Ciaran Buckley

Robin Perlah

Biography

Robin Perlah currently serves as Chair of the Creative Studio (home to Champlain’s creative art and design majors), Program Director for the graphic design (BFA) and interaction design (BS) majors, and is an Associate Professor in the Division of Communications and Creative Media at Champlain College.

In her time at Champlain, Perlah also served as the Academic Director for the Emergent Media Center, where she helped shape the creative vision for the campus-based interactive media studio. Additionally, Robin served as Assistant Dean for the CCM division, interim Program Director for creative media (BFA), and Program Director for the master’s programs in emergent media (MS and MFA). She has taught a wide range of courses in the areas of interaction design, photography, graphic design, and media theory, serving both undergraduate and graduate students. Currently, Robin teaches undergraduate courses in design history as well as photography, image-making, and visual design.

Perlah’s current art practice is based on a persistent interest in the photographic image, both still and moving, as it is transformed by digitality. Her work deals with the ambiguity of memory, the intersection between image capture (both analog and digital) and the methods of processing and presenting images, and how generative art and data mutations can reveal layers of complexity.

Before working at Champlain College, Robin was the co-chair of the Design & Creative Media program at the Center for Technology, Essex, and ran several community art programs to support young people through art-mentoring relationships and other activities. Prior to that, she had a long career as an art teacher and, professional photographer and photo editor, specializing in commercial, portrait, and event photography as well as fine-art printing.

Robin is a site evaluator for the National Association of Schools of Art and Design (NASAD), is part of the volunteer board for PechaKucha Night (PKN) Burlington, and recently rejoined the board of trustees for the Vermont Arts Council as board secretary after finishing her last term as Vice-Chair in 2019. Additionally, she serves as the co-director for the Technology & Design Institute at Governor’s Institutes of Vermont. Robin earned a master of fine arts in emergent media from Champlain College, a bachelor of science in art education from the University of Vermont, and studied commercial and fine art photography at the New England School of Photography.

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Jonathan Banfill

Biography

Dr. Jonathan Banfill is an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies in the Core Division at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont, where he also directs the Global Studies Minor and the Freeman Foundation Asia Grant. Jonathan’s academic background is in Comparative and International Education, where he holds a PhD from UCLA’s School of Education and Information Studies. He also holds an MA in Comparative International Politics from American University in Washington, D.C. and a BA in Comparative History from University of Washington, Seattle.

Jonathan’s research and pedagogical practice is engaged in creating interdisciplinary interconnections between new trends in the humanities, social research on global and urban issues, and creative practices from art and design, via place-based and experiential education. He has a long-term interest in thinking about these issues specifically within the context of a transnational Asia-Pacific, but is expanding in more directions since relocating to Vermont. At Champlain, this means creating courses and pedagogical spaces that can combine students’ professional knowledge with a humanistic perspective that can address future changes and global challenges. Jonathan has lived, worked, and taught in places as diverse as Los Angeles, Beijing, Belfast, Pyongyang, Mexico City, Shanghai, Cape Town, and Tokyo.

Jonathan is a graduate of the UCLA Urban Humanities Initiative, an interdisciplinary research and training program funded by the Mellon Foundation that brings together humanities scholars, architects, and urban planners to study 21st century issues in cities in the Asia Pacific. He also served as a research and teaching fellow for the program and at cityLAB, an urban research think tank in the UCLA department of Architecture and Urban Design. More recently Jonathan is a co-founder of the Urban Humanities Network, which is supporting a new generation of Urban Humanities scholars and practitioners around the world.

At Champlain, Jonathan is Primary Investigator for a Champlain College subaward grant that is part of a larger Vermont EPSCoR proposal organized by The Vermont Complex Systems Center at the University of Vermont. This project, called The Study of Online, Collective Knowledge, and Stories (SOCKS), examines social narratives using Big Data and computational tools. Champlain College’s project focuses on the way that the soundscape has changed in Vermont and how Vermonters have talked about those changes over the last 150 years. Jonathan is a contributing faculty member for a National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Advancement (DHAG) grant that will be used to build infrastructure and contribute to faculty’s professional development for Digital Humanities tools. Finally he is a contributing faculty member to an ongoing multi-media research project funded by the Council of Independent Colleges Humanities Research for the Public Good grant that is investigating the history of Urban Renewal in the city of Burlington.

