faculty profiles

The faculty who teach in the All-College Honors Program are talented teachers and accomplished scholars. Several have been honored as "Professor of the Year" at Canisius. Occasionally, teaching assignments change, thus introducing or returning faculty to Honors.

Bruce Dierenfield, PhD -- Director
Bruce J. Dierenfield, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of St. Olaf College, holds a PhD in American history from the University of Virginia. Since 1986, he has been professor of history at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York, where he specializes in 20th century American politics, society, and law and directs the All-College Honors Program. For six years, he was a Peter Canisius Distinguished Teaching Professor, and coordinated the college's program in the African American Experience. In 2004, he received the college’s Martin Luther King, Jr. award for fostering human rights. Dierenfield has also taught at the University of Helsinki (Finland), at Nanjing University (China), and, as a senior Fulbright scholar, at the Universities of Cologne and Bonn (Germany). He is the author or coauthor of four books, including The Federal Role and Activities in Energy Research and Development, 1946-1980: An Historical Summary (1983), Keeper of the Rules: Congressman Howard W. Smith of Virginia (1987), The Civil Rights Movement (2004), and The Battle over School Prayer: How Engel v. Vitale Changed America (2007). This last book received the Langum Prize in American Legal History and an Alpha Sigma Nu book prize for professional studies. His next books are on African-American Leadership and the Minnesota Civil Liberties Union.

Books:

To read more about him, click here (Adobe Acrobat .PDF) for his Curriculum Vitae.

Other faculty who teach Honors courses:
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M. Fernanda Astiz, PhD
Associate Professor, Adolescence Education

M. Fernanda Astiz, PhD received her MA and Ph.D degrees in Educational Theory and Policy and Comparative and International Education (with a comparative politics focus) from the Pennsylvania State University. She also holds a Political Science degree from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Dr. Astiz has published numerous research articles and book chapters both in English and Spanish on education governance; citizenship and democratic education; and minority acculturation, national identity formation, and schooling. She is currently working on a book on comparative education policy research. Her scholarly production has been translated to several languages. Dr. Astiz is active at national and international conferences and serves on the academic board of prestigious research journals. Throughout her academic career, Dr. Astiz has been recipient of numerous research scholarships and awards. Her co-authored 2002 article entitled “Slouching towards Decentralization. Consequences of Globalization for Curricular Control in National Education Systems” continues to be among the most cited articles of Comparative Education Review.
 
Tom Banchich, PhD
Professor, Classics and History

Tom Banchich, PhD, has a joint appointment in the departments of Classics and History and is chairman of our Classics Department. He holds BA and MA degrees in history from Bowling Green State University and a PhD in Classics from the State University of New York at Buffalo.  The subjects of Banchich’s publications include Greek and Roman intellectual history and historiography, Alexander the Great, Late Antiquity, Byzantium, and the history of classical scholarship. His commentaries on Book I of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and the Pinax of Cebes are part of the Bryn Mawr Commentaries series. He has edited, translated, and produced commentaries on numerous fragmentary historians for Brill’s New Jacoby, is the author of the standard English translations of the Epitome de Caesaribus, the Breviarium of Festus, and About Rivers and Mountains and the Things Found in Them, a work sometimes attributed to Plutarch. He is a co-founder of the scholarly website De Imperatoribus Romanis
and established the series Canisius College Translated Texts, for which Canisius students produce or collaborate in the production of previously un-translated Greek and Latin authors. In 2009, Banchich was the recipient of the Canisius College Faculty Scholarship Award for his book The History of Zonaras: From Alexander Severus to the Death of Theodosius the Great.

 
Terrence Bisson, PhD
professor, Mathematics and Statistics

Terrence Bisson, PhD found out about number theory in the Arnold Ross summer programs at Ohio State University during high school.  He went on to undergraduate work at the University of Chicago, and there he learned category theory, a framework for modern mathematics, from Saunders Mac Lane.

His graduate work was in algebraic topology at Duke University, where he received his PhD in 1977. He spent the next three years teaching and learning in Sydney, Australia.

