Office: BH 158
360-650-6875
David.Curley@wwu.edu

Trained in history and the study of literature, David Curley’s research has focused on using Bengali literature in writing social history. Curley studies pre-colonial Bengal, a region now divided between the states of India and Bangladesh.  He has a book published in 2008, Poetry and History: Bengali Mangal-kabya and Social History in Pre-colonial Bengal. His research interests have included changing conceptions of trade and marketplaces and changing roles of merchants, changing roles of men and women in families, warrior culture and the opening and closing of warrior status to some ‘untouchable’ groups, and early intellectual and political responses to British rule. He is currently writing an intellectual history of Jaynarayan Ghoshal (1752-1821) who was the first Indian to found a school to teach English in north India. Curley’s teaching interests include South Asian history, literature and religion, methods of history in the humanities, and post-colonial novels.

Holly Folk is a cultural historian who works broadly in the areas of 19th and 20th century American religion. She is especially interested in groups that fall outside the ‘mainstream’, including new religious movements, communes and utopias, Native American religions, and Buddhism in America. Folk has presented papers on the history of chiropractic and religious utopianism. She has written many entries for The Encyclopedia of Evangelicalism, and her article on 19th century Catholic women appeared in The Encyclopedia of Women and Religion in North America. Folk is working on a book on early chiropractic and its ties to 19th century alternative medicine, and plans to continue to research how the metaphysical subculture of the Progressive Era responded to questions about science and religion. She teaches courses about religion in the United States and about the study of religion.

Andrea Gogröf (1995)
Professor
Ph.D., Comparative Literature
University of Washington

Office: BH 168   360-650-4770 Andrea.Gogrof@wwu.edu

Andrea Gogröf’s main area of interest is comparative literature and philosophy with a focus on romanticism and modernity. She is the author of Defining Modernism: Baudelaire and Nietzsche on Romanticism, Modernity, Decadence, and Richard Wagner, and has continued to publish on Baudelaire and Nietzsche as well as on the Austrian writer Peter Handke. Her current research uses an interdisciplinary approach that links sociological discourse with literature and literary theory to explore representations of hygiene.  In modern literature the topic of hygiene became a site for expressing many cultural anxieties evoked by new theoretical and practical problems of modernity. Her teaching includes courses on the relationship between Enlightenment and Romanticism, psychoanalysis and representations of otherness, critical and literary theory, literature and film.

Kimberly Lynn (2006)
Associate Professor
Ph.D., History
Johns Hopkins University

Office: BH 156         360-650-4869 Kimberly.Lynn@wwu.edu

Kimberly Lynn’s primary expertise is in the history of early modern Europe and the Spanish Americas. In both her teaching and research, she is particularly interested in the question of Empire and in the intersecting histories of ideas, religion, and culture.  She has conducted research in numerous archives in Spain and Italy, and in Mexico City. Her research focuses on some of the most infamous historical figures—Spanish inquisitors. She investigates the tension between legal theory and daily practice in the trial proceedings and published writings of these judges. She is interested in how inquisitorial careerism can illustrate the nature of empire in the early modern world. She has recently published, as Kimberly Lynn Hossain, ‘Was Adam the First Heretic? Diego de Simancas, Luis de Páramo, and the Origins of Inquisitorial Practice’, in Archive for Reformation History/Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte and ‘Unraveling the Spanish Inquisition: Inquisitorial Studies in the Twenty-first Century’ in History Compass.  Her book on the careers of Spanish inquisitors is under contract with Cambridge University Press. C.V.

Jonathan Miran is a social historian of Muslim Northeast Africa and is engaged in research projects in two broad areas. The first is the history of Islam and Muslim societies in Eritrea and Ethiopia, especially the transmission of Islamic knowledge, Islamic intellectual practice and the impact of the Sufi brotherhoods on northeastern African Muslim communities since the late 18th century.  The other subject, in great part inspired by the Annales School tradition, is the study of the Red Sea and the northwestern Indian Ocean areas as a historical space characterized by dynamic economic, social, and cultural connections and exchanges. He is the author of Red Sea Citizens: Cosmopolitan Society and Cultural Change in Massawa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009). Dr. Miran teaches classes on Islam and the Islamic world, on the history and cultural traditions of Africa, and on the Indian Ocean area.  Publications

Trained in history, philosophy, and literature, Sean Murphy is the Department’s specialist in the humanities of medieval Europe. His introductory courses explore the cultural history of the ancient world (LBRL 121) and medieval and early modern Europe (LBRL 122). At the advanced level, he teaches seminars on Dante (LBRL 302) and on the mutual influence of Jewish and Christian cultures in Europe, c. 1100-c. 1650 (LBRL 417C). His research expertise is in twelfth- and thirteenth-century cultural conflict and its place in the formation of religious identity; he has a special interest in university intellectuals and their ideas about Judaism. He has published articles in Speculum:  A Journal of Medieval Studies, the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly (Special Issue on Peter Abelard), the Journal of Medieval History, and the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Scott Pearce (1992)
Professor and Chair
Ph.D., History
Princeton University