Jonathan is presently helping develop the new major in Digital Humanities at Champlain that will start in fall 2024.

Publications & Abstracts

Urban Humanities Pedagogy (2016) 

Favorite Quote

“If a scholar stays only in one place, then he or she will know no more than one song, their mind poor and pathetic. He ought to travel widely, observe how people live and how things work, understand customs and cultures across regions, learn of mountains, waters, and meteorology (cosmology), in order to extend their knowhow. This is how scholars are benefited from their experiences.”

—Hu Yuan (993-1059), Northern Song Dynasty Educator speaking about what we would now call interdisciplinary education. I am a descendent of Hu and try to put his ideas into practice in my teaching. Original Chinese quote translated by Dr. Weiling Deng.

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Charles Bashaw

Biography

Charles “Chuck” Bashaw received a BA in Comparative Literature from Hampshire College in Amherst, MA, an MA in History from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and a Joint PhD in History and History of Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His scholarly interests all center on questions about how we know things and how much confidence we can have in what we think we know.

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Kelly Bowen

Biography

Kelly A. Bowen is currently an Adjunct Professor in the Core Division. Before Champlain College, Kelly worked in global trade assisting companies to identify opportunities and expand in emerging markets. As an International Trade Director for The Massachusetts Port Authority, she also led delegations of American manufacturers on Gubernatorial Trade Missions. Kelly managed offices in Jerusalem, Berlin, Derry, and Warsaw.

Time abroad fostered a love of the arts. Switching to the right brain, Kelly left business to pursue creative writing. She earned an M.F.A. at Goddard College.

Kelly champions experiential learning within an interdisciplinary framework. Her passion is empowering students (or clients) to uncover personal strengths and recognize their potential:

“Only after examining the self can we place ourselves in the context of a wider world. Critical thinkers evolve through this self-examination and encouragement.”

A Pushcart Prize-nominated writer, her work has been featured in Creative Nonfiction Magazine, The Huffington Post, Healthy Women, The Fiction Advocate, Vermont Digger, USA Today, and others. Her recent poem Dress Code was published in the Military Review Poetry Reader: Global War on Terrorism, 2001-2021 Anthology. Her essay Mystic Trinities received a notable mention in the 2022 edition of Best American Essays.

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Cyndi Brandenburg

Biography

Dr. Brandenburg is a trained neuroscientist who began teaching traditional lab science courses at Champlain College in 1999. With the initiation of Champlain’s Interdisciplinary Core in 2007, she shifted roles and started teaching an array of integrated and inquiry-based courses that are arguably quite different from her more traditional academic roots. As a result, she became particularly interested in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in general, and Interdisciplinarity and Integration in particular, with an eye towards fusing such seemingly disparate fields as the Sciences and the Humanities. She is a strong advocate for the importance of scientific literacy to society, and believes that the phrase “scientific literacy” needs to be understood in far more culturally nuanced and contextually meaningful ways than it typically has been in the past. Her current career focus includes how to make science skills more applicable and accessible to a broad range of students through hands-on, interdisciplinary, and inclusive pedagogies and curricular innovation. Most recently, she helped co-design a new degree program offered by the Degree Design Lab that is interdisciplinary, customizable, and predicated on experiential and project-based learning, and she is currently collaborating on the development of more innovative science-focused degree options for Champlain.

Distinctions & Awards

Edward Phelps Lyman Professorship Award

Publications & Abstracts

• Integration as the New (General Education)
• Scientific Literacy Redefined

Curriculum Vitae

READ MY CV

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Kristian Brevik

Biography

Kristian Brevik is an artist, scientist, and educator, who works to bring together artistic practice, ecology+evolutionary science, and the environmental humanities into collaborative research and art exploring the ways the lives of humans and other beings are entangled. They research relationships between humans and insects using genetics and computational biology, teach science, art and the humanities in academic and community classes, write on the theory and practice of building kinship with other species, and create artwork in the form of large interactive installations, collaborative performance, and short zines on relationships between humans and others in the community of life. They seek to find ways that art and life can help to foster a sense of deep connectedness with the nonhuman kin with whom we share the world. Their large, participatory art installations are rooted in the places and ecologies they represent.