He moved to Buffalo in 1980, where he taught one semester at SUNY-Buffalo before joining the mathematics department at Canisius College. Since then he has continued his research interests in applications of category theory in topology, algebra, and combinatorics, with research sabbaticals in Australia, Wales, Toronto, and Cornell U. These educational travels were shared with his biologist wife, Mary Aldwin Bisson  (SUNY-Buffalo); they met over calculus homework at Chicago. For six recent summers he has been co-director of a National Science Foundation Research Experience at Canisius.
 
boger George Boger, PhD
professor, Philosophy

George Boger, PhD received his graduate training at SUNY Buffalo and is chair of the Philosophy department at Canisius. He specializes in ancient philosophy (esp. Aristotle), Marxism, and the history of logic. He has often taught an Honors seminar on "The Philosophy of Human Rights."
   
Robert Butler, PhD
professor, English

Robert Butler, PhD, who directed the Honors Program for 21 years, received his doctorate from the University of Notre Dame. His teaching interests include modern American literature, especially realism and naturalism, African-American literature and culture, 19th-century Russian literature, and such authors as Mark Twain, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Theodore Dresier, James T. Farrell, and Toni Morrison. Butler is the author or coauthor of seven books. He is a past recipient of the Kenneth L. Koessler Distinguished Faculty Award.

   
 
Jane Cary
professor, Music

Jane Cary has served on the faculty since 1983. A native of Allentown, PA, Cary holds a bachelor of music degree from Syracuse University and a master of music degree from the Eastman School of Music. She took graduate courses in music education at the University of Buffalo where she also studied harpsichord with David Fuller.

Performing extensively throughout Western New York, she has been harpsichord soloist with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Maximiano Valdes and Arie Lipsky, the Niagara Falls Philharmonic and the Ars Nova Musicians Chamber Orchestra. In addition, she performs with chamber ensembles and has presented many solo recitals.

Cary is administrative director of the ArtsCanisius series at Canisius and director of the fine arts department music program. Also active in local music organizations, she has served on the boards of the Greater Buffalo Youth Orchestra, the Buffalo Alumnae Chapter of Sigma Alpha Iota International Music Fraternity and the Chromatic Club of WNY.
 
Mick Cochrane, PhD
professor, English
Lowery writer-in-residence

Mick Cochrane, PhD is a native of St. Paul, MN, and a graduate of the University of St. Thomas. He earned his PhD in English literature from the University of Minnesota, and since 1985 has been a member of the Canisius College English Department. His interests include eighteenth-century literature, biography, contemporary fiction, and creative writing. Cochrane compiled Boswell’s Literary Art: An Annotated Bibliography, and has published critical essays in Biography, Eighteenth-Century Life, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Aethlon, and The Dayton Review. Cochrane is the author of two novels, Flesh Wounds (Nan Talese/Doubleday, Penguin paperback), which was named a finalist in Barnes and Noble’s Discover Great New Writers Competition in 1997, and Sport (St. Martin’s Press, Univ. of Minnesota Press paperback). His short stories and essays have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Kansas Quarterly, Northwest Review, and Scoring From Second: Baseball from Life. With the support of a Peter Canisius Distinguished Teaching Professorship, he established and still coordinates the Canisius Contemporary Writers Series.

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Cookson Sandra Cookson, PhD
professor, English

Sandra Cookson, PhD received her PhD in English from The University of Connecticut. Cookson has taught freshman English and Modern and Contemporary Poetry seminars in the All-College Honors program. She teaches regularly in the English department’s creative writing minor, and she offers the Advanced Creative Writing Poetry Seminar in that program, as well as American Women Poets: Reading and Writing. She also teaches a range of British poetry, from medieval to modern, including a seminar in the English Romantic poets. Cookson also teaches women’s literature and film courses as well as freshman seminars in English. She has published critical essays on twentieth-century American poets in the MasterPlots Series (Salem Press). Her essay on the poetry of Louise Bogan, the subject of her dissertation research, was published in Critical Essays on Louise Bogan, edited by Martha Collins. Her essay on Handel’s musical settings of Milton’s L’Allegro and Il Penseroso appeared in The Milton Quarterly. Her own poetry has been published in a number of literary journals, including Common Ground, (Springfield, MA), July Literary (Buffalo, NY), Out of Line (Trenton, OH), and Rhino (Evanston, IL).
  