Office: BH 152A 360-650-3897 Scott.Pearce@wwu.edu

Trained in the history of China, inner Asia, and Japan, and in Chinese thought and religion, Scott Pearce specializes in the alien dynasties that ruled northern China during the 5th and 6th centuries AD. He currently is working on a book on the “great reformer” emperor, Xiaowen (r. 471-499), who refashioned his realm from an imposition by force of arms into a state that sought to rest upon the traditions of his conquered Chinese subjects. From this work come scholarly and teaching interests in many related issues, such as the encounter and interaction of cultures, the evolution of Buddhism in medieval China, military history, and the poetry of war.

Broadly interested in the history of ideas and the interaction between religion and culture, Rob Stoops takes particular interest in the ways in which elements of a tradition, a story element, a symbol, or an image, can be taken up and given new meaning in a changed context. His area of research is comparative religion. While the development of Christianity in the first two centuries is his main topic, Stoops also studies the larger Greco-Roman world as the context within which early Christianity must be understood. He has written on Alexander the Great and the Aeneid.  His ‘related field’ in doctoral studies was art and archeology. Stoops tries to incorporate works of art and architecture along with texts in both his teaching and research.

Hester Betlem (2012) Lecturer

M.A., Human Rights Studies, Columbia University, M.A., Ph.D., Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University

Office: BH 164 360-650-7649 Hester.Betlem@wwu.edu

Hester Betlem's area of specialization is the anthropology of religion and law with a focus on South Asia. Her background combines the study of Human Rights, History, South Asian Studies, and Anthropology. Her dissertation, "When Custom is a Crime: Law, Life and the Godess in Rural South India" examines the changing contours of a rural Hindu ritual, the "Devadasi Custom."

Monique Kerman's areas of specialization include African and contemporary art history as well as feminist and postcolonial theory. Her dissertation, ‘Growing Pains: Gender and the Legacy of Black British Art’, is a comparative analysis of British artists of African, Caribbean, and Afro-Asian descent, concentrating on the period since 1980. She teaches Humanities of Africa (LBRL 276).  She has an article in press for the journal Critical Interventions, entitled "From 'Primitive' to Postmodern: Modern British Artists of African Descent."

 
Tom Moore has taught a variety of courses for the Liberal Studies department and for the Honors program. His scholarly program is divided between the analytical and the more broadly creative. He has had a chapter accepted for a forthcoming book on mimesis in which he contrasts the work of the French theorist Jean Baudrillard with that of Mircea Eliade, the historian of religions. His poem ‘Central Massachusetts Afternoon’ appeared in the journal Rock and Sling.

Errol Seaton
Lecturer
Ph.D., English and American Literature
University of California-San Diego

Office: BH 159A 360-650-3033 Errol.Seaton@wwu.edu

Errol Seaton has diverse teaching interests such as: Romanticism, British and 20th century American literature; migration in 20th century fiction; literature and society in England, 1900-1945, poetry and World War I, T.S. Eliot. He has taught several courses for the Liberal Studies Department including Western Traditions I, II, and III.

Milton Krieger (1970)
Professor Emeritus
Ph.D. University of Toronto

Milt Krieger retired from Western in 2003.  After retirement he taught in Ghana in 2004, and in the Semester at Sea around the World Program in 2006.  His latest book is Cameroon’s Social Democratic Front: Its History & Prospects as an Opposition Political Party (1990-2011), published in 2008.  He continues to work on a history of jazz in Bellingham and Whatcom County, and together with his wife Judy Krieger, on a history of the community of Loon Lake, B.C.

Rodney Payton (1970)
Professor Emeritus
M.A. Washington State University, Ph.D. University of Chicago

Rodney Payton retired from Western in 2005. He is the author of A Modern Reader’s Guide to Dante’s Inferno (1992) and together with Ulrich Mammitzsch, who also was a member of the department, he translated Johan Huizinga’s Autumn of the Middle Ages (1996), and produced a beautifully illustrated edition. Both books are still in print. After retirement Payton has been giving more time to his interests in woodworking and grandchildren.

William K.B. Stoever (1970)
Professor Emeritus
M.Div., Yale Divinity School
M.Phil., Ph.D., Yale University

William Stoever’s research interests center on Reformed Protestants in England and America, chiefly New England Puritans and Jonathan Edwards. He also is interested in history and theory in the study of religions since the Enlightenment. His book, A Faire and Easie Way to Heaven: Covenant Theology and Antinomianism in Early Massachusetts (1978) gained wide recognition for its contributions to scholarship on New England’s Puritans. Although he officially retired in 2007, he continued to teach until 2008.