Publications & Abstracts

PUBLICATIONS & ABSTRACTS

Recommended Reading, Listening & Viewing

• BCA Artist Studio Tour: Kristian Brevik
• @kbrevil_whalefall on Instagram

Curriculum Vitae

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Favorite Quote

Malheur Maar: A hole in black ground. Steep cliff walls round. A ring of tall green reeds under the walls around the water. Some small people sit here and there silently on the cliffs among rabbitbrush and sagebrush. Some small people silently climb up my pants leg. In the round water are the reeds and the walls and some of the people and the wind moving and the silence.

—Ursula K. LeGuin

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Ariel Burgess

Biography

Ariel K. McKnight Burgess’ interests revolve around how we foster relationships between humans and the more-than-human world that are rooted in care, justice, and mutual responsibility. Through her research on the psychological, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of the climate and ecological crises, Ariel aims to nurture transformational change. With a specialty in climate and ecological psychology, recently she has been thinking a lot about eco-empathy, ecological mourning, and resilience.

At Champlain, Ariel teaches interdisciplinary ecologically-oriented courses where she explores with her students how topics like science, justice, policy, history, art, economics, social change, worldviews, and ethics are interwoven.

Outside of Champlain, Ariel facilitates eco-grief and eco-empathy workshops, and hosts monthly Eco-Resiliency Gatherings, which are always free and open to all who are interested. Ariel is earning a doctorate in ecopsychology with a specialization in climate response and resilience. She holds a bachelor’s in environmental studies and studio art, and a master’s in international environmental policy.

Publications & Abstracts

Burgess, A. K. McK. expected 2023. “Eco Empathy.” In Ecological Feelings: A Rhetorical Compendium, edited by Joshua Barnett. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.

Favorite Quote

“The way out is in.”

—Thich Nhat Hanh

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Veruska Cantelli

Biography

Veruska Cantelli received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Before joining the Core Division at Champlain College, she was an Assistant Professor at the Center for Global Communication Strategies at the University of Tokyo. Veruska is a writer, a translator, and a scholar with a focus on Transnational Feminist Studies and Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies. Among her works are the two volumes Mediterranean: Migrant Crossings (UpSet Press, 2018) and Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War (Zubaan Books in 2023). As a Senior Editor for Warscapes Magazine she curated several retrospectives with particular attention to decoloniality, migration, and food and activism. She studied modern and contemporary dance at the Mary Anthony Dance Studio and the Trisha Brown Dance Studio in New York and has performed with the Human Kinetics Movement Arts. She is serious about Lazio, the soccer team that brought football to the city of Rome in 1900.

Publications & Abstracts

BOOKS AND BOOK CHAPTERS
2023 (Forthcoming) Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War. Zubaan Books (Co-editor)

2021 – Lettere Rivoluzionarie. Diane di Prima, Le Lettere, Translator and Editor

2020 – “Resistant Recipes: Food, Gender and Translation in Migrant and Refugee, Narratives” in The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism. Eds. Rebecca Ruth Gould and Kayvan Tahmasebian, Routledge, (Co-writer)

2018 – Mediterranean, Warscapes and UpSet Press, (Co-editor)

2011 – In Danger, San Francisco: City Lights Books. Ed. Jack Hirschman Translator of literary essays by Pier Paolo Pasolini

ARTICLES
2020 – “The Dance of Bones: Tomioka Taeko’s Stage of Reprobates”Otherness: Essays and Studies, Centre for Studies in Otherness, Aarhus University

2017 – “The Maternal Lineage: Orality and Language in Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Sayings” Journal of International Women’s Studies, Volume 18, Issue 1

2016 – “Student-Centered Teaching: Writing Through Passion” Komaba Journal of English Education, Volume 7, University of Tokyo, co-author

2015 – “The New Paladins of the Humanities: A Warning” Warscapes, June 28th

2015 – “The Bundle on my Back” in Warscapes an in-depth conversation with writer Cristina Ali Farah. January 2015

2013 – Editor and Translator of “Narrating Absences, Narrating History” on the photographs of desaparecidos by Argentinian artist Gustavo Germano, Warscapes, August 2013

2013 – Curator of the Retrospective Food on hierarchy of taste and consumption of “otherness,” Warscapes, June 2013

2013 – Curator of the Retrospective Visas on migration, surveillance and militarization of space, Warscapes, March 2013

2013 – “Eye on Honduras” a conversation with historian Dana Frank on the human rights crisis after the coup, Warscapes, January 2013

2012 – Curator of the Retrospective Uncertain Borders on the work of Gloria Anzaldùa, Warscapes, October 2012.