Jack D’Amico, PhD
professor, English

Jack D'Amico, PhD has an interest in the arts which came from his family, particularly music and literature, and from his undergraduate studies at the University of Buffalo. Before settling in at Canisius, he taught at a number of institutions from Berkeley to Beirut. His areas of research and publication have been English Renaissance theater, Shakespeare, Italian Renaissance theater and Machiavelli. For relaxation, he swims, walks, plays the piano, cooks, and travels, more or less in that order.

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René de la Pedraja, PhD
professor, History

René De la Pedraja, PhD has been at Canisius College since 1989. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1977. Throughout his life he has been passionately concerned with Latin America and its many problems. He has spent over two decades living in Latin America, primarily in Colombia and Cuba. Although his research requires considerable travel, he always looks forward to visiting many interesting places in Europe, Latin America, and the United States. He is particularly fond of large cities with their culture and rich history. He loves to explore the vast collections of famous museums. Whether traveling or at home, he appreciates architecture and likes to visit historic houses. Hollywood has been very effective in diminishing his earlier interest in movies.

Reading books and old documents remains his favorite pursuit. He is a prolific writer who has published nine books and many articles. Students in his Revolutions in Latin America course will read many chapters of his most recent book, Wars of Latin America, 1899–1941.

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betsy dellebovi Betsy Dellebovi, PhD
associate professor, Linguistics

Betsy DelleBovi, PhD is an associate professor in the School of Education & Human Services. Her training is in Composition Instruction and American Literature. Ancillary training includes various areas of education including English Education and the history of American education. DelleBovi is a former director of Canisius’ Tutoring Center where much of her research is derived. Her interests include The Beatles, barns, and golden retrievers, as well as the aging processes of tennis players.
 
Desiderio Jennifer Desiderio, PhD
assistant professor, English

Jennifer Desiderio, PhD grew up in Rochester. She received her B.A. in English and History from Marquette University and her Ph.D. in English from Ohio State University. She enjoys cooking, gardening, and reading contemporary fiction.

Her major teaching area is early American literature to 1900. Some of her interests include sentimental and sensational literature, American Romanticism, authorship in America, women's literature, epistolarity, and the novel in 18th- and 19th-century America. She especially enjoys Herman Melville, Charles Brockden Brown, Hannah Webster Foster, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
 
Devereux David Devereux, PhD
associate professor, History

David Devereux, PhD is originally from London, Ontario. He earned degrees in Canada and his PhD in Britain at the University of London. He teaches a range of courses in the History Department including Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Canada. He does research on the relationship between the end of empire and the Cold War.
 
Richard Falkenstein, PhD
assistant professor, Music

Richard Falkenstein, PhD is a scholar of the lute music of the Italian Renaissance. He received a doctoral degree in musicology from the University at Buffalo, where he studied as a Woodburn Fellow. His current publications include introductions to editions of music by Francesco da Milano and Vincenzo Galilei (Editions Minkoff, Geneca) and a monograph on Perino Fiorentino (Journal of the Lute Society of America). For two decades he has performed on lute and guitar in the Buffalo area as a soloist and in chamber ensembles, most notably with the Buffalo Guitar Quartet (BGQ). While a member of the BGQ, Falkenstein made concert tours throughout the United States as well as in Poland, Russia and South America. He has also recorded with the BGQ for Centaur and New World Records. During the 1990s, he and the members of the BGQ were Artists-in-Residence at Canisius College.
 
forest Michael Forest, PhD
associate professor, Philosophy

Michael Forest, PhD is a native of Detroit and graduated from fellow Jesuit institutions: the University of Detroit and Marquette University. His scholarly interests are in theories of knowledge and cognition especially relating to the American philosophical tradition.  In 2007, he received a Fulbright scholar award to teach at Xiamen University in Fujian province of China.
 
Peter Galie, PhD
professor, Political Science

Peter Galie, PhD received his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh in 1970. He has published numerous articles in the area of state constitutional law, two books entitled The New York State Constitution: A Reference Guide (Greenwood Press, 1991) and Ordered Liberty: A Constitutional History of New York (Fordham U. Press, 1996).

He has participated in three NEH seminars on ancient, biblical and medieval law, respectively. In addition, he has directed an ABA Foundation-supported seminar on “Constitutional Government” in 1978 and an NEH seminar for high school teachers on “The Federalist and the Constitution” in 1987. He is the recipient of a John R. Oishei Foundation Three Year Teaching Professorship, “Rewriting the New York State Constitution,” 1999-2002.  Galie is a past recipient of the Kenneth L. Koessler Distinguished Faculty Award.

He is currently working on a collection of bills of rights before the Bill of Rights.

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Julie Gibert, PhD
associate professor, History

Julie Gibert, PhD received her AB at Davidson College and her M.A. and PhD at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She joined the history department in 1990, and is currently chair of the department.

Gibert’s research interests center on the social history of Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She has published articles and delivered conference papers on a variety of topics including the admission of women to British universities, the effect of the “servant crisis” on British home life. Her current project is an analysis of the depiction of British history in reality-television programs such as 1900 House and 1940s House.

In the All-College Honors program Gibert has taught “Problems in European History” at the sophomore level, and upper-level seminars on “War and Society in 17th Century England” (with Timothy Wadkins), “The British Monarchy,” and on the evolution of British national identity as it is expressed in politics and in popular culture. She has also enjoyed supervising a wide variety of honors theses on topics in British and Irish history.

As an enthusiastic cook, Gibert hopes someday to offer an Honors course on the history of food.
 
Kevin Hardwick, PhD
associate professor, Political Science

Kevin R. Hardwick, PhD joined the Department of Political Science at Canisius College in the fall of 1989. His involvement in politics and the policy process dates back to his senior year in high school when he was elected to a seat on the Susquehanna Valley Board of Education in the Binghamton area. After serving his three-year term on the school board, Hardwick was elected councilman in the Town of Binghamton, New York; a post he held for eight years. In 1986 he was appointed Administrative Assistant to the Majority Leader of the New York State Senate, Warren M. Anderson. He served in this capacity until Senator Anderson's retirement in December of 1988.

Hardwick received his Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Binghamton. His research interests include state legislative politics and the politics of municipal service distribution. In addition to teaching introductory American government courses, he also teaches courses in public policy, public administration, state & local government, the presidency, American Catholics in the Public Square and urban politics. He is a former chair of the Political Science Department and currently serves as the Director of the Urban Studies Program.

Hardwick was a member of the City of Tonawanda Charter Review Commission and was elected First Ward Councilmember in the City of Tonawanda in 1995. He was re-elected to this post twice. After hosting the popular Sunday morning radio program "Hardline with Hardwick," he was elected to the Erie County Legislature in 2009. His unique blend of formal training and practical political experience contributes to lively discussions in all of his classes.
 
Rev. Dan Jamros, S.J., M.A.
associate professor, Religious Studies & Theology

Born in Massachusetts, Rev. Dan Jamros, S.J. majored in English at Holy Cross, and pursued his interest in English literature with an M.A. from Boston College.

After three years as a lay missionary helping New England Jesuits at Al-Hikma University in Baghdad, he joined the Jesuits in 1967. He then obtained an M.A. in Philosophy from Boston College before going to Lebanon for two years of Arabic study, followed by seminary studies in France.

Ordained a priest in 1976, Jamros went to Vanderbilt University in Nashville for his PhD in Theology, where he wrote a dissertation on “Religion in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.”

He has taught theology at Canisius College since 1985, with a special interest in the Christian doctrine of God as it intersects with modern thought. During that time, he has continued to research and write about Hegel’s philosophy of religion. He has also been active in the Canisius College Faculty Senate. When on sabbatical, he goes to Germany to pursue his research on Hegel. During summers he does pastoral work at parishes in Massachusetts and Nashville.

A loyal and avid Red Sox fan since his boyhood, Jamros supports his team in good times and bad. For enjoyment, when he is not reading about the Sox, he likes to see a good film.

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larry jones Larry Jones, PhD
professor, History

Born and raised in the Kansas heartland, Larry Eugene Jones, PhD received his BA and MA from the University of Kansas and his PhD from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

He has taught in the Department of History at Canisius College since 1968 and was department chairman from 1995 to 2002. He is currently director of the International Relations Program at Canisius. Jones has published seven books, including his magnum opus German Liberalism and the Dissolution of the Weimar Party System, 1918-1933, which received the 1989 prize of the German Studies Association for the best book in the field of history and political science. Jones has held a two-year Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Bonn in Germany as well a grant from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for two years of study at the University of the Ruhr in Bochum, West Germany. He has also received research fellowships from the American Council of Society, the National Humanities Center, the German Marshall Fund, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars as well as a number of smaller grants from the German Academic Exchange Service, the American Philosophical Society, and the Canisius College Summer Faculty Fellowship Program. Jones is a past recipient of the Kenneth L. Koessler Distinguished Faculty Award.