2012 – “Gloria Anzaldúa’s Poetics of Borders” Warscapes, October 2012 issue

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Weiling Deng

Biography

Dr. Weiling Deng is Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Champlain College. She currently serves as the Core Division’s Third Year Faculty Lead and helps developing the new curriculum of Digital Humanities. Weiling received her Ph.D. in Social Sciences and Comparative Education from UCLA. Her research and teaching interests span a wide spectrum of interdisciplinary fields, which include Global Asias, Urban Humanities, comparative and international education, human geography, gender and feminist studies, technology and race, postcolonial theory, and postsocialist studies. Weiling emphasizes place- and project-based experiential learning and promotes transnational thinking of Vermont primarily through immigration, diaspora, border, and urban space.

Weiling is currently working on two book projects. The first book, co-authored with Dr. Jonathan Banfill of Champlain College, Los Angeles-based artists Sara Velas and Ruby Carlson, focuses on panorama museum as a critical form of public humanities and art. It challenges the Euro-American convention of panorama production by way of incorporating 20th-century Soviet and Chinese techniques of visual historiography and grounding museum-making in feral DIY Los Angeles art scenes and landscaping. This book releases the study of panorama from its traditional field of art and media history to embrace critical, grassroots, and community-oriented creation of alternative art space in a postcolonial Californian metropolis.

Weiling’s second book develops from her dissertation to examine the creation, transportation, and readjustment of feminist and gender empirical knowledge, with a special focus on transpacific and digitally mediated Chinese feminist and queer activism. It questions the eclipse of race in contemporary Chinese feminist and queer narratives by the binary state-activist approach and maps these narratives between postcolonial and postsocialist feminist works. This book maps the place-based tension instigated by the trans-lingual, transnational, and transmedial practice of the concept of “gender” onto the post-Cold War geopolitics of liberal academic knowledge production.

Weiling’s work has been published on South Asian Review, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Panoramic and Immersive Media Studies, Los Angeles Review of Books, and academic anthologies including Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues: Intersections, Opacities, Challenges in Feminist Theorizing and Practice.

Publications & Abstracts

• “Death and Life in the Bordersand: On the Queer Remembrance of Partition through Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand,” South Asian Review 45, no. 1-2 (August 29, 2023): 66–76.
• “Grappling with the ‘China Crisis’: Positionality, Impasse, and Potential Breakthrough of Chinese Feminist Diaspora in Post-Cold War North America.” In Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues: Intersections, Opacities, Challenges in Feminist Theorizing and Practice, edited by Redi Koobak, Madina Tlostanova, Suruchi Thapar-Björkert (Routledge, 2021).
• “The Chinese Restaurant on Main Street, USA: On Zai Liang’s From Chinatown to Every Town,” Los Angeles Review of Books (September 23, 2023).

Recommended Reading, Listening & Viewing

• Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents, Durham: Duke University Press, 2015
• Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, London: Picador, 2020
• Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, New York: PublicAffairs Books, 2019

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Erik Esckilsen

Biography

Erik Esckilsen came to Champlain College from the publishing industry, where he worked as a writer and editor. Today he teaches writing-intensive courses in a range of subjects, emphasizing art and digital culture, and remains active as an essayist, fiction writer, journalist, and scholar.

Curriculum Vitae

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David Gilbert

Biography

David Gilbert has been living in Montreal off and on since 2006. He studied history at Concordia University at the undergraduate and graduate level with a focus on popular music and society. He worked as a vinyl record and music researcher and appraiser for one of the biggest independent record stores in Canada and as a museum curator/exhibitor in Saskatchewan.