Jones is currently working on a book-length monograph tentatively entitled "Conservatives, Nationalists, and Nazis: A History of the German Right from 1918 to 1934."

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Kelly John Kelly, PhD
professor, Philosophy

John Kelly, PhD has been a member of the philosophy faculty at Canisius since 1966. A native of Buffalo, Kelly graduated from St. Joseph Collegiate Institute and received his undergraduate education at the University of Toronto. He earned his advanced degrees in the School of Philosophy, the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.

Kelly’s major academic interest is in metaphysics and ethics. His publications have focused on ancient Greek philosophy, the philosophy of medicine, and social political philosophy, with special emphasis on modern catholic social thought. He has presented numerous papers in the United States and at many international conferences in England at both the University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford.

In his courses in the philosophy of medicine and medical ethics, Kelly’s goal is to demonstrate to students that ethical analysis must play an integral role in the education and practice of the contemporary physician. To this end he has served on the Ethics Board at the Buffalo General Hospital for over twenty-five years.

Kelly has sought to show his students that being a Canisius student means being the beneficiary of a “double inheritance” – the intellectual tradition of Catholic social thought and the Jesuit humanistic tradition. He incorporates this through his teaching on Catholic social thought, demonstrating that philosophy must play an important role in providing a “human face” to the science of economics.

Besides the classics, Kelly enjoys the poetry of the contemporary Irish poet Seamus Heaney and historical biography. He enjoys traveling, sailing, cross country skiing and walking the beaches of the Delaware seashore in all seasons.
 
Edward Kisailus Edward Kisailus, PhD
professor, Biology

Edward C. Kisailus, PhD received his PhD from Columbia University, he began his career at Canisius in 1981. He is an accomplished sailor, and can be seen sailing a 27 foot Coronado on Lake Erie. True to his height at six foot four inches the boat is appropriately named “Tall Order”. He is a sailing instructor at Seven Seas Sailing School in Buffalo.
 
Rebecca Krawiec, PhD
associate professor, Religious Studies & Theology

Rebecca Krawiec, PhD grew up in eastern Pennsylvania, attended college at Brown University, and got her graduate degrees at Yale University. She arrived at Canisius College in 2000 and has offered a variety of courses including New Testament, Western Religious Traditions, History of Christian Community I, and a class on women and religion. Her research focuses on the early history of Christianity, especially the role of women in monasticism.

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Lee Christopher Lee, PhD
associate professor, Religious Studies & Theology

Christopher Lee, PhD earned his doctoral degree at Syracuse University. His areas of expertise include anthropology of religion, religion in South Asia, Islam and Hinduism. He is the recipient of a Fulbright-Hays fellowship to study how the Urdu language mushaira (poetry recital) impacts globalization and transnational processes on two South Asian Muslim communities. Click here to learn more.
 
Larry Lichtenstein, PhD
associate professor, Economics & Finance

Received the Donald E. Calvert Outstanding Professor Award in 1998. Much of his research involves the housing market. He has presented papers on such topics as rent control and housing cost estimates for members of the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association, and articles that he has written or co-authored have appeared in such publications as the Journal of Urban Economics, New York Economic Review and the Western New York Economic News. He is a past recipient of a Canisius College Faculty Fellowship, a Wehle School of Business Faculty Fellowship, and a research grant from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Attorneys rely on Lichtenstein as an expert witness for providing valuation in cases involving wrongful death and disability, divorce, pensions, and closely held business enterprises. He has also been called upon to perform statistical analysis in employment discrimination cases.
 
Tanya Loughead, PhD
assistant professor, Philosophy

Tanya Loughead, PhD specializies in contemporary continental philosophy, philosophy of literature, postmodernism and phenomenology. She earned her master’s and doctoral degrees in Belgium at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Recent papers delivered by Loughead include, “The Uselessness of Art to the Revolution: Marcuse and Blanchot,” “'Brotherly Love' in Postmodern Times,” “Levinas and Weil on the demand of social justice” and “The Energy of Failure: on Revolution.” She is currently researching the work of Enrique Dussel in reference to postmodernism, religion and social justice. She is also working on a book entitled, Ethics from the Concrete: Essays in Global Phenomenology. She enjoyed a research and service trip to El Salvador and Guatemala during the Summer of 2007.

Loughead teaches HON 120 (Philosophy). She arrived at Canisius College in the Fall of 2005.
 
Lynch Rev. Patrick Lynch, S.J., PhD
associate professor, Religious Studies & Theology

Rev. Patrick Lynch, S.J., PhD has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He teaches courses in the areas of Catholic social ethics, religion and politics, and Jesuit spirituality and history. He has published articles on secularization, Catholic ecclesiology, and war and peace.
 
occhipinti John Occhipinti, PhD
professor, Political Science

John D. Occhipinti, PhD is Professor of Political Science and Director of the European Studies Program at Canisius College. He received his B.A. from Colgate University, was a Fulbright Scholar in Tübingen, Germany in 1989-1990, and earned his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Maryland at College Park. In addition to his Honors seminar, Occhipinti teaches on comparative politics, international crime, and the European Union (EU). Occhipinti has published articles and book chapters on internal security in the EU, as well as his first book, The Politics of EU Police Cooperation: Toward a European FBI? (Lynne Rienner, 2003). He has also lectured for the US Foreign Service Institute and spoken at the US State Department for the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. In August of 2005, Occhipinti was invited by the State Department to brief the newly appointed US Ambassador to the European Union on internal security policy in the EU. A Buffalo native, Occhipinti can be persuaded to engage in a discussion of the local sports scene. He also enjoys traveling to Europe.

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Pfaff Philip Pfaff, PhD
professor, Economics & Finance

Philip Pfaff, PhD, a member of the Economics and Finance Department, has a PhD in Economics from Michigan State University. He teaches in the areas of financial modeling, corporate finance, statistics and quantitative methods. His publications include articles on forecasting the supply of money and a financial modeling text. In recent years he has also taught a course on the economics of sports—a course which has given his students ample opportunity to show off their knowledge of life on the playing field.
 
Rev. James Pribek, S.J.
assistant professor, English

Rev. James Pribek, S.J., is a native of Wisconsin. He holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a baccalaureate in Philosophy and a master's in English from Gonzaga University in Spokane, WA, and two graduate theology degrees from Weston School of Theology in Cambridge, MA. He earned an MA and PhD in Anglo-Irish literature and drama at University College Dublin, where his dissertation traced Cardinal Newman’s influence on James Joyce. He has been a Jesuit for 20 years and a priest for eight years.
 
Reber Tom Reber, PhD
associate professor, English

Tom Reber, PhD's main interests are in rhetoric and composition, science fiction, and the First-Year English program, which he directs. He also advises students in the English Department's Writing Minor. In 2005, he completed a three-year term as Director of the Core Curriculum.

His recent research on the debate about what kind of new Peace Bridge should be built has led him to investigate the history of the bridge. Currently, he is writing a biographical article on Alonzo C. Mather, who tried in the 1890's to get government approval for an electricity-producing "power bridge" at the site of the current Peace Bridge.

Reber enjoys using personal computers and has published an article on the use of electronic discussion in literature courses.
Richard Reitsma, PhD
assistant professor, Spanish/Latin American studies

Richard Reitsma, Assistant Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies, received his M.A. from Purdue University, his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Washington University in St. Louis, and studied abroad in Cuba, Mexico, and France. His doctoral research focused on issues of gender, sexuality, and race in plantation literature of the American South Cuba and Puerto Rico.  At Canisius, Richard teaches Spanish, Latin American Studies, and Honors courses. A longtime judge for the Lambda Literary Awards, his current research concentrates on gender and minority representation in literature and film of the American South, U.S. Latinos, and Latin America. He is currently co-editing, along with Townes Coates, an anthology of essays entitled No Perfect Witness: Being Gay, Talking God, and Fighting Back.  Recent research and publications include an examination of messages of diversity and tolerance in children’s animated movies, an exploration of the tensions between sexuality and ethnic identity in Latino film, and “Lethal Latin Lovers: Sex and Death in Latin American Cinema.”