David has been writing and recording music since he was fifteen and has toured across Canada and the United States many times. He also writes a music blog and is currently writing a book on the rise of spirituality and vegetarianism in New York punk rock and hip hop in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Aside from music, David is an avid trail and ultrarunner and is a brand ambassador for Inherit the Earth running apparel.

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Jeffrey Haig

Biography

Jeff Haig was born in the United States, but grew up in England. He attended Manchester University and Yale. He worked in radio, advertising, television and movie production before becoming a teacher. He specializes in courses on semiotics, art and censorship.

Curriculum Vitae

READ MY CV

Favorite Quote

“Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.”

—Neil Postman

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Miriam Horne

Biography

With a PhD from the Faculty of Education at McGill University in Composition and Rhetoric, Miriam has been teaching in the Core Division at Champlain College since 2008. She is a full professor and the Assistant Dean for Adjunct Support in the Core Division. As a professor, Miriam has taught a range of classes from introductory rhetoric, to service-learning travel courses in Nicaragua, to partnering on a senior capstone in criminal justice. Her teaching philosophy aligns writing with ways of learning in interdisciplinary settings and she encourages students to push their thinking in new directions through hands on learning (such as baking bread) and non-traditional course content (like the rhetoric of recipes). In her research, Miriam prioritizes the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) in areas ranging from civic discourse to collective writing practices, and, most recently the intersections between weaving and pedagogy. Her work has been published in The International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, College Teaching, and Writing in Knowledge Societies. As an assistant dean, Miriam is privileged to work with adjunct faculty and support their teaching in the interdisciplinary liberal arts program known as the Core.

Publications & Abstracts

• Writing in the Knowledge Society
• Writing in a Community of Practice
• Reading in a New Age
• Promoting a Deliberative and Active Citizenry

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Amy Howe

Biography

Amy Howe has been an interdisciplinary educator for 20+ years. Her experience includes designing and teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in gender studies, general education, critical theory, American studies, and the study of religion at Harvard, Brown, Middlebury, Smith, and now at Champlain College. Before her graduate studies and teaching career, she held a nonprofit career managing California- and nationally-based youth-led community organizing projects for underrepresented communities. In 2019, she earned her doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in the study of religion (religion, gender, culture). She also serves as the Academic Director of Women, Gender, and Representation for Smith’s summer Precollege Programs.

Over the last five years at Champlain, Amy Howe has taught widely across the Core Division. Her leadership in innovative curricula and classroom design and leadership, student support, and involvement in diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice issues earned her the Francine Page Teaching Excellence in 2021. Centered on experiential learning techniques, she regularly engages students in community partnerships in rural humanities, digital humanities, and racial and gender social justice issues.

Amy Howe not only remains incredibly proud of being the first in her family to pursue higher education, but she is also a relentless advocate for students who navigate first-generation lives. In her free time, Howe loves spending time with her two dogs, growing house plants (too many these days), crafting, exploring new outdoor spaces, and enjoying circus arts.

Favorite Quote

“The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which one is being educated.”

—James Baldwin

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Erik Kaarla

Biography

Erik Kaarla has been a lifelong educator who started from doing professional writing within a nonfiction context in the Boston area to becoming a writing educator with a special emphasis on rhetoric and composition and business communication. Erik has also remained an avid music and tennis educator. He has provided writing and research instruction at a number of New England colleges including the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, Pine Manor College, Mass Bay Community College, Burlington College, Saint Michael’s College, Community College of Vermont and here at Champlain College. Erik considers himself to be a constructivist teacher placing a persistent emphasis on the compilation and exploration of new knowledge within the classroom. He is also licensed in English 7-12 in Vermont and in all states that support reciprocity in high school credentialing.

Erik’s research interests include the study of practices and methodologies that lead to success in the writing process. He is also active in applying cutting edge music theory applications within classrooms that involve exploration and movement through music curricula.

Erik is a native Finnish speaker and he has also performed translation work and given language lessons for extensive periods of time. He continues to offer instruction in bass and guitar applications.

Favorite Quote

Wherever you go, there you are.

~ Thomas à Kempis, a precursor appeared in a spiritual work composed by Kempis in the 1400s. This comical saying was circulating by 1955 when it was attributed to Jim Russell within a student publication at Pennsylvania State University in Hazleton, Pennsylvania.

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