Prior to coming to Canisius, Richard Reitsma taught Latin American Studies at The Johns Hopkins University; Spanish and Latin American Studies at Gettysburg College; and Literature of the Americas at The College of William and Mary.
 
Wadkins Timothy Wadkins, PhD
professor, Religious Studies & Theology

Timothy Wadkins, PhD is a historian of Christianity, and received his PhD from a joint program of the Graduate Theological Union and University of California at Berkeley. His research and publishing ranges widely from theological controversies in the years leading up to the English Civil War (1640), to the history of American Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism, to modern third world theological issues. His latest publication (Christian Century, November 14, 2006) is a study of Pentecostal growth in modern El Salvador and he is preparing an anthology on the history of global Pentecostalism. 

For the past six years, as part of his Peter Canisius Distinguished Professorship, Wadkins has led a series of summer immersion programs on the history and modern manifestations of Christianity in the Philippines, Mexico, El Salvador, and India. Wadkins is also the director of the Institute for the Global Study of Religion and facilitates the lecture series, Conversations in Christ and Culture. When he is not teaching, writing, and leading seminars in third world countries he is busy helping his wife Tracy raise two young children and playing golf whenever and wherever the opportunity presents itself.
 
Kathryn Williams, PhD
Associate Professor, Classics

Kathryn Williams, PhD joined the Classics Department at Canisius College in 2006. Williams received her BA in History from UNC - Chapel Hill before returning to her native Virginia to earn advanced degrees in Classics at the University of Virginia. Williams’ research focuses primarily on Roman historiography and Latin prose. She has published on Sallust, Tacitus, and Pliny the Younger, and she most recently contributed chapters on the interrelationship between Tacitus’ works and Juvenal’s Satire 4 (Latin Historiography and Poetry in the Early Empire: Generic Interactions, Brill 2010) and on Tacitus’ senatorial embassies (A Companion to Tacitus, Blackwell forthcoming). Current small projects focus on Cicero, Plautus, and various aspects of Roman law and society. Her major project is a monograph on Tacitean envoys, tentatively entitled, “Envoys and Emperors: Diplomacy in Tacitus’ Histories and Annals.”
 
Amy Wolf, PhD
Associate professor, English

Amy Wolf, PhD teaches courses in the field of eighteenth-century British literature. Wolf has recently published articles on Henry Fielding in The Eighteenth-Century Novel and Jane Austen and Bernard Mandeville in Eighteenth-Century Fiction. Recent courses include Women Writers, History of the Novel I, and The Coffeehouse Culture of Eighteenth-Century England, for which she won an award for innovative course design in 2005 from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.
 
Michael Wood, PhD
Assistant Professor, Physics

Michael Wood, PhD knew at the age of fourteen years old that he wanted to study nuclear and particle physics.  He received his Bachelor's of Science from The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC.  At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (a fine Physics Department and a great basketball program), he received his MS and PhD for the study of proton-deuteron elastic scattering at low energies.  For his post-doctoral work, he conducted experiments on meson production at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (TJNAF), a Department of Energy national laboratory in Newport News, VA.  He joined the faculty at Canisius College in 2008.  He continues his research at TJNAF with a grant from the Research Corporation to study the properties of the rho, omega, and phi mesons in nuclei.  Every summer he takes his research students to TJNAF to tour the facility and meet other particle physicists.  He has published papers in Physical Review Letters, Physical Review C, and The Physics Teacher.  For the Honors program, he is teaching a course on the "Theory of Almost Everything", an introduction to the unification of all fundamental forces
 
zeis John Zeis, PhD
professor, Philosophy

John Zeis, PhD received his A.B. from the University of Notre Dame, his M.A. from Niagara and his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests are in the Philosophy of Religion, Theory of Knowledge, and Ethics, and he has numerous professional publications. He teaches Honors Philosophy II in the Honors Program every spring semester. He is also the Faculty Advisor for the Canisius College Equestrian Club and Team, which you can visit at http://www2.canisius.edu/~ihsa. You can find out more about Zeis by visiting his homepage at http://www2.canisius.edu/~zeis.